Instead of competing with One Nation, the Liberal party under Angus Taylor is echoing One Nation’s divisive, hateful position on immigration and in Farrer is preferencing One Nation – a move that could put a One Nation MP in the House of Representatives for the first time.
Liberals in Farrer should ignore Taylor’s how-to-vote card and put One Nation last.
I also think the “at least” being the common refrain when commenting on the performance of our leaders is very telling. Our standards are in the toilet.
Hahaha… yeah. But i also wouldn’t want to give any PM too much more credit for things, especially while they’re still alive. They have large enough ego’s as it is.
A big ego is OK sometimes. The problem is when it’s coupled with narcissism. A truly confident person won’t become overly defensive when criticised. They can recognise their faults and work around them. Albo doesn’t have that quality. Which is partly why he is fixated on his class background. He never grew out of it mentally. So when his policies are scrutinised, it makes him feel insecure.
The ego + narcissism thing was also the big problem with Rudd’s government. His own party room colleagues hated him because of his ego, and he put the cross-bench offside by refusing to do any sort of compromise with them, which is what gave the LNP a clear target to criticise.
Yeah for sure. He always had to signal his intellect. It was condescending. I remember his comment about “detailed programmatic specificity”. Morrison was a dick head, but he got elected because of his daggy dad routine. He pretended to be relatable.
You’ve reminded me of the Life Well Lived - spotify podcast I listened to today. They interviewed Claude Steele a US social psychologist. Steele spoke about stereotype threat, the idea that underperformance in an activity can be brought on by the threat of confirming a stereotype about the participants own context, such as social standing, race, gender, etc).
Steele cited a mini golf study where the black and white ‘elite athletes’ were brought in to play one at a time. Before each started they put the white athletes under stereotype threat by saying “This mini golf course is really a standardised test of natural athletic ability. Do the best you can.” By making this statement it was posited those subjects had an added mental load. To describe differently were multi-tasking. They were trying to play the course, but also thinking about whether they’re confirming those stereotypes about white athletes being worse in natural ability than black athletes. This in turn makes those players play worse than average. Anyway sounded an interesting idea.
The way it relates to what you’re saying is maybe Albanese being fixated on his class background is because he’s feeling that stereotype threat in so many situations he dives into as PM.
Maybe the defensiveness is a result of his fear of confirming the stereotype that only ‘elite’ schooled or wealthy children can grow up to lead a nation. This distracting thought in turn means his mind has that multi-tasking idea interrupting his ability to perform as well as Albanese might.
I mean that’s interesting, but my thoughts on it weren’t that sophisticated. Narcissistic people just don’t like having their behaviour questioned. Think of it like the oppositional defiance of a frustrated child. They will say no when questioned by default. He probably does have some of that class anxiety, being around people from elite backgrounds. I’m not a psychologist, I’ve just grown up around narcissistic people from troubled backgrounds, so I see patterns in body language and speech. What you’ve mentioned is food for thought though.