Anthony Albanese wants you to listen to his fairytales, not his failures

With so few achievements to boast about, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s campaign has become all about spin, dreams, trickery and insults.

I am stunned there’s even a debate about this election. If this was a fairytale you wouldn’t believe it.

“Once upon a time, there was a prime minister.

“And one day he said to his people, ‘For three years I have made you poorer.

“I have taken more of your money and I have spent it all.

If this was a fairytale you wouldn’t believe it. Picture: iStock

“We grow weaker while our enemies grow stronger, and send ships to scare us.

“I have not protected you, but instead tried to divide you into tribes, and treated some better than others.

“I have also brought in a million strangers to live in houses you need for yourselves.

“Now choose me to keep doing what I do for three more years.

“And the people said, ‘yes’, for their leader promised if they would wait 15 months he would borrow more money and give them 70c a day.”

Crazy, right? That’s a fairytale with no happily-ever-after.

But in real-life Australia, astonishingly, the polls suggest Anthony Albanese will be re-elected in five weeks – just – but this time with the Greens as his partners to continue dismantling Australia.

Yes, here we are, in a campaign where spin, dreams, trickery and insults somehow count for more than your lived reality – that life has become harder under Labor.

Take Albanese’s tales in announcing the election. He waved his Medicare card and teared up as he told how it had meant his dear mum got the same health care as a millionaire.

Yet in real-life Australia, there’s been a drop under Albanese in bulk-billing rates, and he even halved the number of free psychology sessions for the poor.

We are, in a campaign where spin, dreams, trickery and insults somehow count for more than your lived reality. Picture: Jason Edwards

One psychologist, close to me, tells me of her heartache when some client, a battler – perhaps an autistic loner still suicidal with depression, or a mum who still can’t deal with the fact she was raped as a child by her father – runs out of free sessions and is cut loose to fend for themselves.

Thank God that the Liberals promise to reverse Albanese’s cut.

Or take Albanese’s big promise on Sunday to stop shoppers being “ripped off” by supermarkets, when in fact the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission said just a week ago it had no evidence of price gouging.

In the real world, it’s Albanese, not supermarkets, making you pay too much for groceries, by keeping inflation higher for longer with his mad spending.

But, oh, the stories we’re now told of a brighter future under Albanese – a “Future Made in Australia”, where Albanese spends even more of your money on green energy schemes and on training “Australians in the skills our country needs to reach Net Zero and build our future here in Australia”.

Yet his “investments” in green hydrogen have collapsed, and until last week his government was still advertising in Spanish, Korean, Arabic and Greek for workers to come build this supposed “Future Made in Australia”.

It sounds so odd, a government ad literally promising our future is “el futuro hecho en Australia”.

Albanese on Sunday was still even repeating the lie that “renewables are the cheapest form of new energy” – as if we all lived a fairytale land where the sun always shines and the breezes always blow.

With so few achievements to boast about, it’s no wonder Albanese is instead mounting the mother of all scare campaigns against Opposition Leader Peter Dutton, as if he were some fairytale villain.

He attacked Dutton by name 18 times in his press conference after calling the election, warning of Dutton, Dutton, Dutton, Dutton, Dutton, Dutton, Dutton, Dutton, Dutton, Dutton, Dutton, Dutton, Dutton, Dutton, Dutton, Dutton, Dutton, Dutton.

His union mates at the ACTU back him with a similarly Dutton-obsessed campaign of vilification: “Don’t risk Dutton.”

Opposition leader Peter Dutton has been vilified by the ACTU. Picture: Thomas Lisson

But how could Dutton be worse?

The government’s budget last week said it all. Albanese had a windfall of $350bn from unexpectedly high prices of our exports and a flood of immigrants yet has now blown the lot, with 10 years of deficits to come.

But Albanese wants you to ignore all that. Listen to his fairytales, not Dutton’s list of his failures.

“I want to be optimistic,” he said on Sunday. “Peter Dutton will always appeal to the darker side.”

Oh, that evil Dutton-Dutton-Dutton. How dare he point out you’ve got poorer under Albanese?

Imagine instead a candy floss world, where Albanese is a great prime minister, and money flows like honey!

Close your eyes and imagine. Don’t open them and see what’s real.