The US midterm backlash against Donald Trump offers Anthony Albanese no reprieve at home, where Pauline Hanson is weaponising grey corruption, pork-barrelling and a nobbled anti-corruption commission to campaign for Labor’s demolition.

The good news for Anthony Albanese from the US Congressional midterms is that he need not even contemplate changing the government’s default position of obsequious servility to Donald Trump and to Israel. I expect that Trump will not be piling on Australia’s humiliation, so much as that the tempo of his foreign policy will decline, except for bombast. I do not expect that this will be because a triumphant and vengeful Democrat Congress will be able to restrain him. It won’t, but it can deny him resources to do as much damage as over the past two years.

That’s probably good for Albanese, and for the Republicans, because the key to re-election for both over the next few years will be dedicated attention to their domestic economies, defeating chronic inflation, lower interest rates and actual increases in real incomes. It probably also includes raising productivity – whatever that means in the present age – or it could mean scrapping a range of government programs which contribute nothing to the personal wealth or income security of Australians. These would include serious cuts and complete rethinking of defence expenditure, the abolition of subsidies to billionaires for discovering rare earths, and the abandonment of the future made in Australia program. The latter, a subsidy scheme for Labor lobbyists and foreign billionaires, wanting Australia to pay for possible AI development, is an economic dud.

The worst thing that Albanese could do after the anti-Trump tsunami would be to deduce that there is now an international trend against populist nationalist revolts of the MAGA, Reform and One Nation variety, and that as a result Pauline Hanson is now a busted flush. Would that it could be so.

But in Australian conditions, the primary revolt and outcome that Pauline Hanson is looking for is the demolition of Anthony Albanese. She has other agendas, including the evisceration of the National and Liberal Parties, score settling on behalf of Gina Rinehart, and her desire to get rid of non-white immigrants. But a continuing and consistent attack on the competence and achievement of the federal party in power, concentration on issues of trust and truth-telling, and the facts of higher costs of living, give her the ammunition to play the vital part of bringing Labor down.

The anti-Trump crusade in the United States was also able to make a big point of corruption, first of an obvious and shameless sort by Trump and his family, secondly through cronies and billionaire donors, and third through the perversion and corruption of the machinery of government so that agencies were working not in the public interest but for the personal agenda and benefit of Trump. Added to this was the receipt of bribes for pardons and unjustified interventions in litigation, the use of agencies of government to persecute and punish Trump’s enemies, and abuses of power over deportations and actions of ICE. He used fraudulent defamation action to extort money from bodies seeking favours from government.

American complacency about naked corruption has its limits

The American public has long demonstrated an appalling tolerance for open political crime, corruption and misbehaviour. But Trump has demonstrated that there are limits beyond which they will not go. ‘Corruption’ was the word most commonly on the lips of voters, certainly as soon as they came to........

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