From Barcelona: It’s hard to escape Australian politics when I see examples of inaction all over the Iberian Peninsula. The news media would have you believe that the area is a hotbed for socialist Wokeri but the reality is rather different. That same energy that built up in the US and delivered Donald Trump’s electoral knock-out victory is about to avalanche here. It’s in Australia, too, but pundits want to pussyfoot around instead of getting in the bullring.

I doubt it is taught in schools anymore, but Aesop’s fables were moral bread for Western children and adults alike for over 2,500 years. One that has stuck with me since my childhood is The Man, the Boy, and the Donkey.

In summary, the man and the boy begin by leading the donkey to market and react to criticism along the way. ‘Why aren’t those idiots riding the donkey? Why are they overloading the donkey? Why is that man making the boy walk? Why is that boy making the old man walk?’ and so on. In the end, the donkey drowns, and they get nothing, hence the moral of the fable is ‘he who pleases all pleases none’.

I am talking about Mr Dutton.

President Trump didn’t mess around and he defied the so-called odds. He put forward a clear message: ‘Are you better off now than you were in 2020?’ In Australia, we could equally ask the same. ‘Are you better off now than you were in 2022?’

Unless you are on Labor’s luvvies list, you are paying to help others feel good about the Albo government. But what’s to like?

Almost everyone I talk to in Barcelona (the ordinary people that is), have a hunger for action. That’s because almost everything exists in a grey-zone, from the legalisation of marijuana to bullfighting.

Pot is everywhere in Barcelona, but technically it is not legal. Perhaps it is to do with syntax, like pot advocate, Greens senator David Shoebridge, proved on X recently:

Shoebridge claimed:

Liberals and Labor just teamed up to vote against legalising cannabis in the Senate.

You can’t even vape in the Senate, let alone smoke pot. But the luvvies don’t get humour or see poor syntax. They see and hear what they want. There’s no point crafting a policy message to them. They already know what they’ve heard.

It is reminiscent of our room service lad who needs to be reminded what he is meant to be doing each time we see him. It’s pretty clear what’s going on there.

The height of stupidity is to be talking about legalising marijuana while banning social media for under sixteens. The Greens voted against the social media ban not because they wanted to promote free speech, but because they wanted to clamp down on social media companies, Soviet-style. Legalising pot is another story.

But even in Madrid, where, unlike Barcelona, you rarely smell pot wherever you walk, some 1 in 4 teens regularly smoke pot and have been introduced to it by age 14. Sarah Hanson-Young can crap on about ‘boomers’ (an already outdated term meant to insult anyone who is over 50 and not Woke) making themselves feel better about protecting teens all she likes.

The Greens have nobody’s interests at heart other than their own luvvies and all they want is for everyone to become their master’s useful idiots. (I’d rather be a boomer.)

Bullfighting in Barcelona is another story. The Plaza de Toros Monumental de Barcelona (La Monumental) is a bullring established in 1914. It held the last bullfight in Catalonia (an autonomous region of Spain with Barcelona as its capital) in 2011 before the Parliament of Catalonia banned bullfighting from 2012. The law has since been overturned by Spain’s highest court for being unconstitutional, but bullfighting has not taken place in Catalonia since.

One aficionado I met at La Monumental said it was all ‘political.’ (Bullfighting appears in the culture section of the newspapers, not the sports section.) The cultural differentiation between Catalonia and elsewhere is part of a push to separate Catalonia from the rest of Spain, an ongoing debate similar to the push in Quebec, Canada.

Again, Barcelona and Catalonia more generally are stagnating in a grey-zone of inaction.

Here on the other side of the world, I repeatedly arrive at the same conclusion. It’s a great place to visit but I wouldn’t want to live here. I am conscious of the Stockholm syndrome of apartment living and perpetual renting and fighting crowds and packed public transport and the low wages. This is the vision the Greens and Labor have for Australia.

Mr Dutton seems to be going along for the ride and people are responding.

Recently, NSW Libertarian MLC John Ruddick has been tweeting about free membership to defecting Liberal members.

With Simon Birmingham retiring, the wets are slowly disappearing. With Mr Dutton ignoring the right, the dries are going elsewhere. It’s like Malcolm Turnbull’s white-ant infestation is undoing the unity Sir Robert provided in bringing together some 18 non-labour political groups back in 1944.

The truth is a vote for any party other than the Coalition is a vote for Labor and the Greens. Many coalition pundits are focused on the 2028 election following a Labor minority government in 2025, but this is stupid. Mr Dutton is setting himself up as the next John Hewson, but he won’t fail on a technical question, at this rate, he’ll just keep scoring own goals until the final whistle.

I have a personal interest in the next election. I want my electricity bills reduced. I want interest rates reduced but not by a reformed ‘Team Jimbo’ RBA. I also want government spending to be reduced, real tax reform to occur, and for everyone, not just Gen X, to start paying their fair share and doing their own lifting.

It’s like they’re all on the wacky tobacky.

Like the translated lyrics from the Woody Allen soundtrack to Vicky Cristina Barcelona (the song Barcelona by the Spanish Indie band Giulia y Los Tellarini that keeps playing in my head while I walk around the city):

From everywhere

Barcelona

You are making a mistake

You can’t keep inventing

May the world be something else

People want action. People want leadership. But that action must make our lives better, not worse.

While the US is going to the DOGE, Australia and the rest of the world are going to the dogs. If only someone would drain the swamp. These are not just ramblings induced by passive pot-smoking in Barcelona.

Dear Mr Dutton, stop trying to please all, for you will please none. Like Americans, we want the world to be something else. God help us if we have another three years of Albo because the Opposition failed to offer us something else. With love from Barcelona.

Byline: Dr Michael de Percy @FlaneurPolitiq is a political scientist and political commentator. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a Chartered Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport (CILTA), and a Member of the Royal Society of NSW. He is Managing Editor of the Journal of Telecommunications and the Digital Economy, Chairman of the ACT and Southern NSW Chapter of CILTA, and a member of the Australian Nuclear Association. Michael is a graduate of the Royal Military College, Duntroon and was appointed to the College of Experts at the Australian Research Council in 2022. All opinions in this article are the author’s own and are not intended to reflect the views of any other person or organisation.