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One week from now, millions of Americans will sit down for their Thanksgiving dinner. Turkeys will be roasted, pies baked, pumpkins mashed, corn boiled, bean casseroles and cranberry sauces prepared. Family members will race home from across the country for the celebration. Many will dread it.
Despite the best efforts of mothers, aunts and grandmothers to keep proceedings civil, ferocious political arguments will erupt around the table.
Republican dads will scold Democrat daughters for supporting Joe Biden over Donald Trump in 2020 then voting blue in the midterm elections, turning the much anticipated red wave into a pink trickle.
![Fiona Katauskas's view. Fiona Katauskas's view.](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/3ye84bKWuWiYMa84cGAXjf/cd30f741-2409-4d4b-b609-89f4c09db2ec.png/r0_0_823_463_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
Republican nephews will tell Democrat uncles Biden is senile, that he fluffs his lines and rarely knows where he is.
In turn, the uncles will say the biggest turkey of all is not the one on the table but Trump, for thinking he can retake the presidency in 2024 after all the dirt he's heaped on himself, not to mention the disastrous showing at the midterms.
There'll be shouting, there'll be tears. That's the price of political polarisation.
We don't have Thanksgiving in Australia but, watching Trump announce his intention to run for Republican nomination, perhaps we should.
We could give thanks for not having the most divisive figure in living memory on our political stage.
Thanks, too, for our system of compulsory voting which means, no matter how disengaged from politics some of us might be, we have to pay it attention every now and then. We have a democracy and a legal obligation to participate in it.
Let's be grateful for the Westminster parliamentary system, which means we avoid the hoopla of presidential elections, where stage performance and charisma count for more than policy. Our politicians might be dull, possessing all the magnetism of traffic islands, but at least they're real - and when they're not, we spot it a mile off and punish them. We don't like carnival barkers.
We can be thankful, too, that we don't have billionaires trying to buy elections - well, we have one and his efforts, which revived the billboard industry and boosted the bottom line of many a newspaper (thanks, Clive), have been a spectacular failure.
We don't suffer Fox News. Apart from a few try-hard crazies who come out after dark on Sky News to harangue a tiny audience (Paul Murray was once beaten by Outback Opal Hunters), our political commentary is level-headed compared to the nonsense broadcast in the US.
Of course, we don't need a turkey to remind ourselves of this - we have Trump.
There he was in the gaudy Mar-a-Lago ballroom yesterday trotting out the familiar lines.
"We call it the China virus, some people call it other things, but it was devastating and we built it back and did an incredible job." More than one million deaths, many on Trump's watch. Incredible.
"We're going to bring people together." Like you did on January 6, 2021?
"Our southern border was tighter than ever before." Ah, yes, the wall. Perhaps the New York Post, once an ardent supporter of Trump, put it best last week after the midterms. Under the headline Trumpty Dumpty, it wrote: "Don (who couldn't build a wall) had a great fall - can all the GOP's men put the party back together again?"
The poor Americans. They have two more years of the world's biggest ego telling them how great he is.
Meanwhile, we can be grateful he's there and not here.
HAVE YOUR SAY: What else can we be grateful for in Australia? Is there anything you'd change about our political system? Has Donald Trump got any chance of taking the presidency in 2024? How do you react when you hear him speaking? How nasty will he get? Email us: echidna@theechidna.com.au
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IN CASE YOU MISSED IT:
- Changes to multi-employer bargaining would help prevent a "race to the bottom" on wages, the Workplace Relations Minister says. In a speech to the National Press Club yesterday, Tony Burke defended the contentious proposed changes to industrial relations laws. Debate on the bill is set to go before the Senate in the next fortnight, with the government looking to pass the laws by the end of the year. Mr Burke said multi-employer bargaining would be one of the ways to help lift stagnant wages. "There is no way of undoing the deliberate design feature of low wage growth without opening up the bargaining system."
- Australia has joined with other nations in raising concerns over reports Russian missiles have strayed into Poland. Two people have been killed in an explosion in eastern Poland, 12km from the Ukrainian border, with Polish, US and western allies investigating the incident. Russia's defence ministry has denied the explosion came from a stray missile, but Polish authorities have deemed it "most likely" Russian-made. Foreign Minister Penny Wong said she'd spoken to Australian ambassador to Poland Lloyd Brodrick and confirmed no Australians were harmed in the blast.
- The International Monetary Fund expects Australia to dodge a recession but has downgraded its expectations for growth next year. The United Nations agency anticipates growth slowing to 1.7 per cent in 2023 - less than the 1.9 per cent forecast in its world economic outlook released last month. In its annual health check on the Australian economy, the IMF pointed to Australia's resilient domestic buffers to economic headwinds, including decent household savings.
THEY SAID IT: "Here's the thing - if Donald Trump is elected president of the United States, in a kind of historical way, it's exciting because we will see the actual last president of the United States. It just won't work after that." - Johnny Depp
YOU SAID IT: Helicopter pilots assisting in fire and flood emergencies and other unsung heroes.
Bernard says: "I'd like to acknowledge Dr Graeme Pearman and Professor David Karoly as outstanding climate scientists. With colleagues, Pearman set up Cape Grim Baseline Air Pollution Station in the mid-1970s and has recorded data that shows the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere since that time. Later, he devoted a lot of his life to public communication. Professor Karoly, atmospheric scientist, is probably better known and is internationally recognised as a world leader in climate dynamics and climate change science. It goes without saying that had many more people listened to scientists like these that we may not need all those citizens filling sandbags today. Of course the work of ambulance drivers at the bottom of the cliff will always be necessary, but why do we so often ignore the need to build fences at the top of the cliff, with signage? Does the National Party still chant 'Climate Change is Crap' at each of their meetings?"
"In the main," says Murray "our early pioneers who built our great country paid more attention to the vagaries of mother nature and built homesteads and communities on ridges or built homes on stilts with wraparound verandahs to suit the weather. There are examples of communities that were washed away in floods and rebuilt on higher ridges and if we had paid more attention to the stories of our Indigenous people, instead of greedy developers, we would know that fires and floods are a natural part of the history of our largely low lying country that have been happening for thousands of years. I am sorry and feel greatly for the many people affected by these events."
Richard says: "I was looking at a map on the back of the toilet door which shows rainfall in Australia for the past 100 years and the weather pattern in 1952 looks very similar to what we are experiencing. I was 12 years of age staying with my grandparents 30 kilometres from Condobolin and we were cut off from Condobolin and Forbes for six weeks. I feel for the residents of both these towns and what they are going through. In my day the hero was George Campbell-Hicks, a pilot who flew his Tiger Moth aircraft doing airdrops to isolated properties in the Condobolin district for weeks."