Comparisons between the Morrison Govt and the Republicans in the US don't always work, as we operate in very different electoral environments. But they are kindred in one key way: both are post-political in the sense of not governing in the way we tend think of parties governing.

They are not governing "for all of us" but in the interests of small subsets of the population, as any follow-the-money exercise will reveal, from pork barrelling to JobKeeper payments. It is about power in service of the few.

They hate the arts and the life of the mind, and actively seek to damage the institutions that support them, particularly universities and arts organisations, as we saw during covid.
Never waste a crisis, as the saying goes, and they didn't.

Most of what they want to achieve is not popular, or what most ppl want, so it has to be imposed by manipulation. Politics is no longer about rallying people to the best policy agenda, but about distraction and the elevation of self-interest.
This is not new, but it is heightened

In the US, the divide between this electoral poison and the gaining of political power is bridged by voting manipulation, which is much harder to do in Australia (thank you AEC).

Here, it is done by controlling various institutions, including the conservative parties themselves, at state and federal level, and by redesigning things like the NDIS and other forms of welfare around a blame-the-victim mentality.

Neoliberalism was always as much a set of values, a moral position, as it was an economic system.
So even if the economics change, which some people argue is happening, the moral core remains, the hyper individualism infests everything.

(Even where genuine community spirit asserts itself, as it did by and large during lockdowns, the media fills up with people recasting that behaviour as deviant, as Stockholm Syndrome, orr a convict mentality and the like.
They can't recognise cooperation, even at scale.)

The approach to this hyperindividualism is increasingly technologised. It is black-boxed, hidden from scrutiny & democratic influence. The courts had some success against robodebt, but robodebt hasn't gone away, anymore than WorkChoices went away.
They expand into other areas.

All this can only happen with acquiescence of a significant section of the media, and News Ltd has morphed into an unapologetic arm of right wing propaganda. (And note, their dominance & worldview creates a gravitational pull on all other media outlets, like a moral black hole.)

But it is not as simple as saying News are right wing. They're so extreme not even a Malcolm Turnbull is safe from their wrath, as we have seen. They don't simply back the Coalition; they back its most extreme elements & have built a social media/MSM nexus to facilitate this.

The country is being reshaped into something unrecognisable from, say, the period of Hawke-Keating, and you can't fight it with incrementalism and appeasement. They will bank every concession and moved hard right to the next thing.

The model is very much what we have done with offshore detention: designate a group of people as beneath contempt, outside any rights to even basic human decency, and then blame them for their own misfortune.
(We have been trained for this and it is now being turned on us.)

People on unemployment benefits, disability benefits, victims of domestic violence, sexual assault, even those trapped overseas: All are now just another type of asylum seeker.
Bonhoeffer was right. First they came for the asylum seekers. Now, many more of us are in the same boat

Australia has always had its faults, its prejudices and abuses (what country hasn't?) but the Morrison Government is something new in the world. Something new in our politics.

Here's the bottom line: All this means we have to see things like the vaccine rollout, the response to sexual abuse, the ridiculous consent video, the anti-renewables, the electoral pork barrelling, not as missteps or cluelessness, but as a particular approach to governance.

They are doing this stuff on purpose.
The agenda is not a 'better country for all' but a country rebuilt in their own image, which is increasingly right wing, evangelical, white, ungenerous in a Randian individualist way, bland, and, of course, patriarchal.

Just correcting: should’ve said Martin Niemoller, not Bonhoeffer. Thanks, @DocAvvers