“Why do Australians care about the domestic politics of the US?” is being asked a lot.
In the wake of another bloody week in US news and the online discourse around it, wrestling with the answer provokes questions about the implications of shared language, cultural sovereignty and deeply divergent attitudes to the politics of speech.
Whether US news interests you or not, any non-American must admit that none of us can compete with the level of spectacle generated since the greatest commercial entertainment culture the world has ever known decided to apply the aesthetics of B-movies to politics.
As an Australian more committed to politics-watching than most, locally produced content of the opposition leader, Sussan Ley, backing in the Afghan women’s cricket team while elsewhere a joyful government MP, Mike Freelander, waves a giant IUD to spruik a healthcare initiative is both adorable and not competitive. Even disturbing rants in the vein of Bob Katter threatening to punch a journalist, Senator Ralph Babet claiming “leftism is a mental illness” or Pauline Hanson chanting something paranoid about Asian lesbian cyborgs fails in its power when you consider that Katter is slightly less famous than his own hat, Hanson once released a video complaining she’d been murdered and Babet is also known as “Senator Baby” (seriously, if you Google the words, his official parliamentary page turns up).
Compare this with the children’s book author turned FBI head, Kash Patel, resembling a lost frog on a highway during his own assassination investigation. Then consider VP and perpetual Succession understudy JD Vance’s livestreamed performance. Then there’s Donald Trump – the president of the United States, the commander-in-chief of the US military – standing on a lawn, next to a helicopter, threatening to dob an Australian journalist into Anthony Albanese for … I don’t know, but I sure got the feeling it may be “impertinence”.
And dear God, these are all news reports from just this week.
In political terms – and to conspicuously shared relief – the Australian majority conclusively chose the giant IUD over the melodrama when the Labor government was re-elected with an expanded majority in May. In entertainment terms Australia is stone cold sober and watching a school play while US politics is a Marvel movie on LSD. After a dull day at work, it can be hard to look away.
The second reason for the fascinated investment in US politics is a drier one. It’s a pragmatic interest in the activities of an economic and military superpower whose choices can still determine whether local industries prosper or fail, whether people stay healthy or sick and to whom Australia, at least, has sacrificed its own defenders in war: in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq (twice).
But there’s also a third, kangaroo-in-the-headlights element to the online interest in “planet America” that, in Australia, I’ve come to believe this week stems from a cultural interest in our English-speaking cousin that is not matched by genuine cultural familiarity.
Australians were, before Trump 2.0, active tourists to the US: more Australians in a year habitually travelled stateside than visitors came the other way. Here we both grow up and proceed towards death with US games, texts and the internet. A shared language gives the illusion of cultural similarity.
Yet the language of extremity that accompanies so much of the wild content drawing the eyeballs of Australians to amplified, omnipresent social media is not something to which we are accustomed. At all.
The vaunted “free speech” rights of Americans that protect expression from Nazi insignia to Klan demonstrations are being debated this week as Trump’s attorney general, Pam Bondi, ponders whether “I don’t like you” deserves censorship as “hate speech”. They date from the passing of the first amendment to the US constitution in 1791.
Australia took a longer time to become a federated nation and, while our courts recognise an “implied [constitutional] freedom of political communication”, over our history we have recognised that speech can harm and therefore must be subject to democratic control. It’s a pendulum of protection that swings with the times; Australia was still banning books until public opinion conclusively upended that restriction in 1973. Public opinion also backed regulating against discriminatory expression in a series of anti-discrimination acts beginning from 1975. The democratic regulation of speech applies to workplaces and the public square, where “bullying” is considered unlawful.
These laws also supposedly apply to the internet but the sheer volume of the US-built information monstrosity now overwhelms our present regulatory framework to contain it. There’s a certain “island tameness” of Australians unused to unregulated speech yet now confronted by it.
If you’re an Australian wondering why you feel emotionally assaulted every time you click a social media app it’s not just due to the content of the US news. It’s the discourse around it and the assumptions that such speech contains.
A local radical right are, of course, mobilising in this window, emboldened by imported discourses that – on the internet – face no meaningful local barrier, to spread the harmful, hateful speech that the Australian majority from right to left has repeatedly, emphatically rejected.
While we delay regulating platforms the assault on our acceptable social parameters will continue. The long-term loss will be more than Australia’s cultural sovereignty. With radicals on the march there will be an eventual inability to discern meaningful difference between our politics and America’s.
• Van Badham is a Guardian Australia columnist
