Viva la Devolution

Labor's top strategist will deliver a speech next week explaining how his team won the recent election. What he won’t say is that it was a charade that will end in catastrophe.

If you’re not doing anything next Wednesday, and have a morbid curiosity about how nihilistic narcissists manipulate democracy to seize power, then you might be interested in attending Labor strategist Paul Erickson’s speech at the National Press Club in Canberra.

Most of the Canberra press corp will be there, not only to revel in Labor’s recent election win, which they supported, but also to hear Erickson explain how he used them to convince the electorate into giving the worst federal government in living memory another term. Nothing warms leftist journalists’ hearts more than being told how someone from party headquarters included them in the party’s grand strategy.

Granted, the atmosphere at the Press Club is likely to be a tad too pretentious for ordinary punters like you and me. But if you do attend, you can console yourself by mingling in the foyer beforehand — savouring an Australian chardonnay made from grapes picked by cheap foreign labour and ruminating on an hors d’oeuvre cooked in a kitchen powered by solar panels made by Chinese slaves — and imagining which of the people around you would have been the first marched to the guillotine if this was the French Revolution on the eve of the Reign of Terror in 1793.

This isn’t an entirely forlorn consolation. Edmund Burke’s description of the Revolution victors in 1792 is curiously prescient of Australia in 2025. He called them “barbarous victors” in whose “great arrangement of mankind, not one reference whatsoever is to be found to any thing moral or any thing politic; nothing that relates to the concerns, the actions, the passions, the interests of men. Hominem non sapient (they do not know man).”

This is as good a description as any of Erickson and Albanese’s winning strategy: ignore anything moral or political; instead, just promise to give the punters free stuff and hope they are stupid enough to not ask who’s paying for it.

I could barely watch Albanese’s victory speech on the night of the election — Lord knows we will be seeing enough of him during the next three years — but this statement at the start of the speech jumped out at me: “Today, the Australian people have voted for Australian values.”

This was a phrase he studiously avoided during the campaign. To the Third World economic migrants in marginal seats whose votes he desperately needed, “Australian values” are measured in Medicare visits and Centrelink payments. Attributing anything more significant to them is to risk being seen as dog-whistling to white racists. Modern elections are instead all about donning different costumes and appealing to fragmented demographic groups, usually on their terms.

Picture: Instagram

With the ballot boxes emptied and the results in, however, Albo was free to pivot back to pretending he was the leader of a united nation with a common destiny and culture, one that wanted “a future built on everything that brings us together”. Not even he can explain what that is without resorting to platitudes. Besides, any country whose leader talks about “bringing us together” is already too divided.

Whatever elaborations of this strategy Erickson reveals on Wednesday are strictly for people whose preoccupation with politics comes at the expense of a personality, not to mention a soul.

The takeaway for the rest of us is that, to Labor, power is everything. The damage they have wrought during their first term has not given them pause. What will happen during the next three years will be worse. We know this because the gloating from within Labor and its supporters in the media has been all about the glory of victory and little about the future. Having squeaked through the campaign without needing to divulge a cohesive plan, one could hardly expect them to release one now.

(The Coalition played mostly the same hand, so the loss, to its traditional followers, has not been so bitter.)

We can guess what Labor’s agenda is, though: censorship, deindustrialisation, massive immigration, more woke indoctrination in schools, a digital ID, sending Aussie kids to die in Ukraine and maybe a compulsory mRNA vaccination or two.

Oh, and more taxes. It’s a good thing that Albanese doesn’t really believe in Australian values. If he did, he’d find a way of taxing them too.

All this comes under “progressive patriotism”, which Albanese has recently started using to define his vague agenda. Leftists are good at controlling language but this trick is starting to wear a bit thin. Just as “social justice” is more about socialism than justice, and “political correctness” is more about politics than doing the right thing, so too is “progressive patriotism” merely a way for progressives to pretend to be patriotic.

Conservatives are now reduced to frantically debating three things: how to form some sort of Reform-like political alternative; speculating how US President Donald Trump will play Albanese when (or if) his attention is diverted from the emerging economic powerhouses in the Middle East to the dying multicultural dystopia in the South Pacific; and whether to just get the hell out before the place becomes the new Venezuela.

What these scenarios overlook is that the government will soon run out of ways to pay for its largesse, and its variously vague agendas will inevitably also come into conflict. When that happens, Labor MPs could well turn on each other the way France Revolutionaries did in 1793.

Maybe then they will realise, as Burke warned, that politics is more about morality than power.