Peta Credlin: Anthony Albanese’s radical agenda that no one voted for
Anthony Albanese seems to forget that he doesn’t have a mandate for the radical remaking of Australia that he and his government seem hellbent on pursuing, writes Peta Credlin.
Opinion
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Imagine if Anthony Albanese had told us, pre-election, that a Labor government would create an Indigenous Voice as the fourth branch of government after the parliament, the executive and the courts, and that one of its first jobs would be to negotiate hundreds of treaties between various aboriginal groupings and the rest of us?
Imagine if he admitted his plans to soften us up to change the date of Australia Day, take the monarch off the $5 note in readiness for the “inevitable” republic, put the unions back in charge by allowing industry-wide bargaining and strikes, and effectively ban all new fossil fuel developments via planning rules, despite the fact we still rely on coal and gas not just to keep the lights on but also to prop up our debt-laden budget?
How do you think voters would have reacted? Not too well would be my guess, even allowing for the fact that Scott Morrison was a massive drag on the Coalition’s vote.
No one should forget that Anthony Albanese is PM despite fewer than a third of Australians voting for Labor.
And Anthony Albanese should never forget that he doesn’t have a mandate for this radical remaking of Australia that he and his government now seems hellbent on pursuing.
Make no mistake: this is a government set on the cultural and economic reordering of our country.
Last week’s leftist manifesto, a 6000-word essay in The Monthly from Treasurer Jim Chalmers, is terrible economics but a good guide to where the government wants to take the country.
His call for markets to respond to “values”, rather than to price signals set by supply and demand, inevitably means more government interference in our economic freedom — on top of the taxes, regulations and subsidies that are already making it harder and harder for people to get ahead.
It shows the government’s determination to wage the class struggle as well as the culture wars that, pre-election, the PM was at pains to reassure us he’d left behind.
Paul Keating’s statement “when you change the government, you change the country” wasn’t just the self-evident point that governments make a difference and that different governments make different decisions. Rather, he was pointing to what Labor governments see as their mission: not to make the country work better but to reshape it in order to better reflect Labor’s values, not necessarily the values of our country.
Most Labor ministers, for example, are not just fixing policy problems in their portfolio, but instead determinedly stripping out any programs and laws from former governments as far back as Howard.
It’s ideology over good sense, as the decision to end the grog-bans in remote Indigenous communities (from Howard) and the cashless welfare card (from Abbott) show.
Last week, as well, we saw the Albanese government release plans to radically reshape the laws around shared parenting in the event of separation and divorce.
Under the draft laws, the decade-long position that both Mum and Dad are important to the life of a child is up for grabs, and experts fear it’s a stealth move back to the days when divorced fathers saw their children on the weekends, if at all.
As a respected aboriginal man told me last weekend in Alice, a big part of their problem with young boys was the absence of strong male role models.
But here we are, contemplating the same madness on a national scale, when it’s the right of the child to know both parents that should be front and centre.
While Coalition governments are usually concerned about addressing practical problems like school standards, hospital waiting lists, and the red tape drowning small business (as examples), Labor governments tend to focus on social engineering, and increasingly identity politics.
Once you could oppose Labor policy on the grounds of cost or lack of effectiveness, but now opponents are made out to be moral pariahs — not just wrong, but bad.
Listen to how often the Prime Minister says that supporting Labor’s Indigenous Voice is just “good manners”, that it’s about “being on the right side of history”, even that the world will judge us harshly if it fails. Despite the fact that he is refusing to give voters any details, everything he says on this topic drips with moral judgment.
But that’s the modus operandi for the modern green-left; make others feel unworthy so they’re more inclined to give in, or to meet the left halfway as we’ve seen on issues of climate and energy policy as well as social change.
It’s why too many moderate Liberals end up quibbling about the detail rather than rejecting what’s wrong in principle because they aren’t brave enough to counter criticism at the next dinner party or on social media.
It’s why the Liberal Party base is peeling off to other players on the centre-right and won’t come back until the MPs they’ve elected grow a spine to reflect the values of those who put them there.
Meanwhile, as the Liberals try to sort out who they are and what they stand for, Labor and its allies are simply relentless.
To soften us up for the Voice, the Indigenous flag is flown everywhere alongside our one and only national flag, and no minister or bureaucrat opens their mouth without an acknowledgment that the country doesn’t belong to all of us, just to some of us.
To soften us up for a republic, axing the King from our bank notes is just the start.
You can be certain that if the Voice referendum fails, Labor will then try to do by legislation what the people have rejected as a way of letting us know that — under Labor — the government always gets its way.
Labor is masterly at bludgeoning Australians into changing what doesn’t need to change, fixing what isn’t broken, and running roughshod over what Australians have a right to decide, not politicians, whether we like it or not.
PELL PROTESTERS GUILTY OF A CARDINAL SIN
We used to be a country where funerals were left to the grieving. Yet as we saw in Sydney last Thursday, even with a High Court verdict unanimously declaring his innocence, protesters sought to, literally, hound Cardinal George Pell to his grave.
Reporting of the funeral gave them as much priority in the news bulletins as the Cardinal’s many achievements in life.
And while their numbers were overwhelmed by those who came to farewell Australia’s most senior Catholic leader, you wouldn’t have known that from coverage by outlets such as the ABC.
Inevitably, as a fierce defender of Christian orthodoxy and as a critic of climate and identity politics, Cardinal Pell was a polarising figure. But protester anger over his stand on issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage just highlighted their ignorance.
Whether you agree or not, what Pell espoused are the traditional Catholic teachings; these were not his self-created positions, and individuals are free to follow the faith or not.
But his critics have always preferred fact over fiction when it came to George Pell.
How many of his critics knew, for example, that he was the first senior clergyman in the world to put in place a process for victims of child sex abuse in the Church to be heard — and compensated?
Or that he brought in the police over clerical abuse claims rather than move those accused to another parish, as some had done in the past.
And that when the Pope promoted him to one of the highest positions in Rome, his job was to expose the financial corruption that had been plaguing the Church for decades.
As the Cardinal’s brother said, on behalf of the Pell family, what he discovered, more than $2 billion dollars not properly accounted for, “sealed his fate”.
I can’t imagine how hard it would have been to endure 404 days of solitary confinement for a crime you didn’t commit. To have, in addition, prayed for your accusers, and forgiven them, shows the quality of the man.
Even his fellow prisoners cheered at the news the High Court unanimously acquitted him.
And if you believe in the rule of law, as I do, then that says more than any protester ever could.
Watch Peta on Credlin on Sky News, weeknights at 6pm
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