But while we continue to enjoy the same entertainment, our other similarities are now radically and alarmingly diverging.

It started during COVID, when Australia quickly and voluntarily reverted back to its roots as a penal colony. Last week, America too re-acquainted itself with its colonial roots.

HAPPINESS

By comprehensively electing Republicans to the White House and Congress, Americans reasserted their adherence not to servitude but to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

These are the God-given rights their founders fought for, and who believed should one day apply to all people everywhere.

It didn’t take long for Vice President-elect JD Vance to pick up this baton and run with it, putting other nations on notice that an alliance with the US was untenable without shared values.

“It’s insane that we would support a military alliance if that military alliance isn’t going to be pro-free speech,” he said.

“American power comes with certain strings attached. One of those is respect for free speech.”

Vance was talking specifically about Europe, where the European Commission is threatening to arbitrarily muzzle Elon Musk’s X platform.

But it would only take a quiet word in his ear for him to shake his head in despair and say that the relationship with Australia is on even thinner ice.

At the same time Vance was placing free speech at the centre of future US alliances, the Australian government was preparing to make some form of self-identification a compulsory condition of using social media in Australia.

This is nominally to prevent kids under 16 from being exposed to social media’s harms, but in effect it also grants the government the power to determine who gets to engage in online debates.

Not coincidentally, the government has simultaneously already passed its Misinformation Bill, the most tyrannical legislation in our nation’s history, through the House of Representatives.

It only needs to get it through the Senate, which is not renowned for its sophisticated appreciation of the centrality of free speech, to make it law.

RESTRICT

The government is hoping to do so before Christmas, so the legislation can be used to seriously restrict the topics that can be discussed during the forthcoming federal election.

It’s impossible to overstate how different this would make our two nations. Was the brief period when Australia and the United States seemed like cousins an historical anomaly?

I hit the streets yesterday to see if this difference was as stark as it seems.

I asked some American tourists if they thought it was dangerous to allow the government to decide who can use social media and what they can say:

“Tyranny is on the doorstep,” one US tourist said. “Don’t let the government take your rights away.”

“It’s freedom of speech. We should be able to say and do what we want. Why regulate it?” said another.

That version of democracy is a tad different to the one held by our Minister for Communications, Michelle Rowland, whose very title alone should send a shiver down your spine.

Australians, whose history is devoid of a Declaration of Independence, Revolutionary War or Civil War, are largely oblivious to the potential of politicians to be corrupted by power.