Credlin: Hard to credit a relatively new government could get so much so wrong so quickly
As Australians, we’ve prided ourselves on being ‘the clever country’ or ‘the Lucky Country’ but, with a dumb enough government, even the most fortunate country in the world will run out of luck, writes Peta Credlin.
Opinion
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Consider the big recent moves by the Albanese government. It’s blocked a $1 billion gold mine with a thousand jobs on the basis of secret Aboriginal cultural business – which the official Indigenous representatives say is fictitious. It’s allowed industry-wide bargaining (and strikes), told workers they don’t have to take their bosses’ calls after hours, and made casual work (with its higher pay) more precarious. It has allowed our hospitals to run critically low in essential IV fluids needed for surgery.
Plus, it’s given 3000 people from a terrorist-controlled war zone the right to come to Australia without any serious security vetting.
What sort of government does that?
As Australians, at different times, we’ve prided ourselves on being “the clever country” or “the Lucky Country”. Maybe we still are clever, as a people; and, sure, as a nation, we’re blessed in a way that many other countries are not. But there’s nothing clever about a government that’s eroding our national security, sapping our economic strength and damaging our social cohesion. And sooner or later, with a dumb enough government, even the most fortunate country in the world will run out of luck. As businessman Gerry Harvey warned on Friday, the Lucky Country is being ruined by excessive costs for energy, compliance and regulation.
It’s hard to credit that a relatively new government could get so much so wrong so quickly. But, contrary to the Prime Minister’s pre-election assurances that he represented “safe change”, a great deal has changed, nearly all of it for the worse.
Last Friday, the usually sensible Resources Minister Madeleine King unleashed a huge spray against Australia’s largest corporate taxpayer after BHP had the temerity to complain about a $1.3bn hit to their cost base thanks to the government’s assault on labour hire firms whose workers are rarely unionised.
Then there was the Treasurer Jim Chalmers. Instead of a speech to a big think tank, outlining what Labor might do to address out-of-control government spending, improve sagging productivity, and avoid the energy train wreck, he chose to pursue an undergraduate attack on Peter Dutton, labelling him not just “divisive” but “dangerous”, and of using a “dog whistle” on race. Meanwhile, Chalmers continues to use record high immigration to artificially maintain overall economic growth despite the fact that, in per capita terms, we’ve been negative for five quarters and there’s an acute lack of housing for half a million newcomers every year.
But it’s the government’s failure to deliver its promised cut in power bills of $275 per household per year that remains its most enduring demonstration of incompetence. Two years ago, Energy Minister Chris Bowen said that the “energy transition” would require the installation of 22,000 new solar panels every single day, and 40 large wind turbines every single month, until 2030 – plus at least 10,000km of transmission lines.
Nothing like this is happening yet the minister insists that “there’s nothing to see here” despite repeated warnings of looming blackouts and brownouts as reliable coal-fired power stations continue to close and gas is routinely demonised. Meanwhile, the government tolerates the green activist law-fare designed to shut down the fossil fuel exports on which much of our prosperity depends.
At “bush summit” meetings held around the country last week, locals complained about what the so-called green revolution was doing to their farming properties and communities. The government’s emission obsession is all upside for the inner-city voters whose piddly rooftop solar panels subsidise their power bills but don’t interrupt their views. While regional Australia is told they must be blanketed in thousands of hectares of large-scale solar, and native forests are felled for wind-turbines. And then there’s the massive transmission towers being forced on people’s land to take renewables power from the regions to the cities.
It used to be Labor’s war on our prosperity that disqualified them as a credible party of government. Bad though that is, it’s not as serious as the visas for votes scheme, where the Albanese government has issued tourist visas to people from a place where two-thirds of the population support terrorist group Hamas: without any due process, without security advice, and without, even, any formal announcement. For a fortnight now, the government has refused to say that supporting Hamas makes someone ineligible to come here on character grounds.
Gaza is a place where people have been schooled from early infancy that Jews should be killed and that the West is evil. Almost no one who comes here from Gaza will ever go back. But the notion that everyone Albanese has let in could sincerely make the Australian citizenship pledge is deeply implausible. After all, new citizens are required to declare their allegiance to a country “whose democratic beliefs I share” and “whose rights and liberties I respect”. How many pro-Hamas Gazans could credibly pledge that?
When even Egypt and Jordan refuse to take in Gazans on security grounds, why on earth should we?
PARLIAMENT MUST NOW REDEFINE WHAT IT MEANS TO BE A WOMAN
I’ve now had the time to read carefully the sixty-page federal court judgment from Justice Robert Bromwich in the case of Tickle versus Giggle, a claim of unlawful discrimination when a females-only online App excluded a biological man who’d had gender reassignment surgery.
It’s clear that Gillard-era changes to the Sex Discrimination Act, billed as no more than “ending discrimination for LGBTIQ people”, have actually ended-up stealing hard-won gains for women and girls to have a “room of one’s own”.
That’s because “gender identity” was added as a ground of unlawful discrimination: Defined as “the gender-related identity, appearance or mannerisms or other gender-related characteristics of a person (whether by way of medical intervention or not), with or without regard to the person’s designated sex at birth”.
Finding in Tickle’s favour, it is sufficient, the judge said that “Ms Tickle is recorded as being female on her updated Queensland birth certificate for her to be, at law, of the female sex”.
No. “Gender” might be something you can decide based on how you want to identify but sex is a matter of biological fact. You either have the XX chromosomes that define your sex as a woman or you do not, and no amount of hormones, surgery or birth certificate updates can change that.
With his judgment, we’re in uncharted territory where Gillard-era changes are trying to undo science because a vociferous and aggressive trans lobby is demanding that biological males claiming to be women should be allowed in our single-sex spaces. This makes a mockery of female equality.
Did this come about because MPs debated the issue and decided that anyone who claims to be a woman really is a woman; or because this question was openly put to voters and decided by an election or at a referendum?
Of course not. What we are saddled with now is something that’s been insinuated into law by stealth and parliament must now fix this mistake.
Watch Peta on Credlin on Sky News, weeknights at 6pm
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