COMMENT

Australia has only seen the start of the Trump effect

Peter Hartcher

When Donald Trump was still campaigning for the White House, the Turnbull government dreaded the thought that he might succeed.

"If Trump wins," said a cabinet minister to his colleagues, "sell everything and put the money under the mattress."

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It was the worst-case scenario, yet the government reassured itself that it was surely impossible. The state of denial explained why there was no serious contingency planning for the possibility of what has now materialised — the greatest external electoral shock Australia has experienced in the postwar era.

"Ronald Reagan would be somewhere there," says James Walter, professor emeritus of political science at Monash University, "but nothing springs to mind that has had quite as much impact as Donald Trump's election."

The assassinations of John Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King were all shocks to Australia, says Walter. "But they were signs of some sort of societal dysfunction, they weren't electoral."

The Turnbull government was encouraged in its delusion by the then US ambassador to Australia, John Berry. In conversations with cabinet ministers and other MPs, Berry argued for months that there was no "pathway" for the Republican candidate to win a majority of the electoral college.

Of course, the Australian government wasn't unique. The global markets only seriously woke up to the fact that Trump was a presidential candidate, not just a media spectacle, in the week before the election.

Japan's government was so alarmed by the outcome that it held an emergency cabinet meeting and dispatched the Prime Minister urgently to the US to meet the president-elect.

The US polling, media and betting systems sent false signals for almost the entirety of the US campaign.

Still, as Hillary Clinton's biggest cheerleader in Australia, Dave Kennedy, who chaired the fundraising effort for her in Australia, said during the campaign: "If you don't do scenario forecasting for every possibility, you're just not being rational."

Malcolm Turnbull has sought to hitch his policy wagon to Trump's runaway horses. Photo: Brook Mitchell

It was not rational to think that, in a two-party system, one of the parties could be entirely dismissed. It was not rational to assume that the near-universal miscomprehension of the Brexit vote could not be repeated. It was not responsible for governments, which have greater responsibility than any other institution, to surrender to wishful thinking.

Australia's government did. And it was wrong. Australia's ambassador to Washington, Joe Hockey, was more prudent than most, never writing Trump off and in the final week telling a Sydney audience the election was "too close to call".

Donald Trump's longest-standing view on any foreign policy issue is his 30-year anger at Japan for supposedly ... — Donald Trump's longest-standing view on any foreign policy issue is his 30-year anger at Japan for supposedly free-riding on its US alliance. Photo: AP

But the fact that he had to ask the golfer Greg Norman for Donald Trump's phone number, a gem of modern diplomacy uncovered this week by the Daily Telegraph's Sharri Markson, so that Turnbull could congratulate the president-elect showed the jerry-rigged nature of the operation.

But from denial to shock, the Turnbull government then moved seamlessly into a state of false assurance. From the moment Pauline Hanson popped a champagne cork to mark Trump's victory, the Trump effect genie has been released here and it will not be put back in the bottle.

All Australia's political parties have concurred on a central lesson of the Trump triumph: All agree that it was an uprising of the overlooked against the establishment. And all agree, in different terminology, that the overlooked must be looked at anew, and included. That they must be permitted to share in national prosperity, to have their legitimate grievances addressed. That they be given greater material equality but also greater psychic equality.

Or, as Turnbull put it: "No sectors or communities or regions should be allowed to be left behind." Above all else, he said, governments needed to make sure that "nobody feels left out or overlooked."

As if underlining his point, the voters in the NSW state byelection in Orange handed a Coalition government a painful demonstration two days later. Mike Baird's government suffered a 34 per cent swing against it on the primary vote.

The main issues were the unpopular amalgamations of local councils and the government proposal, later abandoned, to shut down the greyhound racing industry. But the main impulse seems to have been anger at the interests of country people being overlooked by a metropolitan government.

It is a small-scale local case study of the way Tony Abbott summarised the US election result: "The revenge of the 'deplorables"', using the pejorative that Hillary Clinton used to belittle Trump's support base.

This divide between city and country was a hallmark of the US presidential election. "This election," Ronald Brownstein wrote in The Atlantic, "carved a divide between cities and non-metropolitan areas as stark as American politics has produced since the years just before and after 1920."

The populist anger that powered Brexit and Trump to victories against comfortable establishment expectations is stirring in Australia, too. But the ways that the various parties in Australia have sought to exploit it diverged starkly.

First was the Prime Minister's decision to embrace Trump. Not just his administration and the US alliance. Turnbull went further, into risky territory, to identify with the grubby Trump on a personal level.

"I have had, earlier this morning, a very warm and constructive and practical discussion with president-elect Trump," Turnbull began his comments to the media. "Most importantly, we absolutely agreed on the vital importance of our strong alliance."

He valiantly sought to give the impression of Trump as a great supporter of the US alliance network in the Pacific. This is implausible. Trump's longest-standing view on any foreign policy issue is his 30-year anger at Japan for supposedly free-riding on its US alliance.

Japan's Shinzo Abe certainly doesn't share Turnbull's confidence. He didn't rush to the US to meet Trump on Friday because Tokyo was feeling confident. Turnbull has been overreaching to project calm.

And while Turnbull hasn't sought to deny the stark difference between Australia and the new America over trade liberalisation, he certainly hasn't pointed out that Trump's ascendancy marks the end of an era.

The US led the great postwar movement of market-opening that swept the planet, but is now staunchly opposed to any further trade liberalisation. Indeed, Trump is pledged to try to wind it back.

"The era of neoliberalism is over," writes Mark Blyth in Foreign Affairs. "The era of neonationalism has just begun."

In direct response to Trump's win, a member of Turnbull's government, the National Party's George Christensen, has said that Australia was wrong to end its failed policy of subsidising a car manufacturing industry. Yet you'll find no recognition of this historic change in the US character in the Prime Minister's words.

But Turnbull went further and crossed into personal identification: "It was a very warm discussion," he said of his 15-minute call. "I suppose as both being businessmen who found our way into politics somewhat later in life, we come to the problems of our own nations and indeed world problems, with a pragmatic approach."

Turnbull also sought to hitch his policy wagon to Trump's runaway horses. The government's proposed 10-year program of corporate tax cuts is more urgent than ever, the government argues, because of Trump's plan to cut company taxes. Competitiveness demands Australia keep up, it says.

The Labor opposition, on the other hand, has sought to distance itself from the prospective Trump administration.

Bill Shorten immediately disowned Trump's "values" or discriminating against the disabled, Mexicans, women, Muslims.

And Penny Wong's opinion piece in Fairfax Media this week "represented a real break in the bipartisan foreign policy consensus in Australia," according to Simon Jackman of the US Studies Centre.

Wong said Labor remained committed to the US alliance, but wrote: "We are at a change point, and face the possibility of a very different world and a very different America."

She's right, of course. And she was prudent in advocating that Australia work more closely with like-minded powers in Asia to achieve, among other things, continued US commitment to Asia, a continent that Trump might well want to abandon.

"Wong," says Jackman, has "laid down a marker saying that Labor reserves the right" to take a different approach to the Trump administration. "But who wouldn't? She's made explicit what was implicit."

Turnbull pounced on this to claim Labor was hostile to the alliance; this is a distortion, but there is a difference now in the parties' approach to the US administration-to-be. One fulsome, one wary.

And while distancing itself from Trump, Labor nonetheless leapt on one of the strands in his movement — hostility to immigrant workers. Shorten announced a Labor plan to crack down on 457 visas for temporary foreign workers.

And the conservative faction of the Liberal Party sought out its own vindication in Trump's victory. Tony Abbott claimed it a win for putting climate change "in better perspective" and a blow against Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act: "All of the people who are sick of being called racist, sexist, homophobic, Islamophobic because they don't comply with the canons of political correctness" had seen Trump as their saviour.

Abbott wouldn't mind being embraced as a bit of a saviour by the same people.

And they're here and rising, Cory Bernardi observed. The people who feel "belittled by the establishment" are bringing the populist backlash to Australia.

On this, he's right, as the Orange byelection and the return of Hanson attest. But so far the political parties in Australia are using Trump to sharpen existing arguments.

The next step will be when parties move from posturing to actually change their policies to exploit the lessons of America's populist uprising.

Peter Hartcher is political editor.

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