I left Australia eight years ago, but this election began as if 1950s myopia never left. From afar I've watched four elections and five different PM's slip into the seat. Gossip and infighting dominate the political landscape and cruel policies remain the order of the epoch.
Living within the United Nations community I've witnessed Australia fall from a well-respected international citizen, to becoming the spoilt, sneaky brat of international relations.
Even the most blasé glance at the geo political currents moving through the planet reveal complexities this election pretends don't exist: technological change, climate crisis, ideological bankruptcy, financial fragility, food security, labour uncertainty, increased automation, energy shifts, border fluidity and closures and rising states of emergency.
Australians fighting about jobs and growth in the corner comes across as deeply deluded isolationism. The Great Barrier Reef is dying. The world is watching. Hello Australia? Anybody home?
Since the 90s the major parties are stuck in a complicit rhetorical illness that repeats the Fordist mantra of 'jobs growth' and silences analysis of global geopolitics. It's almost as if the two major parties share a little sepia book containing tired tropes from the past.
After weeks of boredom, the Liberals experimented with passion by accusing Labour of declaring a war on growth. Immature metaphors spewed from Morrison's mouth, offending those who know what war is.
Can someone catch the Liberals up on the legal meaning of war, and remind them the Bush administration exhausted this metaphor? Can someone from the Liberals pop over to Nauru and listen to what war does to the human soul?
At least wars on drugs and terror made some literary sense, but that language is only used now to propagate Trumpism. War on growth rhetoric maintains a narrow focus on the delusion that the Australian economy is sacrosanct, and immune from global trends. It's hyperbolic and deluded. Its like the major parties believe politics stops at Australia's sovereign borders.
"Distance used to be Australia's tyranny — this election reveals it as a political strategy. Australia's narrow escape from the financial crisis bred an arrogant belief in immunity from global realities."
No polity can pretend it's the Fordist 50s, the neoliberal 90s or the fearmongering noughties without risking destroying their home, ecologically and economically. This election repeats the exhausted choice between upfront neoliberalism or one softened by false promises of a fairer neoliberalism. Even harbingers of neoliberalism like the IMF and World Bank conclude it's naïve to continue