By Stephen Saunders
Regardless of the 2025 election, voters will get a duopoly dinner: environmental and energy sellout, regressive education, unfair taxation, mega migration, and the housing hunger games.
In their January election preview, The Australian discerned a deep “ideological schism” between Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton.
Really? Since when? December?
Labor talks about a climate-action net-zero future-vision. But the Treasurer’s “budget repair” and “inflation fighting” are doctrinaire neoliberal.
Ostensibly, Liberals are less about identity-politics, but their new election plan squibs on cost of living, energy, taxation, immigration, housing. Same as Labor’s.
Both sides like an unfair tax burden on workers with absurdly low taxes on resources. They esteem school-funding apartheid and so-called “export education”.
Liberals are pro nuclear – yet bogeyman Dutton acquiesces to net-zero open-borders.
Unlike the Matts – Nationals’ Matt Canavan and entrepreneur Matt Barrie. The latter lobbed his December call to arms into Liberals’ Northern Beaches branch in Sydney.
He said that Australia is dismantling itself from within. It is committing energy and population suicide, instead of being the richest country (for citizens) in the world.
Endless population growth
Prodded on the Los Angeles mega-fires, Albanese instantly indicted “climate change”. National ABC-ANU provided the backing vocals.
But Australia’s main environmental Albo-tross is unnecessary, third-world, population growth. Under Labor, 80% derives from immigration, not “Treasury normal” 60%.
The “stakeholder” classes (hello George Megalogenis) are thrilled, now we’re 30% overseas born and 50% “migrant origin”. It’s a bit like a Middle Eastern autocracy.
Thus far, voters have had to tolerate this upper-class fetish. That doesn’t mean it is sustainable socioeconomics.
Energy policy derailed
In December, Albanese’s Department announced the commencement of the “Net Zero Economy Authority”.
This “takes advantage of opportunities presented by global decarbonisation…to unlock our potential as a renewable energy superpower” in the “global net zero economy”.
These overconfident slogans lean overmuch on one supersized “stakeholder” – the book Superpower and the Superpower Institute.
Look at how Germany, a serious nation with impressive industry and training pillars, is in strife. Their Energiewende placed energy ideology to the fore, then they opened borders. Then war detonated their Russian energy deal.
How could lightweight Australia, with high costs and manufacturing shot, pole-vault to a “net zero” Future Made in Australia? Even our Future Fund baulks.
Wouldn’t the Liberals query it? To a point, they and “stakeholders” have other energy fixations. As per this diversionary Nine Media declamation:
“A nuclear Australia would grow 12 per cent slower every year until 2050”.
The crucial contest isn’t nuclear versus renewables. It’s Australia’s 80% export gas cartel versus Australians – industry and consumers. Though Julia Gillard instigated this gouge, both sides protect it.
Regressive educational policies
Liberal and Labor-Greens underwrite our profoundly unequal school-funding system (church versus state) and the mass importation of post-secondary students.
Denying “self-interest”, Universities Australia wants university-student numbers doubled by 2050. The following derives from their December Election Statement:
“International students drove half of Australia’s economic growth…[don’t] handbrake a $50 billion industry”.
This export-education hoax has been debunked since forever. How could endless rivers of casually vetted students from less wealthy nations usefully drive “growth”?
The foreign student intake clips a degree ticket and repatriates (often Chinese) or undercuts wages and stays (Indian and other).
It is a venal program not special economic sauce. Again, wouldn’t a “Liberal” party be corrective?
No, they’ve endorsed Albanese’s open-doors for Indian qualifications and students. Engaged in a virtue contest over Labor’s fake 270,000 student “cap”.
At the May Budget, the Liberals did promise net-migration falling to 160,000 (still high). By December they’d caved.
Abul Rizvi estimates our underlying or “structural” level of immigration at 300,000. Not that far wrong, after decades of naïve immigration/trade deals giving away border sovereignty for peanuts:
As Barrie couches it, why would Australia with well under 1% of world population accept 14% of global international students? Hint – not for voters.
Treasury punishes voters
Also in December, the Treasurer led (misled) with two more reports.
The Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook (MYEFO) is a Peter Costello lurk. The first page of 2024-25 edition says: responsible management, budget repair, soft landing, fighting inflation.
These Treasury talking points are how the current Treasurer “communicates” with Australians. How’s his MYEFO helping them? With subsidiary talking points.
Easing cost-of-living pressures (why make it so hard to start with). Future Made in Australia (see above). Strengthening the “care” economy (care is not the economy). Broadening opportunity and equality (in reverse) while safeguarding people and environment (until the next fire/flood/pandemic).
“Australians are struggling to get into the housing market” though over “a million jobs have been created”.
Why struggling? Bipartisan tax-incentives for housing speculation – augmented by Labor’s million-plus migrants to date. Who got those (largely government-related) “million” jobs? A million migrants, mainly.
The NSW Liberals dissed MYEFO. If their party wins federally, it’s still Treasury Rules.
As to who really chooses our policy directions, you can have unelected “stakeholders” or unelected international agencies (UN/OECD/IMF troika). Rarely voters.
Then the Treasurer issued Australia’s fifth Population Statement, a Scott Morrison lurk. Media “stakeholders” (ABC, SMH, Financial Review) copied out the Treasury points.
Bizarrely, the 2022 Statement said our population was trending “smaller and older”. Edition 2024, however, has population still “growing in 2100”:
Not even the United Nations would say that. Our central government has lost its environmental mind. Does no one care?
Despite population growth (> 2%) doubling economic growth (< 1%), there’s no concession that hyper migration hurts voters. We’ll all “benefit”, smirks Treasury, as the population zooms past 30 million then 40 million.
Treasury has demolished the Australian Dream with world-level population-replacement plus world-level housing-unaffordability. Yet they fantasize about 2030s women (even Canberra women) re-embracing fertility via:
“Policies that encourage a more equal division of household labour, alleviate the financial cost of having children, and promote housing security”.
“Stakeholders” militate against voters
In the global north, the crisis of democracy and equality spurs scholars.
For Thomas Piketty, capital wins, tough luck about labour parties. Robert Kuttner shows globalism and the “market” hollowing out democratic social provisions. As in Germany and UK.
The American Musa al-Gharbi documents “symbolic capitalist” elites (hello Canberra) emoting for social justice, while flipping the bird to lower orders. With Eric Kaufmann, wokeness has become a stoush over “Western civilisation” itself.
Even Soviet Russia had dissenting artists. Down Under, even satirists and novelists toe the UN line. Otherwise, they might be racists.
Across states, industry and unions, think tanks, academia, and media, our sleepy discourse curates the Liberal-Labor “contest”. Brainwashed (woke) Generation Z thinks housing is a “supply” problem.
Even though Minister O’Neil admitted, Labor wants rising house prices. No wonder the Population Statement demands a 410,000 population top-up every year through to 2035.
Lamenting housing distress, hypocritical business leaders (exceptions Barrie and Tim Fung) still demand Big Australia for confected “skill shortages”.
Mogul net-zero mavens Mike Cannon-Brookes and Andrew Forrest squabbled over a “nation-building” energy cable to Singapore. Now “philanthropist” Forrest makes to deploy a gas import terminal. No market failure; rules the competition watchdog.
Despite their own academics’ State of the Environment evidence, our universities love open-borders net-zero. Which underpins their research and business models.
The ANU, which has always propagandised big migration, follows the UN line with their cross-campus “institute” for climate “solutions”.
This December, ANU propaganda went next-level, claiming Labor’s mega-migration never even happened. This sailed through to the keeper. Some “discourse”.
Political duopoly deprives voters
From Curtin through Whitlam, prime ministers seemed to care about the people a bit.
It’s harder to say this of Scott Morrison or Worse Albanese. Savouring his clifftop retreat and investment properties, with protesters shuttering his electorate office.
Via Barrie, high income-per-head nations are also high electricity-consumption nations.
I’d tweak that. You can be a low-population energy-rich nation (Qatar, Norway) that creams the windfall to cushion its own people.
You can even be a low-population energy-pauper (Denmark, Singapore) using economic strategies (hard work) to deliver a reasonable domestic deal.
Or you can be like Australia:
An amazingly energy-lucky but environmentally-fragile and water-challenged continent, mushrooming its population to 40-50 million (paging Kevin Rudd) to guarantee a precarious deal for citizens. LA is us.
The dispiriting 2025 election
Turning low migration promises upside-down, UK Tory and NZ Labour governments got sacked. “Liberal” Canada is certain to follow. Albanese, he of the accidental on purpose population blitz, is in the same firing line.
Australia copped an all-time drought/fire/flood/pandemic over 2019-21. Yet Albanese supercharged net-migration to 980,000 over 2022-24, 70% above Rudd’s record. Nothing, including LA, can ever get environmental sanity onto the table here.
Instead of an election tackling the Volkswagen-sized breadcrumbs linking mega migration (and tax distortion) to housing distress (and construction dysfunction), we’re getting personality and climate theatricals. A journalistic replay of 2010 and 2013.
Labor-Greens advocate virtuous (UN/OECD/IMF troika) renewables with Liberal baddies going nuclear.
About 30 nations operate 400-plus nuclear power plants worldwide, US and China being top generators. France is 70% nuclear, though the waste backstory worries.
Australia could do nuclear – if preferring the industry’s rosy picture to national CSIRO’s anointing of renewables.
But we’re mediocre infrastructure builders. “Externalities” from resource mining, power plants, waste disposal, might descend unfairly, including on Indigenous lands.
Unlike Qatar/Norway, Liberal/Labor siphon the resource booty off to rent-seekers ahead of voters. Nuclear, unlikely as it is to happen, would be another rent-seeker pile-on.
For reliability of electricity supply, maybe the Liberals should stick to their “gas-fired recovery” trope, with less of the “dramatically” increasing supply.
The 80% export gas-cartel is bad enough, with gleeful trading “partners” on-selling gas imported from dozy Australia. Soon, they’ll sell it back to us via import terminals.
Suits troika. Not a shot fired, they’ve replaced our fair-go with UN social-justice creed:
Population growth + renewables growth = environment-repair + net-zero.
