Peta Credlin: March election likely as wheels falling of hapless Albanese government
While the Prime Minister was at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Conference in Samoa, back at home, the wheels were continuing to fall off his hapless government, writes Peta Credlin.
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While the Prime Minister was busily banging the drum for his climate and energy policies at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Conference (CHOGM) in Samoa, back at home, the wheels were continuing to fall off his hapless government.
While lapping up the overseas hospitality, he also tried to claim UK PM Keir Starmer as an ally on renewables – even though Britain is embarking on a once-in-generation expansion of nuclear power, something Labor ignores when it happens overseas but demonises if there’s any talk of it here.
The basic problem for Anthony Albanese, and for the green-Left generally, is claims that it’s possible to have cheaper power and more jobs by moving to renewables are finally being exposed as a fantasy.
This doesn’t really bother the Greens, who think that wealth is immoral and who want everyone to live like the Amish, only without God. But it’s a real problem for a Labor Party that promised to cut power bills by $275 per household per year and that still needs the votes of middle Australia who are battling to keep their financial heads above water.
In a Senate committee last week, the head of the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) basically blew up the government’s energy policy. Asked by the Nationals’ Senator Matt Canavan whether he could guarantee that energy prices would fall in a system reliant on renewables with storage, the AEMO head simply said, “I can’t”.
As well, he conceded that the CSIRO’s energy price modelling might have to be revisited because it didn’t include the total system cost of moving to renewables-based electricity, including the massive cost of new transmission lines. Transmission lines that are proving harder and harder to build because many farmers and conservationists, quite understandably, don’t want their land, their view, or their national park disfigured by new infrastructure, including wind turbines up to 300m tall.
Not to mention the massive fire risk that these turbines have proven to be, especially when located in windy but inaccessible areas.
So while at CHOGM, the Pacific Island nations used climate change to guilt countries like ours into giving them more aid (even though many Pacific Islands are actually increasing in land area rather than sinking under supposedly steadily rising seas), in the real world, voters want their bills cut and their jobs preserved, as Labor promised but, increasingly, can’t deliver.
And it is cost of living that’s killing the Albanese government’s chances of re-election as the polling trend continues to show. Yes, it is more than 90 years since a first term government has been beaten. But what has this government actually done, in its first term, that deserves your vote?
Like Kamala Harris, the PM has been in office but he hasn’t got a record of achievement to run on unless you count sponsoring a failed referendum, pushing through onerous productivity-sapping workplace laws, letting go of national security and immigration controls, as well as delivering a recession for individuals with six successive quarters of negative growth per person.
In February next year, under this government’s legislation, it will be necessary to set Australia’s emissions reduction targets for 2035. The only way the government could avoid this is if it’s in caretaker mode at the time.
And given the reality that these 2035 targets will need to be “tough” to see off the Greens threat in Labor’s own safe seats – they will also have to include reducing emissions in transport and in agriculture, and will be read against the backdrop of failing to deliver anything like its existing renewables commitment: to install 22,000 solar panels every single day, and erect 40 large wind turbines every single month over seven years, and to get at least 10,000km of new transmission lines built to realise its current 43 per cent reduction by 2030 target.
Further, if the government waits until May for an election, it will have to deliver a budget in March, which will doubtless confirm a fiscal future drowning in red ink – deficits as far as the eye can see.
To me, this makes calling an election in February for March the most likely scenario, especially as the sooner the government moves, the more likely the Coalition will still be scrambling to finalise its policies, its candidates and to raise money to match Labor’s union largesse.
So hang on, it’s going to be a wild ride.
THORPE HAS NO MORAL RIGHT TO BE IN SENATE AFTER SQUATTING ON GREENS
Regardless of the legal position, Senator Lidia Thorpe has no moral right to be in the Senate, having entered the parliament for the Greens and ratted on them.
Indeed, there’s a growing problem of MPs sneaking into the parliament as members of one party but then continuing as independents or creating another one – think former Labor Senator Fatima Payman, former Palmer United Senator Jacqui Lambie, former Centre Alliance Senator Rex Patrick, former Nick Xenophon Team Senator Tim Storer, former One Nation Senators Fraser Anning and Brian Burston, former Liberal Senators Gerard Rennick and Cory Bernardi, former Family First Senator Lucy Gichuhi, former CLP Senator Sam McMahon, former Jacqui Lambie Network Senator Steve Martin (and that’s just the last few parliaments) – as well as Thorpe.
Thorpe’s performance last week raised serious questions over her eligibility to sit in the Senate, given her initial ‘smart alec’ claim that she had not sworn allegiance to the Crown, as the constitution requires, but to the late Queen’s “hairs and successors”.
Her subsequent claim, once her eligibility was questioned, that she’d read “heirs” as “hairs”, because she wasn’t fully on top of the “oppressors’” language, just deepened the embarrassment of having this rank political exhibitionist in the parliament.
Plainly, she wants to have it both ways: insisting that the parliament is an invalid, “colonial” instrument; while continuing to enjoy the $250k wage, the staff and the platform it gives her. The main conclusion to be drawn is that Thorpe is a shrew and utterly unworthy of the position she currently holds.
She’s also hopelessly conflicted as someone who identifies as Aboriginal (via her mother) but who has mixed heritage (via her father, who describes himself as white) meaning she’s really complaining about what one set of her ancestors supposedly did to another set of her ancestors.
Thorpe aside, there is a fundamental problem with the current ability of people to get elected under a party’s brand and then walk away mid-term but still hang on to their seat in the parliament.
None of the senators I mention above who have walked away have ever got enough votes in their own right to get elected. So, by rights, their seat should revert back to the party.
To end what amounts to moral corruption, we need a referendum and this is one I believe that would very easily pass because current Senate antics are making a mockery of a system we should be able to respect.
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