Small business collateral damage in Labor’s Covid-29 policies

Labor is deserting the very people it was founded to serve, it’s policies on Covid-19 showing the party sees small business as merely collateral damage, writes Peter Gleeson.

To understand why Australia has gotten itself into such a terrible Covid-19 mess, we must look closely at what drives the modern Labor Party.

This is a political party that has lost its moral and ethical compass, deserting the very people it was founded to serve – the working man.

Australia is being played right now by a Labor Party so desperate to win the next federal election that it sees small business as merely collateral damage in its pursuit of electoral glory.

Closing state borders, introducing snap lockdowns and running dead on the vaccination rollout is part of a bigger picture to put Anthony Albanese in The Lodge.

For Prime Minister Scott Morrison and his erstwhile Treasurer Josh Frydenberg, the time has come to dispense with the niceties and man up.

Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk and Labor Leader Anthony Albanese in Brisbane. Picture: Richard Walker

Daniel Andrews, Annastacia Palaszczuk and Mark McGowan are not on team Australia. They are not team players.

They are all about holding on to the extraordinary powers the commonwealth has bequeathed them. It’s red versus blue and Australia is the loser.

Labor is anti-business, a carry-over from the days when Wayne Swan was federal treasurer. Labor embraces identity politics and overreach. The Liberals see cancel culture and the PC brigade as dangerous and divisive.

Yet the PM has this Pollyanna view that national cabinet is about bringing the country together, rowing in the same direction. Nothing could be further from the truth as border closures, snap lockdowns, hard-line police tactics and a lack of compassion from the Labor states form the central plan to put Labor into government.

The Labor Party knows its only chance of winning the next federal election is to portray Morrison as a bumbling fool who stuffed up the vaccination rollout and has contributed largely to the crisis of confidence and uncertainty during Covid-19.

Labor has research that shows many voters can’t – or won’t – differentiate between commonwealth and state responsibilities around the handling of the pandemic.

That research clearly shows that Morrison is being blamed for just about every negative aspect of the pandemic, while the states get ticks when they keep people safe. Andrews, Palaszczuk and McGowan have formed an alliance to ignore national cabinet’s 80 per cent vaccination target before Christmas and go it alone on lockdowns and border closures. Australians want vaccination to be their passport to freedom.

Undermining the notion that getting vaccinated means greater freedom is now part of Labor Party strategy. You only have to look at who leads the Labor Party to understand this selfish insanity.

Still smarting from the 2019 “unlosable’’ election, the Labor Party now realises that it must say and do anything to win next time.

That’s why it is running this behind-the-scenes agenda to unravel Morrison’s leadership.

Play the man, not the ball. Labor is putting politics before people. It has turned the federation on its head by refusing to accept the resolutions of national cabinet.

Two can play that game. Maybe the Commonwealth should just forget about distributing the GST windfall to the red states.

Morrison and Frydenberg need to fight fire with fire. They are being treated as mugs by the Labor states. It’s time they muscled up.