We’ve all had a moment during these last few weeks when we’ve been stopped dead in our tracks by an unbelievable news item from the United States. For me, it’s a photo of Elon Musk. In it, Musk is walking across a stage, holding a ‘chainsaw for bureaucracy’ in one hand and in the other, a large painting of himself that echoes Queen Elizabeth I’s Armada Portrait. The painted Musk looks more like a God of the universe than a monarch and the real Musk wears a black MAGA hat. An American flag hangs in the background.
I texted this photo to an ex-pat friend in Sydney, ‘Feels like a bad movie.’
‘But it’s real!’ she texted back.
The richest man in the world donated $277 million to Republican campaigns in last year’s election, and now he’s running the country as a ‘special government employee’.
The U.S. has strikingly similar origins to Australia—both nations were penal colonies to start with, both founded on land the British stole, yet America feels very foreign to us now.
As we sit here in the southern hemisphere, bombarded by news of Trump and his sidekick, I feel compelled to list the things I love—and wish to preserve—about Australia. They are, in no particular order: public toilets, gun control, preferential voting, Medicare, free and open access to coastal walks and beaches. I love sitting in the front seat of a taxi, long service leave, a glass of wine with neighbours at the local bowlo, acknowledgement of country—though it doesn’t go nearly far enough. Australia also has its faults.
'We need to protect our government from the influence of billionaires and massive corporations who don’t have the best interests of everyday Australians at heart.'
Our own federal election looms and I’m reminded of another thing I love about Australia. On the street where I live, there will soon be a Greens sign outside my house, a Labour sign across the road and a bright blue Liberal sign on the corner. When it comes time for boothing, I’ll have a friendly chat with the Labour neighbour—she’ll be boothing, too. But we’re closer to the family with the blue sign.
I tend to talk politics with everyone I meet and it’s conversations with those who vote differently from me that matter most. Afterall, if we only ever speak to people like us, our ideas are never tested—this often happens in the university where I teach, where the hallways ring out like echo chambers.
The best thing about having Liberal neighbours is that it keeps me in check. When my kids ask why conservatives don’t want to pay more tax, I can’t say because their selfish. Our neighbours are some of the most generous people we know. These Liberal voters work full-time, have three kids under six, and still manage to invite us for dinner and mow our lawn. If it’s hot, they invite us to jump in their pool. When we were shut in over COVID, they ordered food from the local café to be delivered to our quarantined house. They are the kind of people who ask about you and rarely talk about themselves. When we discuss the problems in Australia—homelessness, global warming—I’m always surprised to find out how much we have in common. They’re concerned about the same issues as me; we just have different ideas about possible solutions.
In Atlanta, where I grew up, many people no longer put up yard signs for fear of vandalism. Or something worse. Whole families in the U.S. have been split over politics. College campuses resemble warzones. Not so here. When students set up a hundred tents and peacefully protested the war in Palestine on the University of Queensland campus last year, they were not dispersed by police in riot gear, like the student protesters at Columbia University.
Despite similar origins, the U.S. has always been more rebellious and divided than Australia. America fought a revolutionary war; Australia still has the king on its money. The recent pandemic illustrated just how well Australians follow rules. Fifty percent of us still trust the government.
By contrast, only 22 percent of Americans trust their government. Part of this stems from massive campaign spending—and the corruption that comes with it—which has been rising steeply since the 1990s. In last year’s U.S. federal election, a record 15.9 billion USD was spent. This was made possible, in part, by the landmark supreme court decision in 2010 that allows for unlimited political spending by corporations.
Any day now our own federal election will be called. Unlike the U.S., campaigning doesn’t go on for years and it doesn’t cost billions of dollars. When I tell my American friends that campaigns in Australia run for just six weeks, they’re gobsmacked. Australia spent 418 million AUD (less than 2% of what America spent) on their last federal campaign. But Australia’s a much smaller country and this number is rising.
Troubling changes are afloat. Unofficial campaigning started weeks ago—it gets earlier each year, like hot cross buns sold in the shops last December.
There are very few restrictions when it comes to political advertising in Australia. The Parliamentary Education Office states that ‘there is currently no legal requirement for the content of political advertisements to be factually correct’.
It’s worrying that most people get their news from Facebook, X, Instagram or similar platforms that are also unchecked and unreliable—on both sides of politics.
We need to keep campaigns and campaign spending to a minimum to avoid the kind of corruption and distrust in government that we’re seeing in the U.S. right now. New campaign spending caps are a start. Unfortunately, these don’t come into effect until 2028 and when they do, they’ll hurt minor parties, which are already at a disadvantage from vote-based public funding. Still, if it’s a choice between this and the broken campaign finance system Stateside, these caps are preferable.
I worry about the new hard right lobby group Advance that serves as a front for the Liberal party and raises millions of dollars from people like Gina Rinehart to run smear campaigns against Labour and the Greens. In 2023, their ‘No’ campaign spread lies about the Voice. Groups like this may well continue to get around campaign finance laws and give large amounts of money to support candidates indirectly, just like super PACs, such as MAGA, do in the U.S.
It’s tempting to feel a kind of schadenfreude when we read the news from America, but let’s not be too smug. We need to protect our government from the influence of billionaires and massive corporations who don’t have the best interests of everyday Australians at heart. There’s nothing democratic about billionaires running the country.
Sarah Klenbort is a writer and Teaching Associate at the University of Queensland. Her work has appeared in Eureka Street, Guardian Australia, Best Australian Stories, Overland, Island, and other publications here and abroad.
Main image: CEO of Tesla and SpaceX Elon Musk holds a chainsaw and a painting of himself that a member of the audience gave him as he leaves the stage after speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)