A true woke leftie must be proud of their agenda and painfully aware of their unpalatability. Politics is not a game of checkers, but rather chess: every move is calculated. Let’s be clear: the so-called ‘woke agenda’ is no grand progressive project — it’s a political cudgel, used by both sides to provoke, distract, and define the other.
This is not a symptom of Peter Dutton’s politics, rather this is his politics. Dutton has tried to brand Labor-loyal Aussies as a pack of woke warriors who think that rising rent matters less than gender-neutral pronouns. He has made a direct attempt at characterising Labor — from director Albo to your proudly pro-union barista — as woke lefties who believe that the cost-of-living crisis is irrelevant in the face of woke, cultural issues.
Watch his press conferences and you’ll notice his eyes flicker toward the teleprompter, reciting lines from Trump’s political manifesto. Trump’s 2024 victory largely had to do with his ability to dupe the American working and middle-class voters into believing that he would offer considerably better economic outcomes than the Biden administration and, ultimately, his opponent Kamala Harris.
Here lies the critical difference: Dutton isn’t playing to a Trumpian base. Australian voters, by and large, aren’t buying it.
The cost-of-living crisis has shaped the world we currently live in. Times have been so dire that almost three-quarters of the Australian public cannot name a single thing that the Labor government has done to grant financial alleviation.
This was political gold for the Liberals’ campaign: “Three years of Labor and people are still copping a financial beating” was the perfect one-liner to paint them as economically clueless. Forget culture wars, feel your wallet. Yet the Liberals tried to spring the ‘too woke’ trap, and were ultimately unsuccessful.
Paradoxically, Peter Dutton has shown that the ‘woke agenda’ is a relatively unpopular focus for Australian politics — not by luring Labor into the trap like he planned, but by focusing on it too much himself. His recent pledge to make efforts to stop children from being indoctrinated into the ‘woke’ agenda pushed by school curriculum, arguing that students should be “able to think freely, being able to assess what’s before them and not being told and indoctrinated with something that is the agenda of others,” has painted him as a circus clown.
Like an Aussie MAGA magic eight ball, one day Dutton is calling for everyone to return to a full week back in the office, the next he’s de-wokifying schools; not to forget boasting about his refusal to stand in front of the Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander flags. But as the circus rolled through towns, Policeman Pete’s Parlour Game tent drew fewer and fewer crowds. They steadily drifted to Albo’s Trapeze of Tedium.
According to YouGov, Albo’s ratings for a two-party preferred vote have risen to 52.5 percent now, its first lead in this term. It is only fitting that we say he now ‘trumps’ his conservative opponent.
This was never about just luring the Labor party into this cudgel. It was also a strategy to make us — proud woke progressives — look aloof, even smug, about economic pain.
Dutton has proved how unpalatable a staunch focus on the ‘woke agenda’ is, not by successfully baiting Labor into focusing their election pitches on cultural issues, but by shooting himself in the foot by showing his own obsession with tackling the ‘woke agenda’. This sends a stark message to all fellow lefties; if you are looking to persuade Uncle Jim or conquer a finance bro, culture wars are not the answer.
If people believe the government is more concerned with what they consider mere woke propaganda than the price of their groceries, they will believe our words are hollow. As you express your outrage at Peter Dutton’s denigration of Indigenous Australians and immigrants, or his proposal to change school curriculums to ensure students aren’t being ‘indoctrinated’, remember your reaction is exactly what he hoped for. Don’t feed the troll — especially when he’s on a diet of culture wars and canned applause.
