How the Outrage Right uses January 26 as a weapon of division

A recurring theme during the Voice to Parliament referendum was the insistence of the No campaign that the proposal and the entire Yes campaign were “divisive”, despite the hostility toward Indigenous peoples of the No campaign and its criticism of Yes advocates as out-of-touch elites.

The contradiction between actively pursuing division while loudly accusing your opponents of the same wasn’t a one-off or unique to the Voice campaign. It’s a design feature of how the Outrage Right now does business.

The dominant political dynamic across the West currently isn’t the cost of living, the economy or even the nature of government: it’s about resentment, grievance and outrage and their exploitation. In the US, the business model of Donald Trump, his supporters Fox News and the entire MAGA ecosystem — and their counterparts in Australia, such as Peter Dutton, the federal Coalition, News Corp and minor political players like Hanson — is about provoking a deep sense of victimhood and fury.

That outrage, that resentment, must be directed at other groups and individuals — in the US, at “liberals”, “the woke agenda”, universities, teachers, at a vague elite conspiracy to undermine freedom, at “socialists” like Joe Biden, and at evil Democrats who want to destroy America (and the West).

Here it’s virtually the same list because it’s fully imported from America, via copycatting by conspiracy theorists, via sharing of campaign techniques by right-wing political strategists, via social media, via an internal product transfer from one arm of the Murdoch empire, where manufacturing and exploiting division are business norms.

The result is two political playing fields: on one, mildly progressive governments try to restore trust in government by governing competently in the interests of the majority of voters. On the other, right-wing parties attempt to convince voters to be angry and resentful at large sections of their own community, and especially government. They’re playing very different games.

But that fostering of division and rage can’t be too overt: deliberately whipping up hate is rarely a good look. Hence the charges levelled by the Outrage Right at their opponents. “Our radical Democrat opponents are driven by hatred, prejudice and rage,” Donald Trump said when launching his 2020 reelection campaign.

“The radical left continues to sow seeds of division and polarisation … they want to divide America on racial lines and on class lines and globally,” Tim Scott, putative Trump running mate, recently told Fox News.

It’s a familiar theme on Fox: “They don’t want people to have dreams. They want to divide us.” “They want to divide us racially in this country.” And it’s a familiar one here from News Corp: Labor wants to “divide Australians by race”. Tony Burke is being “divisive” on Gaza. The left has been “sowing the seeds of division“. The Coalition happily echoes this talking point. The Voice referendum was never referred to by any term other than the “divisive” Voice. Changes to the stage three tax cuts are “class warfare” intended to “divide Australians“, says Simon Birmingham. “I’m concerned it’s halfway through this government’s term. We feel we’re a poorer and more divided nation,” Sussan Ley concluded in November.

Invasion Day, like the Voice, is another opportunity for the Outrage Right to accuse opponents of being divisive, when itself is seeking to divide and provoke outrage. Dutton led the charge against Woolworths’ decision that it didn’t want to lose money by buying additional cheap, foreign-made, flag-branded tat that no-one wanted. As a manufactured excuse for anger, this was Fox News-like in its confected nature. News Corp, naturally, piled on. The keywords in the coverage on Sky News were “divisive” and “woke”.

The result of this deliberate attempt to whip up outrage was inevitably, for some simpletons, outrage: Woolworths shops were vandalised, windows were allegedly smashed, and there’s reportedly been a 50% increase in abuse of staff, the company says.

Undeterred by the resulting damage and abuse, the media then turned the issue into a kind of jingoistic version of Kramer’s persecutor in Seinfeld who demands to know “Who will not wear the ribbon?!” News Corp wanted to know why Anthony Albanese wasn’t celebrating Australia Day hard enough, indeed, was “eroding it” (a “fish rots from the head” according to one Coalition frontbencher). It wasn’t just Murdoch’s goons; far-right free-to-air broadcaster Seven also attacked Albanese. So did Liberal supporter Kerry Stokes’ other main outlet, The West Australian.

For Peta Credlin, Natalie Barr and a host of other outrage merchants and talking heads on the right, nothing short of Albanese donning an Australian flag pair of speedos, screaming the national anthem and collapsing face down in a pool of Bundy-laced vomit in a suburban park would be enough to demonstrate he’s not being “divisive”.

This kind of test of performative nationalism and demand to reject “division” isn’t merely absurd, it’s intended to divide. The Outrage Right wants to impose patriotic unity on all Australians, whether they like it or not, to effectively make it compulsory to celebrate Invasion Day even if you are the direct descendant of those dispossessed, murdered, raped and immiserated by invasion, even if you find it appalling that Australians won’t recognise the historical fact that invasion and dispossession are the very foundation of Australia. It’s the imposition of a fundamentally exclusionary vision of the country in which Indigenous peoples have been erased and those who object dismissed as out-of-touch “elites”.

It’s not so much Orwellian as, to employ Terry Gilliam’s film about an absurdist dystopia, Brazil-ian: the Outrage Right would like a kind of national surveillance system in which everyone can be monitored, to ensure they are enjoying the colonialist merriment of January 26, or engaging in a reverse image of Orwell’s Two Minutes Hate (unless you’re Indigenous, in which case it’s definitely hate, and it’s directed at you).

But the Outrage Right doesn’t really want conformity — that would necessitate finding another target to demonise, to get people angry about, to stoke resentment about, to tell people that they should feel aggrieved about. The business model is the outrage, not anything resulting from it, not any concrete change.

The lack of interest of Peter Dutton and News Corp in the resulting property damage and abuse of staff (imagine if, say, pro-Palestinian protesters had smashed windows and abused workers) isn’t merely out of embarrassment — it’s because the objective of provoking anger has already been achieved. Anything more is superfluous when your entire goal is to generate outrage.

Is the Coalition’s response to January 26 politically motivated? Let us know by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.