Challenges in Election 2025: More Populist Jingles to Shape National Conformity?
By Denis Bright
The LNP’s advertising agencies continue to compromise our national sovereignty. Voter choice continues to be compromised by slick marketing strategies employed at the recent Queensland elections. The return to truth-telling should surely be taken up on both sides of the political divide by candidates like Maggie Forrest as the federal LNP’s challenger in Ryan:
I am a practising barrister who has appeared in the High Court of Australia, studied criminology and counterterrorism at the University of Cambridge, and worked in the Office of the Prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague.
Already, the most vulnerable sections of Queensland society are the targets of the LNP’s punitive initiatives as reported by Andrew Messenger in The Guardian (28 November 2024):
Queensland’s human rights commissioner says the state’s new hardline youth crime laws – which could result in life sentences for children “who still have their baby teeth” – are evidence of a “society that has lost its way”.
The legislation will require the third override of the state Human Rights Act in two years. All three permitted the state to imprison more children in the youth justice system.
The Queensland human rights commissioner, Scott McDougall, said the state was risking its international reputation by “removing the rights of children”.
Children as young as 10 will also be subject to the same maximum sentence as adults for 13 offences, including unlawful use of a motor vehicle and entering a premises and committing an indictable offence.
Under the legislation, children can be sentenced to life behind bars for five offences, including manslaughter, grievous bodily harm and a form of robbery and burglary.
If convicted of murder, they must be sentenced to life, with a minimum 20-year non-parole period.
Expect less truth-telling from the LNP and the minor far-right parties to blame the Albanese Government for every negative economic and social trend. No mention will be made in the LNP’s advertising outreach of the economic and social crises at play in other Middle Powers from Japan to South Korea, France and Germany. In the latter, an overly compromising Social Democratic Party is now third in INSA public opinion polling after the main Conservative Union (31.5 percent) and the neo-fascist Alternative for Germany (AfD 18.5 per cent).
Recent Australian GDP data can easily be applied to instill fears about the future after several consecutive quarters of negative per capita GDP data (ABS 4 December 2024):
The election date for 2025 is still open with the added variable of the WA election on 5 March. A late May election will have the new budget parameters in place and more responses to the effects of the Trump tariffs on the global economy.
Peter Dutton should be asked which cost-of-living and environmental relief measures will be axed for ideological reasons. This curtailment of government spending will be at the expense of grant allocations to the states and territories which cover up to 60 percent of all revenue in Tasmania and the NT.
MAGA politics from the incoming Trump administration favours the economic development of the US at the expense of other middle powers with the added burdens of defence purchases by Australia from military industrial complexes and systematic tax avoidance by multinational companies. High profile LNP shadow ministers apologize for these excesses and are overly tolerant of tax avoidance by multinational companies in Australia.
ABC News shows that the list of multinational companies engaging in tax avoidance has grown exponentially:
More than 1,200 large companies paid no tax in 2022-23, an Australian Taxation Office (ATO) report reveals.
The ATO’s tenth corporate tax transparency report, which covers 3,985 entities that lodged tax returns in 2022–23, found that while the amount of tax collected increased due to higher mining and oil and gas company profits, there were still 1,253 entities (31 per cent) that did not pay tax.
The report attributes no tax being paid to various reasons, including companies making an accounting loss or claiming tax offsets that reduced their tax bill to zero.
Readers can check on the tax payable by their favourite corporations by scrolling through the list provided by ABC News to the latest full budget year:
SBS News (31 July 2023) also notes the extent of multiple home ownership amongst our national leaders. There is no national housing crisis in these more elite levels of society.
Despite all these exercises in tax avoidance and write-offs for negative gearing on investment properties, public sector spending at national and state levels is carrying the economy forward at a very sluggish pace (ABS 4 December 2024):
Turning the ship of state back to neoliberal values will be difficult even if Peter Dutton makes it over the line in Election 2025. Our own social divide has grown so much under a new global hegemony that threatens every remaining social democratic government.
Avoiding Lost Causes
Trump’s tariffs rise,
A superpower’s economic plight.
LNP advertisers
Must generate fright
Perhaps Aussies will resist
And question why
Middle Powers are under fire
Forge a political front with a left-leaning spire.
Australia Post offers a timely reminder of those dreamtime realities that occasionally colour the night sky in the darkest of seasons in Southern Australia. Will resistance to another decade of neoliberalism and strategic conflicts emerge out of resistance to those overpowering political jingles that seem to triumph in the most disadvantaged regions and outer metro electorates?
Southern Lights (Image: Australia Post 2024)
Denis Bright (pictured) is a financial member of the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA). Denis is committed to consensus-building in these difficult times. Your feedback from readers advances the cause of citizens’ journalism. Full names are not required when making comments. However, a valid email must be submitted if you decide to hit the Replies Button.
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14 comments
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Burleigh Waters
Return to home pageI like Denis’ appeal to both sides of politics. Our sovereignty cannot be compromised and reduced to silly slogans.
Good campaigning is not a secret art with all the resources available to a national government. As soon as Peter Dutton’s macro-theme emerges, pounce on it. I think that Queensland Labor thought a scatter-gun approach would work but the LNP’s macro-theme held up against a bombardment of well-intentioned Labor initiatives.
An alternative to those school days sagas with Donald Trump posing as the global leader for a second time. Even Peter Dutton should join the resistance on Australia’s Long March.
Resistance is fun if it strives to bring everyone on board.
Events in Germany and France are a real challenge to social democracy.
The massive and rapid changes in technology, demographics, culture and power across the globe have politicians in a tizz. Some trying to step back into a past of industrialization and rampant growth that lead all to burgeoning populations, where everything (except sustainability and toxification) had the mythological sweet scent of roses. Others terrified of the now, and the realization of human’s tendency towards corruption and understandings based on ‘belief’ systems.
Such polarizations prove irresistible for ethics-free opportunists of the abstract world, such as clerics, lawyers, accountants, economists, think-tanks, advertisers, media and big-tech giants and the usual gaggle of freebooters to ramp up divide and conquer rhetoric purely for their own self-interest, as opposed to betterment of the whole population and the planet.
In the face of all that, trying to cling to reason is more than difficult, and increases the tendency for individuals to retreat to brutal primordial self-interest, where little has ever been achieved but defensiveness, death and destruction.
History has proven that we are more than adept at that. At what point do we reach the tipping point where all folk are valued equally and reason only is the driver for a better future? It seems it’s now up to the people to make the politicians actually do our bidding rather than that of the ethics-free zone of self-interested opportunists, or those that have slipped into the zone of brutality.
Meanwhile the prick who would be our next Prime Minister,the divisive dickhead Dutton has hired some divisive specialists, who have warped politics elsewhere.Have a look at a Jason Koutsoukis article in today’s Saturday Paper,and ask yourself what sort of arsehole is Dutton?(rhetorical question)
I have been on the trail of Topham Guerin since the Q election campaign. Everyone should read the article by Jason Koutsoukis (https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/politics/2024/12/07/exclusive-dutton-hires-morrisons-disinformation-team#mtr).
This multinational advertising corporation brings Australia into the renewed political advertising orbit favoured by Boris Johnson and global MAGA politics in the numerous Middle Powers from Germany to Japan.
This is a revitalized style of political advertising and news reporting which was already at play in Queen Victoria’s day to justify events like the sieges of Khartoum with endorsement from Winston Churchill. Churchill wrote 15 articles about the war for the Morning Post between September 23 and October 8, 1898. He also wrote a piece for The Times, but Kitchener vetoed its publication. Churchill commanded a troop of 25 lancers in the Battle of Omdurman. He rode through the charge unhurt and shot three enemies.
MAGA politics like Peter Dutton’s communication style is nothing new and makes former LNP leaders like Malcolm Turnbull look radical when they are just apologists for neoliberalism.
Labor insiders should not be afraid to pounce on these developments before they fester exponentially and merge with election 2025.
The vileness of the LNP never ceases to make me feel like projectile vomitting.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/dec/07/queensland-indigenous-truth-telling-inquiry-lnp-closure
How can we mobilise GL when the Town is asleep as before the Q elections? What’s happened to class solidarity in an age of social media and streaming diversions? Are the class warriors dinosaurs from another time?
Our national politics needs livening up around that theme of national sovereignty and those aeons of indigenous survival. If the electorate is more prepared voters will reject the jingles from political advertisers.
Labor does better when the odds are against change. It is really important to target the regions which John Curtin brought on-side in the recovery from the Great Depression.
Advertising gurus from TG will target this article’s latest economic data from ABS.
Linking the data to the trends in the wider global economy and the rise of MAGA politics is so important.
This statistical challenge in new data for future quarters will not go away. It cannot be avoided with scatter-gun initiatives.
Labor should deliver a 2025-26 budget before an election at mid-year before parliament does into election mode. Giving up command of Treasury too soon would be political folly and invite speculation from TG to develop a hasty integrating theme in LNP advertising.
Peter Dutton is vulnerable to his tolerance of Trump and MAGA Politics.
Responsible Middle Powers should not just nod in agreement with the emergent Wizard in the White House.
Albo’s independent calls lately are a welcome sign as the 2025 election approaches.
The United Front still has a chance. Albo has ended the year with a new stride.