Has the Coalition forgotten how to fight?
IN Victoria, Matthew Guy is allowing Andrews to get away with murder. Federally, Turnbull isn’t doing much better with his opponents, writes Peta Credlin.
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THE Andrews Government in Victoria deserves to die of shame over its blatant and deliberate misusing of taxpayers’ money to fund its election campaign.
It will probably get away with it, though: first, because Labor is utterly brazen about ripping off the system (this is the same government, let’s not forget, who used a chauffeured car to ferry around an MP’s dogs); and second, because the Liberals are yet to take the gloves off.
Here are the facts: 21 Labor MPs paid staff to work on Labor’s election campaign rather than to serve their constituents. The chief architect of this waste of tax-paid time, former Victorian Treasurer John Lenders, knew that this arrangement wasn’t kosher. According to unnamed Labor MPs, Premier Daniel Andrews knew about it at the time, after all, Labor’s style is command and control.
The staff who questioned the arrangement were told not to speak about it.
And although Labor has repaid the $388,000 that was misused to get itself elected, it hasn’t repaid the $1 million plus of taxpayers’ money spent appealing all the way to the High Court trying to quash the Victorian Ombudsman’s investigation and bury the report. In other words, they’ve repaid the proceeds of the original ”artifice,” but haven’t repaid the cost of the attempted cover-up.
One of the MPs who used his electoral staff budget for party political campaigning and who then tried to suppress the investigation is the Attorney-General. Another is the Special Minister of State. Neither has even been reprimanded by the Premier, let alone forced to resign even though their responsibilities include maintaining standards of probity in government.
This is a rolled-gold rip-off perpetrated by government. It’s not just a claim in the media but an actual finding from the independent Victorian Ombudsman. Yet with an election due before the end of the year, the Victorian Liberal opposition needs to do more to expose Labor’s dishonesty.
My Sky News colleague Alan Jones couldn’t get the Victorian Opposition Leader onto his radio program for a free kick against his opponents. Matthew Guy is working hard but it’s clear he needs a sharper office in this critical election year, particularly as the Left are taking no prisoners in their onslaught of outrage, misinformation and class war histrionics.
Take ACTU president Sally MacManus’ claim this week that casual workers were being ripped off, even though they’re paid 25 per cent more per hour than permanent ones; and that the industrial tribunal set up by the last Labor government in Canberra should be renamed the Unfair Work Commission.
Big slabs of her log of claims are likely to become Labor’s official policy as Bill Shorten relentlessly pursues his class war agenda but federally, no one much other than a junior minister went into the media as part of a Liberal counter attack.
Having lost 28 Newspolls in a row, with another test due tomorrow, has the Coalition forgotten how to fight? You’ve got to wonder if you look at the last couple of weeks. Take Labor’s decision to stop a quarter of a million pensioners with shares from receiving their company tax rebate. Instead of grabbing this issue like a drowning man thrown a rope, Malcolm Turnbull was too busy preparing for his ASEAN photo-op to do more than one press conference on this last week, and one-half day trip this week.
Unless there is a hitherto undiscerned backbone to stand up to the extreme left, a Shorten Labor government will be a fait accompli. Having worked in politics for 16 years and having written and broadcast about it for the past two, I know this to be true. The PM and his cabinet should know it too and they might eventually get around to saying it. But if they leave it much longer, it will be too late.