So Below

Encouraging scenes of imperial continuity are playing out among the descendants of some British convicts, as Australia undergoes yet another change of prime minister. In a near mirror-image of recent events here on the mainland, the ruling party has defenestrated its self-proclaimed social liberal leader, a former investment banker who lives in the antipodean equivalent of a twenty-thousand-pound garden shed. He supported equal marriage rights, but was also a dedicated appeaser of climate-change deniers who, like the back-bench baboons which proved the nemesis of Britain's late Head Boy, simply responded by demanding more. Like our purple-faced pigsticker's replacement, the new leader is a god-bothering migrant-basher whose strings are more or less openly yanked by our nations' common deity, Rupert Murdoch, and whose party is more and more openly divided into ever-warming hotbeds of mutual loathing and suspicion. Even the local Labor Party has got in on the act, efficiently amassing money for the next election campaign; while the government's largest donor happens to be the man whom the governing party has just humiliated. It just goes to show what a truly determined hard-right party can do when it puts its nose to the wheel and its arse to the grindstone; and this shining achievement was accomplished without aid from Brussels.