Cunning Stunts in Canberra

Our rulers – the avoidance of the word “government” is deliberate – down there in Moscow on the Molonglo are living up to the late Max Corden’s description of our national capital.

Robert Gottliebsen calls the latest Budget the greatest attack on wealth in this country since Federation. The Charmless One’s shameless effort makes anything Paul Keating ever did look like a walk in the park.

One definition of political hubris might be ruling people you hate and that you know hate you, but not caring, well, because you hate them, and because you know that, thanks to the electoral system and the existence of your dumbo UniParty mates across the aisle, the punters can’t do anything about it or you. Oh, then you insult them. Diminish them. The timeless strategy of the propagandists in charge. As Mathias Desmet has suggested.

In one stroke, this charmless political class has radicalised an entire generation. The ageing middle class savers-and-investors. Who made certain investment choices based on an old and now clearly naïve understanding of sound economic management and promise-keeping by those who “govern” us. Who bought property rather than putting it all in union-run super companies.

Will it matter? Is the charmless political class also clueless? Or are we?

Despite the euphoria at both ends of the planet following the outcomes of Farrer and of the UK local council elections, and the suggested narrative of revolution in the air, recent events at elite-central suggest that the robots are still in charge. Are not going anywhere. Because they know they are secure.

Some recent examples of politics-as-normal, despite the earthquakes occurring out in voter land?

· The (clearly) personally corrupt Annika Wells’ bum remains firmly planted on her ministerial leather.

· Ms Gallagher feels empowered to abuse parents who are resisting the state child care industrial complex.

· Albo himself insults One Nation voters by saying their party has been “legitimised” by Farrer and by the collapse of the Liberals. As if previously, One Nation voters were “illegitimate”.

· The insane Bowen tells people paying three dollars a litre for diesel simply to get an EV.

· The ghastly Michelle Rowland (currently Attorney General) has our war heroes arrested. An insult to our veterans and an attempt to “crush the Australian spirit”, as Jackson Warne smartly observed.

· Then there is the attempted capital gains tax heist and the middle finger given to a whole generation. And the farcical attempt to justify it by appealing to something called intergenerational equity, itself an utter canard. Aka unmitigated bullshit. As Henry Ergas and others have shown.

https://propertyupdate.com.au/is-the-albanese-government-about-to-punish-older-wealthier-aussies-in-the-name-of-fairness/

Bullshit, yes. But more importantly, simply high-sounding cover for a heist, a wallet raid by the ruling class who cannot live within our (not their) means and who squander pretty much the whole of the existing tax take on things that are either inherently evil or economically dangerous or undesired by anyone or all three.

The late, great Peter Walsh, a true Labor man and author of Confessions of a Failed Finance Minister, would call the current lot “saboteurs”. The only reason they are coming for our wallets is because of their own, insane spending and their own, insane programs. The Reserve Bank Governor knows this well. The idiot Chalmers doesn’t even know what the problem is that he thinks he is trying to solve.

Has Airbus Albo jumped the shark this time? Sky News’ Laura Jayes thinks so. She thinks that promises and mandates still count. Still matter.

“Integrity”? We shall see. Laura makes the valid point that, had Albo gone to the 2025 election with a promise to raid the savings of a generation of Australians, it is highly doubtful that he would have won 94 seats in the Lower House. Indeed. At least John Howard was honest enough to go to the 1998 election with the “promise” of a GST. Also a repellent tax. And Howard lost most of his hard-won 1996 landslide seats in the process. The price of honesty in government.

It is a very depressing week, especially after the (false?) dawn of Farrer. After all, Pauline Hanson herself delivered an astonishingly sobering prediction that One Nation would (maybe) win about a dozen seats at the next general, and so possibly would hold the balance of power. Not quite the revolution, then.

To keep up our spirits, I offer the following brief take on what we might all say to the stunning politicians in Canberra. From the great Lee Mack.

Lee Mack’s view of the people of Kent has some considerable overlap with the current mood of at least the electorate here. Johannes Leak’s cartoonist take on Farrer depicted Albury’s equivalent “big” installation to Coffs Harbour’s Big Banana, Goulburn’s Big Merino, Ballina’s Big Prawn. Albury now has The Big Middle Finger.

https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=945966188333564&set=a.115623771367814

Where does the latest political class attack on us all leave the insurgency movement? I have referred to the euphoria of recent political revolutions. Is it warranted, and where will it lead? Where can it lead?

The late Robert A Dahl (1915-2014), regarded by many observers as the doyen of American political scientists, once penned a short book titled After the Revolution. Dahl was writing in 1970, in the shadow of the putative revolutionary activities across American (and European) campuses, where students were attacking the then (capitalist) political class. The book is about what should happen next. About the building of legitimate political authority by the new regime. About ensuring that the elite isn’t simply replaced by a counter elite that doesn’t change the unjust structures of the old order, but merely places “rococo decorations on existing structures” (as Dahl described it).

History shows us the problem.

The French revolution simply gave the Frogs Napoleon, a few years on, and after a bloodbath. The 1917 October Revolution in Russia got rid of the Romanovs and delivered Lenin. Then Stalin. And forty million dead in the 1930s in the agricultural “reforms” revealed to the West by Malcolm Muggeridge. The Brits got rid of the Tories in 2024. And got Starmer. Oh, and Trump hasn’t really changed anything basic, stateside. This is merely a counter-elite. We Aussies got rid of Gough. Then we got Malcolm. You change the government … you change the country? Just more Keating bullshit. Even revolutions yield to the UniParty.

Which brings us to the current Liberal Party dance in the weeds, aka the election of a new Liberal Party president, and to Tony Abbott. As always, as Australia goes down the toilet, the Libs are doing what they do best … gazing at their own navels and having an internal factional squabble.

Tony Abbott is probably the most fundamentally decent leader the Libs have ever had. Only John Anderson, former leader of the Nats, matches Abbott as a decent man-in-politics. But anyone who thinks that having even Abbott as a (ceremonial) leader will make a difference, either to the Party itself or to the nation, is sadly mistaken. It would merely be placing rococo decorations on existing structures.

Abbott is the Admirable Crichton of Australian politics.

As per J M Barrie’s masterful play, the hero is a servant in a British aristocratic family, who “plays the game”. He does everything well, and is a loyal servant in a hierarchical structure in which genuine equality is impossible. Crichton actually believes in inequality, and accepts his subordinate role as being the natural order of things. Unlike his master, who is a radical egalitarian. They all get shipwrecked on an island, and the positions of master and servant get uprooted in a naturally emerging meritocracy. Crichton becomes “the gov”. Betrothed to the master’s daughter, even. Then, inevitably, a ship comes and finds them and takes them back to the hierarchical structures of their British homeland. All egalitarian bets are off. As is the marriage. Crichton, like Dahl’s rococo revolutionaries, sticks to the existing structures.

Such is the Liberal Party. Any number of pundits have observed, post Farrer, that they simply don’t get what is happening. They are still doing what Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions called “normal science”. They are, in fact, “normies” in a post-normie world. Except that the robots are still in charge. Despite Farrer.

They are not the vehicles for Dahl-like change in the 2020s.

For the Liberals to become a truly revolutionary, insurgent force, one that doesn’t just kick out thieving Albo but rather, first, acts to cast off its own past, to clean house, to get rid of the moderates and the factional preferment system in which they thrive, to issue an abject apology for their past mortal sins – starting with all their Covid crimes – and second, brings to the table the policies, attitudes and intent of Rupert Lowe and Restore Britain. Lowe wants to change the system of governing, not just to rotate the leadership class. The Libs need not the positioning of the rococo decorating Nigel Farage who, one fears, simply wants to whiff prime ministerial leather in Number Ten, and to swan around like Hugh Grant in Love Actually. Simply being a PM. Occupying the space.

These are all merely cunning stunts.

No Liberal president has the authority to enact the things that are needed, for them or for us. Not even a decent and determined man like Tony Abbott can do that. After all, they knifed him a decade ago. Wouldn’t they do it again?

The game has moved on, at least on the demand side. Just look at Leak’s middle finger installation in Albury. The people are speaking. With a very loud voice.

But the message hasn’t hit the supply side, aka Canberra, wherein lie the robots of the political class who still occupy the commanding heights of the power structures that rule us. They are clearly unperturbed by the events that occurred a mere three hours and thirty-six minutes down the Hume Highway. They continue to play their games, and cling to power. A la Starmer. The budget proves that.

A revolution is only complete when the system changes. Not just the peeps. We need some really cunning stunts in Canberra. Not merely stunning … politicians of the interminable ruling class.

Paul Collits

13 May 2026