Peta Credlin: Anthony Albanese is leading a government that doesn’t know what it believes
Anthony Albanese political judgment needs to be called into question as he makes one bad decision after another, writes Peta Credlin.
Peta Credlin
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There’s a growing sense that we might already have lived through the best of times and that the near future might not be nearly as bright as the recent past.
At the beginning of 2020, sure, there were trouble spots around the world, yet on a macro scale, the world had never been freer, fairer, more prosperous, and safer.
It’s not that way now.
First, we had the pandemic where much of the world’s population was locked up, supposedly for its own safety, for the best part of two years.
It’s pretty clear now that panic-driven policy to deal with Covid did far more damage than the disease itself, with unprecedented levels of peacetime debt and “Big Brother” government, and the global economic disruption that’s helping to drive the new inflation, plus quite a spike in excess deaths through other diseases that were left untreated while the world obsessed over just one.
One of Covid’s weird paradoxes was the different treatment of Black Lives Matter protesters, who were allowed to break the social-distancing rules with impunity, while – even here in Australia – freedom protesters were arrested en masse after being baton charged, teargassed and shot at with rubber bullets.
It was a clear sign of a democratic political order that was losing its moral grip. Then we had Russia’s completely unprovoked invasion of Ukraine: a reminder that tyrants rolling over borders in Europe is not consigned to history. And now, the 9/11-style raid on Israel by Hamas terrorists has been a wake-up call that apocalyptic Islamist death cults haven’t gone away either, while Iran’s sabre-rattling threatens something approaching a new Holocaust.
And there’s still China, the new communist superpower, economically stronger than the old Soviet Union ever was, bullying all its neighbours, waging intermittent trade wars against us, and wondering whether to take advantage of the global disruption to launch a blitzkrieg across the straits at Taiwan, a practically independent liberal democracy that has never been under the control of communist China in its history. But that hasn’t stopped President Xi Jinping making it a priority of his rule. And at 70 years of age, Xi knows he hasn’t got forever to make it happen.
Initially, the main democracies rallied to Ukraine’s support, and for a time David seemed to be beating Goliath. But now the Ukrainians are hurling themselves against the defences that the Russians had time to build while NATO procrastinated over giving Ukraine the weapons needed to win rather than just to avoid defeat.
And as history has taught, time and time again, one country’s difficulty is another country’s opportunity, especially if the exploiter of chaos is willing to do whatever it takes to win and has no internal dissent. Such is the case with Hamas in Gaza, Iran, China, Russia, and not to forget North Korea, who now make up this new Axis of Evil.
This week, the Prime Minister was in Washington to pledge commitment to the US alliance that has kept Australia safe and the world on a mostly even keel the past 70 years. But thanks to the mayhem in Congress, the new laws needed for us to get nuclear-powered subs, even years away, remain extremely uncertain despite all the flag-waving for the TV cameras while Anthony Albanese was in town.
And straight after gushing in Washington about the importance of a commitment to peace, freedom and justice, he will soon head to Beijing, doubtless there to gush about our friendship with a regime that is a threat to everything he has just praised in the US.
The best you could say is that his messaging will sound confused; his critics would call it hypocritical.
But it creates the worrying impression of a government that doesn’t quite know what it believes and whose side it’s on. Especially when this now inveterate prime ministerial traveller couldn’t manage a stopover in Israel, where the leaders of the US, Britain, France and Germany have already been, or even – as far as we know – a phone call to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as his country quite literally fights for its right to exist.
Meanwhile, in our parliament, the Greens seem less concerned about Hamas’s unprovoked terrorist savagery than about an Israeli response complicated by the terrorists’ use of hostages and human shields; a senior government minister justifies local councils flying the Palestinian flag in solidarity with those who want Israel wiped off the map; and there’s still no official action against the protesters shouting “gas the Jews” and other profanities from a vast anti-racism apparatus that would have instantly prosecuted any race hate that wasn’t anti-Semitism.
It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the PM is still shell-shocked from the overwhelmingly defeat of the Voice two weeks ago.
Yet the mere fact that he pursued constitutional change on such a sensitive topic, without any real attempt at bipartisanship, when he must have known that it was likely to fail, was a huge error of judgment.
To be fair, other than this appallingly mistimed trip to Beijing that can’t help but give comfort to our biggest strategic adversary, the PM’s touch on foreign issues has been pretty steady. But on everything else at home, he’s starting to look out of his depth or just wrongheaded.
The most obvious example is the government’s failure to rule out the Treaty and Truth elements of the Uluru trifecta, now that the Voice has been resoundingly defeated.
Mind you, it would be typical of the green-left that it would try to do by executive and legislative action what the voters had clearly rejected.
I suspect it will be a long time before a leftist government ever again puts anything specific to the people, given the risk having their ideological fixations rejected by the collective common sense of voters.
But this government’s greatest error is less its relentless prosecution of the left’s cultural agenda than its wilful economic vandalism.
Getting to net zero won’t just be ruinously expensive – a tri-university study led by former chief scientist Robin Batterham recently put the local cost at $1.5 trillion by 2030 and up to $9 trillion by 2060.
And for what? We will make ourselves poorer and yet it will make no difference to global emissions, given we are less than 1.5 per cent of the problem. All the while, China will keep emitting on a grand scale because of its insistence on putting its own economic and military strength ahead of emissions reduction. Along the way, of course, we’ll deliberately forfeit the coal, gas, and agricultural exports that have been the foundation of our national wealth based on nebulous assurances about green jobs and strategic minerals.
The death a week ago of Bill Hayden, 90, a pragmatic Labor leader of strength and humility who devised a universal medical insurance scheme with reasonable cost discipline, is a reminder of how much our collective national leadership has declined in a generation.
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