The seven fatal flaws at the heart of Labor’s failure to launch
One of Anthony Albanese’s worst mistakes came right at the start, during his victory speech at Sydney’s Canterbury-Hurlstone Park RSL two years ago. His government is drifting – and the situation promises to get worse.
It is two years this month since the Albanese Labor government was elected and we can no longer avoid the conclusion that it has failed.
There is no sign it can deliver on whatever promise it once held and the depressing reality is if it survives into a second term it is likely to be in minority, reliant on the Greens, so that a failed government can get only worse.
There are seven fatal flaws at the heart of the government’s deficiency. Not all are front of mind for voters but all are vital for the national project.
Economy/cost-of-living crisis
Anthony Albanese ran a small-target campaign in 2022 but he did not under-promise. “The cost of everything is going up,” Labor’s election posters trumpeted. “A Labor government will lower the cost of living.” Not only would prices be lower but so would interest rates.
On this score Labor’s performance has been abysmal; high inflation, a dozen interest rate increases, a rent squeeze and housing crisis, and economists predicting there could still be more tightening before the Reserve Bank of Australia starts to ease rates.
Labor’s fiscal policy is at odds with the RBA’s contraction; government spending is at historically high levels, well above the ideal cap of 25 per cent of GDP. Instead of liberating the economy and boosting productivity, Labor has re-regulated the labour market in deference to its union overlords. And instead of reining in spending it has lost control of the National Disability Insurance Scheme and tackles every “problem” with funding announcements.
Energy and industry self-harm
The national self-harm that is Labor’s energy policy will do even more damage to the nation’s economic security than it will to the government’s electoral prospects. The Prime Minister and his Treasurer, Jim Chalmers, promised to reduce household electricity bills by $275 a year but instead bills have increased by double that amount.
Wealthy people in teal seats will hardly have noticed but Labor battlers and mainstream families in marginal seats are getting crunched by power costs, petrol prices, mortgage increases and grocery bills. This plays hard into the cost-of-living crisis and is made only worse for struggling families when they see the virtue-signalling antics of Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen spruiking expensive and impractical electric vehicles.
Labor is also having to defend expensive and invasive large-scale renewable energy projects against local objections and environmental concerns, making enemies across the continent. The footprint of renewable energy is vast and the cost extraordinary – 10,000km of transmission, thousands of hectares of solar factories and wind farms, and hundreds of billions of dollars.
Even the green-left Grattan Institute has admitted the renewables transition is headed for disaster with increasing power shortages, blackouts and price hikes. Having turned an energy-rich nation into one with an energy price and supply crisis, Labor has no plan except to double down on its expensive and ineffectual renewables zealotry. The only beneficiary is China, which uses our coal and ore to manufacture the renewables kit we import. We weaken our economy and become more reliant on China’s manufacturing – genius.
With its Future Made in Australia industry assistance program, Labor is chasing its losses like a drunken gambler. This is an old-fashioned effort to use public money to pick winners, throwing billions of taxpayers’ dollars at the government’s pet green and net-zero projects. What could go wrong?
Weak on border security and immigration
For the first time in a decade, asylum-seekers have made it to the mainland; only three boatloads for now, and we are told not to worry.
The government abolished temporary protection visas, allowed the Biloela family to stay, and freed 150 criminal non-citizens after it botched a High Court case.
Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil and Immigration Minister Andrew Giles are like rabbits in the spotlight as some of the non-citizens are charged with new crimes and the government fails to oppose their bail or re-detain any of them. It appears that nobody is in charge.
This recklessly indifferent attitude to border security is happening while the country accepts a record number of migrants in a population boom that was neither promised nor foreshadowed.
Without a hint of debate or consideration, we are allowing in more migrants than ever – more than the population of Tasmania in the past year. With the housing crisis worsening and infrastructure under pressure right along the eastern seaboard, immigration and population policy could be a major election issue. It seems Labor must have realised the mess it has allowed to unfold because it has promised to halve the immigration rate – yet so far the monthly figures still rise.
Spineless foreign and defence policy
This is a policy area where I feared the worst from Labor and initially was encouraged. Albanese, Foreign Minister Penny Wong and Defence Minister Richard Marles, held the line on AUKUS and stood firm on China. This could not have been easy for leaders of the Socialist Left such as Albanese and Wong, but it was imperative for the nation. It is far from a disaster just yet – the Albanese government is enthusiastic on AUKUS, even though its purse-strings seem tightened for years to come.
It has not yet capitulated to China but the signs are worrying, Albanese seemed to deliberately keep secret a Chinese sonar attack on our sailors so as not to embarrass Xi Jinping in the lead-up to their meeting last year.
Apparently Beijing appreciated the deference because it has started to flatter Albanese (“handsome boy” anybody?) and ease its punitive economic measures against Australia. Viewed over the 24 months, this bout smacks of rope-a-dope, and we need to watch it carefully.
By appointing Kevin Rudd ambassador to Washington, Albanese has left Australia’s stocks dangerously exposed should the Republicans regain the White House. Wong has been weak on Israel, which is in keeping with Australia’s retreat under Labor to the lowest common denominator of UN multilateral posturing. This is sad and dangerous for a significant country such as ours, once prepared to run robust, independent diplomacy.
Reconciliation and Indigenous disadvantage go backwards
One of Albanese’s worst mistakes came right at the start, during his victory speech at the Canterbury-Hurlstone Park RSL two years ago. His buoyant commitment to the Indigenous voice and Uluru Statement from the Heart was a classic case of a leader getting carried away in the moment and racing ahead of the people who elected him. By cloaking the voice in such partisan triumphalism he as good as derailed hopes of a bipartisan compromise.
Labor failed to explain the voice, failed to bring the public with it, failed to persuade the Coalition to support the amendment or find a compromise to guarantee bipartisan support. Instead, Albanese took stewardship of a reform that was decades in the making and drove it into the ground.
Much division and ill-will were unleashed. Reconciliation has been set back a decade or more.
The nation still lacks a proper representative body to provide advice on Indigenous disadvantage, which endures as the nation’s greatest shame. Yet we are left with resentment and suspicion on one side and radical, separatist activism on the other.
By removing the cashless debit card – against advice – and moving too slowly to tackle the youth crime crisis in Alice Springs, the Albanese government has failed Indigenous Australians.
The issues of family violence, alcohol and drug dependency, crime, suicide, education and unemployment persist. For all the grand election night declarations, Labor has not moved the dial a millimetre.
Negligence on national cohesion
While the voice debate tore at our social fabric, the Prime Minister’s insipid response to October 7 and the hatred it unleashed on our shores has fomented the ugliest national divide in living memory. That some Australians could chant “Death to Jews” or “Where’s the Jews” and “Shame on Australia” as the bodies of innocent Israelis were still being recovered from the southern Israeli kibbutzes that were turned into slaughterhouses by Hamas is a chilling reality – it hardly seems possible.
Yet Albanese and Labor have watched on as these protests and other intimidatory rallies in Jewish areas, along with ugly pro-Palestinian (pro-Hamas) demonstrations in our major cities have gathered momentum. At no time has Labor called this out unequivocally, demanded the silencing of hate preachers or tackled the blatant anti-Semitism on display.
Instead it has played horrible games of false equivalence, adding “Islamophobia” to every condemnation of anti-Semitism and proffering advice to Israel as to how it should defend itself from the unspeakable Hamas horror – even as alleged terrorist plots targeting Jewish-Australians have been uncovered on our shores.
Universities are now places of intimidation for Jewish Australians, who no longer feel safe in their own country. Labor makes noises of empathy but does nothing. This can only get worse. Even for voters not engaged in the issues, the lack of spine must be obvious.
No transparency or accountability
Albanese promised to “lead with integrity” and treat voters “with respect” as he committed himself to “restore trust and accountability” to politics. This pledge has not aged well. The judgment in the Bruce Lehrmann defamation case last month has detailed how the political cover-up angle of the Brittany Higgins rape claim was absolute bunkum. The cover-up theory was prosecuted by leading Labor frontbenchers such as Wong, Katy Gallagher and Albanese himself, yet it was found to be a fabrication.
Labor settled a multimillion-dollar compensation claim with Higgins inside a day, warning former Coalition ministers Linda Reynolds and Michaelia Cash they would not be reimbursed for legal fees if they joined the process. Gallagher clearly misled a Senate committee over her prior knowledge of some of the Higgins claims, but she has faced no sanction.
Labor promised a royal commission into the destructive, overblown and unscientific response to the Covid-19 pandemic but has delivered a constrained inquiry conducted by known quantities.
The most dramatic government intervention of the post-war era, in which personal liberties were trampled, businesses and livelihoods were shut down and levels of government spending and indebtedness were unprecedented – arguably the worst public policy failure since Federation – will be left unexamined by a full public inquiry. Labor continued the Coalition’s secret social media censorship of pandemic communications and has failed to criticise those arrangements, and now it wants to expand this type of censorship through a “misinformation” bill. There is less transparency and accountability under Labor than we had before.
Almost two years on, this is an appalling record. The government is drifting and the nation is listless. What we are experiencing is a monumental lack of leadership.
Labor does not seem to know what it should be doing or who should lead the way. Albanese lacks any serious leadership rival – all in all, it is a desultory outlook.
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