Our worst ever government... If memory serves me well

Peter O'Brien I 14 December 2024 I Spectator Australia

Memory can be a fickle friend. Vital details, once secure in the mind, tend to disappear down the memory hole as you advance in years. But on the upside, when it comes to the broad sweep of your experience, it tends to reinforce the positive aspects of your life and diminish the negative. Over the course of my life, I remember three really shocking Labor governments. The first was, of course, Whitlam’s. As I recall, his successor Fraser was not the light on the hill he might have been. But neither was he a total disaster.

The Hawke and Howard years I remember as being dominated by largely competent ministries. Their mistakes I have consigned to the memory hole.

But then came Rudd. In the latter years of that ill-fated government, I remember waking up every morning and wondering, ‘What disaster is going to strike today?’ It was real political theatre and, to be honest, I enjoyed it. I was sure that Tony Abbott would prevail.? As he did, until Malcolm Turncoat set the Liberals on the dismal path that Peter Dutton is now finally managing to turn around – albeit agonisingly slowly.

Fast forward to today and I am again waking up each morning, now no longer looking forward to the daily disaster, but dreading it. And the reason I am dreading it is because the damage now being wrought is on a scale that does not lend itself to correction in a mere one or two terms of a sensible government. I do not believe my memory is playing me false when I say this is the worst government of my lifetime.

The fiscal mountain looks daunting – record national debt – but it’s been conquered before and can be again, given sufficient resolve. Ditto the parlous state of our defence forces. But other areas are much more problematic.

The three major, perhaps permanent, detriments that Albanese’s feckless government are imposing on Australia are: an immigration regime designed to bolster GDP but which is, in fact, implanting, into the nation, a fifth column of Islamic activism; fostering Aboriginal separatism and embedding in our communities a two-tiered citizenship, and, of course; an energy policy that seems set to consign us to the Third World even as its absurdities become each day more apparent. Let me add that the Albanese government has been ably assisted in most of the above initiatives by a series of weak Coalition governments and oppositions at state level.

On immigration, aside from the adverse impact the current high levels have had on, for example, housing, the main problem is the source of many of our immigrants. In my view, the greatest danger facing Australia is not aggression from China, but the influx of Muslim immigrants from the Middle East. Why? Because they are changing our country for the worse, as is evidenced by the disgraceful events of the past year, culminating in the refusal even to allow Jews to commemorate, in peace, the 7 October massacre on its first anniversary. That was a middle finger upraised to Australia and its values. And the greater the Muslim population grows, the more marked will be this damage.

Despite decades of immigration from the Middle East, as a community, many (but not all) Muslims apparently see themselves living in Australia but not being part of Australia. Just the tip of this iceberg is the adamantine refusal to recognise both Israel’s right to exist and the utter depravity of the 7 October atrocity. This is not a difference of political opinion. It is a clash of values. These Islamists (and their useful idiots) rail against the ‘colonisation’ of Palestine by Jews, apparently oblivious to the fact that they themselves, by their own perverted logic, are now colonising Australia.

According to the 2021 Census in Australia, the combined number of people who self-identified as Australian Muslims, from all forms of Islam, constituted 3.2 per cent of our total population. Even at this level we are already seeing a much more assertive, activist Islamic cohort. Why should we welcome these, mostly economic, migrants any more than they welcomed Jews seeking a new life in their ancestral homeland after 2,000 years of persecution?

The shameful actions of Albanese and Wong in abandoning Israel and pandering to the terrorists has now further entrenched this dangerous mindset. This problem is not going to go away anytime soon.

I now turn to the Aboriginal industry.? Despite the clear signal from every corner of Australia (except, of course, the ACT) in rejecting the Voice – even from woke Victoria – the aboriginalisation of our nation proceeds apace in nearly every jurisdiction at both state and local council level. Land is being given away, reparations are being negotiated, place names are being altered and access to iconic natural features is being restricted. And all this is being done at the behest of activists – most of whom have more European ancestry than Aboriginal – without a single one of these excrescences being specifically put to Australian voters at an election or plebiscite.

And once these handouts have been put in place, good luck to any future government with the guts to try to claw them back.

On the subject of energy ‘policy’, this quote from Albanese tells you all you need to know: ‘Just as all of us have a role to play in cutting emissions and meeting the challenge of climate change, all our citizens can benefit from seizing the opportunities of clean energy. It’s also an unprecedented chance for our economies to build new sources of inclusive growth and lasting prosperity. My government’s ambition is for Australia to become a renewable energy superpower.’

A ‘renewable energy superpower’? Why not go the whole hog and aim for Australia to become the dominant world economy? The odds on either happening are vanishingly small. We were once a fossil fuel energy superpower with the cheapest energy on the planet and yet we could not even maintain a car manufacturing industry without government subsidies. And ‘the opportunities of clean energy’? Memo to Albo: success in industry does not depend on the source of the energy it demands. It depends on its low cost and high reliability. And on this question, the jury (in this case empirical evidence) has returned its verdict. No need for me to elaborate. Just watch Chris Uhlmann’s excellent Sky News documentary.

But here’s the cherry on top of this confection – the chance ‘to build new sources of inclusive growth’. What the hell is inclusive growth? I had thought Albo above had plumbed the depths of vacuous idiocy, but then along comes Bowen to tell us that nuclear won’t work for Australia because Melbourne has more sunny days than London. God help us.

I could go on, but I’ll leave it there. Let me conclude with my thoughts on the upcoming election. It is held that Australian voters don’t throw out first-term governments, having done it only once before with the Scullin Labor government. But they damn near did it in 2010, and it was only the treachery of Windsor and Oakeshott that prevented Tony Abbott from emulating Joe Lyons.?? In almost every respect this government is immeasurably worse than the Rudd/Gillard/Rudd fiasco, as bad as that was.

My prediction is that this time Peter Dutton will make history. But he has to avoid what I believe was Abbott’s biggest mistake in 2013, and that was to ignore the importance of the Senate. If you want to change the government in a way that will matter, you have to change not just your local member. You also have to change the Senate, and this theme needs to figure hugely in the Coalition campaign.? Changing the Senate may be easier said than done but if you don’t talk loudly about it, it won’t happen.

Author: Peter O'Brien