Peta Credlin: Anthony Albanese is not listening to the main concern of Australians
Rents, grocery bills and power are all climbing yet Albanese government decisions are only causing more stress in Australian households, writes Peta Credlin.
Opinion
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Whatever the next lot of polls say, the Albanese government is danger of becoming seriously shopsoiled.
If you listen to the Prime Minister, the Voice is the biggest issue facing our country but, to everyday Australians, their focus isn’t the settlement of Australia two centuries ago, it’s how they make ends meet today.
Unfortunately for the PM, not only have rents and grocery bills risen by about 10 per cent over the past year, and power bills by at least 20 per cent, but recent homebuyers are now facing the need to find an extra $20,000 a year just to keep the roof over their heads.
Because most voters are reasonably fair-minded, at least towards new governments, this wouldn’t necessarily be politically disastrous – except everything this government is doing makes a bad situation worse.
Historically high pay rises, that the government supported in the Fair Work Commission, even if not quite keeping pace with inflation, are adding to cost pressure. Likewise, changes to give unions more say in workplace bargaining won’t make businesses more productive. Then there’s higher taxes on super, plus more state taxes on resources, plus even greater difficulty getting any big new projects approved.
And then there’s the Voice, that Albanese lectures us about daily; and that looks increasingly like a distraction from the main game of helping with the cost of living.
When it comes to dealing with inflation, the government has many levers but it’s pushing them all in the wrong direction. By contrast, the Reserve Bank only has one lever, interest rates, which it’s pulling harder than it would otherwise need to, because nothing the government does is helping to get inflation down.
Given that only about a third of all households have a mortgage, interest rate rises impact disproportionately on new homebuyers, usually families with young children, hitting them just when they need support.
The government’s increasingly frantic attempts to blame the Reserve Bank for people’s woes will soon be less convincing because Governor Phil Lowe’s term is about to expire. If the government reappoints him, it will “own” his approach to interest rates. But it will also “own” the policy of any new appointment, especially if it’s an orthodox banker, who basically follows the Lowe line.
The PM’s near-obsession with the Voice, that he’s turning into a badge of political virtue rather than as a way to deliver practical outcomes for disadvantaged people, seems like an indulgence when so much else needs more prime ministerial attention.
It’s obviously his pet project, something he sees as his legacy, yet he can only justify it in terms of the “vibe”. Those that don’t agree with him are increasingly smeared as “racist”, even though it is Albanese who wants to put a race-based body into our Constitution.
Lately, the polls have shown more opposition than support for the Voice, and this is unlikely to change despite the avalanche of money that will soon saturate the airwaves from the “Yes” campaign team. Indeed, being bombarded with ads about doing the right thing for one small section of the population could be quite counter-productive at a time when most Australians are feeling under pressure themselves. It could just add to the sense that the government is promoting unfairness.
There’s always been something odd about a free and equal country giving a special say to one group of people, however much they deserve respect as the First Australians. This was always going to jar with recent migrants who had otherwise been told that, once you’d sworn the citizenship oath, you were a first-class Australian along with everyone else.
Last week the government was in all sorts of trouble over whether the Voice could call for the abolition of Australia Day. To people already growing impatient with the now ubiquitous ‘Welcome to Country’, as if it belongs to some of us but not to all of us, any further attack on Australia Day could be the last straw.
This was compounded by growing protests in Western Australia over a new Aboriginal Heritage Act that means landholders must consult local Indigenous groups for any significant disturbance of the soil, such as erecting a fence. The news one of the PM’s Voice advisers was part of the “pay the rent” campaign isn’t exactly reassuring the Voice is just about being polite to Aboriginal people.
There’s now every chance that the Voice referendum could be defeated. This would be a heavy blow to the PM. A prime minister should be reluctant to venture a change that’s doomed to fail. Yet pulling the referendum, or even postponing it, would have echoes of Kevin Rudd’s 2010 abandonment of his emissions trading scheme.
One way or another, it looks like the government is heading into a winter of discontent.
WHY LETTING CHILDREN IDENTIFY AS CATS HAS ME FELINE VERY CONCERNED
One of the reasons I am on the right of politics is I believe that government exists only to do what people can’t do for themselves. Like build roads or defend the country. Beyond that, government should be as small as possible.
And it’s from that philosophical viewpoint that I recognise some of the craziness infecting our society is craziness that too many of us have let fester. It’s as though we have become passive in our own lives and, while we might think it’s madness, we stand back, say nothing and just hope that government will eventually step in and fix things.
Only they won’t because government weighing in often makes a bad situation worse. And, more particularly, big government disables citizens. It strips away our self-reliance, which is why it should be resisted but also why we need to accept that if we want the tide turned on woke nonsense, it’s up to us to do something about it.
A good example is the fight that’s going on in UK schools where young people have gone to a whole new level of crazy, where they turn up to school identifying as a cat or some other animal and everyone is just supposed to toe the line. Making headlines last week is Rye College in East Sussex where a teacher took issue with a 13-year-old student who refused to accept that a fellow (human) classmate was now a “cat”. The teacher called the sensible student “despicable” and they were punished but, fortunately, the child’s parents pushed back and hence the rot at Rye College was exposed.
It’s here where I support the brilliant and outspoken principal Katherine Birbalsingh, who said the problem here are the parents that tolerate the nonsense of any child deciding they are an animal and indulging them; that “adult authority” is gone. Tough words for any parent to hear but thank God there’s still educators like Birbalsingh prepared to call it out and undaunted by the woke crowd. It’s no wonder Birbalsingh is known as Britain’s strictest headmistress but the results at her school speak for themselves – and parents are clamouring to get their children in.
Watch Peta on Credlin on Sky News, weeknights at 6pm
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