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PoliticsJanuary 16, 2020

The buzzy Australian campaign calling on the Queen to fire Scott Morrison

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Efforts to urge the monarch to repeat a trick from the 70s and dismiss the Australian prime minister over his handling of the bushfire crisis may not be as destructive as the disinformation machine, but it does offer a revealing and worrying snapshot of what good intent looks like in 2020, writes Joe Nunweek.

When Australia started burning and didn’t stop last month, it felt like a particularly visceral and ugly awakening for a lot of us. Souvenir-plate beach towns were decimated by walls of flame, and pictures of their charred and dying wildlife plastered social media feeds. Most responses have been palpably angry, and it’s not surprising that some – feeding on Australia’s healthy streak of festering tabloid-and-broadsheet climate denial – are totally off the planet.

Even if you haven’t really spelunked the absolute bowels of the bad blue-and-white website or the awful bird website, you’ll at least be aware of the tenor of some the main conspiratorial rightwing talking points. The fires were all started and spread by arsonists. The Australian Greens prevented hazard reduction burns.

What’s received less coverage outside of social media itself, though, has been #arsonemergency’s earnest and confused mirror: #dearyourmajesty (sometimes #dearyourmagesty). Though it started through one video rather than a network of fake accounts, and while it’s not as destructive, it is a revealing and worrying snapshot of what good intent looks like as we enter our second decade of Everyone Online, Forever.

#dearyourmajesty started out as an eight-minute video, posted last week by Australian YouTube personality Friendlyjordies (né Jordan Shanks). Shanks, whose YouTube monologues and comedy Crikey once described as serving a “tertiary educated, nerdy and moderately progressive young man that feels excluded both from the sport-obsessed national mainstream and identity politics”, plays a pretty straight bat on this one – low on zingers and more about eviscerating Morrison for his failure to be physically or emotionally present during the fires. He ends with an appeal to the Queen of England:

Your majesty, you fired Gough Whitlam for less than that. After you dismissed him you made Malcolm Fraser prime minister …. If Gough Whitlam was sacked surely Scott Morrison should be sacked for not supplying the firefighters. Get this hashtag trending.

Shanks, who’s a savvy operator, appears to know he’s trading in rhetoric here, and a fair few of the Twitter and Facebook users seem to have taken it in the same spirit. The thing is, a whole lot haven’t. “[Morrison] has breached his oath of office sworn before the governor-general, who should now dismiss him,” writes one. “Your Australian subjects beseech your Majesty Queen Elizabeth II to instruct your representative in Australia…to dismiss this government and to call elections,” urges another.

As you read this, a Change.org petition urging the governor-general to dissolve parliament will probably top 200,000 signatories. Australia’s well-meaning suburban progressives are hungry for change, and they’re expecting it through a wealthy nonagenarian living on the other side of the world who, if the papers are true, has sundry other shit going down.

New Zealanders can sometimes fail to appreciate the significance of Whitlam’s dismissal as prime minister and the apoplexy it continues to generate in a certain segment of Australian society. As an analogy, imagine that Norman Kirk had lived to 1975 only to be dismissed by the governor-general and have Robert Muldoon appointed in his place. Imagine how many times your dad or poppa or insert-relevant-relative with a long memory and a longer-standing interest in politics would go on about this. Double that. Then you’ll start to get a sense of its outlandish presence in the Australian consciousness.

Gough Whitlam wasn’t fired for bad handshakes and a worse response to an emergency. The Labor prime minister’s downfall was at its heart a prosaic numbers game. The opposition, which had come to hold the balance of power parliament’s upper house, announced that they’d block any of the government’s supply bills in the senate unless it called an election, in effect thwarting its ability to do anything as a government at all. For three weeks, Whitlam refused, creating a deadlock.

The governor general, John Kerr, dismissed Whitlam in writing and commissioned the opposition leader, Malcolm Fraser, to form a caretaker government and hold fresh elections of both houses of parliament. It’s chiefly a controversial decision due to the way it was carried out (should Whitlam have gotten some kind of ultimatum or warning before he got the sack?) and the timing (had Kerr given it a little longer, would a couple of senators have crossed the floor and voted with the government?), but Whitlam was resoundingly defeated in the resulting election. His parliamentary speaker tried a bit of a #dearyourmajesty reach himself, writing to the Queen and asking that she personally reinstate Whitlam. Not my problem, she wrote back.

But Morrison’s government has a majority in the lower house and a cross-bench of Pauline Hanson-types to get over the line in the senate. Absent some extraordinary changes of heart from the sort of people who dress up in burqas to parliament and have no issue consigning sick refugees to die in offshore detention, 1975 isn’t about to repeat itself, and the governor general and the Queen aren’t about to step in because the prime minister’s personal favourability ratings have tanked.


None of this has stopped the armchair constitutional law experts. Antony Green, the ABC’s long-serving and highly-regarded election analyst, is currently doing an alarming amount of Twitter engagement trying to set out the conditions on which Morrison’s government could and absolutely would not come crashing down. “Today’s monarchs aren’t despots, Anthony,” one replies. “They acknowledge a constitutional responsibility to their subjects.” Someone needs to go stage an intervention for everyone involved.

Look further afield and you might see parallels to the #dearyourmajesty folly in the US, where there’s an enduring belief that the vice-president and a majority of cabinet could use their constitutional power to remove Donald Trump on the basis of mental incapacity. Or the UK, where (there she is again) the Queen was entreated to prevent a hard-crash out of the EU and simultaneously fire Boris Johnson. What binds these all: they’re held and disseminated by generally decent people, those people are spending too much time on the internet in the same circles, those circles reinforce a shared impression of expertise, and that expertise relies on a seriously magical belief in the powers of established order and process.

Conspiracy theories (including those propagated on a far-right) are generally informed by a distrust of perceived authority, intent and overreach – what American historian Richard Hofstadter once described in his definitive 1964 essay on the subject as “the existence of a vast, insidious preternaturally effective network designed to perpetrate acts of the most fiendish character”.

What we’re dealing with here, and I haven’t seen diagnosed anywhere, is slightly different – there’s the same misunderstanding of what institutions are actually capable of or practically likely to do, but a wistful desire that it be done – that monarchs will step in and suspend democracies, that a group of powerful men with shared interests will spontaneously use ancient loopholes for the good of the nation and wrest control for themselves. The details of exactly how are hand-waved – if this is conspiracy, it’s conspiracy as something benign and reassuring.

While it’s not the kind of belief that leads to people stockpiling guns and ammunition or sending anthrax in the mail, there’s a harmful inertia at the core of this. The existential dread of climate change should keep you up at night, but we have the opportunity at this point in time to participate and organise in civil society in ways that favour direct action, and facilitate a better understanding of why our political systems aren’t working. Long-shot theories such as #notyourmajesty assume those systems have some innate, mystic equilibrium to right themselves. The more people buy in to a dramatic deus ex machina and assume someone or something will step in stop the madness, the more it distracts from what we could be doing well.

Is this just what happens in places like Australia, the UK and the US when the usual norms and expectations get shattered by some mix of malice and sheer uselessness? Will some of us retreat into rose-tinted accounts of authority that’re part sepia-toned nostalgia and part revenge flick? It’s at least interesting to see that the same thing hasn’t happened in New Zealand – while plenty of people obsessively disliked John Key, the public imagination never got fired up with some wordy and galaxy-brained theory that our unwritten constitution would somehow bung him in a cell.

Ultimately, our limited parameters of political discourse and conduct have remained the same government-to-government for decades now, and we’re yet to see escapist tendencies of quite the same kind crop up (to be clear: no one who’s graduated from a New Zealand school should be thanking our level of civics education for this).

In the meantime, the scorched country awaits her majesty’s regards. The leader of the Australian Labor Party, who Liz II’s apparently bound by royal prerogative to install as prime minister, spent his December touring regional Queensland and promising to keep the country’s coal exports flourishing. And if Morrison gets sacked anytime soon, it will be in the grand 21st century Canberra tradition – by the hand of members of his own inner circle who decide new means are needed for the same old ends. In a fire, the ground conditions move quickly – when they do, there’s no magic, just cold and brutal reality.

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PM Jacinda Ardern, just doing normal Australia stuff (Image: Tina Tiller)
PM Jacinda Ardern, just doing normal Australia stuff (Image: Tina Tiller)

PoliticsJanuary 15, 2020

Jacinda Ardern took a summer holiday and Australians lost their shit

PM Jacinda Ardern, just doing normal Australia stuff (Image: Tina Tiller)
PM Jacinda Ardern, just doing normal Australia stuff (Image: Tina Tiller)

Jacinda Ardern has been in Australia at a time when the country is being rocked by devastating bushfires. So what did the Aussies have to say about her visit?

It couldn’t have been timed any better. Jacinda Ardern announced she was going on holiday to Australia last year, but when she touched down, the situation had changed quite a bit.

Bushfires had swept through huge swathes of the country, in particular the very populous New South Wales and Victoria. And Australia’s PM Scott Morrison had just had his own holiday plans curtailed, having to leave an absolutely lovely looking resort in Hawaii, and come back home to do his job.


See also:
Alan Jones just attacked Jacinda Ardern. Here are 14 other times he revealed himself to be an utter cretin
A brief journey through the bad Australian takes on the New Zealand election


Meanwhile Ardern’s domestic problems have caused barely a ripple in Australian political discourse, while her international star continues to shine. So the contrast between the two leaders looked striking to many. Here are some of the most scorching takes that have been released over the ditch about her visit.

Celeste Barber: Make Australia New Zealand’s westernmost province

Celeste Barber might not have been a name familiar to many New Zealanders before the bushfires, but then she put out a fundraising appeal that went hugely viral, ending up pulling in more than $50 million worth of donation pledges. Now she’s launched a new cause – make Australia part of New Zealand so that Ardern becomes their PM too.

According to Newshub, the comedian may have been making a joke here. But taking it extremely seriously, it’s worth pointing out that Australia does actually have a provision in their constitution that would allow New Zealand to become their newest state – could that in fact be reversed? There would be significant advantages to both countries of such an approach. For the Australians, they’d be able to abandon the cultural hellhole of Canberra forever, and relocate their political class to Wellington. And for New Zealanders, they’d never again have to endure another cricket tour to Australia.

“I get sick and tired of that woman.” Steve Price lays into Jacinda Ardern on The Project AU

Steve Price: Ardern is a ‘virtue-signaller’ who should have gone on holiday in NZ

Continuing the long White Australian tradition of telling anyone and everyone that they should go back to their own country, Steve Price (not the footy player) told the audience of The Project that he was bloody well fed up with foreigners coming over there and boosting the tourism industry. “Stay in your own country and spend money in your own place…. Why is she not in Hamilton or Canterbury or somewhere like that? Typical virtue-signalling from Jacinda Ardern. I get sick and tired of that woman,” he said. It’s not clear what exactly the virtue Ardern was meant to be signalling, but perhaps he was pointing out how strange it was for someone to voluntarily go to Queensland.

Tourism experts: Actually, this visit could be great for Australia

The ABC spoke to a couple of locals and tourism experts, who said that a visit from Ardern could do great things for Queensland’s tourism industry. After all, the bushfires are expected to put a lot of visitors off coming, so having a high profile visitor would show the world that it’s open for business. “Obviously she has got a huge following in New Zealand, and is a very popular Prime Minister, so I think it will get out there and people will think about the region as a place to visit,” said Griffith Institute for Tourism director Sarah Gardiner. If that’s the case, maybe Ardern really should have followed Steve Price’s advice and boosted the tourism industry of Hamilton.

Sam Clench: Real PMs lead in times of crisis

In a widely syndicated column, Australian commentator Sam Clench unleashed a massive serve at ScoMo, contrasting his handling of the bushfires with Ardern’s handling of disasters to hit New Zealand. One argument he made was that the PM simply doesn’t go overseas during a time of crisis. But it might interest him to know that right now, the PM of New Zealand is swanning around overseas while the price of limes hits an all-time high, destroying the cocktail potential for millions of Kiwis. Does that sound like leadership to you?

Award winning chef: It’s an honour to cook for Jacinda and Clarke

“Politicians with environmental awareness are as rare as kiwis,” said award winning chef Steven Snow.

A nice sentiment, but quite possibly incorrect. There are currently around 68,000 Kiwi birds, but possibly as few as zero good politicians.

Daily Mail readers: Ardern has handled the bushfires better than Scott Morrison

An incredibly weird poll with a small sample size, but the numbers don’t lie: The readers of the Daily Mail Australia have overwhelmingly declared Ardern is doing a better job with the bushfires than ScoMo.

Now, it’s not exactly clear what Ardern has done to deserve such applause, short of being in charge of a government that sent some firefighters over the ditch, as happens pretty much every year. But it’s possible that you could have replaced her name with literally any other public figure in the world, and they still would have scored better than Scott Morrison.

Jacinda Ardern: Going to Australia means we can have a relatively anonymous holiday

Lol, good luck with that.

Unnamed internet user: ‘I’ll get Scomo on a flight to NZ’

Please don’t do this to us Australia.

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