by ROGER CROOK – THIS Federal Election play has been inflicted on us many times before – the only thing that changes are the players. The plot always remains the same.
The build-up to electing the next Australian government is a tragedy; it is a play in four Acts – each lasting a week – before the final scene on May 3, which can’t come soon enough.
- At what point does the law of the land have the power to intervene.
- Or do we just accept lying as part of political life in Australia?
- We don’t have a leader – or an aspiring leader – with the fortitude to be brutally honest.
Let us be done with this farce.
The pork barrels are the props, and they never wear out; a coat of paint and a polish and they’re good for many a year yet.
ACTOR
For the past three years I have watched the lead actor Anthony Albanese, for that is what he is, an actor, as he and his Labor cast of phonies blithely put our country into poverty.
I listen to them as they tell lies, just like last time; in reality, there is no such thing as their version of the truth; there is just the truth and there are lies.
In Queensland this morning, in a broadcast available to the nation Mr Albanese told bare-faced terminological inexacitudes (Winston Churchill’s definition of a lie).
What’s more, he smiled at the Australian people while he did so.
What is it about socialists both here and in America who, without compunction, claim that their conservative opposition will destroy, what they claim, is their socialist health care?
What does society say to the young about a political Party which deliberately, with malice, has set about frightening the old, the frail and the gullible into voting for them, when they know what they claim is a lie?
What is the true character of a person who will lie to maintain or gain office? What is the true character of a political Party that supports and propagates the fabrications, the lies and fibs their leaders utter?
At what point does the law of the land have the power to intervene – or do we just accept lying as part of political life in Australia today?
Truth is the foundation on which our society has been built; it is the cornerstone that separates the honest from the dishonest; the good from the bad; from the very beginning we tell our children it is the law, which they must accept.
Yet there is mounting evidence that those who have gained political power; those who have gained governance over the rest of us, have done so by not telling the truth, by lying, in the past and in the present.
When did we start casually accepting that those who seek to govern us will use lies to achieve their ends?
If the past three years have taught us anything it is that treasury and the national accounts are treated as play money by Labor.
Between 2022 and 2025 Australia’s nation debt has increased to about $720b.
This current Labor government estimates that the national debt will increase to $744b in 2026.
In spite of that debt, Labor is making promises of spending more money, which, again, they will have to borrow.
Labor is incurring more debt; debt that our children and grandchildren will have to pay off.
According to the polls out this morning, some people believe that more debt is good and they will vote for it.
PAIN
Why have none of those who seek to lead this country told the people about the debt that they and their predecessors have incurred; and having done that, told us how they are going to fix it and the short-term pain that will cause?
It’s because we do not have a leader or an aspiring leader with the intestinal fortitude to be brutally honest with the people of Australia.
We need a leader who will tell the people the truth. Someone with the strength of character tell the people of Australia that we are living well beyond our means, and it must stop if we are to avoid Paul Keating’s prediction of Australia becoming a banana republic.
The story of modern Australia, the Australia of 2025 and facing a federal election, is told in the passage of time; it is told in the lifetime of many of us from when our self-belief was so strong that we knew we could beat the world at anything, including the English at cricket; and did.
To where we are now, a place where I see nothing but mountains of debt and a people becoming increasingly disheartened, lacking in aspiration, and in some places a distinct absence of national pride.
The rapid escalation in cost of living and the loss of real value in the income of our lowest paid workers is putting great strain on them and their families.
Meanwhile those in leafy green suburbs believe they can save the world by voting for a not-quite Labor Party; a Party that has the name of a duck, both chestnut and grey. (If it looks like one, walks like one, if it sounds like one, then it must be.)
The aged, my cohort, are feeling more than a little lost and disheartened; wondering what has happened to the country they spent a lifetime building?
The pension has lost value; a fact largely unrecognised by this government of all governments, a Labor government.
No longer do Labor seem to be the Party of the blue collar worker, the working man and woman, the aged, the frail and the disenfranchised.
Labor is now the Party of the elites, the academics, the wealthy civil servants and the doctors’ wives from the leafy suburbs. Those factions have joined with old Labor people of yesteryear, the dyed-in-the-wool socialists who would rather perish than vote for the Coalition.
In the past, real leaders in Australia have emerged from the ranks of their political Party – but only after a spell in our world, the real world.
The last of them were probably John Howard and, of course, Bob Hawke; Tony Abbott made it but was politically assassinated by his own Party in an act of pure bastardry.
In his place we got a Labor-lite Malcolm Bligh Turnbull, a fitting middle name for a man who time has shown to be nasty and vindictive in office and unremittingly treacherous out of it.
Where should we look for the inspiration we need as a nation to drag us out of this bog of debt and development torpor, which consumes us?
Should we explore earlier times in our history for the inspiration we so badly need today to turn Australia around? Where should we look and what kind of person should we look for?
To the pioneers who brought Australia together with the Australian Constitution? To Henry Parkes or Edmond Barton; or are both so unknown to the majority of young and new Australians today to make our reference to them meaningless?
Should we look to Curtin, Chifley and Menzies? How they steered this country through war and peace?
TRAUMA
How they planned during war for a massive re-build of the nation after war; they knew what Australia would face after years of war and trauma and planned to fix it.
What courage of conviction, what confidence to start the planning that laid the foundations of modern Australia, all while the nation fought to survive?
There was a time when our leaders were men and women with an experience of life, the life that the ordinary people lead.
Chifley had been a train driver and a union man; he didn’t use the Lodge except for official functions, he preferred Hotel Kurrajong and walking to work every morning.
He smoked his pipe in his office and regularly set fire to his waste paper basket. They always had a jug of water on his desk.
His weekends, whenever he could, were spent back in his modest cottage close to the railyards in Bathurst. He was known to wander down-town to catch up with the local gossip and meet his mates; no harbour views for him.
Or should we look for our inspiration to the average Australian man and woman? Starting with the pioneers who cleared the land and built the railways, roads, bridges, and ports; who mined the gold and designed and built the State capitals, schools and universities.
Or should we look for inspiration to those who in the 1960s who had lived through WWI and mourned the many dead; who had survived the Great Depression, the soup kitchens, and the unemployment, and then without time to gather breath had endured the Spanish flu pandemic and then six years of WWII?
Or should we look to those of that generation who lived in rural Australia, who continued to clear the land and grow wheat, wool, and meat; the fruit and the vegetables that kept the population alive and gave the nation an income?
Or should we look to ourselves in 2025 and ask ourselves what is it that we want for our nation and for ourselves? Remember what John F Kennedy said in his inaugural address in 1961: “Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.”
TRUTH
The truth is the first casualty in an election. The incumbents don’t want the truth told so they invariably tell lies about what they have achieved and fail to reveal to the voters, what their election promises will cost if they are re-elected.
Elections in Australia are not a contest of ideas, nor are they a debate about the strategic direction the country must take to secure its future in a restless world.
They become a contest of who has the shiniest beads, the best tobacco and the sharpest axes to give away to the gullible natives.
If ever an opposition, if ever the leaders of the Liberal Party and the National Party needed a conversation starter and a ready-made critique of the incumbent Labor Government, then it is in the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) analysis of the Australian Bureau of Statistics data published for the December quarter of 2024 which shows:
- Australians experienced the first two-year per capita economic contraction in 41 years. The last time the personal economy contracted for two successive years was in 1982-83.
- Australians are $5400 worse off as real GDP per capita has fallen behind the pre-pandemic growth trend during the term of the Albanese Government.
- While GDP per capita increased by less than 0.1 per cent in the quarter, it declined by 0.7 per cent in 2024.
- GDP per capita has declined in eight of the ten full quarters of the Albanese Government, equating to two full years of declining living standards and economic wellbeing.
Those details, properly communicated to all Australians by a competent Opposition, would surely be enough for them to question the direction the Labor Government has taken them and Australia.
Then, a concise and achievable policy to right the wrongs; together with a short, medium and long-term strategy to restore and then improve the standard of living and economic well being of all Australians, including the inevitable short-term pain of change, is in my view a challenge, which all Australians would accept.
I wonder if His Majesties Opposition has the courage to keep it simple? PC
Either we hold our noses for Dutton, or we buy ourselves another three years of Albo.
Dutton has at least evidenced spine, as Immigration minister. It’s more than PM Clueless can claim.
The simple answer is, no. Dutton is a gutless squish without a spine or balls.
The less praise about the truly appalling John Howard the better. Spiteful little gun grabber, responsible for much of what is wrong now.