On Trump and the left

Jock Webb writes: Re. “Rundle: progressives will blame everyone but themselves for this mess” (yesterday). What a load of garbage the Bernardis and other trash are coming out with. Fran Kelly at the ABC sees Trump as an excuse for bringing every right wing fool and failure on RN and we apparently must change 18c. In Australia, Trump may well have lost. As it stands, 49% of the US voters turned out and about 23.5% voted Trump and 23.7 for Clinton. What is more we do not have a class of people in Australia who have not had a wage rise in 40 years like in the US. Trump’s constituency is not the Howard battler, they are not battlers, moderately well off middle class. If we have something like that here it will be because the conservatives have destroyed jobs in their thousands as the GOP did in the states Why would anyone think they are a solution?

Adrian Jackson writes: Australians will not be affected by, nor care much, who is president of the USA. The Commonwealth constitution makes Canberra responsible for Defence (not Offence), External Affairs and Trade. Foreign Affairs will carry on as usual, including from staff in our embassies. In Defence we are not in NATO, nor do we want to be, and ANZUS in largely a cold war irrelevance. The Trans Pacific Partnership has many member nations on the Pacific Rim; in fact the USA was not included by the group of nations who proposed it originally. Australia is also a member of the greatest potential trading block in the world the British Commonwealth, with 65 nations and one-third of humanity. Additionally over a dozen Asian nations like China, Taiwan, India, Japan, South Korea and Singapore have excellent trade relations with Australia. As Australia’s “Cultural Attache” Dr Sir Les Paterson would say: “no worries”.