It's all just so stupid, isn't it? - Amy Remeikis

You may be feeling overwhelmed by the flurry of crises – and that's by design, writes Amy Remeikis

Young generations are locked out of housing, but let’s talk about an attention-seeking extremist dressed in a burqa. The planet is burning, but let’s keep allowing fossil fuel lobbyists to dictate our policies. Israel commits a genocide, but instead of holding the perpetrators to account, the UN signs off on Trump’s real estate plan for Gaza. Our greatest ‘ally’ is in the grips of authoritarian fever, but Labor somehow thinks tying our nation’s future to this sinking ship is smart strategy. We’re investing billions in the US military industrial complex while telling our public hospitals to ‘reign’ in spending. Children are apparently too young for social media, but old enough to be treated as adults in the incarceration system.

But hey - did you hear some Liberal right-wingers are burning down their own party?

The hyper-normalisation of crisis is by design. It’s not new - in Australia it’s been used by all sides of politics since the success of the Howard government to keep people in a state of overwhelm. But it has now reached the point where if you are not feeling like you’re going crazy, then you probably are.

The manipulation of power is so overt the manipulators are no longer even bothering to hide it. They brag about it. For example, the AFR recently reported on a bizarre event held by influential stockbroker Geoff Wilson – a distant relative of Liberal MP Tim Wilson – held to thank those he saw as being instrumental in the defeat of the Albanese government’s very modest superannuation tax changes that was originally designed to target rich retirees. It included an engraved trophy for Matthew Cranston, a journalist with The Australian – if ever we needed another reminder of mainstream media’s proximity to power.

But this is all so normal it barely raises an eyebrow, let alone an outcry at the hijacking of democracy.

It’s so expected that it becomes part of the debate. Peta Credlin admitted years later the Coalition knew the carbon price wasn’t a tax, but it didn’t matter because they convinced the public it was, helped by mainstream media that never called it out. Barnaby Joyce bragged about his $100 lamb roast lie in his book, Weatherboard and Iron, which again worked because the media dutifully repeated it. Children overboard worked. Weapons of mass destruction in Iraq worked. All these lies have worked, which might explain why Nationals leader David Littleproud and the baby muppets continue to spout the fib of a $9 trillion transition to net zero.

Lies work in large part due to a media that repeats what it knows not to be true under the dubious cover of being ‘part of the debate’. Politicians worked out how to hijack this system decades ago. And they are still doing it – even Pauline Hanson is having a crack with her Islamophobic antics, aimed at spinning a lie about Muslim immigration to distract us all from the hoarding of wealth by a small clique up the top.

While the Labor government dithers and fills the space of Howard’s Liberal party, the right continue to see how far they can drag the ‘centre’ and have media sanitise it as ‘normal’.

One of the reasons there has been so much work done to try and rehabilitate the mess that is the Coalition (when a quick glance of history would inform you that this incarnation of a centre-right/right party is done and will be lucky to last out the decade) is because that is how Australian politics makes sense to so many journalists.

It’s a story they tell themselves, and the nation, even if the shifting trends are clear as water. The Liberal party must be rehabilitated because we are supposed to have two major parties, one that is left of centre and the other right of centre. The two parties are considered two sides of a ‘sensible’ centre no matter what they do or how extreme their policies become (like Labor proposing life sentences for children). If the facts don’t play according to the script, then make it.

So while mainstream media tries to sell that message, the same forces that have controlled the narrative for the last five decades are rebuilding to do it again. The HR Nicholls Society – a group formed by John Stone, Peter Costello, Barrie Purvis and Ray Evans in 1986 with the main goal of destroying Australia’s union movement and industrial relations system (which they called a ‘focus on productivity and deregulation’) – were so successful in meeting their goals, they largely went dormant.

In 2023, in response to Labor’s industrial relations reforms, particularly multi-employer bargaining – which allows employees in traditionally weaker bargaining positions (like the care sector) to join with other similar employees and bargain as a group – the society was reinvigorated.

It held its annual conference last week, with speakers including MP Tim Wilson, former News Corp journalist Adam Creighton, former AFR editor Michael Stutchbury and a variety of other thought-aligned culture warriors.

After about a decade of mostly sleepy advocacy, having won most of the battles and succeeded themselves out of relevancy, these groups are roaring back, inspired by populist politics sweeping much of the western world and the addictive lure of winning. Because for decades in Australia, these groups have won. And they openly brag about it and use the media to position them as the ‘centre’, convincing Australians that their greedy pursuits for wealth and power are, somehow, in the interests of all.

These groups have won so comprehensively they have sucked the fight out of the Labor party, which governs in fear of what they could do in response. Labor has been beaten down into emulating the Liberal party of old, but without the gumption to use power. Labor doesn’t want the battle, and so the media calls that ‘stable’ governing.

Any push for reform in the public interest is ‘radical’ and so forces are mobilised, lies are told, facts are twisted and this is all put forward as one very sensible side of the ‘debate’.

And yet you have to wonder - why? Who is this serving? Because it’s not Australians who voted for something different. We have endured their f*** around era and we’re now finding out. It seems increasingly likely those who keep perpetuating this f***ery will do the same.