by ROGER CROOK – OUR “dear leader” Chairman Albanese tells us Australia faces its biggest challenges since the Second World War.
We are told those challenges are unprecedented in scale and complexity when compared to previous decades.
- Yet nobody has a qualification in accounting or finance.
- The Albanese Government replete with degrees, is unable to comprehend the very fundamentals of government.
- Disposable income is two per cent lower than pre-pandemic levels. While in the OECD it has risen by 7.7 per cent.
Then why, we must ask, is our leader and his cabinet not performing; why are they not up to the standard of the men and women who steered Australia through WWII and who laid the foundations for the remarkable country Australia became?
For the Silent Generation (those born between 1925-45) the challenges confronting Australia today are reminiscent of the trials and the world-beating successes accomplished by the Australian people in the sixty or so years after WWII.
DETERIORATE
The 70s, 80s and 90s brought unprecedented growth and a standard of living which was the envy of the world. Halcyon days which started to deteriorate into debt with the election of Labor and Kevin Rudd in 2007.
Australia’s demise has continued; the laziness of governments of both the Left and the Right during the past 20 years, abrogating long held beliefs; being more concerned to be seen kowtowing to internationally conventions and charters than the needs of the Australian people.
It is sobering to contemplate what strength of character and the extraordinary ability John Curtin and his cabinet revealed after being elected in 1941.
Not only to mobilise Australia to play its vital part in the global effort to defeat both Germany and Japan; but at the same time start planning for the re-construction of Australia once the war had been won.
Compare them to the Albanese cabinet of 2025 and consider whether they have the ability to copy the performance of the Curtin and, later, the Menzies governments to re-build Australia to where it was a couple of decades ago?
A photograph of the Curtin cabinet in 1941 shows they were men of mature age; life expectancy for men in Australia in 1941 was 62.
John Curtin, Eric Harrison and Frank Forde we know fought in WWI.
Others most probably did because: “Nearly 40 per cent of Australian males between 18 and 44 years of age (416,809) enlisted to serve in WWI. Thirty-nine per cent – 60,000 – of them died; 47 per cent, – 152,000 – were wounded.
When the Spanish Flu pandemic struck in 1919 it killed about 15,000 men women and children.
Curtin’s cabinet did not shirk the challenge that had been started by the Menzies Government in 1939, when plans were articulated by some, and met with little enthusiasm by others – including Menzies – for the need to organise government for the restructuring and rebuilding of Australia after the war through the Ministry of Post War Reconstruction.
The men in Curtin’s cabinet, hardened by the horror of WWI, tested and straightened by the Great Depression; chastened by a pandemic, didn’t miss a step when in 1941, they found themselves occupying the government benches.
Just two of their number had university degrees. Bert Evatt as Attorney-General and Minister for External Affairs, often irrational, was an accomplished academic and judge.
John Dedman, Minister for War Organisation of Industry studied economics and engineering at the University of Edinburgh.
That was it, the rest of the cabinet were men who had all been educated in the Australian University of Hard Knocks.
Prime Minister John Curtin left school at 13 and was self-educated and became an accomplished writer and union leader.
CLASSES
Ben Chifley (Treasurer) and later Prime Minister, left school at 16, joined the railways and became an engine driver; he attended night classes to improve his education.
Frank Forde, born in Queensland and qualified as a schoolteacher via the monitorial system, went on to study electronics. In 1941 he became Minister for the Army and Deputy Prime Minister, often standing in for Curtin when he was ill or overseas.
Jack Beasley – always something of a rebel – it took the election of Curtin, also a strong union man to bring him back into the fold and to be rewarded with the vital position of Minister for Supply & Development.
Norman Makin, Minister for Munitions who nearly became a pattern maker oversaw the establishment of new factories to make small arms. Later he became Minister for Aircraft Production, another fledgling industry for a country once dependent on agriculture.
Throughout the Curtin Cabinet there is the thread of a group of “common men”, tied together by their political Party, being called upon to perform extraordinary tasks for their country; history tells us how outstanding and successful they were.
We are constantly reminded that the challenges facing Australia at present are similar to those faced by Australia during and after WWII. Are they? Or is that just an excuse?
Who then are the people of the Labor Party whom we have just elected to get us out of the spiral of ever-increasing national debt and a deteriorating standard of living?
Who are the men and the women, on whom we now rely; what is the experience and the proven capability of those in whom we have placed our faith to stop the deterioration of Australia, to repair the damage done and once again make Australia the envy of the world?
To start with in contrast to the Curtin Cabinet, every member of the Albanese Cabinet has at least one university degree; some have more than one.
In the current Labor cabinet eleven ministers (we should not be surprised!) have a degree in Law; eight (of course) have a degree in – the Arts!
Three have a degree in Business and Commerce; five have a degree in Political Science, International Relations or Government Policy; nobody, nobody has a qualification in accounting or finance; two have a science degree and one a degree in psychology.
There is an uncanny similarity between the academic qualifications of the government and those of Sussan Ley and His Majesties Opposition; both are replete with highly academically qualified people. Both must share the blame for the current state of the nation.
PLASTERED
The Albanese Government and many State Labor governments, replete with men and women with degrees and doctorates plastered over their office walls, are unable to comprehend the very fundamentals of government.
Australia is now a country with a rapidly escalating debt federally and in the States; a standard of living which is falling when in the rest of the OECD it is rising; real household income has fallen by six per cent since 2022.
Some say this is the biggest fall in the standard of living in the developed world.
Disposable income is two per cent lower than pre-pandemic levels. While in the OECD it has risen by 7.7 per cent.
Australian governments, unconcerned at the consequences and for their own fiscal benefit, have allowed the population to increase by 2.76m in the past five years, from 25.6 in 2020 to 27.6 in March 2025.
Most of that growth has been in the past four years under the Albanese Government.
The price of a house is now beyond the means of many and the wait list for rental houses is massive and grows by 20 per cent a year. The health service is underfunded and severely strained; new hospitals are a thing of the past.
The NDIS has become an uncontrollable behemoth costing as much or more that Medicare at over $40 billion a year.
Aged care is underfunded and the old in Australia are beginning to feel they are forgotten people.
Australia is living beyond its means and faces structural challenges unimaginable 20 years ago.
WWII forced Australia to change from a country dependent on its rural industries to a country that could increasingly provide and fend for itself.
It was forced into building new industries to play its part in the war effort. It is little appreciated these days that between 1939 and 1945 Australian dockyards built at least sixty corvettes, eight River Class frigates and fifteen Fairmile motor launches; there were thirty-nine ships under construction when the war ended in August 1945.
FIGHTER
Australia also became an aircraft manufacturer building both the Australian designed Boomerang fighter and the American Beauford bomber.
Ipswich became the centre for the manufacture of shells, grenade casing and barrels for the 25-pounder gun. Other factories produced millions of rounds of small arms munitions and casings.
There was a fledgling electronics industry building radar. Large lathes were brought to Australia and the people learned how to make (and repair) engines and gearboxes from scratch.
Now 70 years later it takes years of political pondering to make decisions on whether or not Australia is capable of change to meet the needs of today when our forebears, most of whom left school at fourteen, showed the world what a fledging nation could do with its back to the wall.
At the end of the war, with a population of just 7.3m, plans were formulated by the Curtin and then Chifley governments to absorb back into Australian life more than 600,000 service personnel and 200,000 employed in war industries.
Unemployment, the big fear of the Chifley Government, was unfounded. In 1946 the Commonwealth Employment Services had vacancies for 22,000 men and 31,000 women.
In 1945 the Commonwealth Housing Commission identified a need for 700,000 new homes.
Despite materials and skills shortages and the difficulties facing the economy of this nation after a world war, the Commonwealth Government led by both Chifley of the ALP and Menzies of the Liberal Party, built 670,000 homes in the ten years to 1955.
On March 11 this year the World Socialist Web Site told Australia that the federal Labor Government had been forced to admit that virtually no homes were built under its Housing Australia Future Fund (HAAF) three years after promoting the program as part of its 2022 election platform.
What has gone wrong when this once proud nation can no longer meet the basic internationally recognised right of all people to have a home, a roof over their head, privacy, peace and quiet?
The answer is quite simple. Those who have been elected to power by the Australian people over the past quarter of a century, since the Howard and Costello years of recovery and surplus, have been incompetent.
Under Albanese and his cabal of socialist sycophants and blue-sky idealists the level of total and absolute incompetence and worthlessness is reaching a climax.
As demonstrations against excessive migration have spread from Europe and clashed with those of the anti-Jewish far Left supporting terrorism, Australia needs leadership and, like Mother Hubbard, we find the cupboard is bare.PC
