The Unnatural Selection podcast is produced by Jorge Tsipos, Adam Direen and Tom Heath. Visit the Unnatural Selection website at www.UnnaturalShow.com for stuff and things.
The views expressed are those of the hosts and their guests and do not reflect those of any other entities. Unnatural Selection is a show made for comedic purposes and should not be taken seriously by anyone.
You might’ve heard that Sussan Ley has taken over as leader of the Liberal Party. If you know who Sussan is (which is not a given), you might even think “ah, the Libs have learned their lesson from their shellacking on election night and have finally had a ‘come to Jesus moment’ and chosen the path of sanity.” You might think that because… well, that’s what everyone’s been saying. She’s a moderate female, lady! Man, this is a new Coalition for the 20th century, maybe even ready for second-wave feminism!
Addressing the country as Liberal leader for the first time, Ms Ley said she planned to “do things differently” and shepherd in a “fresh approach” after the Coalition’s ruinous election loss earlier this month.
Of course, as all the focus seems to be on the ‘history-making’ aspect of her ascent to the leadership, there appears to be little discussion on the fact that, on substance, there’s less daylight between Sussan Ley and Peter Dutton than two teenagers slow dancing at the Bluelight Disco. Remember those? Simpler times.
So, let’s do what all the actual journalists should be doing and dig into the voting record to see how much difference there is between the supposedly “moderate” Ley and the hyper-conservative Dark Lord Dutton we just defenestrated (Spoiler alert: almost none).
Voting Record
Let’s get this out of the way – regarding her voting record, Sussan Ley has voted in lock step with Peter Dutton 99.5% of the time. There are quite literally only 13 instances out of the 2,660 times they have voted where they weren’t in perfect sync – you can literally count on three hands how many times it’s ever happened (borrow a friend’s hand if you don’t have three).
With that last one about reproductive bodily autonomy, it’s not like she’s a pro-abortion revolutionary, protesting the Capitol, it’s only that she ‘generally’ voted against it whilst Dutton ‘consistently’ voted against it. Which means there was one instance where they disagreed – here’s the bill, it was in 2006:
The Liberal Party allows its members to undertake ‘conscience votes’ on matters of ethical concern. There are not the kind of Fatima Paymen-esque consequences for speaking or voting out of step with the party, as there are with Labor. So, we have to deduce from this that Ley has chosen to vote this way her entire career, not because she’s being forced to by the Liberal Party Whip, but simply because she wants to; it’s what she genuinely believes.
Plausible Deniability? (No)
If we were to try to embody the pinnacle of Christlike generosity, one could make the argument that Ley, as a frontbencher, was ‘just following orders’ in the past, and now that she’s the head of the party, perhaps her priorities will be different. Perhaps because of her gender (for some reason) and her softer language, we’ll see a wholesale reshaping of the Liberal Party from soup to nuts. But I mean, man, you’re going out of your way there to sell the dream. It’s almost as delusional as James McGrath urging us to increasingly desperately wait for the pre-polls to come in and save the day on election night. Legend has it he’s still waiting for those pre-polls.
For my money, if you had to find a person who was going to continue the exact same trajectory that the Liberal Party has been on since the Howard years, but do so with a slightly less creepy smile, then you couldn’t do better than Sussan Ley. Just because she doesn’t say things like she’d refuse to stand in front of an Indigenous Flag or that she kinda ‘gets’ Welcome to Country Acknowledgements, doesn’t mean she’s the Hero of the Soviet Union that people seem to be making her out to be.
So the next time you hear someone call her a moderate, send them this link.
Sussan Ley made history this week (I’m annoyed to say), when she was elected leader of the Liberal Party, becoming the first woman to hold the position in the party’s 80-year existence – continuing the bold conservative tradition of selecting women but only if they’re terrible. Her ascension comes in the immediate aftermath of a significant defeat for the Coalition, where Peter Dutton lost his seat of Dickson (along with everyone else’s).
The political landscape confronting Ley upon her ascension has been grim for the LNP. The party has suffered what many commentators described as its “worst defeat in history”, a “catastrophic election loss,” or “an absolute fuckening”(that last one was me) – reducing its presence in the lower house to 41 seats (enough to mostly fill a charter bus). In comparison, Labor looks set to end up with 93 seats. That differential alone is enough to relegate the Liberal Party into near total legislative irrelevance in the short to medium term.
You can read my analysis of what went wrong in the campaign here and here, but in short, the LNP ran a shabby campaign, and proposed policies that actively alienated crucial voter demographics; notably women, younger Australians and those with functional prefrontal cortexes. This electoral rout provides the immediate and challenging context for Ley’s leadership – this isn’t just a simple rebranding job, update the logo, new lick of paint, that sort of thing. In three short years, Ley needs to restructure Coalition party politics wholesale.
You might be saying, Jorge, doesn’t that sound impossible? Isn’t this exactly like that “glass cliff” thing, where women are more likely to be appointed to precarious leadership positions during times of turmoil, almost guaranteeing their failure? To which I’d say, “Yes, yes it does.” Given the LNP would need to retake roughly 35 seats in the next cycle to form government (as we mentioned on the latest Unnatural Selection podcast), it seems like the new leader’s job is less about actually winning as much as it is about staunching the bleeding from their recently severed leg.
Both Ley’s statements and remarks from colleagues, such as outgoing Senator Linda Reynolds (“We’ve listened and we’ve acted” … where have I heard that before…), indicate an acknowledgment that things need to drastically change if the Liberal party would like to make contact with voters not named Gina Rinehart ever again. Her stated intent to “represent modern Australia,” is laudable, but given she only won her leadership ballot 29 votes to 25 against the ‘more conservative’ Angus Taylor (who as Shadow Treasurer members of his own party suggest was directly responsible for the party’s biggest bollocking in history) indicates that Liberal party isn’t quite ready yet to grow the fuck up, even if at this stage they’re happy to give Sussan a hospital handpass.
As you might’ve heard, on the 3rd of May (henceforth Liberation Day) Dark Lord Dutton was unceremoniously yeeted from his seat (and thus, the Liberal Party leadership). What happens now is that the party will meet in the next few weeks, after the election result is finalised, to elect a new party leader.
Whilst many online are describing this period as the ‘end of an era’ with regards to Dutton’s particular brand of divisive, shitty politics, I reckon the reality probably is much darker – as I suggested in my previous post.
Sadly, the Liberal Party’s scramble for a new leader isn’t just a political process; it’s a darkly comedic spectacle revealing a party potentially doubling down on the very things that they just got bollocked for at the polls. Rather than act with unity (which shouldn’t be that hard, there’s only 40 of them left…), the disastrous LNP result precipitated a political bloodbath with everyone from Jacinta Price to Matt Canavan whipping out their daggers as they jockey for place in the new pecking order.
The Contenders
Angus’ The Numbers’ Taylor
The leading favourite appears to be (and I can’t believe I’m going to say this) Angus Taylor. Taylor is the shadow treasurer and played a prominent second fiddle in Dutton’s election campaign. A fierce conservative at heart, he was elevated to the frontbench by Abbott and backed Dutton’s takeover from Turnbull.
Once viewed as the Liberal’s ‘golden boy’ and a potential ‘Prime-Minister in waiting’, the shine has since come off him in recent years, due to his role in the “watergate” (not that Watergate) and “grassgate” scandals in 2017 – both very boring scandals that amount to him not declaring financial interests and relationships when he should have. A tale as old as time – as long as there have been interests to declare, Liberal ministers have been not doing that.
The man was a Rhodes Scholar, educated in Oxford in economics (I’m shocked to learn), which suggests he’s been merely playing dumb, rather than actually being dumb with regards to the party costings in this most recent election cycle. I don’t know if it’s just my partisan hackery, but he’s always coded as a bit of a ‘mimbo’ to me – consistently getting on TV and not understanding the basics of how his portfolio functions. But I suppose if Tony Abbott can be a Rhodes Scholar, then literally anyone could be.
It’s interesting to me that Taylor’s considered the front runner, considering his prominent role in the shadow cabinet and his (at least partial) responsibility for the absolute spanking the Liberal party received at the hands of the electorate last week. Labor Treasurer Jim Chalmers, also perhaps suspecting that Taylor was in pole position to be the next leader, decided to stick the boot in on election night, saying explicity that Taylor was a key part of the Coalition’s failure and bore a significant responsibility for the party’s loss.
Whilst it was almost certainly political opportunism (you love to see it) you can see how the Liberal’s sloppy costings, promise to repeal Labor tax cuts and extremely wishful thinking about an ‘off budget’ multi-hundred-billion dollar nuclear plan are sort of hard to blame on anyone but the shadow treasurer – leading many to ask how is Angus Taylor still a thing? Is the architect of the previous campaign’s perceived economic missteps really the fresh face the Liberals need to lead them into the future? I’m doubtful.
After Dutton’s departure, Sussan became the acting party head, as she’s the Deputy Leader, and is nominally the other front-runner. But you know, she’s a woman, so much like Julie Bishop, I reckon, is likely to be found at the bottom of a well (politically) after this process. It’s a surprise to literally no one that the LNP’s female representation is currently at an all-time nadir.
Ley has her own financial scandal to cop to as well – a real Sophie’s Choice between these two. In January 2017, Sussan resigned from her position as Minister for Health following a controversy surrounding her travel expense claims. It was revealed that she had purchased a $795,000 apartment on the Gold Coast during a taxpayer-funded trip in 2015 – but of course, buying an apartment for yourself isn’t public business. Ley stated the purchase was “not planned nor anticipated” and that all travel was within entitlement rules. You know how you just casually drop the better part of a million dollars on a whim – ugh, so relatable.
She also played into some pretty gross, racist tropes when she tweeted this:
In all fairness, this is 90% of the content on X nowadays; it’d be weird if she didn’t post things like this.
Ley also has the notable disadvantage of being an utter moron. She revealed in a 2015 interview that she added the extra ‘s’ to her name in her 20s due to her apparent belief in numerology – “I read about this numerology theory that if you add the numbers that match the letters in your name, you can change your personality,” which, I guess, in a way, it has. I know this kind of wanton stupidity from a Liberal shouldn’t surprise and disappoint me after fifteen years, but it still somehow does.
The Party Takes Another Right Turn (Into Oncoming Traffic)
Based on these picks, one can only conclude that the Coalition (if you can believe it) seems to be moving in an even further right-wing, batshit conservative, anti-climate direction. It’s like they are trying to lose. Mathematically, they will have to learn to appeal to those now distant ‘blue ribbon’ liberal seats in the inner city suburbs if they want to govern again.
Or, uhhh, maybe not, shine on you crazy diamonds – never change.
The Unnatural Selection podcast is produced by Jorge Tsipos, Adam Direen and Tom Heath. Visit the Unnatural Selection website at www.UnnaturalShow.com for stuff and things.
The views expressed are those of the hosts and their guests and do not reflect those of any other entities. Unnatural Selection is a show made for comedic purposes and should not be taken seriously by anyone.
As you might expect, since the election on May 3rd, the Think-Piece-Industrial-Complex has kicked into overdrive, with every lukewarm-IQ politics-watcher with a keyboard (myself included) writing lengthy dissertations (without final count data) as to why the Dutton campaign ran aground. Some say it was Dutton’s problems with women, some say it was his insistence on strapping on his Sky News armour and battling in the culture wars, and some mention demographics. These things are all true to a certain extent, but they don’t tell the whole story.
Most annoying (to me at least) are what I like to call the ‘why didn’t you say anything then?’ pieces, which talk about how (only in the light of his loss) the Dutton campaign was (and always had been, actually) hopelessly adrift, with internal squabbles and poor leadership, destined to lose. These inevitable pieces always cite examples that the journalist must have collected during the campaign, that they bravely kept to themselves until the point where Dutton as a political entity was spent, and thus it was safe to dish on him without losing future access—accountability journalism at its finest: Speak truth to power, yaas queen.
These kinds of pieces also give some credence to a notion that I had during the campaign’s final weeks: that some in the media more or less knew that the election was probably going to be a Labor blowout. The conclusion being that many in the mainstream media were feeding the ‘slim Labor majority’ or (god forbid) ‘Labor minority’ government narrative to maintain interest in a horserace that was already over, for ratings. Who will mop up all those juicy clicks if voters think the election is all done and dusted? Won’t somebody think of the CPMs! I thought this idea was a bit ‘galaxy brain’ of me, but hearing former mainstream journalists Osman Faruqi and Scott Mitchell float the idea has given me some confidence in this perspective.
Something that the ensuing flood of think pieces claim boldly is that ‘Australia rejected the Dutton-Murdoch agenda’ and Australia ‘rejects division’ by choosing Albanese. I don’t know, have you met Australians? Many of us are seemingly up for some dogshit culture war nonsense, what with the ‘woke issue’ saturating the airwaves with nauseating ‘debates’ for more than a few years now. This has not been a winning issue for the Left in Australia for some time.
Peta Credlin was right (in her way) when she said that Dutton didn’t go hard enough on the culture war politics. Not morally right (of course, it’s Peta Credlin), but in the sense that Dutton didn’t go after the most politically beneficial culture wars he could have. You could easily see a scenario where, like Trump, Dutton was simply smarter about selecting which culture war issues to go after to whip up the voters enough to carry him to victory. If it was less about ‘welcome to country’ ceremonies and ‘woke agendas in school curriculum’ and more about “protecting” women in sports from trans-women (a la the Americans), it might be a very different story. We had John Howard as our Prime Minister for 12 years, followed by Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison. We are not all of a sudden the Heroes of the Soviet Union that these writers seem to think we are.
Now that the dye is cast, reporters like to write about the outcome like it was pre-ordained, as though it was always going to shake out this way – but it wasn’t. Dutton and the Coalition were winning in February, with more or less this same platform of dogshit, divisive politics. Dutton has had a long (long) history of racist, incendiary politics over the last 24 years, and the voters of Dickson and the Liberal Party had no problem whatsoever electing, re-electing and elevating him to the front bench and eventually to Opposition Leader. The fact that he was a culture warrior wasn’t a downside; for many of his supporters, it was the point.
Ultimately, I think the Fin Review had it right (ew, hate that) when Associate Professor Paul Williams said:
“It was [Dutton’s] personal style, too small a policy platform, unpalatable policies and a shambolic campaign.”
There was a Trump Effect, but not in the way people are claiming – it wasn’t out of a rejection of divisive politics and ‘letting kindness win’ – it was simply a rejection of the kind of chaos that Trump (and by proxy, Dutton) have come to represent over the last few months. Labor ran a decent campaign and Dutton was an unlikable fuck up.
Lots of voters (unfortunately) like what Trump is doing (victimising deportees, arresting judges, mass deportations), it’s even gotten more popular over time, they just don’t like how he’s doing it. Hearing conservative commentators talk about it, you realise it’s not the substance of what he’s doing that bothers them, it’s the unconstitutional style in which he is doing it. Not enough to do anything about it, of course, but enough to publicly wring their hands on progressive podcasts, at least.
Australians are in many ways the same – they’re dissatisfied with the trajectory of our politics, and due to the cost-of-living degradation that’s occurred over the last few years, they’re right to be. Combine this with declining primary votes for the two major parties over the years, and it’s not hard to tell the story of an electorate that wants a significant shakeup in how their politics runs.
Voters want a shake-up – they didn’t want Dutton’s shake-up.
By not acknowledging this virulent, ugly side to our politics and proceeding forward by thinking that we’ve ‘put it all behind us’, and that we’re some kind of Star Trek post-racial, egalitarian society all of a sudden, is inherently misleading. Don’t forget, we’re the same nation that gave the People’s Elbow to The Voice 19 months ago—a non-binding, unpaid body that would provide ignorable advice to parliament on a small number of indigenous issues. Suppose we forget the existence of these strains in our politics. In that case, we leave ourselves open to the same kind of Trumpian politics in the next election cycle, as long as the salesman speaks like Malcolm Turnbull rather than Peter Dutton.
The right-wing populist backlash hasn’t been denied, merely delayed.
Tune in to this episode of Unnatural Selection for an inside look at ABC’s on-air drama, expert breakdowns and the unforgettable moments that defined Australia Votes 2025. This episode has been edited down from a longer live stream.
Early in the evening, Antony Green called a Labor majority.
Antony Green delivered his final on-air analysis after 36 years, walking viewers through seat-by-seat results.
Mid-evening saw Opposition Leader Peter Dutton unseated in Dickson by Labor’s Ali France—the first time an opposition leader has lost their own seat in 125 years.
Dutton’s concession speech and his first show of human emotion.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s emotional victory speech promised cost-of-living relief, healthcare expansion and accelerated climate action.
The Unnatural Selection podcast is produced by Jorge Tsipos, Adam Direen and Tom Heath. Visit the Unnatural Selection website at www.UnnaturalShow.com for stuff and things.
The views expressed are those of the hosts and their guests and do not reflect those of any other entities. Unnatural Selection is a show made for comedic purposes and should not be taken seriously by anyone.
So we did it. We destroyed the final horcrux and prevented the rise of Dark Lord Dutton. Whilst full results for all seats are not yet available, it looks like Labor is in for a thumping victory with at least 10 seats picked up from the LNP and the Greens. Whilst Labor’s won what’s been described as a ‘historic’ victory, it’s important to note that several factors contributed to the party’s success.
Labor’s Campaign
I don’t want to take it away from them; Labor ran a tight, disciplined campaign. As discussed on 4 Corners this week, journalist Louise Milligan explicitly noted how controlled the media scrum was. How tightly staged each interaction Albanese had with the public was. Despite a single pro-Pallestinian protester accosting Albo on the campaign trail this week (big slay), it’s notable that there weren’t many more of these kinds of instances on the trail. Probably not great for accountability journalism, but great for the Labor campaign pushing a clear, disciplined message.
On messaging, Labor’s was clear, entertaining and lighthearted. The party took a millennial-driven, meme-heavy social media strategy, spending more on digital media than the LNP or Clive Palmer(!). They made early missteps with weird AI slop videos, but they ironed that out quickly. Labor’s national campaign manager, Paul Erikson (or P Erikson, as he is now fondly known on social media, due to his authorisation appearing at the end of these ads) has become a rallying cry for Labor’s social media faithful since the election, which should tell you something.
As a quick aside, I think Simpsons and Star Wars memes are funny, but I do slightly despair at the coarsening of our discourse. Are our attention spans so shattered by TikTok that we’re doomed to 6-second vertical video memes rather than serious policy discussion driving elections? Rhetorical question, I know the answer’s yes.
The policy that Labor advocated was also straightforward – not ‘stop-the-boats’ clear, but clear enough. Classic Labor fare: increasing bulk-billing at GP’s, helping with cost of living concerns, building homes, modest tax cuts, HELP Debt relief, etc. The plans were sensible, costed, and resonated with the Australian public’s concerns about their cost of living. All in all, a solid campaign.
In just nine weeks the LNP managed to turn a four point lead into a three point national loss; the kind of bollocking I’ve never seen in electoral politics in fifteen years of watching. Dutton was a very effective attack dog in opposition during the last term, punching down on Albo is easy (and fun, I often find) but these last few weeks have showed a desperate side of Dutton. He’s excellent at making things unpopular (like the Voice Referendum) but is less good at making things popular (like his dumb potato head or bad policies).
Dutton also saw the success of the Trump campaign in America, and in November, immediately started cribbing some of the same talking points: cost of living, ‘are you better off than you were three years ago’, government efficiency, cutting the public service, etc. This strategy might’ve seemed like a winner at the time, but given how toxic and gross the first 100 days of the Trump administration has been since January 20th, this branding has seemingly bitten him in the arse. After Trump’s needless trade war, disastrous economic forecasts and illegal renditioning of people to El Salvadorian mega prisons, his approvals have unsurprisingly taken a nose-dive.
It also doesn’t help that in the last few weeks, Dutton, realising the adverse effect this was having on his campaign (after months of leaning into it), started to backpedal. But not before Jacinta Price could shriek “Make Australia Great Again!” next to him at a press conference, alongside well-publicised stories of her pictured wearing a MAGA hat. Providing a clear signal to voters that this walk-back from Trump was purely for optics.
The LNP also had the unenviable task of selling the Australian public an absolute bill of goods. With all that coal money, the IPA, and all the other think tanks carrying foul intellectual water for them, you’d have thought they’d emerge on the stage in 2025 with a series of thought-out, costed policies that would blow the socks off the Australian public. They, of course, did not – which begs the question: what were they doing for the last three years? They announced a bevvy of unpopular policies that damaged them with key constituencies that they needed to gain ground with to win, including:
This, unsurprisingly, alienated, in turn, government workers, women, Canberrans, working families, rural communities, environmentalists, and anyone with brain cells. Dutton then abruptly reversed course on all but the nuclear policy, futher alienating these cohorts and creating the impression (correctly) that he had no fucking idea what he was doing.
Presumably, these ideas were loudly applauded at the LNP fundraiser dinners filled with male, small-government, small-dicked, small-brained, small-business owners, and they didn’t decide to poll the actual favourability of any of those issues before they announced them as policy. Getting rid of WFH is about as popular as syphilis, as it turns out. It’s almost like they didn’t want to win. They know it’s a popularity contest, right?
To that point, there was also a little something at play that I like to call the ‘Dutton’s a bit of a Cunt Effect.’ He’s always been a divisive, racist, culture-war figure in Australian politics who doesn’t (fortunately as it turns out) resonate with the majority. Despite the two-party preferred polling always having the ALP and the LNP within roughly 5 points of each other, Dutton went into the vote with a negative 16-point preferred prime-minister margin against Albanese, suggesting even dyed-in-the-wool LNP voters couldn’t stomach this rancid spud.
Finally, the decision to release the policy costings two days before the election probably mattered to nobody except me, but I found it extremely underhanded and gross. Here’s a party looking to reshape this country’s financial future in ways that, if you read their proposed platform, were as radical as they were poorly thought out. They decided to oppose Labor’s tax cuts and pledge to repeal them, which Treasurer Jim Chalmers on election night called “One of the dumbest things I’ve ever seen” in electoral politics. They also, for a party that relies on its strong economic management bona fides, managed to bungle their return to surplus, suggesting a path that was worse on the deficit than Labor’s.
It was also just a fundamentally unserious policy document. The return to surplus was largely predicated on enormous assumed savings from cutting the public service, which is directly at odds with the ‘revised’ position that the LNP had put forward the week earlier that the plan was ‘never’ to cut 41,000 public service sector jobs (some of which don’t even exist yet – huh?), but simply to rely on a hiring freeze and natural attrition to thin the herd. $1.7 billion of savings in year one is a lot of public servants choosing to resign completely voluntarily.
Ignoring, of course, that in the final year of the Morrison government alone, the LNP spent $21 billion on external consultants, to artificially paper over the freeze that they had on hiring in the public sector. Needless to say, all the work that the public sector is doing wouldn’t dematerialise; it would, presumably, be outsourced again to the big four consulting firms, who would charge you a 5x multiple to complete the work. Thus, not actually saving any money in reality, but in all likelihood costing even more. They revealed themselves as cynical, unserious liars – and I’m glad I’m not the only one who noticed.
External Factors
Several external structural factors also played against the coalition this election cycle.
Millennials are now the largest voting cohort against a waning Boomer power base, giving us a larger say in who represents us on a Federal level. Given that the largest portion of LNP voters are 65+ and (I don’t mean to upset any Boomers in my readership here) are going to be dropping like incredibly wealthy flies over the next 15 years, the Coalition is faced with an increasingly bad set of national circumstances, if they’re looking to take back government.
Progressives are also nominally more popular with Millennials, which may not surprise you – who amongst us didn’t find themselves in a Che Guevara t-shirt in their youth before googling who Che Guevara actually was. What might surprise you, however, is that Millennials are also, notably, a generation that’s not getting more conservative as we age – bucking the usual trend of rightward drift, providing some structural difficulties for the LNP to overcome.
These factors don’t mean that the LNP can’t ever win again, by any means – all one ever needs in opposition is a bad recession or a juicy sex scandal (cough, Peggy Sue), and any sin can be electorally forgiven. What it does mean is that if the Liberals want to be in serious contention for national two-party politics they need to get their shit together and start speaking to the issues that their voters are interested in.
So while Labour ran a solid campaign, much of their success can be attributed to the missteps of Peter Dutton, the Coalition’s weak policy platform and structural demographic factors. Labor has won a substantial victory this week, no doubt, but given the major risks confronting the global economy for the next three years, they may grow to wish they hadn’t.
He painted a picture of radical teachers “indoctrinating” kids into “political activists,” then promised a swift rewrite of the National Curriculum to banish bias, despite being unable to point out what (if any) parts of said curriculum were too woke, or even what ‘woke’ means. Students and union groups promptly freaked the fuck out, warning that even vague threats to slash education spending on this basis risked undermining classroom autonomy and free speech… which, yeah, of course it does. That’s the point. This is the same LNP that said free speech was so important that people “have the right to be bigots,” yeah?
On 1 May, with some voters already at the polls, Dutton told reporters flatly that he, in fact, had “no proposals” to change the curriculum after all. Cue shadow ministers insisting the Coalition remained committed to “getting back to basics,” whilst being coy as to what “basics” actually are. What this, and many other Dutton backflips during this campaign, tells Australian voters is more or less what they already intuitively know: the spud is not ready for prime time.
Donald Trump many times vowed to restore “common sense” during his election campaign by gutting “CRT” from schools, leaving many families wondering what, exactly, ‘critical race theory’ had to do with AP Physics (Hint: Nothing!). Florida’s Ron DeSantis went further, banning an Advanced Placement African American Studies course for alleged “indoctrination,” only for the academic board to point out the disputed topics were historically vetted. Book bans and lesson-plan overhauls followed nationwide, framed as common-sense fixes to “activist” curricula. Because if there’s one thing we can all agree on, it’s that Americans have too much darn book-learnin’.
This approach helped sweep Donald Trump back into the presidency, but these tactics simply don’t fly with the Australian electorate, partially due to that still-semi-functional educational system I mentioned earlier. If anything, Dutton’s allusions to wanting to emulate Trump’s ‘Department of Government Efficiency’, cut 41,000 public service sector workers and enforce ‘return to office’ mandates have made (enough) Australians realise that this is not the kind of reactionary politics that we want to import from the US – resulting in a 5 point swing against the LNP over eight weeks. It also doesn’t help that Jacinta Price started yelling “Make Australia Great Again!” next to Dutton at a press conference. You can see the moment his little heart breaks – aw! A comment that Price (and I shit you not) ‘does not realise’ that she said. Babe, we have it on tape? Why deny it?
What this looks like (and frankly, what it is) is a leader who is morally and ideologically bankrupt; a man who is willing to say and do whatever reactionary nonsense he thinks will get him into power. It worked great when he was just in opposition, punching down on Anthony Albanese is easy (and fun!), but when it came time to articulate a comprehensive, costed, positive policy vision for Australia’s future, he’s been found completely wanting.
Hopefully, enough Australians realise this that on May 3rd, they will choose at the ballot box to permanently return the potato to managing his $300 mil property portfolio – clearly his true calling in life.
Lets get one thing straight, I don’t like RFK Jr. He’s a liar and a charlatan who’s spent decades grifting and lying his way into one of the most critical, heavily resourced portfolios in the USA; the position of Secretary of Health and Human Services, which overseas a budget of 1.8 trillion dollars. Yes, that’s trillion, with a ‘t’—more than the GDP of… well, most nations on earth.
So, with my cards on the table, I want you to know that I am not here to give the man a Fox News ‘Fair and Balanced’ appraisal. This article is a partisan hit piece. A hatchet job. A People’s Elbow to his solar plexus of his bullshit. I am not trying to be impartial. Don’t ‘@’ me.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. appeared on Dr. Phil this week for what was less of a hard-hitting interview and more of a hot stone massage with a happy ending – to discuss various topics, marking the 100th day of the Trump administration (yay..). You’ll be unsurprised to know that he spouted a lot of ‘facts’, that are total bullshit. His approach seems grounded in a reasonable perspective to the untrained ear: food dyes, chemicals, and pesticides are in our foods, and that’s no good for us. Let’s get rid of them. Make America Healthy Again! Who could argue with that?
The problem is he’ll mention real things like ‘vanishing choloric density’ – where you eat processed foods and don’t receive anywhere near the same level of satiation (the ‘I’m full’ feeling) that you would get from eating an apple, for instance – in the same breath as health figures that he’s pulling out of his arse. No, Robert, 35% of American teens aren’t “diabetic or prediabetic”. Maybe he saw the stat that “352,000 Americans under age 20 are estimated to have diagnosed diabetes, approximately 0.35% of that population,” and confused .35% with 35%, maybe he’s just off by a magnitude of 100 – but I honestly think that’s giving him far too much benefit of the doubt. Having diabetes and being potentially pre-diabetic are two radically different cohorts of people, and by framing it that way, it exaggerates the numbers to suggest something entirely different. And when he doesn’t have manipulatable facts to hand, he just fucking lies.
And yet he touches on something that we know to be the case: obesity and the dearth of natural, unprocessed foods are a growing concern in the US and other developed nations. The rate of pre-diabetic teens is increasing at an alarming rate. One only needs to read the book Salt, Sugar, Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us to see how radically large processed food companies have stacked the deck against consumers for profit. It’s not a secret.
You can read at length about the perfect level of chip crunch that food scientists at Frito-Lay have worked out to ‘enhance mouthfeel’ and trigger the ‘bliss point’ (4 pounds per square inch, by the way) or how preservatives are added to food simply to increase ‘shelf life’ to improve profitability by reducing wastage. Many moneyed interests are at play, spending billions of dollars on advertising and R&D to make sure you jam their chocolate bar down your mouth as frequently as possible – it is not a fair fight.
That’s all real – you don’t need to lie about that.
The problem is RFK Jr is a pathological liar and bullshit artist – he can’t help himself but to spew a slew of scary, real-sounding ‘facts’ that any journalist (a real one, not Dr Phil, please) would be unable to rebut in real-time, due to their sheer volume. He’s practised at this, and he’s been doing it for years. It sounds accurate when he says it. Here’s a good use of AI: have a crawler underneath the footage of RFK Jr talking that live fact-checks his nonsense. You’d finally break the machines once and for all. It might be the only way to fight them. Or better yet, stop putting this grifter on TV.
And then, as it always does with old mate Robbie, the conversation turned to vaccines.
RFK Jr. emphasised in response to a viewer’s question that parents should “do their own research” on vaccine safety, as they do with researching baby food and prams. This statement is problematic for several reasons, not the least because (I am now realising) most people don’t know how to do actual research.
What most people know how to do is Google things, look on social media and… that’s about it. I’d wager that most Americans don’t know what PubMed is, let alone how to read it; what ‘statistical significance’ means, or what ‘p-values’ are. Unless you’ve got the benefit of a tertiary education, how would you know these things? Why would you want to know these things? They’re so very dull.
Unfortunately in our world, the truth is often behind a paywall, whereas the bullshit is entirely free. So what usually ends up happening is people ‘do their own research’ and uncover significant numbers of ‘sources’ of influencers and bloggers that simply mirror their existing prejudices and cognitive biases back to them – all of which are algorithmically boosted by multinational internet platforms to keep you scrolling. They are not incentivised to tell you the truth, they’re incentivised to feed you what you want so you keep scrolling and they can serve you more ads and make more money—a system designed for clicks, not truth. At a certain point, even well-intentioned people declare epistemological bankruptcy and give up on the ‘knowing things’ project altogether.
The second issue is that researching medical treatments inherently differs from researching which pram to buy. Whilst in the latter case, reviews from ‘mommy-bloggers’ might actually help you select the right pram for your needs – it always helps to have an unbiased third party to review a product and share their thoughts and experiences – their learnings will not be helpful in the field of vaccine medicine. Because in all liklihood they don’t know shit about fuck.
This is why we have medical research. So people who have spent decades studying a specific subject matter, inside and out, can examine double-blinded controlled studies and determine the evidence’s preponderance. These results are then published and reviewed by other experts incentivised to poke holes in the research if it’s methodologically lacking. Other scientists can also replicate these experiments and verify or disprove the results. It’s the scientific method. It’s how we built knowledge in a repeatable way. It’s the only way to really create knowledge. Is it perfect? No, the system is vulnerable to bad incentives, liars, and cognitive biases – see the Replication Crisis in psychology for an example. Still, it’s the best method we have for generating consensus claims, such as: the MMR vaccine is safe and effective. Except for a few specific circumstances, all kids should have it.
The problem with people like RFK Jr and all the other grifters like him is that they engage with this bad-faith cat and mouse game with the truth. He never gets on TV and screams ‘run for your life, vaccines are going to kill your kids, ahhhh’ because a) that would look crazy, and b) it would be less effective than his current strategy, which is to sow doubt. It also doesn’t help when you have Dr Phil laundering this charlatan’s reputation by going on and on about RFK’s supposed rock-solid commitment to ‘gold-standard’ science. He’s a doctor after all; he must know! The TV man wouldn’t lie; he was on Oprah!
It’s this bullshit of ‘just asking questions’ under the guise of ‘testing’ vaccines to ‘ensure that they’re safe and effective’ which I find infuriating. Vaccines are safe and effective because we have decades of evidence to prove it. Simply by repeatedly posing the question and asking parents to do their own research, RFK Jr is not-so-subtly undermining the concept of vaccination in the viewer’s mind. By emphasising every parent’s ‘right to choose’ for their kids, RFK Jr legitimises both sides of that choice as equally valid, which they are not.
In the context of the U.S. experiencing its largest measles outbreak in 25 years, it is unconscionable to be injecting doubt and creating a permission structure for parents to act in ways that are damaging to the collective, especially when it’s based on deliberately distorted facts and junk science. RFK Jr.’s comments will undermine public trust in vaccines and vaccination efforts, as they are intended to do. They will undoubtedly result in the unnecessary deaths of thousands of people during his tenure in the administration.
Eryk Salvaggio, an author who writes extensively on AI and technology, claims, “What people care about isn’t whether something is true, but how it makes them feel.” Stephen Colbert first identified this right-wing phenomenon on his show The Colbert Report with a term: Truthiness. This term intends to satirise the right wing’s obsession with adopting positions which, while they aren’t true, certainly feel like they should be true to the adopters. A short-sighted willingness to live in their reality, even if it doesn’t comport with the facts.
The unfortunate reality is that many Americans (hell, many Australians) are either so poorly educated or so insulated within their own algorithmically generated news environments that truthiness is no longer a punchline; it’s now driving a trillion-dollar department of the US Government and resurrecting a disease that in the year 2000 was declared eliminated. Who knew Dr Phil could suck harder than he already does?