Trump in Riyadh: a Wake-up Call for Australia

The US President has announced a new era in which trade alone will foster world peace and prosperity. Albanese's plan to clamp down on our freedoms won't bother him then.

Labor’s victory in the recent federal election and the reduction of the Coalition to an emasculated woke rabble all but guarantees that there will be a concerted attack on the freedoms and assets of normal, hard-working Australians for the next three years, and a widening of the divide between ordinary people and the elite.

We got a foretaste of this today when Sky News reported who the government will exempt from its harsh new taxation on large superannuation accounts — all of them are current or former holders of political office and some of their hangers-on.

More sinisterly, they also include police chiefs, which is one way of saying you’re going to need some armed help to implement the other policies you’ve got planned for the forthcoming term of office.

Conservatives have, since the election, consoled themselves with three potentially optimistic developments: creating a Reform-style grass-roots political movement; crossing our fingers and hoping Donald Trump puts social and political conditions on whatever deals he strikes with Anthony Albanese; or just packing up and getting out before Labor turns Australia into the new Venezuela.

Those three options have been reduced to two since Trump’s speech in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on Friday.

To be honest, hoping Trump would come to our rescue by telling Albanese to lay off the censorship, high taxes, insane woke educational indoctrination and green fantasies, among other catastrophes, never sat well with me anyway. What Albanese’s band of tyrannical hacks does to us is our problem, not Trump’s.

And that is pretty much what he said in Riyadh.

“In recent years, far too many American presidents have been afflicted with the notion that it’s our job to look into the souls of foreign leaders and use US policy to dispense justice for their sins… I believe it is God’s job to sit in judgment; my job, to defend America and to promote the fundamental interest of stability, prosperity, and peace. That’s what I really want to do.”

In other words, we are done being the world’s morality police.

He’s already implemented this new political paradigm.

Only last month he was reported to have told British Prime Minister Keir Starmer: “No free trade without free speech.” At the same time, Vice President JD Vance noted with alarm, and a hint of a threat, that free speech was “in retreat” across Britain and Europe.

Reflecting a government-wide mandate, the State Department said it was “concerned about freedom of speech in the United Kingdom”, citing the case of a woman arrested for silently protesting outside an abortion clinic.

But when the free-trade deal with Britain was signed 10 days ago, non-commercial clauses were left out. Trump has decided that God can judge Starmer for jailing people like Tommy Robinson and Lucy Connolly for having the audacity to criticise rapists and murderers. Trump's main job is to strike deals that benefit the people of the United States.

Naturally, this aspect of Trump’s speech was not reported in the mainstream media, partly because the corporate hacks either didn’t understand the significance of this change of direction or, if they did, are still waiting for instructions from the cabal about how to respond.

Trump even said he was reaching out to Iran, to offer them a “new path and a much better path toward a far better and more hopeful future”.

This is the sort of magnanimity that can’t come from a life spent in politics, where enmity and spite are the driving forces; rather, it’s the prerequisite for success in business. You work with whoever wants to buy your product or invest in your company, regardless of personal differences.

Playing the Ayatollahs will have its challenges but at least he knows who he’s dealing with — misogynistic theocrats whose idea of fun is blowing up Jews and Sunnis. Convincing them that there is more to life may or may not be simple but Trump’s ebullience and grandiosity make it plausible.

Albanese is less easily pigeonholed but infinitely more pliable. He marches in the Mardi Gras, dances at Taylor Swift concerts, often look on the verge of tears, poses piously for cameras while praying in a cathedral and never stops banging on about being raised by a single mum in housing commission.

All Trump would need to do, should he want to, is flatteringly mention Albo’s impeccable working-class credentials, flick him some tickets to a Swift gig and pose for a selfie and, hey presto, he’s got himself a favourable trade deal and a bonus option to build one of his towers next to the Sydney Opera House.

Whether you and I are by then doing one to two years’ hard labour for saying on Facebook that mRNA vaccines kill or windmills don’t work won’t be Trump’s problem.