MICHAEL USHER: Aussies question who will Make Australia Great Again as nostalgia for affluent past grows

You can hear the drums beating for the local franchise of a “Make Australia Great Again” campaign. And they’re getting louder.

Gina Rinehart, for one, has enthusiastically returned to Australia rallying business and mining leaders to get behind Trump’s wrecking ball style leadership, and smash wasteful big-spending governments.

But it won’t just be billionaires pushing the Australian version of MAGA. Like its style or not, MAGA is a political phenomenon, and a powerhouse strategy that has seen Trump victorious on many levels of American government. Any political leader here who ignores it, does so at their peril, no matter how distasteful they may find it.

The MAGA movement in the United States, it turns out, just wasn’t isolated to the expected Trump base. Younger millennial voters got on board in droves.

The generation who only a short while ago was criticised for being woke, selfish, free-spending, and in need of instant praise have shifted big time. And shifted behind Trump in large parts of America. Turns out they now have mortgages, a second baby on the way and are scared of job insecurity. The millennial lurch to the right has become its seems, a powerful voting force. And Trump tapped into them with his MAGA movement.

Those millennials here are exactly who the next successful Australian government needs to lasso. But will anyone in the big parties adopt a “Make Australia Great Again” campaign? I can’t see Labor dipping to that. I can see the Liberals crafting the theme to drive their campaign. I can definitely see Clive Palmer going all in.

It does however raise the interesting debate, as it did in the US, about what needs making great again? And is it all slogan and sentiment, with little truth?

It poses an interesting question that was never really answered in Trump’s election campaign but unleashed a fondness for years gone by.

Just convince the majority of people that the country’s broken, and that your party can take them back to that time life was better. It is very effective. A promise of a nostalgic return to a more patriotic period in voters’ younger lives when they felt they had more cash, were safer, more valued and more confident.

So how does that look like in Australia? What are the “great” times in Australia’s history we’d like to restore?

It’s a subjective question of course, and I’d imagine the answer is clouded by very selective nostalgia, meaning any leap back to perceived great times would take us to eras where not everyone thought they were especially great at all, in particular women.

But I’d imagine, like in the United States, making things great here would mean fixing a consistent slide in living standards. And specifically, that means making housing affordability great again. That’s the spot younger voters want made great again. Their nostalgia, real or otherwise, is rooted in seeing their parents and grandparents afforded great times to buy bricks and mortar. In 1984, a home cost 3.3 times the average annual income, not 10 times like it is today.

But we might not be too eager to embrace the MAGA spin?

Could it be that we genuinely think Australia is pretty great as it is, besides some economic headwinds?

I’m not sure. I think we’ve stopped thinking we were the lucky country some time back. But do we think Australia is as great as it could be? Business groups argue we’re a long way from being great.

They say small businesses are bogged down in red tape and increasingly hamstrung by strict green policies, all of which is holding back growth. If you’re a public servant you might think times are bit more great than others, given some 26,000 new public sector jobs have been created.

If you’re in big construction you might say times are great given the billions governments are spending on infrastructure. But if you’re in housing construction, labour and material costs, and lengthy development approvals are sending many to the wall. And if you’re mining, times have been great, and looking a little less great.

Make Australia Great Again?

Absolutely we can, but will it catch on well as here as it did in the US? If some politicians embrace the sentiment, even without the full-blown marketing campaigns of the red hats and T-shirts, they’ll tap into a real feeling that’s out there in the suburbs and regional communities.

That feeling of: why aren’t we doing better? Why are we worse off? Even if the answers to those questions are complex and don’t quite provide the truth people want to hear, the cat’s out of the bag now that America has demanded better of its big government.

The social media messaging of Make America Great Again has sunk in with younger Australian voters, it will be interesting to see who here adopts the MAGA strategy.