Trendsetting declarations?

This is becoming a trend: Voters in countries in the Commonwealth are rejecting the USA’s titular president and his hard-right authoritarian politics. Will this spread? We can certainly hope so.

This past Saturday, Australians went to the polls in parliamentary elections, and the delivered a resounding defeat to the countries MAGA-aligned conservatives. Just as Canada recently did, the Australian conservative leader also lost his own seat in Parliament. Well done, Australia, well done.

Australia’s re-elected government is under the Australian Labor Party (ALP) headed by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese (his surname is pronounced “all-ban-EE-zee”). The leader of The Coalition was Peter Dutton who tried to use the US Republicans' culture war antics, along with a bizarre focus on expanding nuclear energy (critics suggested it was to promote uranium mining in Australia, and also to distract from conservatives’ fixation on coal, which is also mined in Australia).

The Albanese government wasn’t overwhelmingly popular late last year, then in January everything changed as the US regime bedded in. In the last couple weeks before the election, it looked like the ALP would be re-elected, but the polls were quite close, and it looked like maybe the best Albanese could hope for was to form a minority government (this happens when no party has an absolute majority in Parliament and is able to form government with the support of minor parties). In the end, the ALP increased its majority.

The conservative Liberal Party (which is in coalition with the largely rural National Party, and together they’re usually called “The Coalition”) was the target because of their rhetoric aping the US regime’s leader, leading to the ALP branding him “DOGE-y Dutton”. He wasn’t the only MAGA-aligned Australian, of course. The AP News article linked to above noted:

Trumpet of Patriots, a minor party inspired by Trump policies with an advertising budget funded by mining magnate Clive Palmer that eclipsed the major parties, attracted only 2% of the vote.

Once again, mining rears its head (many of Australia’s ultra rich are connected to mining). At any rate, it’s always pleasing to see oligarchs waste some of their obscene wealth in a failed campaign to buy an election, much as Elon failed to buy a Wisconsin Supreme Court seat. Seeing the oligarchs fail utterly is always satisfying to the those of us who love and embrace democracy.1

New Zealand’s next general election is next year, and we have two very different minor parties aligned with the US Republican regime: One is led by an octogenarian who apes the Republican leader’s culture war bullshit. His party is introducing a bill to declare there are only two genders, after campaigning in the election to require restaurants, bars, etc., to verify that the gender of patrons using matched the toilets the toilets they planned to use. How, precisely, business were to do that was never stated, leading to mockery about them requiring genital inspections.

The other hard-rightwing minor party is led by a much younger man who wants to implement the same far-right fascistic agenda being advocated by those working behind the scenes of the USA’s current regime, in part because that particular minor party leader was part of an international organisation promoting neoliberal (sometimes call neoconservative) policies, such as, promoting the interests of corporations and the ultra rich, against poor and working people, and in favour of using the power of the state to control behaviour they don’t approve of (though in this case, not religiously based). They also want to privatise pretty much all government functions, in much the same way the USA’s “Doge” is trying to give core US government functions to corporations. That guy is about to become Deputy Prime Minister under the coalition agreement the three parties entered into to form government,

It’s around a year and a half-ish until New Zealand's next General Election, and there’s no way to know what shape politics here or in the US will be in. Will New Zealand join its fellow Commonwealth nations and reject the divisive and negative politics of the USA? No idea at this point, but you can be sure I’ll be talking about it—next year. Right now, I am proud to celebrate with both Australia and Canada.