by ROGER CROOK – IT’S generally accepted that Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and many in his cabinet are liars.
The “great lie” for which Albanese will always be remembered was his first. It was made by the “new Albo” – the slimmed down, well dressed, urbane, smooth, cool Albo.
- Albanese and his ministers are perfectly happy spending tens of billions of borrowed dollars on a net-zero ideology.
- Rather than on those most in need.
- Neither the PM, nor his Labor Government, could care less.
Pauline Hanson and One Nation recently responded to the nation’s anger at being treated like mugs; organising a fleet of large vans with “Fire the Liar!” to run around Australia.
Several hundred times before being elected in 2022, Albanese and all of his Australian Labor Party candidates promised people a reduction of $275 in their power bills.
CLAIMED
It was a major platform of the election; they claimed they were sure because they “had done the modelling”.
In-so-doing, Climate Change Minister Chis Bowen promised Australia would become the renewable energy capital of the world. A super power.
He reasoned and he proselytised that because the sun shines and the wind blows across Australia (more than anywhere in the world he seemed to believe?) and because they’re free, cost nothing, by harvesting both they assured Australia, electricity would be cheaper than ‘dirty’ coal.
We now known that their boasts, their promises to Australia were as light as the steam that rises from the condensation towers on a coal fired power station.
The sun has shone and the wind has blown as they foresaw, the amount of renewable energy has increased as they predicted, but it has cost the Australian taxpayer many billions of dollars.
Whether they were too stupid to recognise or too arrogant to listen to others, Blackout Bowen and PM Albanese failed to accept the age-old adage that you don’t get anything for nothing in this world.
Their modelling didn’t tell them that converting energy out of wind and sun (into electrons) comes at an excruciating cost – particularly if they’re harvested a long way from where they’re to be used.
In their 21st Century attempt to emulate King Canute, Albanese and Bowen have caused the Australian landscape – and the untouched natural environment of national parks and rain forest – to be vandalised with wind turbines, transmission towers and solar farms.
Now, with the national economy in free fall, with real wages declining, with the rate of business failures higher than they have ever been, there is further pain ahead for the beleaguered Australian tax payer.
Macrobusiness published figures just last week which showed that by almost any financial metric imaginable, Australia is one of the worst, if not the worst, performer in the OECD.
The OECD reports that real wages in Australia have fallen by five per cent over the past five years. The proof is in the pudding.
It is now clear that during their term in control of the economy, this incompetent Labor Government has been driving real wages down.
Those who believe they are worse off now than before Labor, are correct; and to add pain to misery, inflation in Australia remains among the highest in the developed world.
Australia’s Gross Domestic Product per hours worked is the worst in the OECD – and declining. It has hardly improved since March 2016 when the index was set at zero.
Whereas in America, where Trump and MAGA is working, they lead the OECD with a score of 116 and increasing. New Zealand is on about 107 and declining, the UK on 104 and increasing. Australia languishes a fraction above the 2016 starting point at 100.
That is a decade of almost stagnant GDP in Australia, what Labor has achieved is an acceleration in that decline.
When people complain that times are tough and One Nation agrees, then the ‘real’ reason according to Macrobusiness is that “real household disposable income” in Australia has fallen dramatically since 2022, since Labor came to power.
STAGNATED
Phillip Lowe, the one-time governor of the RBA says: “Our living standards have stagnated, there has been no net growth per capita in incomes for seven or eight years – that’s after per capita growth rising by 1.5 per cent a year for nearly three decades. This is the fundamental economic problem the country faces.”
As a nation, we are not even treading water, ever so slowly we are sinking and drifting further and further offshore where, unless someone finds a lifeboat and guides us back to dry land, we shall inevitably drown in our own debt.
Paul Keating’s prediction of a “Banana Republic” will be realised by Labor under Anthony Albanese.
With the national debt close to one trillion dollars – and nearly two trillion dollars when the debts of the Labor dominated States are taken into account – that lifeboat will not be built by Labor.
There is a stark comparison to be made between the ALP during and after WWII – when great Labor men like Curtin, Chifley and Evatt carefully steered Australia through the most difficult times in its short history – and Labor of today.
With Albanese, Marles and Chalmers in charge, not to mention the terrifying Penny Wong, Australia is lost.
Those great Labor men of the pre and post-war times are recognised in history as having somehow, after years of the debilitating Great Recession, to have carefully and courageously navigated the storms of war and at the same time, using those hard times to build Australia from being almost totally dependent on rural exports into a significant industrial post-war nation.
What incredible foresight those men had when, together with many from the other side of the House including Menzies, they laid the foundations for the post-war reconstruction of Australia.
Curtin, sadly, died in 1945 before he could see the fruits of his labour. Chifley was PM between 1945 and 1949, and he made great strides in implementing post-war reconstruction plans.
Menzies between 1949 and 1966 oversaw the great changes in Australia. He oversaw Australia’s industrial and rural development to where total self-sufficiency was within the nation’s grasp.
Under Menzies, we became the country with the highest standard of the world.
Australia’s current economic slide began early in the evening of May 2, 2022, when it became patently obvious that the Australian electorate had believed the pre-election promises made by Albanese and his team — there was a landslide victory.
Later that evening on stage with his then fiancé, now wife, Jodie Haydon, the freshly minted, slim and assured Anthony Albanese stood before the Australian people and boasted.
He boasted about being the son of a pensioner who grew up in public housing, and how tough life could be.
He then made a series of promises about the future of Australia with his Labor Government in control; in essence, he assured us all, that Australia was to become the new “promised land”.
POSITIVE
On national television and in front of a cheering crowd he told Australia that during the election campaign he had put forward a positive, clear plan for a better future for our country.
He told us how he was driven by two principles:-
- “No one will be left behind because the disadvantaged and the vulnerable must be looked after. No one should be held back, because we should always support aspiration and opportunity. That is what my government will do.”
- “I want to seek our common purpose and promote unity and not fear and – optimism, not fear and division. It is what I have sought to do throughout my political life.”
Slowly, since that fateful day for Australia, he has made a fool of himself, his party and of all of those who voted for him.
When Albanese spoke in Adelaide last week before the faithful at the 50th Labor Congress, the picture he painted was hardly recognisable as Australia today.
He made assertions which had absolutely nothing to do with the truth and the mess that he and his conceited, incompetent government have inflicted on the Australian people; it was as if the challenges highlighted by the figures from the OECD didn’t exist.
Four year ago he told us he was driven by two principles, one of those was that no one will be left behind and that the vulnerable and the disadvantaged must be looked after.
The pride he displayed with his disclosure of being brought up in public housing by a single mother would have resonated with many.
The difference between Albanese as a boy and his mother as a pensioner is that they had a house to live in.
A house that was provided by the Wran Labor Government, which was most probably built in the post WWII era by Chifley or Menzies.
PRIDE
That was when Australia could and did house its people and took pride in providing what every Australian is entitled to — a house.
Today, right across Australia, where the ALP are in control in NSW, Victoria, SA and WA and in Queensland where they are not, but were for years, the wait lists for what we now call social housing are longer than they have ever been.
The Albanese Federal Government has failed miserably in their promise made four years ago to provide housing for those in need.
Today, the leading cohort seeking social housing, needing a roof over their head which they can afford, are people with whom our PM claims to identifiy; they are single mature ladies, invariably over 55.
Many of these ladies for one reason or another, maybe due to death or divorce or just the throw of the dice, find themselves alone in the latter years of their working life.
Many are ladies who spent their earlier years raising children and providing a home for a family.
Now, on their own, they find they have no superannuation and few skills that are needed by today’s employers, so they finish up looking for a job at the lower end of the income scale.
For them, being middle aged and single is a double whammy, a double curse; there is always too much month left over at the end of the money.
Their need for social housing is extreme. Contrary to what Albanese says, too many Australians have been left behind.
DESTITUTE
Many are destitute because of the high rents. Many make choices between paying the rent, buying food and keeping warm in winter and cool in summer. Some, only partly, achieve this.
While many of our senior citizens suffer in poverty in their later years, Albanese and his ministers have shown Australia that they are perfectly happy spending tens of billions of borrowed dollars on a net-zero ideology, rather than on those most in need.
On top of the failure by Labor to build sufficient social housing, are the growing number of homeless in Australia.
As a percentage of the population, there are more homeless people now than at any time in our past.
As Albanese smiled down on his cheering followers in Adelaide recently – and raised his hands acknowledging their adoration – the PM deliberately forgot to repeat that promise he made back in 2022.
“No one will be left behind because the disadvantaged and the vulnerable must be looked after. No one should be held back, because we should always support aspiration and opportunity.”
He once promised: “That is what my government will do.” PC
