Listening to the ABC on the radio last year, a couple of earnest, bog-standard lefties were discussing the Trump presidency and clutching their pearls. “He’s upsetting the established global order!” they wailed. That’s the whole damn point! I fumed to myself. If the American people had wanted to keep the established order, they would have elected the establishment candidate, Hillary Clinton.
But they didn’t.
Australians similarly rejected the establishment wisdom of the ABC types earlier this year, when they elected Scott Morrison instead of the establishment candidate, Bill Shorten. Although Morrison is not quite the sledgehammer Trump is, he is nonetheless quietly pruning Australia from the established globalist order.
And the Canberra Swamp monsters are not happy.
Scott Morrison has centralised the making of key foreign policy decisions within his office, bypassing the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade for advice before his call for China to be classified as a developed country and his recent attack on “negative globalism”.
DFAT secretary Frances Adamson told a Senate estimates hearing on Thursday that her department was not consulted by the Prime Minister on two major foreign policy speeches in the past month.
The nerve! Imagine a prime minister having the temerity to think that he’s the leader of the country, not some shadowy cabal of unelected technocrats.
In the first, delivered in Chicago on September 24, Mr Morrison declared it was time that China was declared a newly developed nation, which would deny it favourable treatment under World Trade Organisation rules.
In the second, at the Lowy Institute on October 3, he warned that “unaccountable” international organisations were threatening the national interest by “coercively” seeking to impose their mandate on Australia.
And a great many ordinary Australians quietly agreed.
Ms Adamson said she was not aware before Mr Morrison delivered the Chicago speech that he would argue that China was now a developed country.
Well, there’s that gigantic military, the nuclear weapons, the space program, the fourth-highest global GDP…all kinds of giveaways.
Mr Morrison warned in the Lowy speech against international institutions that “demand conformity” of sovereign nations. “We should avoid any reflex towards a negative globalism that coercively seeks to impose a mandate from an often ill-defined borderless global community. And worse still, an unaccountable internationalist bureaucracy,” he said at the time […] Ms Adamson said she was not aware of any circumstances in which global institutions could impose their will on independent states.
theaustralian.com.au/nation/dfat-in-the-dark-on-pms-negative-globalism-speech
Apparently, this public service mandarin is strangely ignorant of, hmm, Libya? Greece?
But of course, the corridor elite doesn’t want the hoi polloi getting all uppity. Who knows what might happen? We might even begin to think we live in democracies.