Peter Dutton must show brave leadership to win power

The challenge for Peter Dutton in his budget reply will be to show a credible plan to overcome the economic stagnation, social division and military weakness that’s created what his own shadow treasurer has called a lost decade.

You know Australia is governed by intellectual pygmies when we have a Treasurer who thinks a tax cut worth 70c a day is worth suspending the parliament for in an attempt to wedge the opposition as he presides over $1 trillion of debt and a budget written in the red ink of forever deficits.

Alongside his jelly-backed boss Anthony Albanese and colleagues such as the energy-wrecker Chris Bowen, this really is the worst government we have ever had. In history.

This week’s budget should be the Albanese government’s epitaph: the final headstone document to bury a government that has broken promises, squandered billions in a vote-buying spree, torched our social cohesion over the voice referendum and its lack of action over anti-Semitism, opened the migration floodgates and destroyed our energy security – not to mention presiding over an 8 per cent-plus drop in our living standards that the OECD confirms is the worst in the developed world.

Yet Labor’s only answer is to toss a few coins of spare change at the problem. We were never meant to see these numbers. It was a budget that happened only because the Prime Minister was spooked by the optics of calling an election the same weekend that Cyclone Alfred hit the east coast, hence Tuesday’s effort.

Federal Treasurer Jim Chalmers delivers his post budget address at the National Press Club.

It was a political budget, not an economic one, designed to try to win an election, not to strengthen the country; and the question now is: are we going to have an election fought over rival handouts and scare campaigns or one fought over competing visions for a better Australia?

The almost criminal neglect in Labor’s fourth budget was that the litany of giveaways included almost nothing that will strengthen the economy long term – an economy that has been substantially weakened over the past three years by government policy.

And the challenge for Peter Dutton in his budget reply, effectively his opening salvo in the election campaign, will be to show a credible plan to overcome the economic stagnation, social division and military weakness that’s created what his own shadow treasurer has called a lost decade, and now imperils our very future in a world of ever-accelerating dangers.

Of course, this was always going to be an election dominated by cost of living after two successive years of declining GDP per person, the longest and worst household recession on record.

The question for our political leaders, though, is whether to address this with short-term taxpayer-funded sugar hits, as Labor is trying to do, or by tackling the structural problems in our economy that are destroying well-paid jobs, killing private sector investment and sabotaging our best sources of natural wealth.

Chris Bowen

At the heart of our national folly has been running an energy system to reduce emissions rather than to produce affordable and reliable power.

Cheap energy from abundant fossil fuels was the only comparative advantage Australia has ever had as a manufacturing economy.

The effective collapse of our only manufacturer of structural steel at Whyalla is the inevitable consequence of the inexorable climb in power prices and our progressive deindustrialisation as successive governments since Kevin Rudd bought the con that climate change was the greatest moral challenge of our time. Try telling that to the Ukrainians, the Israelis or the Taiwanese.

But since the departure of Tony Abbott, every prime minister has nodded to the Greta Thunberg view of the world; and now we’re left with the madness of a government still claiming this week that we can become “an indispensable part of the net-zero economy” on the back of endless subsidies and the green hydrogen fantasy that even Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest has abandoned.

Meanwhile, the resource exports that we depend on for our standard of living are increasingly jeopardised by systematic green lawfare that’s funded in part by state and federal governments.

The extension of the massive North West Shelf gas province has now been in an approvals process for six years. The Narrabri gas project that could largely remedy gas shortages in NSW is still in approval limbo after more than a decade.

As the saga of the McPhillamys goldmine near Blayney in NSW has demonstrated, even after all environmental approvals have been granted, projects can still be sabotaged by green activists inventing Indigenous myths for ministers who think cultural superstition should trump real jobs for local Aboriginal ­people.

The Albanese government has already banned live-sheep exports, wants to ban all logging in native forests, is plainly split on whether to allow fish farming in Tasmania and, if it’s re-elected, especially if in coalition with the Greens, will inevitably move to cull the national herd that’s responsible for 90 per cent of agricultural emissions, roll out Victoria’s nonsensical ban on household gas connections across the country, and force the costly replacement of petrol and diesel vehicles with electric ones.

That’s even though Australia produces scarcely 1 per cent of global emissions and none of the four biggest emitters – China, the US, India and Russia – are committed to net zero by 2050, or indeed to any reduction in emissions that weakens their economic and military strength.

Perhaps the most deluded aspect of the budget speech was the government’s cult-like devotion to a green transition that, Europe apart, the rest of the world has rejected or else uses as a weapon to weaken the West.

Then there’s immigration, which averaged just over 100,000 a year in the Howard era, escalated to more than 200,000 a year in the decade to the pandemic, and has averaged 400,000 a year since then. It largely has been driven by universities and English language schools, selling residency rather than education, and by employers importing labour rather than training locals and, if necessary, paying them more.

It is a Ponzi scheme loved by gutless treasurers and lazy officials unwilling to take the tough decisions needed for genuine economic reform, so instead they import often low-skill workers to pump-prime the bottom line.

But it’s immigration at this scale that’s a big part of the cost-of-living squeeze, putting downward pressure on wages, upward pressure on housing costs and unsustainable pressure on infra­structure.

Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest.

There also has been a recent migrant element in the post-October 7 eruption of Jew-hatred, suggesting that at least some migrants don’t take the Australian citizenship pledge very seriously and are importing old prejudices into their new country.

A very big cut in migration, at least until housing and infrastructure can catch up, plus a readiness to discriminate on the basis of values, might have some short-term budgetary implications but would boost long-term productivity and help social cohesion.

The Opposition Leader’s challenge is to rise above short-term vote-buying and address the long-term national interest. Especially after the pounding he has had from the government’s dirt unit for the past few weeks, Dutton is clearly the underdog.

And add in the fact that he’s effectively having to fight not just Labor but also the broader activist left of the Greens and their well-heeled siblings, the teals.

So my advice to Dutton, given what he’s up against, is not to die wondering.

Australians are desperate for brave leadership. Australians are desperate for competent government. And, most of all, they are desperate to hear honestly and simply a credible plan for how we are going to tackle the challenges ahead of us.