Andrew Bolt: It’s a new year but still the same inept Albo

As Anthony Albanese previewed the year to come, 2024 seems set to be a long and grinding road for the PM, with no sign he’s found his map.

Anthony Albanese held a press conference on Wednesday to announce he’s starting this new year by making … the same mistakes.

It was bizarre. Here’s how the Prime Minister – savaged last year for his love of foreign travel and junkets – started: “I am very positive as we enter the New Year and later this morning I will be attending – briefly – Davey Warner’s last Test match at the SCG”.

That “briefly” seems the only concession to the widespread feeling that Albanese should knuckle down at the office.

And what of the dreadful optics of that presser, held after a year in which Albanese was monstered for trying to divide Australians by race with his referendum on the Voice, an Aboriginal-only advisory parliament?

The Sky News coverage showed Albanese squarely in front of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags, with just half our Australian flag peeping from the right of the screen.

Can Labor go back to Project Australia – one nation for one people – and scrap its suicidal vision of a nation of warring tribes?

Can Labor go back to Project Australia – one nation for one people – and scrap its suicidal vision of a nation of warring tribes? Picture: Gaye Gerard

Not likely under Albanese, who earlier this week pitched even harder for the Muslim vote, even though it’s Jews who tell me they no longer feel safe here, given all the Jew hatred.

Again with cricket on his mind, Albanese praised Test batsman Usman Khawaja “for the courage he has shown standing up for human values”.

In fact, Khawaja, a Muslim of Pakistani descent, has campaigned less for “human values” than for a Muslim cause during Israel’s war against the Hamas terrorist group that runs Gaza and still holds dozens of Jewish women hostage, along with Jewish men.

Yes, the slogans on Khawaja’s shoes sound like “human values” – “freedom is a human right”, “all lives are equal” – but they were in the colours of the Palestinian flag. I don’t recall Khawaja likewise protesting against Hamas slaughtering 1200 Jews and raping dozens of Jewish women.

I also don’t recall Albanese praising any Jewish athlete or artist – Deborah Conway, for instance – for crusading for the Jewish victims, and at far greater personal cost.

At least Albanese did tell the press conference he wanted “cost-of-living relief” in the May Budget, after more than a year and a half of high inflation.

Great! But what that would be, he couldn’t say. It seems 2024 will be a long and grinding road for Albanese, with no sign he’s found his map.