Andrew Bolt: Laurel and Hardy ministers star in Albanese government’s worst week
Australians would laugh at the most humiliating week suffered by this incompetent Albanese government if we didn’t know that these Labor ministers were smashing Australia’s future.
Andrew Bolt
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This is now the most humiliating week suffered by this incompetent Albanese government since 60 per cent of voters last October rejected its racist Voice.
It’s so bad that Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil, looking shell-shocked, literally fled from journalists in Parliament House asking her to explain her latest cock-up.
But let me take you through a week when the wheels really started to fall off.
On Tuesday, Energy Minister Chris Bowen asked Toyota Australia boss Matthew Callachor to back him up at a press conference called to sell the government’s new plan to stop car makers from selling so many of the popular four-wheel drives that Bowen thinks are too gassy for the planet.
Bowen claims his new emissions standards would save motorists money, but then a reporter asked Callachor the obvious question: would Bowen’s plan still let Toyota sell cars with “the same capability and range as the current model … for the same price”.
Answer: of course not. Although Callachor put it more diplomatically, given Bowen was right next to him.
“It will be difficult,” he said.
“That does leave a challenge, a significant challenge … the technology’s yet to actually be at an affordable price.”
But that was almost nothing compared to what followed. In short, the government panicked.
It’s already been caned for being caught dozing last year by the High Court, which ruled it couldn’t keep foreign criminals in detention indefinitely if it couldn’t send them home.
Result: the government freed 149 foreign criminals without initially having any system to check where they were or control their movements.
Worse, in response to Opposition questioning in a Senate estimates hearing on February 12, O’Neil’s department head, Stephanie Foster, handed over a document admitting the released detainees included seven people convicted of murder or attempted murder, 37 sex offenders and 72 violent criminals.
Fast forward to this week.
We now learn through Sky News that O’Neil was so mortified that Foster told the truth too soon that she raged at her department head, leaving Foster reportedly in tears, or “visibly upset”. There was even no-talkies, reportedly, for days. So much for the new “transparency”.
That we now know such details suggests the internal leaking against the government has started.
But even that wasn’t the worst.
The government is now rightly terrified that the High Court could next month rule it must also free any foreign detainees who could be sent home but refuse to go.
This applies most to Iranians, since Iran won’t take back any citizens against their will.
O’Neil and Andrew Giles – the government’s Laurel and Hardy – came up with a supposed fix.
They proposed a brutal new law making it a crime for a foreign detainee to refuse to co-operate with being sent home, with a maximum penalty of five years’ jail.
They would also ban visas for people from countries like Iran that refused to take back their citizens.
But to avoid giving any ammunition or warning to the Opposition it decided – idiotically – to wait from last Friday to Tuesday morning to reveal its legislation.
It clearly hoped to stampede the opposition into passing the laws – quick! quick! quick! – by Wednesday, the last day of sittings ahead of a six-week break, and ahead of the High Court decision.
As a gotcha it was a disaster. Total own goal.
The opposition – yes, perhaps playing politics – could credibly claim it needed more time and a proper Senate inquiry to check the bill for “unintended consequences”, and refused to pass it before the parliament rose for the pre-Budget break.
Even the Greens agreed to this, while caning the government for being mean to the detainees.
The whole thing was such an egg-on-face farce that O’Neil on Wednesday scurried wordlessly down a corridor in parliament and then ducked down a staircase like a foreign criminal herself as reporters chased her, asking questions about the disaster.
She radiated a guilty cluelessness.
As for Giles, he simply refused to come out and explain his legislation, until he and O’Neill were finally embarrassed into calling a press conference on Wednesday afternoon.
You’d laugh, if you didn’t know these ministers – along with Workplace Relations Minister Tony Burke – are smashing Australia’s future.
Bowen is destroying our coal-fired electricity system without having anything adequate to replace it.
Burke is crippling employers with new pro-union laws.
And Giles and O’Neill are crushing our cities and creating a housing crisis by importing an astonishing 550,000 immigrants, net, in a single year.
Our future in their hands.
Watch and weep.
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