Andrew Bolt: Anthony Albanese’s identity politics won’t impress voters
There’s nothing like symbolic gestures and identity politics to excite Anthony Albanese but can we please talk about what’s worrying people most?
Andrew Bolt
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Paul Erickson must have torn his hair out to hear Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s latest announcement, as the country plunges to a possible recession.
Albanese on Saturday opened the new Pride Square in Sydney’s inner west, and declared that come Saturday week he’d be at the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras to be “the first prime minister not to watch … but to march”.
Well, whoopee do.
More evidence that there’s nothing like symbolic gestures and identity politics to excite this prime minister.
What I suspect will upset Erickson, Labor’s national secretary, is that just four days earlier he’d told Albanese and a room full of Labor MPs to come back down to planet Earth.
Could they please talk about what’s worrying people most?
In case they hadn’t worked it out, Erickson added: “The cost of living.”
“You must look like you are responding to this first and foremost,” Erickson said.
“This is where people are at … This is where people expect you to be.”
It’s amazing Albanese and his crew needed telling. Who hasn’t freaked at what soaring inflation and interest rates, plus the explosion in gas and electricity bills, are doing to battlers?
Yet Albanese seems obsessed by identity politics and the global warming scare — and by making useless gestures for both.
Most obviously, he’s lecturing us almost every day on the Voice — a kind of Aboriginal-only advisory parliament in our constitution that will just divide us by race.
But there’s much more flag-waving.
For instance, he’s created a new Ambassador for First Nations People, ordered the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags be flown at press conferences, let public servants snub Australia Day, urged policies to stop us driving petrol cars, announced the creation of a new Poet Laureate position, got rid of the Queen’s face from the $5 note, and appointed an Assistant Minister for the Republic.
He’s also just had his Treasurer pen a 6000-word essay on inventing a “better capitalism”, and his Foreign Minister lecture Britain on confronting its colonial past.
Oh, and meanwhile he’s spent three straight evenings watching tennis at the Australian Open.
No wonder Erickson had to step in.
Much more of this and voters will draw a contrast between their priorities and the Prime Minister’s.
Maybe they’ll even ask: is the reason Albanese would rather wave from a gay pride rally is that doing something useful for us all is just too hard?
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