MICHAEL USHER: Will Donald Trump’s appointment of Elon Musk to target government efficiency be copied here?

As someone who gets a little drunk on news all day, every day, I tried for a few hours today to detox and step away from the free pour of information on my phone and laptop. But after three loads of washing, some kitchen experiments with a Greek marinade and staring at gym weights I may have peeked at a few headlines.

Elon Musk being handed a broom as Donald Trump’s czar of demolishing bureaucracy was just too much. My brief detox was done. Time to fill my cup again with frothy, free-flowing news!

I really have tried to tune out of happenings in the United States in the wake of Trump’s sweeping red victory, but it’s impossible. The super-charged speed of Trump’s changes in his clean-sweep presidency is something to watch and understand.

If the sitting President Joe Biden thought he’d have some clear air to sing his achievements before Trump officially takes office in late January, he was very wrong. Just like his wounded Vice-President Kamala Harris, Biden has underestimated the all-business, all-brawling Donald J Trump.

Every day since his historic win, the president-elect has dropped daily bombshells about his take-no-prisoners team that will get about executing his orders from the White House and who will, in his words, Make America Great Again. It was no surprise that Elon Musk would play a role, but the one he’s landed is quite extraordinary. He will co-lead the yet to be formed Department of Government Efficiency. In short, he will blow up the government bureaucracies Trump hates. It’s an oddly named department, however, because it actually isn’t part of the government, but will sit outside it and give the new president broad advice on how to slash and burn actual government departments that Trump has well and truly in his sights.

It’s no secret that Trump is a fan of Musk, and Musk is an even bigger fan of Trump. But what the Florida property billionaire sees in the eccentric Musk is an entrepreneur extraordinaire who’s launched rockets and satellites into space, turned the family car electric and made home batteries that bypass power grids. Musk brought the future forward, and now Trump wants that free-range, out of the box, entrepreneurial mind to transform the bloated, hungry wasteful government that burns taxpayers’ dollars and delivers very little in some services.

It will be fascinating to see what “efficiency” Musk achieves. I know many of you reading this might well be thinking “that’s exactly what we need in Australia”. It’d be a powerful government to take on the layers of Australian bureaucracy and entrenched government departments. If you judge on actions, not policy, you’d conclude the current Labor Government isn’t going to take the Musk approach given it has now grown government departments since it came into power, recruiting about 26,000 new public servants with a wage bill of $5 billion. That takes the total public sector workforce to 365,400. Can you imagine if Elon had his way with those numbers?

The chances of a government efficiency czar being appointed here are remote. But don’t be surprised to hear Peter Dutton promise to reverse Anthony Albanese’s public servant job spree to try and expose the relatively low growth of job numbers in real world businesses around Australia not dependent on taxpayers footing the bill.

Musk’s appointment, and a few others in the soon-to-be Trump administration are raising eyebrows. It is an entirely free enterprise approach to government. But as a footnote to Trump’s victory and how he’s shaping his team, there were some amazing numbers that caught my attention also after I broke my very brief news drought. They help answer how Americans voted so overwhelmingly for Trump, and how he reached his mass audience of voters.

Nielsen figures have revealed some very revealing shifts in how Americans are absorbing news and information. And they lead to the conclusion, although debated I’m sure, that this was the podcast election. For example, the combined average primetime news audiences of the three major cable news networks — CNN, Fox and MSNBC — was 5.2 million viewers. The Joe Rogan Experience podcast was 11 million per episode! No wonder Trump trumpeted his three-hour chat with Joe late in the campaign as a major turning point for him, or least, icing on the already baked cake of his stunning election victory. Of greater note, the podcast hooked in younger people. With an average age of 34, podcasts on US election issues found new younger voters compared to the cable news channels where the average age is 70. Rich pickings for politicians in search of power and new fields to harvest new votes.