The big three global fails set to haunt our Prime Minister 

#GregSheridan — The Australian January 28, 2025

Joe Biden, Justin Trudeau, Jacinda Ardern. Three of the very worst democratic leaders in the world in the past decade. Each brought fantastic harm on their respective nations. Each was once hugely successful, the very toast of the town. Yet each has been repudiated and run out of office, all of them resigning, unwillingly, ahead of schedule in order to avoid catastrophic electoral defeat. Each, I think, was a badly flawed individual. But their collective failure has a bigger lesson.

It’s a punctuation point in modern politics. It represents the exhaustion, and now the clear incoherence, of the contemporary model of centre-left government.

The collapse of Olaf Scholz’s Social Democratic-led government in Germany is similar, though the peculiarities of Germany’s electoral system mean the change won’t be anything like as clear as that from Biden to Donald Trump, from Ardern to Christopher Luxon, or the likely transition from Trudeau to conservative leader Pierre Poilievre.

In Britain the cycle was back to front.

All three leaders injected race and gender into every aspect of life and policy.

All three exhibited an almost complete indifference to how wealth was generated, instead embracing a dreamland in which maximum climate change commitments not only had no wealth offset, but magically created wealth out of thin air, literally. The problem is the world just didn’t work that way.

All three were completely unrealistic on national security, apparently thinking that multilateralism was a substitute for hard power. 
Thus Biden’s approach to Iranian militancy, terror promotion and nuclear development was to try to seduce the mullahs into becoming tea-sipping multilateralists.
How much cultural change will follow political change in the US, Canada and NZ?

That’s unclear, but the failure of governments that practise contemporary, progressive-left, symbolism politics, with big spending, vague aspirations, and no serious action on security, is indisputable.

— Does Albanese have an alternative governing model to turn to?