John Kehoe is a twit:
The media intrigue over Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s $4.3 million coastal home joint purchase with his fiancee confirms that tall poppy syndrome is alive in Australia.
In the United States, where I lived for almost five years as a foreign correspondent, Americans celebrate financial success. Billionaire Donald Trump was elected president in 2016 and may soon be again. Another billionaire, Michael Bloomberg, founder of global data and media company Bloomberg, was elected mayor of New York City three times.
Many American voters regard wealth as a sign of success in their aspirations to be financially independent. Wealth in Australia is more often denigrated or frowned upon.
Is wealth a sign that a politician makes a good leader?
Malcolm Turnbull anyone?
Not to mention Adam Smith in the Theory of Moral Sentiments:
As we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation. Though our brother is on the rack, as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers. They never did, and never can, carry us beyond our own person, and it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations. Neither can that faculty help us to this any other way, than by representing to us what would be our own, if we were in his case. It is the impressions of our own senses only, not those of his, which our imaginations copy. By the imagination, we place ourselves in his situation …
Smith knew that listening to a successful businessman when it comes to policy is a recipe for public policy disaster.
See America and Donald Trump, who rules, more or less, for personal gain.
Every time we put one of these rapacious and self-serving white shoe brigaders into power, we erode the public policy ethos of public policy.
This is as bad for capitalists as it is for the lumpen proletariate, because eventually both collapse into civil war.
Again, see the Trumpian US.
Albo has done everything in his power to disempower vulnerable Australians, doing far more damage than any LNP leader before him:
- allowing energy cartels to gut households;
- flooding the nation with cheap foreign labour to support house prices;
- destroying real wages and incomes more than anyone since the Great Depression.
Albo’s property profiteering is not “tall poppy”; rather, it is the perfect symbol of his deep betrayal of “labour” politics.
It has generated a justified rage in the polity at continually falling victim to the AFR’s corporate interest de jour.
The gallows thirst for you, too, John Kehoe.
