Aussie rules: give Trumpism the boot

0:10Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm Rosie Bloor. And I'm Jason Palmer. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

0:24In the past two decades, India has been engaged in a road revolution. There are some pretty obvious benefits to its massive infrastructure building exercise, but improving rural connections has also had some more unexpected consequences. And the superstars of track and field don't get anywhere near the paychecks that, say, footballers do. Now one of the world's most decorated runners is pushing a new league that aims to raise the bar.

1:01First up, though.

1:09A few days ago, we heard about Canada's election, where unity against Trump helped the Liberal Party make a stunning turnaround. This weekend, Australia heads to the polls. And once again, the incumbent Labour government is getting a lift from MAGA. Earlier this year, Australia's election seemed to be headed towards a Conservative coalition win. Sulin Wong, host of our Scam podcast and Asia correspondent, is currently in Sydney. But since Trump returned to the White House, Australians have watched in horror as he's abandoned Ukraine, started a global trade war and purged tens of thousands of federal employees.

1:51And all of this has given Australia's incumbent Social Democrat government, run by the Labour Party, a huge boost ahead of the election on Saturday.

2:05Su-Lynn, earlier this week, we saw something similar in Canada, but Australia's a long way from the US. Why is its politics so shaped by Trump as well? Yeah, I really enjoyed listening to you and Hal discuss the Canadian election earlier this week. And as I was listening, I was thinking to myself, look, the reality is Australia isn't Canada. Australia isn't facing the threat of annexation. It's not facing the prospect of 25 % tariffs. Trump has suggested 10 % tariffs on Australia. But the reality is that Australia is also reeling from the sting of the betrayal of what it sees as an incredibly important longtime ally.

2:47I mean, I think Australia is the only country in the world that has sent troops to every single war America has fought since the Second World War. That's more wars than even Britain and Canada. have sent troops to. And now Australians are just shocked by what they're seeing in the headlines every morning. Two thirds of Australians now say that America cannot be trusted as a security partner. And what a more independent defence policy. And there's another poll that's shown recently. Australians trust the current Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, more than the opposition leader, Peter Dutton, to manage Australia's relationship with Trump.

3:24So why wouldn't they trust the Conservatives to manage Trump? Well, I think actually what we're seeing in Australia is a lot of Australians don't want a leader like Trump. And what Dutton, the opposition leader, did very early in the campaign was style himself as a mini Trump. He came out and described the president as a big thinker and a dealmaker for proposing America take over Gaza. He stood by as one of his shadow ministers, Jacinta Nampijimpa-Price, declared that her party's goal was to make Australia great again. And earlier in the year, he'd appointed Price as shadow minister for government efficiency, inspired by Elon Musk.

4:05All of this actually played really, really badly with the Australian electorate, which for a whole range of different reasons is quite different from the American electorate. And as his approval rating started falling in the polls, he realised he'd made a huge mistake and he tried to turn it all around. I don't agree at all with President Trump's approach to the tariffs, and I've been very clear about that. As a result, he's been forced to abandon a whole raft of unpopular policies, for example, huge cuts in the civil service, and he's just tried to more broadly distance himself from Trump. But in a way, the damage was already done, and he continued to just make gaffe after gaffe throughout the campaign, whether or not they were related to Trump or not.

4:47The only other thing I'd add is that it's not just been that Dutton's ran an appalling campaign. It's that the current Prime Minister Albanese, his campaign has really benefited from the advantage of incumbency. There's a feeling in Australia that we're on the brink of a global recession, and in times of crisis, voters tend to rally behind the government of the day. So what, if anything, do you think this election tells us about the Australian electorate? Neither party has run a particularly inspiring campaign or a campaign full of big ideas and big policy. But there are a couple of very unique things about Australia's electoral system.

5:25One, there's compulsory voting, which means every single Australian has to go to the polls tomorrow. And as a result, in contrast to other countries where political parties might be trying to win the support of motivated supporters who are likely to go vote, in Australia, politicians are trying to win the votes of ordinary Australians, the very middle of the electorate. Secondly, there's preferential voting, which means that everyone gets to express who their first choice is, but then they also get to number second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth on the ballot, which means broadly they can express whether they're centre-right or centre-left and aren't necessarily throwing their vote away, even if their number one candidate doesn't get in.

6:08And then thirdly, there's a genuinely independent electoral commission here that is respected across the political spectrum. So as a result, people aren't really questioning electoral boundaries when they're redrawn ahead of an election, and they're not questioning the results of the election. One really, really interesting trend to watch in this election is whether we're going to see independent candidates become even more popular. So last election, there was a really shocking change where several inner city prosperous seats across the country were won by professional women who didn't really have a background in politics and were campaigning on the need for climate action.

6:51And a lot of these women are running again and they're expected to hold their seats. And that's radically changing Australia's political landscape. I felt that the coalition was out of step with the values of this community, which are, I would say, socially progressive, care about the environment, but economically conservative. Allegra Spender is an independent candidate who entered parliament in 2022. What does it mean to be an independent in Australia? It means being not party aligned. So it means that you can work with any side of politics on the issues that matter to you and you have a freedom to vote on every issue on its merits.

7:26Across Australia, from Spender's prosperous seat to regional towns and remote areas of the country, it's actually really been the cost of living crisis and the lack of affordable housing that has dominated the election. And as fewer and fewer young Australians are able to buy a house, it's very likely that this is going to be the issue of not just this election campaign, but many election campaigns going into the future. So Lynn, I'm interested in some of the wider context here. If we go back 20 years, Australia had a choice in a sense. Would it continue to ally with the US or would it somehow become part of Asia politically?

8:06Now, as you say, it made a very firm choice, but I'm interested in what discussion there's been about the US-China relationship and attitudes towards China in this election? You know, Rosie, it's a great question. And one thing I found incredibly striking covering this election campaign in Australia is that no one has been saying the C word. That is China. Both major parties basically refuse to bring it up. There's a number of reasons for it that relate to the growing number of Australians of Chinese heritage in this country and fears that they're going to lose votes if they say inflammatory things about the Chinese Communist Party.

8:47But I also think that it's an incredibly difficult question right now, because even though polls are showing that Australians really dislike Trump, they're still broadly in support of Australia's alliance with the US. And so there's a huge question around how to navigate that. And I guess that's not a question that's just facing Australia. That's a question that a lot of countries are now grappling with. And a lot of people I've spoken to over the past couple of weeks involved in this campaign on all sides of politics say that the broad strategy is just to try not to say too much and wait and see what happens, which again, I think is a strategy that a lot of politicians around the world are adopting right now when it comes to trying to navigate these tectonic shifts we're seeing in geopolitics when it comes to the US-China relationship.

9:38And so that's very much the case here in Australia as well. Great to talk to you, Suleen. Thanks so much. Thanks so much, Rosie.

10:02I've just listened to tomorrow's episode of The Weekend Intelligence and can tell you to be ready for a rocket through recent American history. We've all talked about the astonishing deluge of news in the past 100 days. Tomorrow you'll hear from the federal employees at the nub end of those changes. What happens when Elon Musk's doge comes to your office door? You'll need to be a subscriber to find out.

10:36A few weeks ago, I left my comfortable flat in Bombay and travelled deep into interior India. Leo Marani, our Asia correspondent, is based in Mumbai, which he still insists on calling Bombay. The reason I went there was because I wanted to find some of the new roads that have been built connecting tiny little villages across the length and breadth of the country. I arrived in a town called Khaira, in a state called Chhattisgarh, and I found what, to me, looked like a sort of idealised depiction of Indian rural life. There were blue uniformed schoolchildren playing in a playground and eating their lunch.

11:17Some of them were offering leftovers to the cows outside. Until recently, getting here from the nearest, slightly bigger settlement would have involved a quite long-winded journey on pothole surfaces. But just a few months ago, a brand new road opened, almost two kilometers long, and it's made the commute much simpler. And this is only one example of tens of thousands of villages across India that have been connected with newish roads over the past quarter century.

11:48In the year 2000, India undertook some pretty massive decisions when it comes to road connectivity. At the time, the national highway network was just about 52 ,000 kilometers. Today, it's nearly tripled that. At the start of the century, India had roughly speaking half a million kilometers of surfaced rural roads. Usually they were of pretty shady quality. I've been on a lot of these. They're bumpy and a lot of the time they just aren't really there. By last year, India had added an additional 773 ,000 kilometers at an average of 33 ,500 per year under one program alone. This transformation has occurred because on Christmas Day in the year 2000, the then Prime Minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, announced something called the Pradhan Mantri Gramsodok Yojana or the Prime Minister's Rural Roads Program.

12:41The idea at the time was to connect villages with a population of over 1 ,000 people to the nearest market town. And over time it evolved. It became 500 people, 250 people, not just market towns, connecting to hospitals or educational institutions, all sorts of things. But the result has been quite staggering.

13:02Over the past couple of years of reporting on India, I have had the opportunity to travel to all sorts of rural districts across the length and breadth of the country. and I have to say it's been nowhere near as difficult as I might have imagined. But it's not just that it's made life easier for me and people like me visiting these places, but it's been transformational for the people who actually live there. And amongst the things that researchers found were better access to transport services, reduced travel times, both of those are kind of obvious, but also greater labor mobility out of agriculture, pupils stayed in school longer, and it had particular effects especially for women and for maternal health.

13:41One pair of researchers found that rates of domestic violence declined, fewer women reported needing commission to leave the house. Another researcher found that there was better health care for pregnant women, fewer home births, which means more births in hospitals or clinics, and even higher rates of childhood vaccination. All of which is great, but there are a lot of problems in India that a single-lane tarmac road simply cannot solve on its own.

14:15Most importantly, really, there's no evidence that rural roads have raised income in the countryside. Now, just because there's no evidence doesn't mean it hasn't happened. A lot of this research looks at the first few years of the program, so it's possible that over time, incomes did rise. Another explanation is that because they facilitated migration, the families of those who left and sent money back home, they did better, but maybe not everyone in the village did. But most importantly, there's all sorts of things wrong with the way India's rural economy works, chiefly agricultural policies, and one single road is not going to fix all of those things.

14:57Late last year, the government announced the latest edition of this program, the fourth now. This aims to link another 25 ,000 villages with another 62 ,000-odd kilometers in the next four years. But the focus now needs to shift. It's not just about building roads, but the roads need to be maintained, held up to a certain standard, and that's the problem. When I was in central India, one of the roads I went on that was brand new, it was great, but at the other end of the same village, the road was in less good condition. And in another village, not far from this one that I visited, I drove across a road built under this scheme which had ceased to exist, basically.

15:37It had reverted to a state of nature, let's say. And there's many reasons for these sorts of things. One is that the quality of the construction may not be very good. There may be dodgy materials or weird mixes. Another is that local politicians will sometimes prioritise funds to certain areas of their constituency where they have more voters. There's also the problem that different Indian states have different capacities for actually implementing these schemes. The central government provides a lot of the money, but the work actually has to be done by the states. And that's not uniform across India.

16:10The central government is now trying to address some of these problems. But what's really needed is greater oversight and maintenance to ensure that all of these roads, these hundreds of thousands of kilometers of roads that have been built over the past quarter century, remain usable in the coming years.

16:28The high-profile expressways that India has been building are great, and they get all the attention. But the rural roads programs have been no less transformational. About half the country still lives in its villages, and for them to take part in India's growth, to benefit from India's growth, they need to be able to get out of their villages and access market towns, public services and move around. As one of the researchers I spoke to said to me, no matter what the benefits and the things that these roads haven't solved, a road is a no-brainer. Everybody should be connected to a road and that's kind of impossible to argue with.

17:09Frees That Frees That

17:37Don't list is led by Portuguese footballer Cristiano Ronaldo. He's kept company by boxers, basketball players, baseball players, American football stars, tennis players, golfers. They're all men. Not a single female athlete made the top 100 list in 2024. But also, neither did a single track athlete. Now, one of the most decorated Olympians of all time, four-time Olympic gold medal winner Michael Johnson wants to change all that. He has launched a new tournament called Grand Slam Track. This is combat racing. Best on best. This is where scores are set, legends made, a festival of speed, four times every year.

18:23The race is on. The structure of Grand Slam Track includes four different events in a single season, the first one of which took place in the ancestral home of sprinting, Kingston, Jamaica, in April. The next event in Miami begins today. So first question here is why is it on that grand list of the big earners that track stars earn so little? Well, Johnson believes, with some justification, that this is a problem of supply rather than demand. So the major events for track athletes are the Olympics and the World Championships. but these provide only three events every four-year cycle so there simply aren't that many opportunities for these guys to compete at the very highest level when you think about for example other individual sports like golf and tennis they each have four grand slam events a year plus a fairly substantial event calendar of second tier events but that just doesn't really exist for track there is something called the diamond league won by world athletics the track governing body.

19:28But the Diamond League's prize money isn't very high, which means that they have a chronic issue of trying to get competitive fields assembled. There are too many disciplines, which means that organizers actually limit the number of events there are in each Diamond League competition. So you may not get a 200 meter competition in every single meet, all of which suppresses broadcast revenue, which keeps prize money low and just means that these events just don't have the kind of cachet of big golf or tennis Grand Slams. But Grand Slam Track is trying to change all that. But how? What's going to be different?

20:02Well, Grand Slam Track wants to change just to make sure that all of these fields in their disciplines are extremely competitive so that the sport itself is compelling. This is the big bet, really, is that there isn't so much innovation. It doesn't look or feel any different to watching athletics at the World Championships or the Olympics. The idea is that if they can make the sport more compelling and more competitive, then that will attract more fans. They've also tried to streamline this because if you think about the number of athletics competitions you get at an Olympic or a World Championship meet, it's a lot for people to kind of keep track of, excuse the pun.

20:33So they've actually cut out quite a lot. So there's no track event longer than 5 ,000 meters and there are no field events at all. So even though we got, for example, one of the biggest breakout stars of Paris 2024 was Mondo Duplantis, the whole vaulter, there's no place for him in Grand Slam track. This is purely about running on the track as quickly as you can. Another point that Johnson makes a big play of is that athletes are under contract to appear at all four of the Grand Slam track's season meets. The idea is that the athletes are guaranteed to get paid. Second of all, fans are guaranteed to see these athletes that they want to see.

21:11As close to a guarantee as you can that these guys are going to be there. Putting them under contract and mandating them to appear at all four of these events is a new step forward that we haven't seen before. And you said that the first event in this new era took place in Kingston in April. How did it go? It was a good start. The most important thing that they managed to achieve was that they got genuinely competitive fields. There were 45 gold, silver, and bronze medalists from Paris that were eligible for Grand Slam track to pick up. And they managed to sign 21 of them to compete in Kingston.

21:43So for a start-up venture to get almost half of the best athletes in the world, that's a pretty good going. The difficulty is going to be getting bums on seats. If the appeal of Grand Slam track is to make athletics feel like an event, there is nothing that's going to put people off more than a lack of atmosphere in the stands. And it was notable that this stadium in Kingston, which holds about 35 ,000, was nowhere close to being full. That doesn't look great on the TV pictures, and it's something that Johnson's admitted is a problem. However, for the very first event, it was a good start, and a key thing would be to see how popular these events become in America, which is the world's biggest market for athletics.

22:25So when we start to look at the pictures from Miami, it'll be very interesting to see how many other seats are taken in the stadium. Well, before we get those data into our lab books, what do you reckon? What do you think about the prospects for this effort, the fundamentals of the business? I think they're onto something. I think this point about there being not enough supply to meet demand, despite this issue about getting fans in the stadium, is probably true. I think we should probably be judging this on year three, rather than after a single event. There's lots of things that athletics has going for it.

22:54It has a lot of very marketable stars. These guys are already promoting the hell out of themselves on social media, trying to differentiate themselves, trying to build their own fan bases. And it would make sense if there was a competition to meet them 50-50 on this. it's a very simple sport to understand. The gun goes off and they run as fast as they can and whoever gets their first wins, this doesn't require a huge amount of buy-in from fans to understand it. So I think there's huge room for growth in athletics. It's just going to take a bit of time to figure out if this particular venture is the right one.

23:24Mike, thanks very much for joining us. Thank you for having me.

23:40That's all for this episode of The Intelligence. The show's editors are Chris Impey and Jack Gill. Our deputy editor is Jonjo Devlin. And our sound designer is Will Rowe. Our senior producers are Rory Galloway, Sarah Larniuk and Alizé Jean-Baptiste. Our senior creative producer is William Warren. Our producers are Henrietta McFarlane, Benji Guy and Jonathan Day. We'll all see you back here for The Weekend Intelligence tomorrow. Thank you.