Damage trails Labor like broken tourists behind a run of Pamplona bulls
On this score the Albanese Labor government is a monumental failure; it could be sued for malpractice.
Politicians should take and adhere to a version of the Hippocratic oath – first they should do no harm. On this score the Albanese Labor government is a monumental failure; it could be sued for malpractice.
It is difficult to think of an area where the government has made an improvement to the nation. But damage trails in its wake like broken tourists behind a run of Pamplona bulls.
What is worse is that some Labor actions seem deliberately designed to damage the nation. We can accept that this is not the government’s intent, but its misguided actions, based on ideology rather than practicality, unavoidably are hurting the country.
Nowhere has this been more starkly apparent than at COP28 in Dubai this week when Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen pushed for global action to obliterate two of our top three export industries – coal and gas.
“If we are to keep 1.5 degrees alive, fossil fuels have no ongoing role to play in our energy systems, and I speak as the Climate and Energy Minister of one of the world’s largest fossil fuel exporters,” Bowen said. In this one sentence the vandalism of our economy was self-evident. Yet Bowen uttered it with pride and added an explanation that was so inane it could have come from Greta Thunberg or Extinction Rebellion. “We embrace that fact and acknowledge it because we also live in the Pacific and we are not going to see our brothers and sisters inundated and their countries swallowed by the seas,” he said.
Without wasting a whole column pulling that nonsense apart, suffice to say Australia’s actions cannot make any material difference to the planet’s climate, global emissions are rising with or without our exports, studies show Pacific Islands are growing in area rather than disappearing, and climate and sea levels will vary over time thanks to natural variations, whatever humans do.
Whether we like it or not, the scientific facts demonstrate that Bowen’s anti-fossil fuels crusade can do only serious economic harm to our country without delivering any discernible climate benefits.
This is the definition of bad governance. Meanwhile, China continues to enrich itself, partly by increasing emissions to deliver affordable energy so it can manufacture and export, among most other things, the equipment we need to continue our expensive and flailing transition to renewable energy.
Bowen is the energy minister for a country endowed with vast resources of coal, gas and uranium, yet his goal is to use none of them. Our economic and strategic rivals put them to good use to gain advantages over us; if China wishes ill of us, all it needs to do is refrain from interrupting as we go about our self-harm.
Before Bowen even got back to Australia, people in NSW were being told to resist using their air-conditioners and dishwashers for fear we would overstretch electricity supplies. It turns out they don’t want us to use airconditioners on the hot days when we actually need them.
This brings us to power prices – Labor repeatedly and emphatically promised to cut costs. “Reducing power prices by $275,” Anthony Albanese declared. “We’ll get power prices down by $275 a year,” Jim Chalmers pledged. Instead, prices have risen by more than that, fuelling inflation and adding to cost of living pressures. Albanese and Chalmers also made grand promises on the cost of living. “Taking pressure off the cost of living,” Albanese said. “There is a cost-of-living crisis.”
The reality has been the opposite. Wages have risen, but not high enough to keep pace with inflation, so real wages have declined and the Reserve Bank expects living standards to continue to slide in the coming year.
Inflation and the resultant dozen interest rate rises under Labor also should be sheeted home to the Albanese government given Labor blamed the Coalition when these trends first emerged before the election.
Labor has failed to curb spending or boost productivity to counter these factors; in fact its labour market re-regulation will only dampen productivity and economic growth into the future.
Union power has increased, and that trend will continue. The government capitulated to public sector unions, accepting an ongoing bias towards working from home for federal public servants.
It is a fair bet it will take a change of government and years of bloody-minded negotiations to get large numbers of bureaucrats back into the office; and this precedent makes it more difficult for the private sector, too.
Record levels of immigration also have fuelled inflation and cost pressures, particularly on housing and rent. The Albanese government loosened visa conditions for international students and saw net migration skyrocket to 510,000 in the year to June, adding almost the equivalent to the entire population of Tasmania to the nation in a single year.
Simultaneously the government has undermined faith in the integrity of our border security by failing to cautiously manage the release of 148 non-citizen criminals from immigration detention.
With at least a half-dozen alleged re-offenders still to be dealt with by courts and the possibility of more offences occurring, this issue is far from over. Meanwhile a dozen asylum-seekers made it to the mainland by boat, the first to do so in a decade.
Border security was one of the traditional Labor weaknesses I identified as a primary concern for an incoming Albanese government, and it appeared solid for the first year. But now Labor (and the country) is exposed, and the Prime Minister will need to reimpose authority in coming months.
The other clear vulnerability was the ability to stand up to China. Again, for the first year, the new government seemed sturdy. But immediately before, during and after his breakthrough Beijing visit, Albanese kowtowed. To suppress the Chinese navy’s sonar attack on our navy divers until after a crucial follow-up meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping at the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation summit was a transparently weak attempt to avoid confrontation.
Albanese failed to stand up for our sailors and our country. There is much to play out in this relationship and it remains unpredictable, but you should never start such machinations with weakness – weakness is provocative.
Back home, Labor is buying back water rights, so irrigation communities will be hollowed out and agricultural production will suffer. The government seems to be cutting and running on Australia Day, and it has an assistant minister for the republic but no plan or proposal to deliver that constitutional reform.
Albanese took the carefully formulated next step in Indigenous reconciliation that was the result of years of consultation and negotiation – constitutional recognition through an Indigenous voice to parliament – and turned it into an act of partisan triumphalism on election night. The reform project never recovered.
Labor failed to negotiate a bipartisan consensus, insulted the public by refusing to share or discuss details, ran a classically elitist and emotional campaign, and turned a historic opportunity for national unity into a divisive defeat that set back reconciliation, possibly for a generation.
Reactionaries have been enlivened by the referendum defeat and are seeking to abolish welcomes to country and most other hat tips to Indigenous culture. Defeat of the voice is being leveraged as a licence to “unremember” Indigenous history. It is horrible.
On coming to government Labor discovered the Coalition had been secretly censoring Covid commentary on digital media platforms, and instead of ending and exposing the practice, it continued the censorship. Labor is now proposing so-called misinformation laws that would apply similar draconian and illiberal censorship powers to a broader range of topics.
Albanese Labor also squibbed a national royal commission into the pandemic response. It needs to investigate all aspects of the medical, social, economic and political interventions at state and federal levels. None of the state or federal pandemic leaders is still in their position, yet still the Albanese government baulks at the idea of discovering the truth.
Labor provided an anaemic response to the Hamas atrocity in Israel and showed inexplicable hesitancy to stridently denounce the pro-Hamas protests in Australia in which the shameful chants “Death to Jews” and “Gas the Jews” defiled the forecourt of the iconic Sydney Opera House. Pictures of this protest reverberated around the world, setting in train another socially divisive dilemma that seemed unthinkable just a year ago.
Pro-Palestine groups (effectively pro-Hamas) have deliberately targeted Jewish communities and businesses in Sydney and Melbourne with vile and intimidatory behaviour. Yet the Albanese Labor government seems to have been merely a spectator.
The government should be leading national efforts to stamp out this behaviour and address the Islamist extremism at its heart by targeting hate preachers and ramping up efforts to engage and moderate Muslim communities. Instead, it has emboldened anti-Israel activists and anti-Semitic agitators by voting in favour of a UN resolution that gave Hamas a diplomatic victory.
In foreign policy terms we have abandoned Israel in one of its darkest hours and broken with our most important ally, the US, in the management of the world’s most volcanic strategic fault line. And the implications for our multicultural compact, national cohesion and terrorism vulnerability are ominous.
In a democracy we must always accept the verdict of the voters. If you don’t like the result, the only remedy is to muster more voter support. But that does not mean the voters always get it right.
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