Credlin: Make a resolution to keep political leaders to account

Your personal new year’s resolutions need to be matched by those we make to keep our country strong and to hold our political leaders to account, writes Peta Credlin.

The new year is often time for a personal stocktake – if you’re like me, the wardrobe gets a clean-out and the pantry too. But often it’s a much deeper, more thoughtful stocktake about where we are headed and are we living the life we hoped.

And that’s also a useful habit for a country, especially one like Australia, which is still the best place in the world to live, but won’t remain that way if we keep talking ourselves down and squandering our country’s natural blessings.

But before getting into some new year’s resolutions for Australia, here’s some of the significant economic, cultural and security developments that you might have missed over the holiday period.

In Victoria (where else?), there’s now a new tax on empty houses (the holiday home tax). It’s supposed to free up housing stock, but is really just an expression of green Labor’s inexorable need for more revenue due to their debt addiction, as well as dislike of aspiration. There’s also a ban on any new home in the state getting a gas connection for the oven or for heating.

The Kwinana alumina refinery in WA is closing because of high energy prices.

There was the announced closure of Western Australia’s Kwinana alumina refinery, because of high energy prices, meaning another step towards the deindustrialisation of Australia.

On the Indigenous front, the Albanese government said it was considering legislating local and regional Aboriginal Voices, notwithstanding the resounding popular vote against Indigenous separatism.

Eighty-one councils are now refusing to hold citizenship ceremonies on Australia Day, despite people like VyVyan Huynh celebrating outside Melbourne Town Hall last year. Picture: David Caird

Ahead of our national day on January 26, 81 councils are now refusing to hold citizenship ceremonies on Australia Day, in another manifestation of the hard Left’s embarrassment about our history.

And while pro-Hamas and often anti-Semitic demonstrations are continuing in our large cities, the government ostentatiously refused to provide a frigate to protect commercial shipping in the Red Sea. This is the first time in four decades that an Australian government has refused a US request for military support, even though we need the Americans more than ever if we are to get the nuclear submarines that an effective military deterrence now requires, and despite the fact many other nations have stepped up to protect this key shipping route that feeds our supply chain.

Over the summer break, Labor hard heads clearly showed Prime Minister Anthony Albanese polling that his post-Voice brand was in trouble, evidenced by his attempt at a new year’s reset. But it fell flat because everyone was still on holidays, he had nothing much to say and then he blew it by heading back to sit in the stand at the Test cricket rather than get to work on real issues such as the biting cost of living. With the Australian Open tennis starting on Sunday, expect more of the same.

Anthony Albanese’s summer reset fell flat, with the Prime Minister talking cricket with Nathan Lyon and Pat Cummins rather than tackling the cost of living. Picture: Jonathan Ng

A country needs to be economically strong, culturally cohesive, and militarily secure if it is to flourish. And all of these need a lot of serious effort if the Australia of the future is to be as successful as the Australia of the recent past.

With power prices, grocery bills and housing costs all surging, everyone’s focus is rightly on cost of living. But instead of Band-Aid measures that merely mask the problems, like selective subsidies for household electricity bills, what’s needed is an end to the government policies that are driving up the cost of everyday life.

Such as reconsidering the legislated move to 82 per cent renewable energy in just seven years, up from scarcely 30 per cent now, which is going to require huge investment in more weather-dependent electricity, more rare-earth-hungry batteries to try to keep the lights on when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining, and new powerlines to make a decentralised grid work.

Such as ending the reluctance of governments (and activist courts) to permit the new gas and coal developments needed if we are to sustain the export income on which our prosperity depends (because other countries, whatever they might claim at climate conferences, don’t really share our emissions obsession).

Such as revisiting the union-driven assault on businesses’ right to run their own workforce that is the key to the higher productivity we need to stay a First World economy.

This Australia Day, fly our national flag high and be proud of a country that is the envy of the world.

And such as cutting record immigration, which is putting downward pressure on wages, upward pressure on housing costs and big pressure on infrastructure, because governments have subcontracted out our immigration intake to universities hungry for fee-paying foreign students and to businesses that are too lazy to train their own workers or too greedy to pay them an Australian wage.

So, our first new year resolution should be to elect governments (and councils!) that understand that their job is to serve the people and not special interests.

Then there’s the sustained assault on pride in our country that nothing in our past or present justifies. Immigrant nations such as ours succeed if people are encouraged to join Team Australia. If not, many newcomers tend to stay in their ethnic “tribes” and that spells trouble.

We can’t let the Left turn patriotism into a dirty word. Resolve among your friends and family to do something this Australia Day that pushes back on those who hate our country. Fly our national flag high and be proud of a country that is the envy of the world.

Finally, given the world is becoming a much more dangerous place, with Russia’s dictator thinking the US has lost interest in helping Ukraine, Iran’s proxies threatening to enter the war against Israel, and China’s increasing belligerence against Taiwan, we need a collective resolution that freedom is worth defending and our country can’t shirk its duty to help fellow democracies.

All those personal new year’s resolutions need to be matched by those we make to keep our country strong and to hold our political leaders to account.

PREDICTIONS OF STORMY WEATHER AHEAD FOR POLITICALLY-CORRECT BOM

The problem with so many so-called “expert” individuals and institutions is that any real expertise they have is often tainted by politics. Take the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM). Once, people trusted that the BOM was doing its best, partly because it admitted that weather forecasting was inherently uncertain given all the variables.

But these days, the BOM that can’t get its forecasts right for next week, or this current summer, is also the same BOM that shrieks alarmism about climate change decades and decades down the track.

Last September, the BOM confidently predicted that “the long-range forecast indicates warmer and drier than average conditions are likely across most of southern and eastern Australia from October to December”.

With near record floods in Victoria and southern Queensland, and good rains nearly everywhere else, so much for the bureau’s “expertise”. The problem is that many farmers, fearing a lack of feed, sold their stock for rock-bottom prices on the strength of this advice.

Others were on their harvesters around-the-clock to beat the coming rain that they had been told not to expect.

The BOM knows its work will only get favourable notice if it panders to political correctness. Hence its references to the impact of climate change, and constant playing up of “extreme weather events”, as if Australia has never before known floods, droughts, storms and fires. Naturally, the ABC was there to beat up the BOM’s forecasts claiming that “El Nino reaches strong intensity pointing to a scorching 2024 ahead for the planet”.

We all have an interest in the weather but the constant predictions of climate doom and the endless dwelling on imminent storms is starting to resemble weather porn. When the experts are so frequently contradicted by observed facts, you’ve got to fear that “the” science has been contaminated by green prejudice.

Watch Peta on Credlin on Sky News, weeknights at 6pm

Originally published as Credlin: Make a resolution to keep political leaders to account