In this article, Senior Fellow John Roskam contextualises and disseminates the IPA’s research into the Voice to Parliament and the political realignment.
The lesson for Peter Dutton is not to copy Donald Trump – which in an Australian context would be impossible. What he must be, though, is authentic.
In Australia we like looking down our noses at America. We feel superior when we see America’s gun culture and the oversized food servings of its restaurants.
And we believe our version of democracy, with its “centrism” and compulsory voting, is better than the chaos and circus of American politics.
Now, to top it all off, Donald Trump has won the election for president a second time (or a third time, according to defeated Republican senate candidate Kari Lake).
But for all of this, there’s something Australians should ponder. In our country, our prime minister’s preferred means of communication with the public is a phone call of a few minutes into a breakfast radio show hosted by two people best known for being vulgar.
A few days before the US election, Donald Trump spoke for nearly three uninterrupted hours with Joe Rogan in an unscripted interview released to the public, uncut and unedited.
The discussion has now been watched 49 million times on YouTube. One of the subjects that came up was whether Trump believed in UFOs. He said he didn’t, but he thought the existence of life somewhere else in the universe couldn’t be ruled out.
No Australian politician would dare do a three-hour interview. Even if an MP did want to do it, their media adviser would talk them out of it.
(The difference between Trump and Kamala Harris is summed up by how her campaign team dealt with Rogan. Harris would appear on condition that the interview was one hour and she wasn’t questioned about certain topics. Rogan refused her requirements, the interview didn’t occur, and he ended up endorsing Trump. In 2020 Rogan had endorsed Bernie Sanders.)
Love him or loathe him, American voters knew who Donald Trump was, and he didn’t pretend to be someone he wasn’t.
After Trump’s election, Liberals are asking whether Peter Dutton can “do a Trump”, at least, “be a bit more Trump-like”. To which the answer is no.
There’s only one Michelangelo, one Mozart, and one Donald Trump. Australia is not America. To many Americans, voting for Trump was an existential cry of defiance and a call for recognition.
Trump’s perceived authenticity is one of the reasons for his success with young people – 46 per cent of voters aged 18 to 29 voted for a 78-year-old Republican to be president.
Trump proved wrong the claim that centre-right political parties need to veer left to get the votes of young people. He and his strategists realised two things early in the campaign.
First, young people, particularly males, were the demographic that provided the largest potential uplift in his vote. Second, young people crave authenticity in their leaders.
The same applies in Australia. One way of proving this is by comparing the vote of young people in the Voice referendum in 2023 with their vote in the 2022 federal election.
A finding that has received very little attention is that 55 per cent of males between 18 and 24 voted No at the referendum. Only 34 per cent of that age group voted for the Coalition at the election. Among females of that age, 26 per cent voted No, but only 15 per cent voted for the Coalition.
Overall, 41 per cent of those aged 18 to 24 and 48 per cent of those aged 25 to 34 voted No at the referendum. While those numbers are less than the No vote across the population, they reveal a picture of younger voters more nuanced than the caricature that everyone under 40 is “left-wing and woke”.
At the heart of Anthony Albanese’s polling problems is the slowly developing sense in the electorate that he’s not authentic.
Paul Keating as prime minister could easily have survived a controversy about whether he did or didn’t ask the boss of Qantas for flight upgrades. After all, he wore Zegna suits and collected French clocks.
Albanese’s self-created persona centred on his public housing upbringing is very different.
The lesson of Trump for Dutton and Coalition MPs is not that they should talk and act like him – which in an Australian context would be impossible anyway. What they must be, though, is authentic.
“Authenticity is the new currency”. Love him or loathe him, American voters knew who Donald Trump was, and he didn’t pretend to be someone he wasn’t. The same could be said about Peter Dutton.
