By Stephen Saunders
Scott Morrison and Anthony Albanese both represent feeding the rich and flogging the environment. But UN Albanese is a culture warrior, with worse fibs, and record immigration to undermine local workers.
Unsuitable Scott Morrison was pitchforked into Parliament on the nod of the biggest Australian influencer this century, John Howard.
Engineered into the leadership by other MPs carrying crosses, aided by soulless officials, Morrison nurtured the crude and cruel robodebt.
He continued the standard-issue neoliberal program of 1980s-onwards Australia: feed the rich and flog the environment (FRIFE).
Morrison lied about stopping the boats. He muddled through COVID but pushed China back. From the start, He backed Big Australia. He even “supported” United Nations Net Zero emissions, albeit half-heartedly.
Towards the end, reality thrashed satire. Morrison flattened that kid and confessed he was a bit of a bulldozer.
Compared with Everywhere Howard, what lasting influences does Morrison leave? His Religious Persecution, sorry Discrimination Bill, was always jinxed.
The Rudd-Gillard-Albanese progression
Superficially, Anthony Albanese replacing Scott Morrison resembles Julia Gillard usurping “bad” Kevin Rudd. But Albanese is more like Rudd, his American Ambassador.
Sure, Rudd was de trop. He loved China and Big Australia. But harangued factional bosses and abused pampered officials.
Rudd eventually tried to tax Australia’s third-world natural-resource giveaways. The mining and petroleum multinationals had to replace him with Gillard. She let them write their own tax arrangements and as she facilitated the gas cartel.
Gillard soothed hurting officials and lied about Big Australia. But in Labor folklore, she was a “reformer”.
She commissioned the Gonski report. You all know the story: school funding would be “needs-based and sector blind”. Instead, we got the opposite – another generation of educational apartheid and underperformance. The “left” claims it’s all Tony Abbott’s fault.
You all know this fable too. “Bad” Greens defeated Rudd’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS). And Abbott knocked over Gillard’s Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), which was set to push our total emissions down.
It is nonsense. Like the 40% coverage European Union ETS, our CPRS/ETS might have shaved emissions among “regulated” industries and firms. That’s assuming they didn’t corrupt the government, sabotage the targets, disguise their emissions, and maximise fake offsets.
Meantime, global and Australian emissions keep climbing. Earth doesn’t follow carbon “markets”. Isn’t going Net Zero.
Like Morrison, Albanese reinforces inequality
Like Gillard, good-guy Albo might leave a “reform” story for academics.
But for punters from Penrith to Pinjarra, blessings will be slim. Compared with Morrison, he might enforce inequality more ethically. Hurrah.
FRIFE? Albo does it on his ear. Check the first and second Jim Chalmers Budgets. Their humungous immigration tide purportedly lifts all boats.
Fibbing on national ABC, Treasurer Chalmers says 715,000 net migration over 2022-24 is “not something” he controls. Inequality? Falling real wages? Failing environment? These are not discussed in his Budgets. He fudges them in the virtual signalling wellbeing framework.
Chalmers’ endless-growth Intergenerational Report (IGR) offers UN platitudes of “net zero transformation” and “renewable energy superpower”, as well as exciting opportunities in the bedpan, sorry care economy. It conveniently ignores practical industry and worker oriented policies.
The IGR reboots Big Australia and our usual immigration economy, ignoring voters’ wishes.
The Albanese Government took the fibs next-level. Would you believe, immigration is just catching up for COVID? Australia’s population is trending smaller and older? Me neither.
If you dare to criticise that 715,000 net migration, a powerful minority will flash you the Race Card. Even our cartoonists and satirists run a mile from the immigration issue.
What, you don’t like 1.9% population growth? Look over there – 1.5% economic growth. As Australia generates yet another per-capita recession.
You can ignore Labor’s “climate action” spin and their absurdity of “fixing” the migration system under massive immigration.
You can also ignore the Labor-Greens mockery of fixing rental/housing affordability under relentless population growth.
It doesn’t matter how often Guardian and ABC “correspondents” sandpaper the ball. The IGR’s institutionalised mass migration cruels housing affordability for Australians. It’s nearly four times higher than the average annual migration in 20th century Australia.
In the October 2022 Budget, Treasurer Chalmers targeted net migration of 235,000 each year from 2022-23 to 2025-26.
In the May 2023 Budget, that was suddenly 400,000, 315,000, 260,000, and 260,000. Gosh, his August IGR is back at 235,000 – the same as the Morrison IGR of 2021.
Jim Chalmers is just making it up as he goes. His IGR targets 40 million by 2062 – yet is touted as “slow growing” population.
Launching the IGR he smirked, “more people will be renting for life”, it’s the “end of complacency”. End of equality more like it.
Like Rudd, Albanese’s first loyalty is globalism
Why would Anthony Albanese go to such population extremes? He’s not just servicing powerful donors. He’s a globalist. The breadcrumbs lead back to the UN.
Both Rudd and Albanese are Net Zero blazers in international climate “clubs”. They distract attention from the eight billion humans and the 26 million Australians.
Population generates emissions/consumption/GDP. That’s not quantum mechanics or string theory. In Australia, population’s way easier to manage than emissions. Not even Year 10 Albanese’s Open Borders Australia is an endless-growth “democracy of stakeholders”.
It is more destructive of cohesion and equality than Morrison’s sexism and pugnacity.
Australian Liam Young has already written and filmed the ultimate globalist fantasy. Ten billion people living in one joyous “planet city” as the rest of earth “re-wilds”.
UN narratives drive Albanese’s policies
How did the UN ducks line up for Albanese?
While corporates neutered the 1960s-1990s environmental push, UN stitched up the population side. As early as 1994, they betrayed family planning in the global south.
Individual nations still reduce population growth – no thanks to UN. Camouflaging global population trends and hyping a distant Net Zero, UN policies suit Australian corporates.
Australia’s 1990s were the peak of government-and-science on the driest continent’s carrying capacity. Biogeographically, Tim Flannery wrote for Australian Academy of Science (AAS) that our desirable maximum population was “20-30 million”.
The Greens soon dropped the “racist” population issue. Flannery and AAS pivoted to climate advocacy. That trickle is now a stampede.
In the last five years, our scientific herd has swarmed the Net Zero gangplank. Add “climate change” to that grant application and it looks even better.
Instead of invigilating Albanese’s dodgy Safeguard Mechanism, 43% emissions reduction, and Net Zero Authority, scientists condone his propaganda.
Other “stakeholders” would rarely challenge his essentially UN derivative population and environment policies. When Senator Kristina Keneally wobbled, she was shamed and excluded. Opposition Leader Peter Dutton faces similar risks.
One CEO, Matt Barrie, did bucket Open Borders. Mega-billion CEOs Twiggy Forrest and Mike Cannon-Brookes prefer Albanese’s pose: Be a fake Net Zero hero.
UN Albanese is worse than Morrison
Behold Albanese’s cautious pragmatism, steady tiller, and cabinet governance. He is “saving” us from Morrison’s Trump type “menace”.
The rich will get richer while Albanese’s UN-themed corporatism will leave workers worse off and the environment in worse shape.
Logically, why should we expect anything different?
Read French prof Thomas Piketty among others. “Left” parties now represent education. “Right” parties still represent money.
As fellow French prof Julia Cagé kvetches, with limited electoral funding and lax private donations, nobody really represents workers. These European (also American) findings hold for Australia.
Cagé recommends reserved seats for worker candidates. You could equally say, voters need their own Canberra lobby to protect them from overpopulation – and indeed the gas cartel.
Donors and stakeholders will keep pointing at Morrison/Dutton while sugar-coating UN Albanese. Because, in our uncompetitive markets, they will still be making out like bandits.
On the one hand, consider the local realities that Albanese ought to be remediating.
As regards the economy: see the above unnecessary per capita recessions, dismal productivity growth, the absence of genuine industry policy.
Any “job growth” is mostly going to migrants and local unemployment will rise. Real wages are depressed and real household income has tanked.
As regards the environment: we have systematic overpopulation, a Potemkin-façade climate policy, fossil fuels forever, urban-sprawl unto the last koala, keen logging and land clearing, native-species crashes, wild-west irrigation and water markets, crazy urban water policy, on it goes.
As regards inequality: the top 10% get tax cuts and hog benefits of “growth”, we have sharply unequal schooling, universities bulk-processing migrants and gouging locals, perennially “catch up” infrastructure and services, institutionalised rental/housing unaffordability.
On the other hand, consider the globalist dreams, Albanese dreams. We have Open Borders, Net Zero and identity politics.
Albo was always going to continue Morrison’s AUKUS. But also, he’s accelerated our immigration/trade exposure to China and India.
Which hand is pushing down harder on the tiller? What “reforms” does he want to be remembered for? It’s not even close.
Why would Airbus Albo bother about living standards, or ecological overshoot when he can crush-load our population, yet be lauded internationally for “pursuing” Net Zero?
