By Stephen Saunders
Surely, Labor can’t just run on their dismal record. What a tissue of lies. If they keep inciting and exploiting Trump Derangement Syndrome, that might work better.
Running Treasury’s line, Albanese Labor’s first-term bedtime-story is oft repeated.
Caring-and-sharing Labor stands for budget repair, inflation fighting, the million jobs, growing wages, cost-of-living relief, its housing accord, and net-zero transformation.
Even (or especially) among ordinary folks, who don’t obsess with tribal politics the way some of us do, it’s not hard to see how misleading this is.
Check your wallet. Maybe have a good look around your suburbs, especially if you live in Soviet Victoria. Check the state of suburban furnishings and services and how safe you feel. Read out your last power bill, setting aside the “free” government bribe.
Marvel at the vertical suburbs “Australians” are now being herded into, like it or not. Drive to the far edge of your city, if you can even locate it anymore. Check what kinds of cultural nirvanas are to be found out there.
What the “left” ideologue Albanese really delivers goes a bit more like this: sectarian strife, no-limit immigration and increasing overpopulation, falling living standards, increasing inequality, stagnant wages, failed energy policy, severe rental distress, and cruelly unaffordable housing.
Recall Mark Butler’s wisecrack on Your ABC. Labor is trying very hard to reduce immigration and build more houses.
Leaving aside ABC Patricia Karvelas herself and other well-heeled guests, did mild workers in the audience really buy that? Do Australians at large? Seriously, would you pin your hopes on that kind of “record”?
Mind you, Labor clings to their “achievements”. The other day, there went ABC and Sydney Morning Herald, running government-fibs, as honed by ANU Migration Hub. Migration tipped to plummet as post COVID visas set to expire, so Shane Wright (or wrong) put it.
Now, if a person can keep a straight face long enough, it’s surprising what they can learn from the Scott Trust for Colonial Enlightenment, aka Guardian Australia.
Labor accuses Dutton of copying Trump…extreme Coalition stance. Shooting down educational and governance kites flown by Peter Dutton, as if these were the full-blown Donald.
Or check SMH again, also from April Fool’s Day. Worse than Russia: [Australian] voters fear Trump’s America, goes David Crowe’s gutter headline.
At Your ABC, this kind of propaganda will recur frequently until the May election. This article says More Australian universities impacted by Trump cuts. It is totally impartial, right up to the seventh word.
Mr Dutton, most Australians don’t like Trump all that much. Or you, perhaps. Many Australians pay limited attention to politicians and politics. And the younger folk have been “educated” in pro UN-Labor open-borders net-zero.
While Trump is saying and doing vivid stuff, deliberately. Shuttering the Education Department. Buying Greenland or redeveloping Gaza. Monstering judges and lawyers. Drill baby drill. A “tariff rampage” against the “world order”, according to heavily editorialising ABC.
He floated very early his notion of a third term, just to mess with minds. One could go on.
There is and will be attractive mud, a political windfall for the ages, and some can be flung at Dutton. Again, imagine you are Labor. Do you run more on your record or more on Trump?
Though slightly bespattered, perhaps the Coalition can regroup and box cleverer.
Some might argue that’s mostly a matter of avoiding anything that looks remotely Trumpian to the smallest degree. But maybe the Coalition needs to do more. Their offerings are still somewhat Me Too, acknowledging their fair go at gas reservation and slowly improving go at shaving immigration.
But what about Labor? Late in the day, they’ve finally posted relaxed-and-complacent election offerings under eight red tiles.
These reveal some worthwhile points but largely preserve Labor’s destructive settings for immigration and housing, energy and environment, education, and taxation. Does anyone see mainstream media (or Dutton himself) hammering these tiles?
The Liberals could exploit the three-year litany of Labor lies, the gap between Treasury dot points and mean policies or outcomes. They could find ways, perhaps, to push the over-egged Trump-smear back onto woke Labor, which is rusted onto regressive UN/OECD energy and population orthodoxies, at considerable cost to Australian voters and welfare.
Here, Dutton’s rejection of The Lodge for Kirribilli looks to be a better ploy than wasting working-from-home or deporting deviant-dual-citizens. Albanese claims the PM should be “close” to his Department. That is arguable with a woke Glyn Davis in charge thinking his top-20% thoughts.
In crass terms, yet not that divorced from the truth, Canberra = The Voice = You’re A Racist. The Coalition should get out often, among western or outer-ring suburbanites, into marginal rural seats, badly dissed by Albanese postures and policies.
How desperately does the Coalition want a win, to end the 1931 drought? Or are they kind of waiting their turn, as Albanese Labor sort of did.
Why would I even care, seeing the contest as more about the top 20% versus the rest, less about Liberal versus Labor? Compared with America’s Red versus Blue, Australia is somewhat Purple.
But wait. I’d even prefer Albanese-Redux to the dire prospect of Labor-Greens minority government or some amalgam of Labor plus Green-Teals.
People like to imagine that Greens or Teals “moderate” Labor. In many or most respects, however, each is more extreme, more distanced from community values and views.
If Labor needed Greens or Teals to hit 76 seats, nothing can be ruled out. Remember the minority government Julia Gillard formed—in exchange for trivial “commitments” then a beating in 2013.
Similarly, or so I console myself, any Labor/Greens/Teals conglomerate government would forfeit the Treasury benches soon enough. But think of the damage by then. Three more years of Albanese will be bad enough.
