by FRED PAWLE – OF ALL Australia’s vulnerabilities at the moment, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s woefully inadequate understanding of high-stakes gambling is the most dangerous.
As a gambler, PM Albanese is more like the bloke who hits the pokies after a couple of hours of fruitlessly plying a floozie with champagne cocktails at his local pub.
- Trump can see this.
- He’s starting to make it clear that the Australia-US alliance is on thin ice.
- However the cards might fall, Albanese knows at the end of the game he will retire to his cliffside mansion.
He is no Daniel Craig as James Bond in Casino Royale taking millions in a Montenegro poker game from ruthless terrorism financier Le Chiffre and seducing French goddess Vesper into the deal.
But here we are. Albo, with his irrational confidence and telling body language, has found his way onto the highest-roller table in the world.
STAKES
And while the professional players around him are playing for even higher stakes than James Bond ever did – the fate of nations – Albo acts as if it’s for nothing more than Bundy & Cokes and another chance with the floozie in the front bar.
How he got here is as depressingly apparent as his nonchalance. He wormed his way into a safe Labor seat then simply wait.
He cooled his heals as the rest of the contenders had dropped before he assumed the Party leadership just as Labor’s turn to run the government rolled around.
His nonchalance is even easier to explain: he’s playing with our money, not his.
However the cards might fall, he knows at the end of the game he will still retire to his cliffside mansion on the Central Coast of NSW. Why should he care about the losses he incurs?
The timing is perfect for him, and historically catastrophic for us. He’s found himself in a standoff not only with Russian President Vladimir Putin but Donald Trump as well.
Remarkably, he’s raised both of them, unaware that no matter how many favourable cards he’s dealt (not many, if any at all), and how high he raises the stakes, Putin pays the croupier and Trump owns the casino.
Meanwhile, Xi Jinping, not a gambling man, is waiting in the alley to mug him for spare change as he stumbles home.
This gambling analogy is not a random one. It’s the way Trump sees this situation too.
“You don’t have the cards right now,” he told Volodymyr Zelensky when Zelensky tried to call the shots in the White House last month.
Trump told him outright that if they did a deal, some good cards would fall his way. The US President could not have been clearer about the advantages of playing a smart hand. But Zelensky wasn’t listening.
Unfortunately for us, neither was Albo.
So let’s see which chips Albo has piled into the pot and what his game plan is.
He’s bet a chunk of our military capability, which could potentially increase to all of it, on Ukraine winning its war against Russia.
As a consequence of that, he’s also gambled our trade relationship with the United States because Trump thinks Ukraine is a losing bet and is naturally antithetical to its allies.
Albo has doubled down on that play by remaining allied to our embarrassment of an ambassador Kevin Rudd, who is like Australia’s own Zelensky – only more gay.
Speaking of military capability, Albo is gambling that away too, by flooding the country with migrants who have little affinity with our culture and history.
MISHMASH
Even if they were prepared to defend the place (and there’s no guarantee they would), our defence forces would be such a mishmash of cultures they’d struggle to agree on what uniform to wear, let alone aim their guns at the same enemy.
The payoff for all this immigration? They artificially grow the economy, so Albo gets to tell us punters we are not in a recession, even as we become poorer and homeless because the migrants have taken our the real estate.
Which leads me to the biggest bet of all – our freedom of speech. Asked recently how to solve the problem of racial tensions in Australia, NSW Premier Chris Minns was unequivocal: more censorship.
The level of censorship in Australia these days would make America’s Founding Fathers, who recognised the centrality of free speech to a thriving society, despair.
In many ways, Australia is now closer to, say, Cuba, than it is to the United States. And each time Minns or some other gormless hack clamps down on our ability to debate the issues that affect us, we get closer to North Korea or Iran.
Trump can see this, and is starting to make it clear that the traditional Australia-US alliance is on thin ice. Why wouldn’t it be?
Albo has all but dared him to throw us under the bus. He can’t see how vulnerable Australia is, but Putin and Xi can.
There is now very little stopping China invading Australia. We are so reliant on imports that China could reduce our already-fractured society to anarchy in the first 24 hours of a naval blockade.
An invasion after that would involve little more than parking a few frigates at Circular Quay and strolling ashore at the same place where Captain Arthur Phillip “invaded” 237 years ago.
This time, though, the indigenous population might not fare so well.
APPEASE
And if China does invade, it won’t be to seize control of our “renewable energy superpower” infrastructure. It will be for the resources that Albo’s Government wants to leave in the ground in order to appease the environmental harridans in its ranks.
These resources, ironically, are infinitely more valuable than the petty chips Albo is throwing on the table to Putin and Trump.
Australia has enough coal, under the current rate of usage, to last 1200 years. We have 28 per cent of the world’s uranium supplies, almost unlimited supplies of gas, abundant oil, millions of hectares of unused land, access to advanced industrial and farming technology, and we are (or were, until recently) one of the oldest, most stable democracies in the world.
Albanese is gambling the nation’s future in a game where the other players see him as a bumbling fool, blissfully unaware that there is nothing he could win that we don’t have already.PC
– Fred Pawle
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