How many mistakes can a minister make before Anthony Albanese finally sacks them?
The Albanese government is not only dangerously ideological but incompetent. Even Labor supporters should be frightened.
Andrew Bolt
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What should frighten even Labor supporters is that Andrew Giles – in trouble yet again – isn’t even the biggest underperformer in the Albanese Government.
The question now is: Is this Government even worse than Gough Whitlam’s?
Is it not only dangerously ideological, but incompetent?
Giles might seem Exhibit A after his latest embarrassment.
He’s admitted the 149 foreign criminals he freed from detention last year – including murderers and 37 sex offenders – were given invalid visas.
That means at least 10 will escape prosecution for breaching their now-invalid visa conditions, like breaking curfews or not reporting to police.
Giles’ performance makes me ask how many mistakes a minister in this Government can make before Prime Minister Anthony Albanese finally sacks them.
Count ‘em.
Last year the High Court ruled Giles had to free a Burmese pedophile from immigration detention, since there was no real chance he could be sent back home.
Giles was caught unprepared, even though one judge warned months earlier this ruling was probably coming.
Result: he released the pedophile – plus 148 other criminals he thought were in the same position – without any initial plan to keep an eye on them and control their movement, and no laws to get them put away if they proved to be a danger.
Worse, it turned out he’d skipped two meetings in his own office to discuss what to do if the High Court ruled as it did, going instead to events to promote Labor’s doomed Voice, its planned Aboriginal-only advisory parliament.
But it’s not just that. With Giles as Immigration Minister, this government:
• Let in a record 520,000 immigrants, net, in just one year, helping to cause a housing shortage;
• Gave visas to 2000 Palestinians in terrorist-run Gaza and the West Bank during this war, with cursory checks in as little as a day;
• Gave people smugglers hope just four days after it was elected by letting a Biloela family of fake refugees from Sri Lanka stay, and later rewarding another 19,000 illegal boat people with permanent visas;
• Let two boats of illegal immigrants land on our coast; and
• Let 81 councils ban citizenship ceremonies on Australia Day, further weakening our unity.
That’s some record in less than two years, yet Giles is far from the worst or most damaging of the ministers of a government struggling to perform basic tasks.
Take Chris Bowen, the Climate Change and Energy Minister.
What’s he touched that hasn’t then gone to custard?
Bowen is on a crusade to pretend to save us from a pretend “climate crisis” by replacing our coal-fired power stations with wind and solar. That means as much as 90 per cent of our base-load power will be gone in a decade, to be replaced by … er, what?
Bowen’s rollout of wind and solar plants is way behind, as is his scheme for 28,000km of transmission lines to hook them all up. His Snowy 2.0 scheme to store green power is already 10 times the promised price.
Now his plan to make Australians buy more electric cars – 89 per cent of new car sales by 2030 – is attacked as impossible by car companies and a “ute tax” by the Opposition.
It’s a mess. The Australian Energy Market Operator warns of more blackouts from next summer and Bowen’s promise to cut electricity bills by $275 by next year is laughable.
Yet Bowen, too, is still a minister – and still not the Government’s most inept minister. The most dangerous, but not most incompetent.
That’s probably Linda Burney, the Indigenous Australians Minister.
She didn’t just oversee Labor’s catastrophic campaign for the Voice, which was rejected last year by 60 per cent of voters, with Burney incapable of explaining why we needed it.
What else has she done, as crime by Aboriginal youths in towns like Alice Springs explodes? What – apart from this week giving us a $4 billion plan to build houses at an astonishing $1.4 million a pop for just 10,000 Aborigines, and build them in remote areas, exactly where there are no good jobs?
Need I go on?
This is a Government that is keeping us out of recession only by ramping up immigration and getting lucky on windfall prices for resources like the fossil fuels it hates.
It’s meanwhile hammered business with pro-union restrictions that will keep productivity increases at lows it admits we haven’t seen in 60 years. No wonder Australians last year got 1 per cent poorer, on average, per person.
What’s this Government good for? Worse than Whitlam.
Originally published as How many mistakes can a minister make before Anthony Albanese finally sacks them?