Much has been made by the legacy media of the poll woes of Australia’s (supposedly) centre-right coalition. Being the legacy media, most of it misses the point entirely: it’s not that Labor is stunningly popular – no more the UK Labour were when they won a landslide victory at the last general election. Like their UK counterparts, Australian Labor captured barely a third of the vote. In a normal election, that would have translated to a humiliating drubbing.
So, how did Anthony Albanese turn that record-low primary vote into a record-high number of seats?
It’s simple: nobody likes Labor, but they like the current incarnation of the coalition even less. Especially the major coalition partner, the Liberals. Traditionally a centre-right party, the current Liberals have abandoned all that for fruitlessly clutching at the coat-tails of the green-left, yapping, ‘Us, too!’ Their voter base has rewarded them by walking away, en masse.
New Zealanders will be familiar with this scenario, as they watch National slide inexorably under the leadership of Christopher Luxon, who seems like nothing so much as a smug clone of Jacinda Ardern. Americans, too, spent decades watching the Republican party slide into ‘RINO’ irrelevance. Donald Trump has changed all that.
Many centre-right Australians, such as the hundreds of thousands who rallied to the “March for Australia”, are wondering: Where is our Trump?
The Brits have their answer.
Nigel Farage has announced his Reform UK party would abolish the right of migrants to qualify for permanent settlement in the UK after five years in an effort to end the “era of cheap, low-skill foreign labour”.
Under the current system, migrants can apply for indefinite leave to remain after five years, giving the right to live and work in the UK permanently. It is a key route to gaining British citizenship and allows people to claim benefits.
Australia has a similar system, exacerbated by a foreign student-industrial complex that pours fees into the big universities’ coffers and provides an easy backdoor for would-be migrants. Hundreds of thousands of Indians, especially, enrol in courses that they either have no intention of completing, or which are little more than diploma mills functioning as an underground migration system.
No government in Australia has had the guts or the inclination to tackle this broken system. Labor, especially, are capitalising on it shamelessly, as witnessed by the disgraceful mass-citizenship rallies on the eve of the last election.
Reform has pledged to scrap indefinite leave to remain entirely, replacing it with a renewable five-year visa for those who meet certain criteria, designed to bring Britain into line with other countries such as the United Arab Emirates. Those who currently have settled status would be forced to reapply for the new visa.
Under Mr Farage’s plans, there would be far higher salary thresholds and more stringent limits on bringing spouses and children to the UK […]
The visas will be contingent on not having accessed benefits or other public funds, and there will be stricter rules around requiring migrants to demonstrate “good character”. This will include ruling out people who are guilty of financial misconduct, tax evasion and other criminal convictions.
Applicants will need a much higher standard of English, the equivalent of an advanced level under an internationally recognised system. The new level of C1 will mean applicants have to be able to express ideas fluently and spontaneously in English, compared with the current level of B1, which requires being able to deal with most situations likely to arise while travelling.
The next election will be a critical threshold for Britain, which is staring down the barrel of millions of foreigners becoming eligible, under the current system, to apply for UK citizenship. As Nigel Farage rightly says, the past two decades of staggeringly high migration, coupled with an invasion of millions of illegal immigrants, is “the biggest betrayal of voters’ trust in modern times”.
New Zealand doesn’t quite have a Farage poised to disrupt the two-party cabal, just yet. But it does have:
In NZ’s fragmented political landscape, Peters’s recent populist right-wing exploits could realign his country’s conservative politics in a fashion similar to the effect Farage and his nationalist Reform party are currently having in the UK.
Of course the legacy media are going to smear Peters with all their rote-learned scare words: ‘hard-right’, ‘far-right’, ‘populist’… you’ve heard them all a million times before.
Of course Peters sets the legacy media into an almighty fit of pearl-clutching. Peters – Gasp! Horror! – attacks globalism and promotes patriotism and nationalism. Because they simply cannot even wrap their heads around the idea of sincere patriotism, naturally the legacy media see this all as just so much ‘populism’. The notion that one’s country and countrymen could count more than intersectional identity groups is an incomprehensible heresy.
Not only does Peters’s argument have the intention of reframing NZ immigration strategy, it also encourages the same cri de coeur that shapes Farage’s political cause: “I want my country back.”
Cue orchestrated sneering from the chi-chi ethnic cafes of the Viaduct and Lambton Quay.
And similar to Farage’s approach to political storytelling, Peters speaks to his people as though they have a personal stake in the changes he prescribes.
Pfft. Imagine the proles thinking that they have a stake in anything.
To the shock of the UK and NZ elite, they may well find that the deplorables are waking up and finding that they are strong.
