Hanson, Palmer and the drongology of Australia’s far right
Folks, there’s never been a better time to be a dolt and/or a drongo.
We are living through relentlessly stupid times, where Nazi-Boer grifters and sex-pest veneer-dependents are teaming up to drive the world into a brick wall over and over again, like a Cybertruck packed with flammable crash-test dummies and loose nitroglycerin. It’s basically Wages of Fear if the truckers had ketamine habits and steered into every speed bump and pothole.
Such is the drongology of everyday life right now; there’s no escaping it.
Being, as it is, the season of lead poisoning, Australia’s far-right dunderhead brigade has seized on this hellish moment to finally go full drongo. This gaggle of unflushables — floaters who have mostly haunted our political landscape since the early ’90s — are slotting as seamlessly into the new stupid as they did the old.
Related Article Block Placeholder
Article ID: 1198746
It’s a hustle as old as time, a sweaty mountebank game made all the more pathetic and desperate by the tragic dagotry of its Australianness.
Where to begin?
A few months ago, Benjamin Letts Dawkins — a former Labor, former One Nation, now independent member of the WA Legislative Council — legally changed his name to Austin Letts “Aussie” Trump so he could appear as “Aussie Trump” on the state’s ballot roll. Aussie Trump was expelled from the ALP after pleading guilty to 35 breaches of a domestic violence restraining order. Pauline Hanson booted him because he didn’t “pass the pub test” in his commitment to the job.
A lot has been made of the rise of “the family court dad”, an aesthetic entwined with the far-right’s ascendancy. Elon Musk is perhaps the apotheosis of this phenomenon — if perhaps too cartoonishly so — with his skinny-leg jeans and crazy-tees 9gag circa-2009 vibe that embodies an “every-second-weekend trip to Sportsbet with papa” energy.
Aussie Trump is a distilled, Australian version of this new far-right: gone are the billions of dollars, the celebrity, the $10,000 hair transplant. In its place is a quasi-tragic “background extra in Porridge” reality, a flip-flop trot to Coles at 11pm to buy a bachelor’s-handbag narrative that can’t help but seep through our nation’s shrunken perversity.
It’d be laughable if it wasn’t so pathetic — if this creep factor wasn’t everywhere.
Mark Latham and Pauline Hanson are the height of an atavistic form of drongology that has skulked Australia since Percy Reginald Williamson and William John Miles seized the fascist dipshit trumpet in the 1930s. Both have become Lynchian tulpas of their roiling internal horrors — faces wrought in gout and constipation, hair and makeup by way of the Harkonnens in Lynch’s Dune. They wear their philosophies on their faces, as both warning and advertisement.
Related Article Block Placeholder
Article ID: 1198762
The grotesquerie is built in by design, at this point. Part of what makes Latham, Hanson and other long-lived Australian jackboots have such a long half-life is the self-sustaining consistency of their inherent ugliness. A consistent product sells, and if you keep an aisle at the supermarket called, I dunno, “melted children’s toys with Satanic auras” open long enough, you’ll eventually find they have a regular — even eager — buyer base.
Much has been made already of AI being the “the new aesthetic of fascism”. Its innate soullessness is a natural draw for these hucksters and their base. It promises laziness, and more excitingly, exclusion and extinction — of artist from process, and eventually society. Naturally, when Palmer launched his Brass Trumpetters Party, or whatever it’s called, he announced it with an AI logo that looked like it would appear on a lo-res printed poster for bingo night at an outer suburban sports pub.
This is the vibe. This is what they’re going for because it’s all they need. They are playing limbo with the bar raised to the ceiling fan — what does it matter if they’re flashing nutsack through worn-out Carman boxers? Nobody really cares.
Such is life in the colonies. The daggotry is intractable. It is baked into our national identity, our way of being, so these people can slide by without friction.
If I detail the only true antidote to such symptoms I’ll be blacklisted from here and elsewhere, maybe with good reason. But we need to call an orc an orc in times such as these. To equivocate is to give into it. We are already up to our bottom lip in shit, do we really think that’s a good time to start whistling dandy?
Have something to say about this article? Write to us at letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication in Crikey’s Your Say. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
