Bishop to (lifestyle) pawn Has any politician in the history of time had a cosier post-politics career than former deputy Liberal Party leader Julie Bishop? Far from letting the Liberal’s loss of her former electorate Curtin get her down, she’s now taken up a “partnership” with skincare and make-up brand Estée Lauder:
Bishop was the platonic ideal of a “moderate” Liberal, in that she had the reputation of being “one of the good ones” while not appearing to shift her party an iota. Remember her tireless work for marriage equality (the one entry under “political positions” on her Wikipedia page)? Us neither. Since the press fell over itself to find significance in her shoe choice when she resigned from Parliament, her vague girlboss vibe and the lack of controversy one generates when one avoids taking any explicit stands on anything have been parlayed into an uncontested celebrity status surely unprecedented in Australian politics.
Trump Watch After the profoundly numbing events in Uvalde, Texas, last week — with 19 children and two teachers killed in a mass shooting — former president Donald Trump showed up at the National Rifle Association’s annual convention to prove that there is literally no situation he’s incapable of making worse. Trump was one of three Republican politicians to speak at the event (many others had withdrawn).
It is impossible to know what goes through the man’s mind at the best of times, but just imagine the combination of personality traits that is required to end a speech during which you’ve read a list of 19 murdered children like this:
Taken for Grant-ed Speaking of Trump, get a load of this take from ABC international affairs analyst Stan Grant:
The teals here are not so unlike the Trump supporters in the US. Yes, they want different things. They are urban, elite and less unruly. But they come from the same sense of abandonment, disillusion and desperation. The psychology is the same.
It’s a pretty compelling point — so long as you ignore issues of class, education, wealth, societal status, temperament, pet issues, preferred rhetoric, cultural preoccupations, job security, geographical location, gender breakdown, views on climate change, views on and relationships with power, and theory of political change, the two groups are pretty much identical.
Crying Fowler Last week we noted what an ongoing blessing from the content gods an election really is: after six weeks of campaigning, you get the aftermath. Usually this is limited to the losing party, which has already given us such gems as the apparent plan to ditch Scott Morrison during the election campaign period and an unnamed MP delivering this immortal assessment of Morrison’s leadership, via The Saturday Paper: “He fucked us and his fingerprints are absolutely fuckin’ everywhere on that. The bloke thinks he is a master strategist. He is a fuckwit.”
But because of the unusual patchwork nature of this result, and the ringing endorsement of Greens and independent candidates, we manage to get some public delusion from the winning party, too, via failed candidate for Fowler Kristina Keneally. Keneally, who was parachuted into a multicultural seat where she didn’t live over Tu Le, a much more representative prospective candidate.
Was this result a fully deserved repudiation of the ALP’s complacent, entitled approach to the voters it relies on and who rely on it? Not a bit of it! It was, according to Keneally, a backlash against the lockdowns imposed by… then NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian. Yep, just as Liberal strategists insist that it was a backlash against Labor premier Dan Andrews that wiped out their party in Victoria (you know, again), Keneally is drawing from the new political theory that voters will punish a federal candidate for something their opposition at a state level does:
The most important factor was COVID and its impacts … Fowler had the harshest and longest lockdowns in the state, supported by both Liberal and Labor, and there was an understandable sense of anger at both major parties, with people reacting with “a pox on both your houses”.
