EDITORIAL: Labor in danger of repeating democrats’ mistakes

If there’s one lesson for the Australian political class to take out of Donald Trump’s re-emergence, it’s this: stop with the distractions.

That’s what doomed Kamala Harris and the Democrats — their obsession with side issues and trivialities when in reality, there was only ever one subject that mattered.

One of the most widely circulated ads of the campaign was one that played off Harris’s support for gender-affirming care.

“Kamala’s for they/them. President Trump is for you,” the ad asserted.

It was crude and reductive, but it struck at the heart of the disconnect between the American mainstream and the ruling class.

Diversity initiatives and social justice pushes are great. When things are going well.

But when people are struggling to clothe their kids or make their mortgage repayments, it can all seem like diversion from the real issues.

This election saw Americans clearly articulate what mattered to them.

The economy.

Under President Joe Biden, the American economy had rebounded well after the dark days of COVID. Unemployment was low, growth was strong and inflation had fallen to 2.4 per cent, a figure that would make Australians green with envy.

But there was a huge gap between those rosy figures and the reality of life for middle Americans.

Yes, inflation had fallen. But essentials such as food and fuel were still significantly more expensive than they were four years ago when Trump was last in the White House.

Harris’s fatal error was to misjudge the depth of ill-feeling.

Instead of adequately addressing the legitimate concerns of Americans doing it tough, she chose to lurch leftwards, fighting the election on the battlegrounds of abortion rights and identity politics.

It was a tactic that failed miserably.

In Harris, Americans saw a candidate who just didn’t get it.

In Trump, they saw someone who did.

We can only hope that Australian politicians are listening. The economy is the only game in town.

So far, the signs aren’t positive that the message is getting through.

On Thursday, just a few days after the RBA chose to hold interest rates steady for an eighth consecutive time in a signal that our cost-of-living crisis isn’t going anywhere, Anthony Albanese announced his next big policy set piece.

A move to kick kids under 16 off social media.

Albanese and his coterie of advisers and focus group conveners are betting that it will play well with mums and dads, who are rightly worried about the horrors their kids may be exposed to online.

It’s a policy dreamt up to generate headlines and give the illusion of action.

But blanket bans rarely work. Tech-savvy pre-teens will quickly devise workarounds to whatever measures are put in place to keep them offline. And when they do, that same problematic content will be there waiting for them.

It’s just another distraction as the cost-of-living crisis ticks on.