Opinion: Labor’s Twilight Zone, where common sense goes to die

Welcome to the Twilight Zone of federal election campaigning, with a Queensland MP off to a flying start in a laughable attack over a push to get federal public servants back into the office, writes Mike O’Connor.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s team inhabits an alternate reality.

You are now entering the Twilight Zone and travelling through another dimension, a journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are those of the imagination.

The words are taken from the introduction to the Sixties television program The Twilight Zone, but in 2025 aptly describe the journey we are about to undertake, one which will carry us, battered and bewildered, to the eve of the federal election.

It’s a time when reality is suspended and voters are asked to accept promises of better times to come in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary and to vote for the government so it can do all the things it promised to do three years ago.

Employment Minister Murray Watt, arguably not the sharpest shovel in a cabinet of blunt digging implements, welcomed us to the Twilight Zone with his claim that the Opposition’s plan to get federal public servants out of their trackie daks and back into the office would cost each of them $4976 a year.

How does one arrive at such a precise figure? Because, according to Senator Watt’s tortured logic, they would be paying $20 a day for parking. “At a time when people are doing it tough, Peter Dutton wants Aussies to pay up to an additional $4976 on transport and parking costs alone every year,” he said. No figures were available for those who caught the bus or train, walked or rode a bike, and no talk of the productivity gains inherent in getting people off the couch and back to the office.

Employment Minister Murray Watt is not the sharpest implement in the cabinet.

It is also, apparently, an attack on women which must be news to all those women who happily head off to work every day without feeling that they are the unwitting victims of an anti-female conspiracy by employers.

Energy Minister Chris Bowen, long-time resident of The Zone, has blamed rising power prices – the ones the government promised would fall – on breakdowns at coal-fired generators.

The reason they are breaking down is that Bowen has made it uneconomic to run them because of the billions of dollars pumped into renewable energy schemes, the ones which can’t deliver power on demand.

The answer, obviously, is more subsidies making the running of a coal generated power station less economic and leading to further breakdowns.

We got our power bill last week, which showed us still in credit from government handouts, with federal Treasurer Jim Chalmers suggesting further handouts. Please stop. We don’t want your free money. Spend it on hospitals, schools and roads.

Those wishing to escape The Zone and the government’s make-believe world may be tempted to seek refuge in Hollywood’s fairytales, such as the newly released remake of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

Please note, however, that Snow White is no longer white, which of course would imply white colonial privileged elitism. She has, instead, become Latino.

Energy Minister Chris Bowen is a long-time resident of The Twilight Zone.

Nor does Not So Snow White dream of true love, but of becoming a leader who is fair, brave and true while the dwarfs, which are not called dwarfs, are computer generated to avoid offending real dwarfs. This upset the small people who complained that they had been deprived of being paid lots of money by being cast in the movie.

Film goers are warned not to laugh at Sleepy, because this could upset people suffering from narcolepsy. Nor should they presume that just because Dopey is called Dopey, he’s a bit on the slow side leading some to say the movie should have been called Woke White and the Seven Pronouns.

Back in what passes for reality, the Reserve Bank lifted our expectations with its announcement that it was going to redesign the $5 note, dumping the image of our late Queen and replacing her with an image to represent “what makes this country so special”.

I’ll bet you $5 that you never realised that what makes us so special is “the First Nations’ contribution to the restoration and conservation of our environment”.

The theme of the new design would be inclusive, the bank said, in so saying effectively excluding from consideration the contribution made to what makes our country so special by the other 98 per cent of the population.

The Italian region of Abruzzo has announced that it is selling houses in villages which have been depopulated for the equivalent of $1.70, and Australians are eligible. As an escape from the Twilight Zone, it’s becoming an attractive option.

Originally published as Opinion: Labor’s Twilight Zone, where common sense goes to die