Meet the wannabe PM — Bill ‘Inauthentic’ Shorten
Bill Shorten may spruik his compassion on ‘equality’, health and education spending but voters simply don’t trust him, writes Miranda Devine. Any rational mind can see through his sinister policies.
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Scott Morrison’s government hauled itself through the last day of parliament on Thursday like the corpse from Weekend At Bernie’s, while over on the opposition benches, Labor MPs were so cocky they could barely contain themselves.
But Bill Shorten really shouldn’t get ahead of himself. Just because the polls favour Labor doesn’t mean it’s all over.
It’s true the Coalition is starting from behind, with two seats lost to independents as a result of last year’s leadership coup, plus another two seats rendered notionally Labor by electoral redistributions. A third term after six years of regicide is a big ask.
But it doesn’t hurt to be the underdog.
In the near miss of 2016, when Malcolm Turnbull scraped into office by one seat, 84 per cent of Coalition voters polled before the election said they expected the government to win.
This time there will be no such complacency. Voters know the Coalition needs a miracle to get over the line.
MORE FROM MIRANDA DEVINE: Shorten’s Budget reply speech was long on hubris and short on truth
But that miracle, if you look closely enough, is Shorten himself.
Voters don’t trust him, as the latest YouGov Galaxy poll shows. More than one third of respondents judge Shorten to be “untrustworthy”. That’s a fatal character assessment.
Of his many nicknames, “Mr Inauthentic” fits best, right down to the speech affectation that waxes and wanes depending on his audience. Sometimes Shorten says “with” and sometimes “wiv”, a vestige of trying to slum it with the union bruvvas after attending one of Melbourne’s poshest schools.
If you earn over $80,000, Bill Shorten thinks you’re a fat cat from the top end of town who deserves to be fleeced by the taxman pic.twitter.com/btoJe5YJXV
— Miranda Devine (@mirandadevine) April 5, 2019
He spruiks his compassion on “equality”, health and education spending.
But his policies are sinister, from higher taxes on middle income earners, self-funded retirees and the property market, to electric cars, punitive climate action and identity politics.
He plans to attack the wealth creators and redistribute their money to an ever-expanding class of supplicants.
MORE FROM MIRANDA DEVINE: Pauline Hanson, who the hell do you think you are?
We know how that turns out. The wealth creators, the entrepreneurs, the skilled, the aspirational, the savers and the proudly self-reliant are not going to sit passively while Shorten robs them blind.
They’ll rearrange their tax affairs, shift their business overseas, shrink their exposure, lower their incomes, invest less money in their businesses and work fewer hours.
The cash cow will keel over and the golden goose will fly the coop, leaving Labor with nothing but debt to pay for its trademark reckless spending.
Shorten’s policy for 50 per cent of new cars to be electric, for instance, is a Rudd-esque delusion which would cost motorists and taxpayers billions, for zero benefit.
Electric cars (aka coal-powered cars) are the most expensive way to cut emissions, according to research published last year in the Journal of Economic Perspectives.
Not that Shorten cares. Just how little thought he has given to his policy was clear when he was quizzed on FM radio by Kyle and Jackie O.
How long does an electric car take to charge?
“Oh it can take um… it depends what the original charge is, but it can take um … err … eight to ten minutes depending on your charge,” dissembled Shorten.
You can’t even charge your mobile phone in eight minutes, as motoring expert Trent Nikolic later pointed out. Even with a $5000 modification to your home to allow fast-charging, it would still take around eight hours.
MORE FROM MIRANDA DEVINE: The real reason Gladys was victorious
The main point of Labor’s climate policy is an impossible target of 50 per cent renewables by 2030 and emissions reduction of 45 per cent, twice as much as the Coalition.
A “lunch box tax” is one of the draconian ways Labor plans to achieve this goal, an effective carbon tax on 250 companies whose emissions are above 25,000 tonnes of CO2 a year, including food manufacturers such as Arnott’s, Bega Cheese, Ingham’s, McCain and the Australian Lamb Company who, of course, will pass the costs to consumers.
More companies will follow the Huggies nappy factory out the door, as it heads from southwest Sydney to China and Korea, where power and wages are cheaper.
But a carbon tax on so-called big emitters won’t be enough. Shorten wants to expand Queensland’s Labor government’s restriction on land clearing to all Australia, thus strangling agricultural expansion.
Yet building the solar farms required to reach 50 per cent renewables will require massive land clearing. And for what? In Germany the renewable experiment has sent electricity prices soaring while emissions barely shifted. Even Al Gore’s climate guru James Hansen says the idea that renewable energy can replace fossil fuels is like “believing in the Easter bunny and Tooth Fairy”.
Modelling by BAEconomics finds Labor’s climate policy would cost as many as 336,000 jobs, lower wages by 8 per cent and wipe up to half-a-trillion dollars from the economy. Yet, as our chief scientist has said, nothing we do will change the temperature of the planet.
Then there is the radical transformation of our society via the identity politics that is embedded into Labor’s national platform. It has signed Australia up to the “Yogyakarta Principles on the Application of International Human Rights Law in Relation to sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression and sex characteristics”.
This is mandatory enforcement of radical gender ideology on every aspect of our lives, from gender-free birth certificates, passports and driver’s licences to instant gender change by the stroke of a pen.
Shorten said nothing will change but do you trust him?
When voters finally take a good look at the Opposition Leader, the only rational conclusion is: “Yeah, no”.
Originally published as Meet the wannabe PM — Bill ‘Inauthentic’ Shorten
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