Piers Akerman: Voters get sinking feeling they still can’t trust Labor

Labor is again split over the party’s decision to ignore the pleas of workers in northern Queensland in favour of Green-Left ­activists in the inner-urban areas of southern cities who have adopted the global warming cult as their creed, Piers Akerman writes.

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In World War II, claims that the Curtin Labor government was prepared to sacrifice northern Queensland to the Japanese at the so-called “Brisbane Line” divided the ALP.

Fast forward to 2019 and Labor is again split over the party’s decision to ignore the pleas of workers in northern Queensland in favour of Green-Left ­activists in the inner-urban areas of southern cities who have adopted the global warming cult as their creed.

But Labor’s strategy to snub the hardworking northerners in favour of the activists is starting to unravel because of the widespread unpopularity of the Green-Left’s embrace of lifting border controls, new taxes on retirees and the promise of higher power costs.

Labor leader Bill Shorten, a former AWU boss, is now being challenged by the powerful miners’ union, the CFMEU, to state where he stands but he cannot without showing how divided the Labor Party is on the climate change issue.

Opposition Leader Bill Shorten. Picture: AAP/Ellen Smith

Mr Shorten hedged his bets Thursday in the wake of coal giant Glencore’s announcement of a production cap on coal saying he believed coal still had a future but he refused to endorse Adani’s giant Carmichael mine which would open up the vast resources of the Galilee Basin and create thousands of jobs for regional Queensland.

Queensland’s Labor Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk has lost control of the issue with members of her government including the Townsville-based MP Cathy O’Toole breaking ranks supporting the mine and urging its approval by the state government even as senior bureaucrat Queensland Resources Investment Commissioner Caoilin Chestnutt last week telling an unimpressed investor audience in India that while in theory Adani’s Carmichael mine could be approved in the next two months, it could be up to two years away.

Labor MP Cathy O’Toole.

Adani has become the focus of the illogical global warming protest movement in Australia which, fittingly, is being spearheaded by ignorant schoolchildren led by viperous Pied Pipers from the extreme radical Left teachers union and encouraged by muddle-headed virtue-signalling parents.

Mr Shorten’s willingness to cave in to the Green-Left in search of votes smacks of desperation and just as the ALP split in the mid-1950s kept the ALP out of office, so too, do the emerging differences within the ALP over border security, energy costs, mining jobs and retirees’ taxation threaten to create division within the party just when its members are acting as if they were already occupying the government benches.

With just a few more parliamentary sitting days before the Budget rapidly followed by the federal election, Labor supporters will have to mull over the facts surrounding these issues and not just the vibe favoured by the Green-Left and Independents like Dr Kerryn Phelps.

On climate change, the science is certainly not in and despite the crying from the nursery, the fate of the Great Barrier Reef is not dependent upon closing coal mining and throwing tens of thousands of Australians onto the unemployment scrap heap.

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The reality of border control is even easier to nail because the facts — the science — is incontrovertible.

When the Howard government left office in 2007, there were just four people being held in immigration detention. Under the weak border control of the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd Labor governments — which the Greens and independent idiots supported — there were some 800 boats, 50,000 unlawful arrivals, 1200 deaths at sea, and 20,000 people in onshore detention.

The Coalition, under the strong leadership of Tony Abbott, the government humanely fixed the situation.

Now those who were responsible for smashing the border policies are determined to do the same thing all over again thanks to Dr Phelps and the same Green-Left supporters which this time around include the renegade former Liberal Julia Banks.

Voters are starting to think about the election as they should.

Every election is important but Labor’s claims to be just a cigarette paper’s depth from the Coalition on border control are a demonstrably a nonsense.

Labor’s tax plans to target franking credits are focused on punishing responsible Australians who have prudently planned for their retirement.

The activists targeting Adani are putting $77 billion of projects at risk according to the CFMEU.

The indications are that the electorate is beginning to appreciate the very real risks posed by Labor even though much of the news and commentary presented on the taxpayer-funded ABC and SBS is indistinguishable from the ALP’s talking points.

There is time before the election for Prime Minister Scott Morrison and his key ministers to put the case for re-election before the nation despite the general media opposition.

Labor’s options are disappearing because they promises they have made so far just don’t stack up against its record when last in office.

The evidence is plain. Labor just can’t be trusted.