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.
The EO kicked off with what amounts to a legal force-field for cops (as we all agree, there’s historically been way too much accountability for American police officers…), promising to foot the bill for any civil lawsuits that officers might incur while “aggressively” upholding “law and order.” This mechanism will “include the use of private-sector pro bono assistance for such law enforcement officers,” ah, so that’s what they were doing with law firms Paul Weiss and Skadden. Now it makes sense.
The order doesn’t stop there; the President has deputised Delta Nu Sorority Fascist Attorney General, Pam Bondi (Bondee? Bon-dye?), to go on a state-sanctioned witch hunt for local officials deemed insufficiently supportive of the regime’s law enforcement tactics under the guise of ‘Holding State and Local Officials Accountable’ a phrase so deliberately chilling that I could apply it to the sight of a burn.
State and local officials who dare to question a federal officer’s judgment risk obstruction charges and civil penalties designed to make them think twice, maybe even three times, before doing their jobs. Within 60 days, every federal consent decree and judicially supervised reform is flagged for review, with instructions to “modify, rescind, or conclude” any agreement that might “unduly impede the performance of law enforcement functions.” What might those functions be? Whatever the fuck I say they are, I’m the guy with the gun, see? Isn’t power rad?
Trump also orders department heads to maximise the use of federal resources to “aggressively police communities against all crimes.” If you’ve suffered a traumatic brain injury or you’re a Pauline Hanson voter, you may think this sounds okay. Who doesn’t want all crimes prosecuted? Crimes are bad, right? When you have the judicial system by the short and curlies, just about anything could be construed as a crime – and it’s not hard to see how this power could be abused by everyone’s favourite vindictive, small-handed, orange-dusted psycho. Trump is not above utilising the department in this way, as we saw this very monthwhen he directed the DOJ to investigate people who hurt his feelings.
If you ever wondered what happens when you mix a trillion-dollar military-industrial complex with a case of malignant narcissism, then… congrats, now you have that. You wished it into existence like The Secret. It’s your fault. Couldn’t you manifest world peace instead? What’s wrong with you? Why are you like this?
Now here’s the terrifying shit: a 90-day plan to repurpose “excess” military and national-security assets—think surplus Humvees, night-vision goggles, and maybe a tank or two, just to pull someone over for a broken tail light—normal, cool-country stuff. The sort of stuff that the good guys in movies do. Surely this is what the glorious founders had in mind: the military tooling around in an M1A1 Abrams tank on Main Street, enforcing a police state. It’s not like militarisation of the police hasn’t already been a problem for a full decade or anything. The same GOP that used to decry any federal agent doing their job as a ‘jack booted thug’ is apparently fine with all of this now? Incredible.
This redefinition of “excess equipment” as anything not needed for active foreign engagements smooths the way for law enforcement to start collecting toys once reserved for the battlefield. If you were trying to recreate the opening scenes of domestic social unrest in Alex Garland’s Civil War (2024), congrats, you’ve done a great job. Again, why are you still imagining things? I am begging you to stop. Imagine an apology for Kyle Gass instead.
Lawfare analysts point out that these extraordinary domestic-deployment theories were always meant for emergencies, not routine crime fighting. But if Trump just declares everything an emergency (like he did with the Southern Border), then apparently everyone’s powerless to stop him all of a sudden. No national emergency for universal healthcare in a pandemic, just the Nazi stuff – gotcha. Using old laws like the Alien Enemies Act (1798) to deport migrants who are in the US legally – Good! Posse Comitatus (1835), which was created to stop exactly this scenario – bad! Got it.
The real issue with this executive order is the whole “we decide what’s a crime” thing and “I am the senate” thing, and Trump always yelling “Execute order 66!”. They’re so weird. You might be asking, Jorge, how they can do this? They can’t, but they’re doing it anyway.
If the government can just pick and choose what counts as illegal, and then go full banana republic in prosecuting anything, what’s to stop them from prosecuting anyone? As we know from the book Three Felonies a Day, US citizens generally (knowingly or unknowingly) commit roughly…. Three felonies a day.
Federal laws are opaque and complex and require judicious application. In the hands of the ‘ponderous judge’ Merrick Garland, that’s not really a problem. In the hands of Delta Nu Sorority Fascist Pam Bondi, it might be a different story. As said in the TV show Succession, “You can’t make a Tomlette without breaking some Greggs.”
This week it has emerged that everyone’s favourite Horcrux owner and narrative antagonist of ‘the boy who lived’ Peter Dutton has been fortunate indeed with his share purchases. In what can only be described as Olympic-level, Buffett-ian levels of deep market intuition, Peter Dutton went on a “share-buying blitz” across the banking sector between the 11th of November 2008 and the 23rd of January 2009, in the depths of the GFC.
The remarkable thing is that on the 24th of January, 2009, the Rudd government’s proposed $4bn bank bailout package was announced, sending prices of those exact shares skyrocketing. Of course, we don’t know how many shares he bought or at what exact price – but given the dates, we can assume he made a tidy profit.
Dutton’s Register of Interest Updates 2008-9
Prior to the bailout, for example, shares in NAB were trading around $16, down from a high of $41 before the crisis. After the bailout announcement, shares in NAB recovered quickly to a high of $22 by April 2009 and then a high of $30 by October 2009.
Relevant share price charts
Peter Dutton, of course, denies any claims that he traded on any insider information and expects us to believe that this just happened to be the luckiest coincidence ever. Gee whiz, couldn’t have happened to a gooder boy!
It is worth noting, however, that when a party in government is crafting a broad package of legislation, especially something as consequential as a multi-billion dollar bailout, it would be sensible (and very normal) for them to confer with the opposition party. It’s reported that:
“While Mr Dutton was in opposition at the time, the Labor Government was regularly briefing the opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull on major stimulus packages, prompting Labor questions about what he knew when he bought the shares.”1
Samantha Maiden, news.com.au
Governments often share this kind of information with their opposition, as it has several benefits:
Bipartisan Support: If you can strengthen your legislation by obtaining the support of both major parties, this would virtually guarantee passage of the bill through both the upper and lower houses, without dealing with those pesky independents or speaking with Pauline Hanson. Ugh.
The Appearance of being Bipartisan: Voters are oddly horny for bipartisanship. There’s nothing they love more than their pollies getting along in Canberra. Unless, of course, they’re getting on too well, in which case it’s a secret cabal, and they’re all just as bad as each other – bloody pollies! In any case, it looks good for the party in power if they’re seen as consultative and moderate by conferring with the opposition. And of course the most important…
Not Being Held Responsible if Things go Tits Up: Fairly straight forward, if both major parties vote for the thing it’s very difficult to get hung out to dry for it later. It’s the grown-up equivalent of getting your sibling to steal the cookies from the cookie jar with you to diffuse the blame when you get caught: “Yes, we’re all in the wrong. Equally. Together.”
So it’s not unreasonable to assume that Dutton could have known that the bailout was coming, or at the very least should have known that a bailout was in the offing, given that the foundations of capitalism were being rocked in a once-in-a-generation cataclysm that can only be explained by the awesome powers of Margot Robbie in a bath.
In any case, Dutton’s denied all insider knowledge, and there’s no way of crawling into a man’s brain to know his true intentions – and even if there were, there are brains that I would have higher on my list than Peter Dutton’s. Gross.
If P Duds Did Make Share Trades with Insider information, Would that be Legal?
Well, in a word, no.
Australia’s insider trading laws are comparatively strict, especially when compared to the wild-west-free-for-all-fuck-and-suckfest that is the United States Congress. Insider trading in the USA’s congressional system is not only not illegal, it’s downright celebrated. Go to CapitolTrades.com if you want to mirror congressional share trades; they tend to outperform the market for some mysterious, unknowable reason.
Australian law, however:
“…encompasses a broader prohibition because it operates on an “information connection” rather than a “person connection” – meaning that individuals who possess information that they know, or ought reasonably to know, is both material and nonpublic are prohibited from trading or from passing the information to others who might trade.”2
To my mind, it should be less relevant to voters whether he knew directly about the bailout; the key question is whether he should have reasonably expected that a bailout was going to occur based on his privileged position in Parliament.
Even if we give the most charitable possible interpretation of events and assume that he was sitting quietly in a room, alone, twiddling his thumbs during the maelstrom of the global financial crisis and not involved in any way in discussing the potential response with his colleagues across the ailse, it still tells you something grotesque about Peter Dutton’s character:
When he should’ve been focused on helping the Australian people, he was focused on making a bag for himself. An admirable quality in independent rappers, less so for a member of parliament.
Even if it’s not insider trading (which for legal reasons, I again repeat that he denies engaging in) it’s still really fucking gross. Do we want a guy to lead our country who sees impending financial collapse and thinks, “How can I make some money out of this? Daddy’s gotta get his beak wet, num num num.”
That’s the real problem with these share trades, not that it’s necessarily illegal, it’s that it bespeaks a complete lack of character from a man who seeks the highest office in the land. It’s fucking grubby and gross.
Also, to have the audacity to get caught out and then complain that it’s “ancient history” and this is the result of Labor’s grubby “dirt unit” is just astounding. That’s called playing politics, mate and this round, you lost. The LNP owned a whole news cycle last year because Anthony Albanese (checks notes) legally bought a house with his own money – the idea that LNP wouldn’t act on this information if the roles were reversed is laughable. Expect much dirtier politics from the LNP than this come election time; just watch.
Nagy, Donna M., and Juliette Overland. “Insider Trading Law in the United States and Australia: Fiduciary Breaches, Market Abuses, and the Harshness of Penalties.” The Cambridge Handbook of Investor Protection. ↩︎
