Andrew Bolt: Anthony Albanese’s government lacks love for Australia

The shame around Australian culture is spreading and it helps to explain signs of decay in the Albanese government.

There is a reason Labor governments often make our borders weaker, and a clue is that Anthony Albanese was so clueless on Friday.

He fronted a press conference on the NSW Central Coast and the first question he was asked was about 30 more illegal immigrants landing, undetected, on a West Australian beach: “Do you know anything about that?”

His response: “I’ve been travelling in the car, so I haven’t been advised about that.”

Pardon? Sitting in the back of a commonwealth limousine humming along the highway seems a perfect chance for a Prime Minister to catch up on the news, 50 years since the mobile telephone was invented.

The honest answer Albanese should have given is this: “No one cared enough about this to tell me.”

Not Immigration Minister Andrew Giles, not Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil, not one of Albanese’s staff.

You might think this was just a slip caused by incompetence, but it’s part of a pattern that suggests the problem is not with Labor’s brain, but its heart.

There is a reason Labor governments often make our borders weaker, and a clue is that Anthony Albanese was so clueless on Friday. Picture: Martin Ollman

People don’t protect what they don’t love, and I suspect we’re seeing the consequences of a Labor government that just doesn’t love its country enough.

Oops, how rude of me. Of course we love this country, they’ll protest.

Didn’t Albanese say in his Australia Day speech three weeks ago this was “the greatest country on earth”?

True, but nowhere in that speech did he say he loved it, or why the new citizens he was talking to should as well, unless you count the dead phrase where he called Australia “a modern, prosperous, peaceful and multicultural democracy”.

He praised the Aboriginal culture, and praised the “diversity” migrants brought, but not once did Albanese praise the Australian culture that should bind the 30 per cent of Australians now born overseas.

Instead, he’s once said, we should teach children “Indigenous people suffered a lot”, and “massacres occurred”. Which makes me wonder: when did a federal Labor minister last give a passionate speech about their love for this country and list its virtues, without immediately adding it’s also racist or genocidal or with a nasty past, and, goodness, aren’t we lucky migrants redeem us with their “diversity”?

Did you hear one such speech on Australia Day?

Instead, this government let a record 81 councils scrap Australia Day citizenship ceremonies, being so ashamed of this “divisive” day.

This shame of Australian culture is spreading, and helps to explain signs of decay in the Albanese government.

Didn’t Albanese say in his Australia Day speech three weeks ago this was ‘the greatest country on earth’? Picture: Martin Ollman

It’s not just that people smugglers are again treating this government as a soft touch, as they did the previous Rudd and Gillard Labor governments. Check what might make them think that.

Just four days after he won the 2022 election, Albanese let a family of illegal immigrants from Sri Lanka stay in Biloela, even though our courts agreed they weren’t real refugees. He then let 19,000 other illegal immigrants on temporary protection visas become permanent residents.

There are other signs that this government treats our immigration system as something for the benefit of foreigners, rather than the benefit of Australians. Or acts as if our culture can only be improved by importing millions of people from different ones, even hostile ones.

Last financial year, for instance, the government let in an astonishing 520,000 immigrants, net, even though we’re short of homes even for Australians.

Albanese last November even let 860 Palestinians from the terrorist-run Gaza and West Bank come here, without time for proper security checks. He also ramped up our refugee intake to 20,000 a year, mostly from Africa, the Middle East and Asia, and promised to let 280 “climate refugees” from Tuvalu move here every year, even though Tuvalu is growing, not drowning.

Then there’s his other immigration disaster – freeing 149 foreign criminals from immigration detention, including seven people jailed for murder or attempted murder and 37 sex offenders.

Yes, the High Court had ruled that foreigners who wouldn’t or couldn’t go home must not be kept in indefinite detention, but how could Albanese’s government have let them out before taking basic measures to protect Australians?

Here’s another sign of rot: this government can’t now find enough Australians to fight and even die for their country, leaving our already small Australian Defence Force 7 per cent undermanned. No surprise, when Australia is routinely painted as racist, colonialist, child-stealing and a planet-choking menace.

No, incompetence isn’t the only reason another Labor government is making a mess of our borders. People just don’t protect what they don’t love.