Steve Price: Anthony Albanese electric car policy shows he’s out of touch
Anthony Albanese’s electric car policy showed how far we are from the days when a bare-chested Bob Hawke was a man of the people.
Opinion
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You can only imagine what a bare-chested Bob Hawke, then ALP and ACTU President, would have made of this week’s Labor Party National Conference — held virtually.
The below pictures of the late Prime Minister were taken at Terrigal on the central coast of NSW during the reign of the Whitlam Government.
Writing two years ago about the summer of love event journalist Tony Wright remembered it was held at the Hotel Florida in February 1975.
Beers in hand with bikini clad women hanging on his every word, Hawke as Wright remembers, spent most of the conference dressed in budgie smugglers.
You have to wonder in later years what another fan of those swim costumes, Tony Abbott, thought when criticised for his fashion sense while Hawke was celebrated.
Hypocrisy writ large but then when it came to Abbott any criticism was seen as valid, sadly.
Whitlam himself delivered the keynote address at that conference, can you believe it, wearing a Hawaiian shirt. The takeout message – they all have one – was the Whitlam Government was going to leave the conference with their PROGRAM and DETERMINATION refreshed.
By November of course, as history would show, the party was over. Whitlam was sacked by Sir John Kerr and Malcolm Fraser was PM.
Current Labor leader Anthony Albanese doesn’t have the luxury of incumbency and if the key policies to come from the conference of zoom — as opposed to love — was anything to go by he isn’t going into Government anytime soon.
Luckily for a besieged PM Scott Morrison, he’s got Albo up against him.
Don’t get me wrong, I have a lot of time for the Labor leader and if I had the choice of spending an afternoon with him or with the current PM, Anthony wins every time.
During a long lunch at a Thai restaurant in Darlinghurst a few years back with just him and me I got to know a little more about Albo. Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard were running the show back then and Anthony, it would be fair to say, wasn’t a huge fan.
The problem he has today though is he’s no Bob Hawke, just like Scott Morrison is no John Howard. Both our current political leaders seem to have lost the ability to connect with average Australians.
I wrote way back on December 5 that Scott Morrison had a tin ear. Now it seems to me he has two tin ears.
If this week’s ALP agenda-setting get together is any example, then Albanese suffers from the same inability to connect with middle Australia.
With echoes of the Rudd years — remember cash for clinkers and the deadly pink bat scheme or the cash burning school halls program — the Albanese agenda seems just as crazy.
Take Labor’s pie in the sky electric vehicle policy, where it was actually explained this week, that with their new policy an imported Nissan Leaf electric car would be $2000 cheaper.
This tiny plug-in alternative — to say a Toyota Camry or Hyundai i30 — would be just under $50,000.
Anyone seen how small a Nissan Leaf is? Labor says it will also slash import tariffs on such cars and there would be no FBT for businesses who provide one for their employees.
Can we get real world here for just a second please?
Virtually no-one by choice would want to drive a Nissan Leaf. Of all the cars sold in Australia last year, less than 1 per cent were fully electric.
Only 6900 electric cars in total were sold last year and many of those would have been expensive Teslas sold to wealthy millionaires wanting to look as if they really care about the planet.
And the cost to you the taxpayer of this fantasy ego policy that’s trying to wedge the Coalition into seeming to be fans of petrol guzzling SUV’s? $200 million over three years.
These tax breaks by the way remind us all of the folly of former leader Bill Shorten during the losing campaign last election.
Labor clearly has a short memory because the failed former leader Shorten spent days trying to explain his claim an electric vehicle could be charged in 10 minutes.
Experts laughed at him and yet with just a few days of debate at this latest conference they go back to electric vehicles that no-one really wants and tie themselves to a policy that’s never seeing the light of day.
Late this week shadow frontbencher Chris Bowen even admitted he drove a gas guzzling four-wheel drive because he had two dogs and a few children.
Good on you Chris, just like millions of Australians who couldn’t squeeze the tribe into an electric Nissan Leaf.
Could someone please tell the Labor Party and Albo they are supposed to be the party of the worker. How many tradies do these inner-city conference types think turn up to a building site in a Nissan Leaf?
You can add to that the idea that employers and taxpayers can afford to pay at full salary six months maternity leave plus superannuation to both parents.
That’s a great incentive to employ young women wanting to start a family, thinking you might have to pay them a full salary for six months plus superannuation to care for the new baby.
The old let’s recognise Palestine as a nation reared its head again as well.
Under Bill Shorten at the last election Labor got smashed in Queensland because coal workers realised their jobs were about to disappear and yet, here we go again.
Bob Hawke and John Howard would not believe how out of touch the men that now occupy the jobs they once held are. As Australian Prime Minister, Howard donned the green and gold tracksuit and supported the Test team, the Wallabies, Pat Rafter and Cathy Freeman.
Bob famously, when Australia II won the America’s Cup, fingered any boss willing to sack someone as a bum.
Right down the middle, no Cronulla Sharks, no South Sydney Rabbitohs.
Sadly for Labor they even had to steal their next election slogan from Britain’s Jeremy Corbyn – WE ARE ON YOUR SIDE – that will work for Albo about as well as it did for the British leader.
The problem for Australian voters is we don’t actually know whose side either leader is on, it just feels like it’s not ours.
Like Gough, the advisers to Albo should have suggested he deliver his keynote address in a Hawaiian shirt – couldn’t do any harm.
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Originally published as Steve Price: Anthony Albanese electric car policy shows he’s out of touch
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