Blockade a city and open the door to the right: zealots do Dutton a favour

by Mark Sawyer | Jun 28, 2022 | Lobbyland

The return of a Coalition government in 2025 is a long shot, whether under Peter Dutton or anyone else. But oppositions have come roaring back to government after a defeat, especially the Coalition.

And if the unlikely happens and the conservatives are back in Canberra in three years, perhaps historians will see the seeds having been sown in the first six weeks of the Albanese government.

The Blockade protests have been an exercise in bloodymindedness. Ironically, most of their commuter victims on the Sydney Harbour Bridge during the morning peak are likely to be voters who supported climate-action candidates in North Sydney, Mackellar and Warringah.

The Blockade spokespeople and their champions repeatedly assert that no social change has happened without disruption and some inconvenience to the populace. That assertion might apply in jurisdictions such as the US and South Africa, but much less so in the social laboratory of the Australian federation since 1901.

Meanwhile the Greens, having performed brilliantly at the ballot box, have disappeared down a rabbit hole of gender-definition disputes in Victoria. Furious arguments of the how many angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin ilk, have pitted the far left against the far far left in ideological tests of purity, with no past tweet or expression of opinion off limits to the pitchfork wielders.

Adam Bandt’s posturing over the national flag illustrates that nobody does Indigenous politics of concern like the well-meaning white saviour figure.

Blockade and anti-colonialist ”infiltrators” may be opening the door to a resurgent right in 2025.

Mark Sawyer is a journalist with extensive experience in print and digital media in Sydney, Melbourne and rural Australia.

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