The president is bringing out the differences between political cultures and traditions in Australia and the US, especially in attitudes towards what government can and should do.

Donald Trump is coming to mean many things for this nation’s political leaders and for the Australian people. Mad king, tariff tyrant, spoiler of world orders, trasher of international rules. And still a hero to some.

During Trump’s first term, the Turnbull Government looked to give him an education in alliances. It invited him onto a decommissioned US aircraft carrier in New York harbour and played a video about diggers and GIs defending freedom.

The effort, endorsed beyond the usual supporters, said much about the Australian desire to fit this political freak into the set of expectations of what US presidents ought to appreciate about Australia.

Perhaps it worked. This time around, consider how Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, unfairly panned for not dashing to Washington in the days both before and after the president’s inauguration, now invokes the spirit of Trump to paint Peter Dutton as too great a risk to inflict on the Australian political tradition.

According to much of the press, Dutton is squirming as a result. Time will tell whether, however, the opposition leader is simply playing sensible suburban electorate politics.

Albanese must believe that he has the best of both worlds during this election. Questing for prime ministerial gravitas, he professes complete trust in Trump the untrustworthy (this, as Lowy Institute polling shows that barely a third of all Australians now have confidence in the US acting responsibly in the world).

The election explained

• Everything you need to know about the election
• The 25 seats that will decide the election
• The state of play in your electorate
• The 12 teal battlegrounds to watch out for
• Forget Albanese and Dutton, these 30 people really run elections

Playing politics, Albanese then depicts the Coalition and its leader as having Trumpian intentions. The prime minister speaks two languages on America. He hails the US as a defence guarantor even as its leader tears asunder the strategic assumptions of the past 80 years. Next, he presents as the bulwark against any chill Trumpian winds seeking to breeze through Australian politics.

Perhaps he is mindful, as Lowy polling again shows, that Australian support for the alliance is, for the moment at least, inoculated against  Trump’s ways and whims.

Albanese might just pull it off. But it carries risks too.

“Mr President,” Trump’s aides might say before the prime minister arrives at the West Wing on his next visit to Washington, “behold the Australian leader who used you as whipping boy to help win his second term.” Trump will likely be furious.

Probably not since the 1966 election has  America featured so prominently in an Australian election campaign. For Labor, those are painful memories. In 1966, Liberal leader Harold Holt won a landslide over Labor’s Arthur Calwell by professing to be “all the way” with LBJ in Vietnam.

This time, Labor is having its own electoral field day by labelling their opponent “DOGE-y Dutton”. That charge is freighted with far more than just the image of an Elon Musk-type figure being let loose on government services.

Trump is bringing out the differences between the Australian and American political cultures and traditions, especially in attitudes towards what government can and should do. Aside from what transpires in his foreign policy, this might well be the deeper structural meaning of Trump for Australia. Because while such differences were not as sharp during the height of globalisation, they appear to be reasserting themselves.

These differences arose primarily out of the two countries’ different foundations. At America’s founding, the independent, self-supporting Yeoman farmer was, as Thomas Jefferson said, the ideal citizen for the republic. The government needed to be limited.

The Revolutionaries’ view of the British Government in the War of Independence helped to strengthen this negative view of government. The ideal was inscribed in the Bill of Rights attached to the US Constitution. It placed limits on the powers of government to restrict citizens’ freedoms and protected them against centralised abuses of power.

Neither the Constitution nor the Bill of Rights says anything about the rights of workers to act collectively through trade unions or the responsibility of governments to provide for the social welfare of the people.

The spirit of the documents was against the idea that governments should intervene in and regulate the economy and raise taxes for unemployment relief, old age pension, and the protection of health and the environment, and other collective goods.

So during the Great Depression, when then-president Franklin Roosevelt intervened in the economy to regulate business and agriculture, protect unions and provide extensive social welfare for urban workers, the term “socialism” was eschewed, and these measures were deemed “liberal”, even though they were the complete opposite of what classical European “liberalism” meant.

Socialism and communism belonged, like kings, aristocracies and caste privileges, to the evil old world. Unlike in Europe, it was not possible for America to ever establish a socialist or Labor Party that commanded wide popular support.

In Australia, however, from the beginning, there was little resistance to government enterprises, whether in banking, transport or communication. Australians embraced the idea of government providing social welfare to protect workers, farmers and the community against the booms and busts of capitalism and ordinary life.

With the rise of great cities on the coast, centred on industry and commerce, workers rapidly organised themselves into unions and formed a Labor Party, which since the formation of the Commonwealth has been either the government or the opposition.

And unlike the US, the Australian colonies never turned their back on their European origins. So they embraced the language of class to describe their politics and society. “Labor” and even the term “socialism” were accepted descriptions of a national party, and it was regularly elected to government in the states and the Commonwealth.

Dutton may be rueing that some of his colleagues, such as Senator Jacinta Price, so quickly donned the Trumpian cap, before assessing properly whether the cap fits here. Albanese, on the other hand, appears to be doing little more than simply turning up, hoping the electorate awards him points for parading as defender of Australian political faiths.

Republished from the Australian Financial Review, 21 April