‘Bombshell’ News for Joe Biden From Australia

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

Look at this, mates. From Down Under comes news that the incumbent prime minister of Australia has been returned to office in what the wires are calling a “sensational” result. The “bombshell triumph,” says a leading news site, comes after “repeated polls” placed the Australian Labor Party ahead of the ruling conservatives, who Down Under are called the Liberal Party.

No doubt it would be a mistake for us Yanks to make too much of this. Gravity pulls in the opposite direction on this side of the globe. Then again, too, it might be a mistake to ignore this portent altogether, since we are entering an election in which the more liberal figure, Jos. Biden, is polling ahead of the incumbent, more conservative president.

Particularly because Labor “scrutineers,” in the phrase of the Australian Web site news.com.au, reckon that “older voters have punished the party for its higher-taxing agenda.” The wire reports that “states where the economy is not thriving” have backed the more conservative party’s agenda, which is “focused on the economy and jobs.”

Plus, too, according to the Wall Street Journal’s report, the conservatives gained their victory “after voters in resource-rich districts turned against center-left opponents who had put climate change at the heart of their campaign.” It noted that Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s coalition appealed to voters in battleground states, “struggling at the end of a long mining boom.”

“It Was Supposed To Be Australia’s Climate Change Election,” is the way the headline writers in the New York Times put it. “What happened?” The Times answers that Australians “shrugged off the warming seas killing the Great Barrier Reef and the extreme drought punishing farmers” to elect a conservative who has “long resisted plans to sharply cut down on carbon emissions and coal.”

This is something to keep in mind as leaders of our equivalent of the Australian Labor Party — Joe Biden and the Democrats — launch their campaign. They’ve been attacking President Trump’s fitness and vowing to redeem America’s soul, all while raising taxes. And while embracing, in one form or another, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal. The news this morning is that it didn’t work Down Under.


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