Peta Credlin: Palestinian Authority endorsement is ‘good news’ for desperate government

Australians want a change of direction, they want to be able to work hard and get ahead, but most of all, they want hope that our nation’s best days are not behind us, writes Peta Credlin.

At the moment, it’s hard to find anyone who thinks our country is headed in the right direction. The latest poll says that 59 per of Australians reckon they’re worse off than three years ago and that’s a terrible omen for a federal government that must go to the polls by May.

A government desperate for some good news, like an interest-rate cut, instead, on Friday, had an endorsement from the Palestinian Authority that said Australia was on a “positive trajectory” after it voted in the UN for an unconditional ceasefire that would leave the terrorist group Hamas in charge of Gaza and do nothing to free the hostages.

So, for the price of Islamist votes in Labor seats, our government has sold out our foreign policy principles.

Almost certainly this is the worst government in living memory.

There have been seven successive quarters of negative growth per person, a household recession. The power prices that the government promised to cut by $275 per household per year are, instead, up by an average of over $600. Real wages have fallen, and mortgage costs have soared, meaning that the average household has endured a 9 per cent cut in its living standards.

Anthony Albanese has been applauded by Hamas, leaving Jewish Australians even more concerned. Picture: David Caird

A Prime Minister who promised to emulate Bob Hawke, “bringing the nation together”, instead squandered the massive goodwill that exists towards Aboriginal people by pushing his constitutionally entrenched Voice, that rightly crashed to defeat because it would have permanently divided us on the basis of race.

Meanwhile, our social cohesion has never been more under-threat with anti-Jewish racism at record levels following the firebombing of a Melbourne synagogue and cars torched in Sydney.

None of this is helped by unsustainably record-high immigration, notwithstanding feeble government efforts to rein it in, that’s putting downward pressure on wages, upward pressure on housing and massive pressure on infrastructure.

Not every failure is the government’s fault. Anthony Albanese, for instance, can’t be blamed for the various dictatorships now threatening the world’s peace. Successive governments, not just his, have neglected economic reform, taken social cohesion for granted, and pandered to the climate cult.

Yet his government is making all of these problems worse, essentially because too many of its senior members want to be even-handed between the US and China; think more law, more bureaucracy and more spending is the answer to every social and economic issue; and believe, deep down, that Australia was founded on an act of fundamental injustice for which we must forever atone.

Under the current government, energy policy will be an ongoing trainwreck with prices heading ever further north and power rationing and blackouts inevitable. Pushed by the Greens, Labor genuinely believes there is a climate emergency and that the only way to avoid global mayhem is for Australia to rapidly decarbonise.

The result of the moral fervour behind Australia rapidly decarbonising is we lose cheap electricity and will have no more coal and gas to ship, meaning the loss of two of our three biggest exports. Picture: Ian Waldie/Bloomberg

The result of such moral fervour is that we’ve lost our greatest comparative economic advantage, cheap electricity, and have made ourselves ever more dependent on the real renewable energy superpower, China, which uses our coal and gas to produce the wind turbines and solar panels increasingly disfiguring our landscape. Soon, thanks to the government’s emissions obsession, we will have no more coal and gas to ship, meaning the loss of two of our three biggest exports.

It’s becoming increasingly obvious that – hysterical attacks on Peter Dutton aside – the government’s political plan is to bribe its way back to office, despite the dire budgetary outlook, borrowing billions and billions from overseas.

Of course, the government will point to strong employment as a sign of its economic genius. Yet almost 80 per cent of all the new jobs are in the public sector or jobs, like childcare, that only survive due to ever-increasing government subsidies.

The trouble with this magic-pudding economics is that it forces the Reserve Bank to keep interest rates higher for longer, not only penalising the productive economy but also every household trying to get ahead via home ownership. But that’s Labor’s plan: To make ever more of us more dependent on the state.

To win government in his own right, Peter Dutton needs to win 18 seats, as many as Tony Abbott won at the 2013 election. With the parties currently neck-and-neck in the polls, and with the last first term government to lose way back in 1931, this is a tall order. Yet increasingly, it’s looking possible.

Australians want a change of direction, they want to be able to work hard and get ahead, but most of all, they want hope that our nation’s best days are not behind us.

VALE

Kevin Andrews, who changed the course of Australia’s history when he took on Malcolm Turnbull, who tried to force colleagues to support Kevin Rudd’s carbon tax madness in 2009. A lifelong servant of the Liberal Party, a man of faith, and family.

VICTORIAN LIB LEADER MUST MAN UP AND ADMIT HE WRONGED WOMAN

What sort of a person tells deliberate mistruths about a colleague in order to save his own skin, causes his innocent target massive reputational and professional damage, and then refuses to apologise and make amends even when he’s found out?

The current leader of the Victorian Liberal Party, that’s who.

Forget whether or not John Pesutto is the best person to lead the Opposition. Right now, he’s in the morally shameful position of having wronged an innocent woman and not being man enough to apologise and make amends.

As Justice O’Callaghan of the Federal Court found in his judgment on Thursday, Pesutto’s evidence was “untrue”, when pressed on his evidence that Deeming had a “bad reputation”, “he was unable to provide a skerrick of evidence to support it” indeed, “it flies in the face of objective facts … that it was Mr Pesutto himself who proposed that Mrs Deeming be elected to the position of Party Whip.”

Moira Deeming. Picture: David Crosling

John Pesutto. Picture: David Crosling

As his judgment stated, “this is a shameful state of affairs” and that, in O’Callaghan view, Pesutto only expelled her because he was frightened that Daniel Andrews could weaponise the issue to damage his fledgling leadership.

If Pesutto were man enough to finally accept the judge’s finding that Deeming is entirely innocent of the foul neo-Nazi smear, and to have her back into the party room from which she should never have been expelled, he might be able to argue he should remain as leader.

But at a delusional press conference last Thursday, he refused to accept that losing the defamation case reflected any discredit on him, and when asked whether he’d apologise to his victim, cowardly said “that was a matter for his lawyers”.

That sort of response is not worthy of a leader. If nothing changes, Victorian Liberal Party members, volunteers and donors will go on strike and that could lose Peter Dutton the federal election, let alone leave Labor in permanent government in Victoria. If Pesutto won’t apologise, those that the run the Liberal Party in Victoria must demonstrate that they, at least, acknowledge the court’s findings, by apologising to Deeming on behalf of the party, and assuring her of continued support.

At least frontbencher Sam Groth displayed integrity by resigning from Pesutto’s front bench on Friday after his leader’s refusal to apologise or resign.

THUMBS UP

Pride in Australia: Geelong City Council voting to reinstate Australia Day and Peter Dutton saying he will honour our national flag. Is the era of woke finally coming to an end?

THUMBS DOWN

Medical Inaction: UK’s Labour government has permanently banned puberty blockers to gender-confused minors because of their harmful and irreversible side effects. NZ has them under review too, so why no action in Australia?

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

Originally published as Peta Credlin: Palestinian Authority endorsement is ‘good news’ for desperate government