Akerman: Labor shortsighted on security, energy crisis and Aboriginal policy

The short-sightedness of the Albanese government makes Mr Magoo look like an eagle-eyed visionary, writes Piers Akerman.

At home and away, Australia has gone rapidly backwards under the Albanese Labor-Green government. The US has warned that China presents a real and present threat to Western interests in the Pacific region and that Australia needs to rapidly scale up its defence capability.

We didn’t send a ship to assist allies in the Middle East, but we managed to send a single vessel to the recent RIMPAC exercises. We’ve failed to stand with our closest allies in the face of rising threats from radical Islamists due to pressure placed on Labor MPs in seats with vocal Muslim minorities.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s failure to rein in renegade MP Fatima Payman before she walked out of the ALP sent a strong message to radicals that he was all hat and no cattle. His inability to discipline a junior senator gave them a green light to abandon government policy, knowing that any repercussions would be meaningless.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s inability to discipline a junior senator gave radicals a green light to abandon government policy. Picture: Liam Kidston

Instead of uniting the nation, Albanese’s government has created schisms that could take generations to erase. Where we once had a national flag, government representatives now stand before the national flag and two based on race. A flag by people living in the West Bank and in Gaza is now displayed at protests, alongside the race-based Aboriginal flag.

Such is the Muslim hold on government that Labor has had nothing to say about Sydney University’s capitulation to radical protesters and its agreement to permit radical groups to vet defence investments and research programs.

Protesters on the lawns of The University of Sydney. Picture: Lisa Maree Williams/Getty Images

Cutting-edge Israeli weapons research, which Australia badly needs, has been axed even as US Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell has urged us to tool up our defence industries. “We need short-term stocks of critical ordnance. We need more shipbuilding across the alliance,” he told The Australian newspaper.

Campbell called out the evil alliance of China, Russia, Iran and North Korea as the “enormous peril” of our time.

Instead of rising to meet the challenge, the government has sat passively as protesters succeed in restricting the engagement with Israel, one of the world’s foremost innovators. This is unbridled idiocy.

Last month, I visited an Iron Dome battery near the Israel town of Sderot, close to the Gaza border. The missiles fired from there had thwarted a rain of rockets launched by Hamas and saved hundreds, if not thousands, of lives.

Israeli forces fire a rocket from their Iron Dome defence system in the southern city of Ashkelon to intercept rockets launched from the Gaza Strip in May. Picture: Ronaldo Schemidt/AFP

The battery’s operation was largely automatically controlled by a bank of radar-linked computers. Australia has no such protection. We’re also lagging in the procurement of drones, which have proved their worth both in Israel and Ukraine.

The short-sightedness of the Albanese government makes Mr Magoo look like an eagle-eyed visionary. Nowhere is this more apparent than in its blind approach to the energy crisis.

Closing ageing coal-fired power plants without providing for reliable base-load electricity – just to appease irrational teal and Greens voters – has driven up living costs.

Punishing investors prepared to back new gas projects is just the latest folly in a series of scandalous decisions made by the government. The Opposition has presented two proposals that promise real results in the national interest.

Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price has slammed the “ideological nonsense” of progressive ideology followed by the government in respect to Aboriginal policy.

Citing the failures of the reversing of the alcohol bans and debit card quarantining of 80 per cent of Centrelink payments in remote communities, Senator Price correctly rejects academic humbug for on-the-ground lived experience.

The Opposition’s plan to remove restrictions on the gas supply and lift the ban on the discussion of nuclear energy should be no-brainers – but the government is inflicting endless pain on the nation with its rejection of these simple remedies.

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