Andrew Bolt: Labor’s ‘look at us’ climate Bill will not change a thing

Australians are being belted by cost of living pressures, while Labor continues to babble about a fake climate crisis and Albanese employs useless gestures to advertise his goodness.

The band kept playing as the Titanic sank. But in Canberra this week, the Anthony Albanese band just played games of “show we’ve got heart”.

Yes, this Labor government is already away with the fairies.

We have Australians now getting belted by a cost of living crisis, with inflation on Wednesday soaring to 6.1 per cent, interest rates rising fast and house prices now plummeting.

Many people are already struggling to pay their grocery bills, fill their cars or pay for their heating. Now the International Monetary Fund is warning the whole world economy “may soon be teetering on the edge of a global recession”.

Worst for us, China, our biggest trading partner, is tipped to slump to a growth rate this year of just 3.3 per cent – its lowest in 40 years.

Yet if Australians had tuned into parliament on Tuesday and Wednesday they’d have heard almost nothing from their new government on practical steps to tackle any of this.

Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen on Wednesday crowed ‘the time for action on climate change has arrived. Picture: Gary Ramage

No, what they got was Labor preening and babbling endlessly about our fake climate crisis and Labor’s fake solution.

“The time for action on climate change has arrived,” crowed Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen on Wednesday, as if this government could really make a difference to our weather.

Exactly what is this fool wanting to change? Is he trying to turn off the great rains that the Australian Bureau of Statistics announced the day before had produced the “improved growing conditions” that gave our farmers an absolute bonanza – crops and herds worth 17 per cent more?

Luckily, Labor’s “look at us’ climate change bill will fail to change even a drop of rain, but the results will be disastrous – our electricity will become even more expensive and unreliable.

That wasn’t the only example of Labor spending the first two days of parliament on moral showboating.

In the Senate on Tuesday, the Senate held no fewer than three acknowledgments of traditional owners. When the Senate started the next day with another, One Nation leader Pauline Hanson understandably shouted she’d had enough.

When the Senate started on Wednesday, Pauline Hanson understandably shouted she’d had enough. Picture: Gary Ramage

Here, too, Labor was so dazzled by its goodness – we’re so anti-racist! – that it was blind to the real evil it was actually doing.

The Governor-General, in formally outlining to the Senate the government’s top priorities, didn’t just promote its plan to divide us by race by creating an advisory parliament just for Aboriginal people, but even announced the end of the welfare card.

This card stops people on welfare in vulnerable communities from using their welfare money to buy alcohol or gamble in a casino. Most particularly, as Jacinta Price, the brilliant new Aboriginal and Celtic national senator, pointed out, the card stopped “humbugging” – an Aboriginal custom forcing people with money to share with male relatives demanding they hand it over to buy booze.

But Labor insists this card is racist. It basks in seeming pure, while out bush women pay the price by being beaten black and blue, and children go hungry.

Yet even this is just a small example of a huge blindness in this new government. Here it is still posturing on its vain moral crusades, tilting at imaginary windmills, while our economy hits a very real iceberg.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers says things will ‘get tougher’ for our economy. Picture: Gary Ramage

True, Wednesday’s inflation news forced Treasurer Jim Chalmers to call a press conference to declare these were “confronting numbers”, “it will get tougher”, and the world’s economy is “treading a precarious and perilous path”.

But what would he actually do about any of this?

Oh. Well, Chalmers said he’d try to spend wisely. But he immediately added he’d increase spending for “free” childcare.

Other than that, Chalmers said he’d shop around for ideas: “There is an appetite for real talk about our economic position”.

Goody! More talk! And this government plans to talk until well into next year – after a summit with bosses and unions in September, after a White Paper it then draws up on the best ideas, and after it then works out which ideas it will actually take on, and how. And there’ll be a budget in late October.

And there you were, believing Albanese actually had a plan for the economy that’s now turning so sour. In fact, he just had a plan for a plan to plan an economic plan.

But note the contrast. On useless gestures to advertise his goodness, Albanese knows already exactly what must happen. Huge cuts to emissions. A race-based parliament. Destruction dressed up as compassion.

Just don’t hurry him on the economy. Surely that iceberg can wait while Labor talks global warming instead.