Akerman: Count on Labor’s sheep to keep dreaming

This week’s ALP national conference added a further 2000 to the Queensland flock – but it is the rest of us who will be shorn, writes Piers Akerman.

There are 2.1 million sheep in Queensland. This week the ALP national conference added a further 2000 to the flock. The true believers listening to the true deceivers baa-ed approvingly as Labor Prime Minister Anthony Albanese made promises that will never be kept. The nation will not see 1.2 million new homes built over the next five years despite the promise of $3.5bn of taxpayers’ money being offered as an incentive to the states.

Anyone who had tried to find a tradesman across the nation recently knows there is a serious skill shortage of trained hands, let alone a major problem sourcing building materials.

According to Bureau of Statistics figures released in July, there was a total of just 46,546 dwelling commencements to March, and the number of private sector house commencements fell by 5.5 per cent to 26,026 dwellings. The value of total building work fell by 0.4 per cent to $30.7bn. Take into account the effect of the extra 200,000 immigrants (read prospective Labor voters) Albanese has invited into the country and ask how their arrival will alleviate the housing shortage.

Workers labour on steel beams at a construction site in Sydney. A shortage of skilled workers and building materials makes the promise of 1.2 million new homes one which will not be kept. Picture: Brendon Thorne/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Come in spinner.

Buying off militant trade unions and the lunatic Left with a promise of a South Australian-based nuclear submarine building program is another pledge that will never be realised.

Talk about deja vu all over again. Kim Beazley, when defence minister in 1987, ordered the building of the Collins class submarines.

A Collins class submarine under construction in Australia. The pipe dream of establishing an international-standard submarine manufacturing industry continues to this day.

The chosen design was to be new. Experimental, far larger than any built by the selected builders, the Swedish firm Kockums, and there was a sweetener for the contractor, the Australian Submarine Corp, if it built the six boats at a site in Port Adelaide in the South Australian electorate held then by Labor giant Mick Young. Australia was to become submarine builders to the world.

The original $2.6bn contract blew out to more than $5.1bn.

The pipe dream of establishing an international-standard submarine manufacturing industry in Australia continues to this day with the re-announcement of 20,000 jobs in both SA and Western Australia.

Another fantasy is the notion that by handing money to foreign firms to build more unreliable and inefficient renewable wind, solar and hydro energy sources, Australia will cut its so-called greenhouse emissions to 43 per cent net below 2005 levels by 2030.

Wind turbines in Waubra, Victoria. Picture: Carla Gottgens/Bloomberg via Getty Images

According to the latest figures released by the Department of Energy, etc, Australian greenhouse emissions increased by 1.5 per cent in the year to March 2022, despite the closure of several coal-fired power plants. As for being green, wind turbines are shredding native birds at an alarming rate and solar panels are blanketing valuable farm land, even before clearances are made for the proposed 10,000km of new transmission lines to connect inefficient power sources to the grid.

With AUKUS delivering nuclear-powered subs, but a ban on domestic nuclear power, we have another typically contradictory Labor policy – nuclear energy is good for defence but not for power-hungry consumers.

The sheep loved the line that Australia “will maintain the prohibition on the establishment of nuclear power plants” though the take up of nuclear energy is delivering cheaper, cleaner electricity to nations around the world.

Delegates clap at the close of the 49th ALP National Conference in Brisbane. Picture: Dan Peled/NCA NewsWire

The sellout of principles of the Left faction was nowhere more visible than the attack on Israel’s sovereignty and capitulation to the activist Palestinian lobby. Fortunately, the decision not to change the existing party platform on Israel and the Palestinians was a rare return to reality and a sober appreciation of Australia’s – and Labor’s – long support for a nation whose birth we championed and whose entry to the United Nations we supported.

That moment of lucidity passed, though, when the conference cheered Albanese, a party leader who admits to not reading the detail of the most important proposal to change the Constitution to favour a particular race. The Voice would give those who claim to be Indigenous a special authority to engage with all arms of the government on matter that affect them – even where nuclear submarines should be based.

Those who would be given this privilege would be totally unaccountable to the majority of Australians, the taxpayers who are bled around $40bn a year to support Indigenous programs.

The sheep were definitely in Brisbane – but it is the rest of us who will be shorn.