https://quadrant.org.au/news-opinions/america/farewell-america-hello-victorias-swamp/
“It almost catches in the throat to admit the prospect of life once more in Melbourne is a downer. But here I am, booked in 48 hours to leave a country where the things of which conservatives dreamed but never hoped to see are being fulfilled by a Trump administration committed to refurbishing free speech and property rights, the twin pillars on which Western democracy rests and depends.
Instead, it will be Jew-haters on parade, a politicised police force, courts packed with Labor mates and an opposition more passionate about its intramural party feuds and lawsuits than rescuing Victoria from debt, corruption and incompetence.:
It would be an exaggeration, although only a small one, to say the US bathes right now in the sunny optimism of another ‘morning in America’ like the one Ronald Reagan brought to a country sick half to death of Jimmy Carter, but by several handy measures the Second Age of Trump is certainly off to a spirited start. Republicans are dancing, literally, as are quarterbacks and prize fighters, and from the stunned Left there have been no outbreaks worth noting of the reflex to riot and protest. They’re whipped and they know it, those aggrieved intersectionalists, so unsettled by the loss of House, Senate and Oval Office that the instinct to fill the streets with public nuisances is for the moment in abeyance. But they know what’s coming. Trump’s proposed cabinet of slashers, heretics, critics, crusaders, protectionists, free-market libertarians and assorted silicon smarties is a proclamation of intent to gore the Left’s most sacred cows, a restoration of the First Amendment’s right to free speech high on that to-do list.
All of which makes it very hard to be leaving the United States, especially when the destination is Melbourne, where my US election year ends next week at Tullamarine. It’s a dismal thought. Years ago, my friend Imre Salusinszky warned that the Australia of memory and imagination might not match the fact of a society changed deeply over the decades I had spent in New York. It was hard to believe. Whenever I’d flown home, the holidaying visitor to an overgrown country town by the Yarra, everything was as it should be — the easiness of life under a big blue sky, the footy, great food, cheap golf, magpies instead of sirens, zinc creme and the Boxing Day Test. But Imre was proven right when I ignored his caution and came home for good. Things had changed and not for the better. A welter of Labor victories, broken only by the limp and hapless Baillieu years, saddled the state with debt and an authoritarian nannyism that grew more assertive and obnoxious year by year. But it was the Covid madness that did it for me, put pay to any last delusion that Victoria, its once lovely capital and the state’s most vital institutions were not in some way rotting before our eyes.
