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Trump shuts down borders and Turnbull sits right on the fence

It's smashing that Julie Bishop wants to cut a deal with the tangerine tyrant in the White House to spare Australians the ordeal of being fed into the furnace of his exciting new race war, but if she was a human being rather than a human analogue fembot with X-ray laser eyes and the heart of a tape recorder, she might have sought to spare everyone that fate.

Then again, that would put her out of goose-step with the rest of the government.

When heads of state, business leaders and old-school conservatives around the world were condemning the punishing omnishambles of Trump's de facto Muslim ban, Malcolm Turnbull insisted it wasn't his job to go around punching nazis, and Scott Morrison pointed out with admirable candour that the Trump Administration was really only catching up to us when it came to brutalising brown people.

It wasn't fear of being called out as a hypocrite that prevented Turnbull, seemingly almost alone among Western leaders, of condemning the theatre of cruelty now playing out at America's borders. It wasn't even cowardice, as many insisted yesterday.

The Turnbull government, like Washington's new chief executive Cheezel demon, was simply being true to itself and to its voters. Trump promised a pogrom? Here's your pogrom. The LNP promised a boot in the face of anyone foolish enough to look for sanctuary on our shores? Peter Dutton has a shiny pair of Doc Martens he'd like to break in.

In one sense Fizza and JBish are just doing their jobs, looking out for Australian interests. Trump would understand that sort of transactional relationship.

It's even possible he might be able to focus the gibbering id that passes for his higher brain functions long enough to deliver on his promise to Turnbull that he'd honour Obama's deal to take the survivors of our Pacific gulags. (Don't bet on it, though.)

But what happens a year or two from now if and when Trump has burned himself out and we have to deal with whoever comes in to clean up his mess? It's looking like it will be an epic mess, and whoever gets that job probably isn't going to thank anybody who made it worse.

Which we just did, in our own small, very special, spineless, self-seeking way.

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