Tall Poppies, short tempers, and a changing political landscape

A backlash to a t-shirt, highlights an emerging split in the mainstream political right, and tectonic shifts in the wider political landscape.

With so many people with profiles prepared to talk about so little about big issues, a statement like Tame’s can spark discussion. (Source: X)

Grace Tame just has to breath air to live in the head of the petty Australian rent free. The former Australian of the wore T-Shirt with ‘Fuck Murdoch’ emblazoned on it for a function at The Lodge hosted by the Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. A barrage of criticism flooded in from sections of the rusted on right of Australia’s stagnant political spectrum, calling out Tame’s statement for being disrespectful.

Like woke politics, fixation on gender, and Australia day, Grace Tame has become an ideological rallying point for the US-styled identity obsessed sooks that now inhabit large swathes of the hollowed out shell that was once Robert Menzies style Australian conservatism. A cohort of those who would like to call themselves ‘quiet Australians’ these days, are people with quite a lot to say, and the PM copped flack from the usual pack: the opposition, the press, and Prue Macsween.

In a normal world, you would think a Labor Prime Minister whose government took the mandate amongst a sea of Teals, a public demand for change, and a blistering public outrage towards Murdoch products after being squeezed through bushfires and pandemics, equipped with a neatly packaged just-add-water Murdoch Royal Commission supported by former Prime Ministers from both major parties, would lean-in to such a moment. But the political sliding doors have jammed shut, and Albanese ended up criticizing her in fear of retribution. Tame called him ‘weak kneed’. As the PMs feeble condemnation trickled out, Newscorp was waging a coordinated personal attack on Australian Jewish Council Chief Executive Sarah Schwartz for not being a Jew who was not a Zionist, and paying out millions for malpractice in the UK. Just another day in world of Newscorp.

In the ideological Terra Nullius, where a trickle down ordinariness is imposed on our meticulously engineered apathetic society, Tame has stood out as one of the few public figures willing to to stand up for what they believe in. In a country where the comedians don't rock the boat for missing out on the opportunity to host the next legacy TV variety show, a land where musicians lose record contracts for making political statements, and a place where journalists are sacked for sharing posts and largely happy to echo decrees from their corporate masters, Tame is one of the rare examples of influential Australians using their profile to make impactful statements. And impactful statements stick out in the Australian vacuum of vapidity and incongruousness, having profound effects on the increasingly shrinking numbers of change resistant that cling like barnacles to the cracked hulls of our major parties and legacy media narratives.

We all become accustomed to the dramatic shrieks of the cancel culture obsessed modern reactionary-right, augmented by the worst parts of US far-right discourse and Australian small mindedness, while claiming victim-hood from a range of things like spectre of foreign migrant invasions, woke ideology in schools, and climate change. Yet we are seeing a splintering of once aligned voters leaving the major parties in droves, and watching the reducing numbers of establishment die-hards half enthusiastically flood in to place a punt on Murdoch vs Tame, sat a bit off for everyone. Including those in more disenfranchised sections of the Australian right.

For some time, the autopilot left/right camps of Australia have outsourced their political identity to one of a few media outlets in this godforsaken country to largely reflect their political views. But as the left has come to discover from the ABCs questionable coverage of Israels genocide in Gaza, or the right has been scratching their heads about the corporate media praising Duttons support for freedom restricting legislation like the social media age ban or dismissing issues of foreign interference, the legacy media footy teams, and their political counterparts, no longer encapsulate the concerns or needs of the membership, and the section of legacy-right political automatons that went into bat for Murdoch, did so in isolation.

Modern conservatism, hollowed out by the same neoliberal succubi that perch on the chest of the post-Blairite modern left, asks its supporters to blindly support the status quo, while copping trickle down changes that suit the ever unreasonable elites dictating terms above. With a wary Australian public across the political spectrum ever disenfranchised with the self interested major party political elites, the rusted on Australian right, just like their Labor counterparts, shoot themselves in the foot defending the established systems that empower the titanic duopolies that hoover our capital to the unreasonable extent that their profits cause greed-spiral inflation and keep Australians on the back foot.

The excuse making establishment left are no better. Beset by the same double standards and concessions for their footy team, desperately hearkening back to a time when major party politicians remembered who they worked for and acted accordingly, they have watched Labor vote on the same side of the division bell with the LNP on legislation that doesn't benefit the population, and they have seen them abandon their Whitlam inspired values that sought to argue against militarism, war and poverty. The people that voted them in with default meal ticket votes have witnessed them turn from the party of the working left, to a symbiotic neoliberal blob that functions as a bipartisan pendulum for the objectives of foreign overlords and the corporate elite.

The rusted-ons that screw into the joists that prop up the left and right of the duopoly have corroded over the decades, barely supporting a top heavy brutalist structure that rocks on its foundations. The people who wear out the floorboards inside are unwilling to attend to the irreparable rot forming in the stumps that prop up the broad churches and caucus rooms of the duopoly. With AFL clubs boasting more members than the major parties, and the MPs within those parties being as vapid and ineffective leaders as they are, the social contract continues to degrade, and the public begins to gain the function to articulate the source of their woes outside a distrustful political bubble.

In the same way that the rusted-on-right in media and entertainment promote a bleak and uninspiring Peter Dutton, progressive figures on the rusted-on-left give the inadequacies of the Albanese Government a pass, perpetuating the mundane dualism that swings to the Australian constant of a neverending Drongo dance. And as a result, a confluence of small mindedness, subservience, risk aversion, consumer selfishness, and political apathy has washed through the national fabric.

This is by design, piped clumsily by the sausage fingers of distracted political hacks in Canberra who look upwards to their benefactors in embarrassing ways they don't bother to conceal, to maintain a situation that keeps Australians always on the edge of a steady downward spiral. To rob us of dreams that give us hope. So they can rule over us.

Among the wider weathered Australian community, sick of misinformation and division sowed by the subjective media, reflected by drastic declines in sales and influence, those on the conservative side who lump in for Murdoch look out of touch. A sentiment echoed in the comments sections of conservative social media platforms. Tame sends a message to Albanese he literally can't look away from. It echoes a sentiment in segments of Australian society, including some non-admitting rusted-ons, that he better fish around for that mandate again and saddle up with the public to win an election, or else he is probably toast..

As Murdoch legacy media becomes more legacy, and its reach diminishes, so too does its quality and tradecraft. The same may be applying to the LNP and Coalition in Canberra. Swimming up a diminishing stream, with rapidly evaporating consumer bases, beset with issues of legitimacy, prestige and influence, the corporate press hammers out uglier and more destructive narratives with no nuance or quality, increasingly shallow, bitter and overtly selfish: it should go and get fucked. A brave government could have challenged a disconnected Newscorp with the mandate of the people, instead it has parlayed with those who call for its defeat in a not-too-distant election, at a time that requires clarity and confidence in leadership.

Its hard for them to see it sometimes, but Australians are weathered by the bipartisan political cohort that have shoved them around for a decade, and wary that they openly favour the interests of the elite over the needs of the population. Australians no longer have the proverbial wool over their eyes, feeling ripped off by hollow major party politicians, and both the left and the right have become disenfranchised with their political options (and lack thereof), and blame the political class for the current predicaments that see us as a key exporter importing gas, and paying $10 dollars for a bag of lemons at the supermarket. Even for the real stubborn quiet Australian, its getting harder to back Newscorp against Tame, Newscorp against Prince Harry, or Newscorp against anyone for that matter, because most Australians see it as a toxic and nefarious foreign based subjective element that is directly at odds with Australian interests.

Grace Tame, like corporate super profits, one in six children in poverty, and so many things, is beyond politics now. In the post-pandemic era of war and economic upheaval, where either government fails to govern, where democracy turns to neo-feudalism, and genocides flash before our eyes—less and less can be seen through the tea leaves of right vs left—and more can be seen through the lens of ‘us vs them’. Due to this bipartisan abrogation, there is a confluence of Australians converging in the no-man's-land between the political aisles, and while decaying legacy media entities convene with legacy political parties to plug holes in a sinking ship, they will find less in the public ready to defend them. Governments and oppositions, and even Newscorp better choose who they want to please going forward. Because most Australians from both sides know its not them, and are joining together to think of how they can do things different.