On 22 January, Gina Rinehart said: “If we are sensible, we should set up a DOGE [Department of Government Efficiency] immediately, reduce government waste, government tape and regulations.”
Mere days later, on 25 January, Peter Dutton appointed Jacinta Nampijinpa Price as the shadow minister for government efficiency (SMOGE?), describing her new job as to cut “wasteful spending”.
Correlation isn’t causation, but the political and narrative threads connecting Dutton’s Coalition opposition to Donald Trump’s American presidency and his mega-billionaire offsider Elon Musk grow more numerous by the day.
Leading up to a cost-of-living election, the change makes sense; after Price helping defeat Labor’s referendum for an Indigenous voice, the new role puts a strong media performer into the spotlight.
The links only grew when Dutton pointed a finger at, as his first example of “wasteful spending that is out of control”, the “36,000 additional Canberra public servants employed under this government”.
The public service workforce, and plans to “restructure federal agencies”, are a key part of DOGE’s remit.
Dutton on Sunday said the proposed government efficiency role was to “identify where taxpayers’ money is being wasted”, but he did not deny the title had been inspired by Musk and Trump.
Despite appointing a shadow minister for government efficiency, Dutton also kept Adelaide Liberal MP James Stevens in his role as shadow assistant minister for government waste reduction.
It was not immediately clear what the distinction between the two roles would be, or why a role about efficiency had two people responsible for it, beyond calling to mind the online jokes about a similar situation where Musk and one-time presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy were initially slated to share the leadership of the initiative.
Since Trump’s November election win, many conservative politicians and commentators have urged Dutton to more closely follow the strategy of the US president in the coming Australian poll.
Many believe Trump’s presidency will usher in a new era of conservative government across the western world, catalysing change on issues like immigration, diversity and inclusion, and climate.
Mining billionaire Rinehart – Australia’s richest person – held a meeting with Musk the morning after Trump’s election win. She has made several speeches and public comments calling for Australia to adopt Trump-style policies to cut red tape.
“Donald Trump has led an important movement with his policies – a movement that is growing and growing,” she told The Australian newspaper last week. “I hope our country is not left behind.”
Several Coalition MPs have urged Dutton to follow Trump in seeking to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement, though the Liberal leader says he won’t.
But in an eerie echo of Trump’s plans to radically cut government employee numbers, Dutton has recently stepped up his criticism of the growth in the number of public servants, as well as criticising “woke” progressive causes.
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Never mind that a vast number of these new public servants were hired for jobs including providing services, answering phones or processing claims for the NDIS, veterans services or Centrelink; or that they came in to do jobs previously outsourced to higher-paid, outside consultants by former governments.
A day after Price’s SMOGE role was announced, the deputy opposition leader, Sussan Ley, invoked Musk’s SpaceX, comparing the arrival of the First Fleet to the tech billionaire’s quest to reach Mars.
It seems only a matter of time before Musk – who has regularly commented on elections around the world, making favourable remarks about conservative politicians to 214 million followers on his social media platform X – looks toward Australian politics again.
Musk has previously strongly criticised the Albanese Labor government as “fascists” for its efforts to regulate big tech companies and control online misinformation. Albanese hit back at the “arrogant billionaire”, and recently raised Australia’s foreign interference laws when asked about Musk’s potential effect on the coming election.
It’s hard to quantify what effect Musk’s idle tweeting could have on our election, or how many of his 214 million followers are Australian voters.
But Musk enjoys two things that could spell turbulence for a Labor party seeking re-election: he has (at least for now) the ear of the president of the United States, who has himself been no stranger to publicly making life difficult for Australian prime ministers; and Musk has a global profile of his own.
On Sunday, Musk beamed in to a campaign event for Germany’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party, telling supporters: “It’s good to be proud of German culture, German values, and not to lose that in some sort of multiculturalism that dilutes everything.”
It’s not difficult to imagine how a similar message would rev up some Australian voters, or to imagine Musk’s willingness to weigh in. In recent times he has regularly commented on British, Brazilian, Argentinian, South African, Norwegian and German politics often in favour of right-wing politicians and policies on immigration, crime, government spending and social issues like diversity, gender and free speech.
Albanese has dismissed Musk’s threat to his agenda and maintains Australia will continue its alliance with the US under Trump’s presidency. But getting drawn back into an ugly global stoush with the world’s richest man, if his eye is drawn back to the politics of Canberra, wouldn’t be a prospect Labor would relish.
