The Albanese Government's Death Spiral: The Loss of All Credibility
By John Stapleton
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese will be touring Australia this week promoting the "Vote Yes" campaign for the Referendum for constitutional recognition of an Indigenous Voice to Parliament, prior to the vote this coming Saturday, 14 October.
Problematic from the beginning, the government's heavy promotion of The Voice has left the country deeply divided. While government placards "Vote Yes" adorn polling centres and the front yards of Labor loyalists, the latest polls show some two thirds of the population hostile to the notion. With the dramatic collapse of support for The Voice has come a corresponding decline in the standing of both the government and the Prime Minister's. The knives are already out. Politics is a blood sport.
Albanese will be losing yet more support and credibility every time he opens his mouth. He has been uttering the same platitudinous phrases for months, "closing the gap", "an Indigenous young male has a greater chance of going to jail than university", "there is nothing to fear", "this should be above politics", "bringing Australians together".
And now that he is suffering savage reputational damage thanks to his mismanagement of the Referendum campaign, the more Albanese talks the worse things get. Now, as he plants himself in front of another screen television cameras, his colleagues are beginning to shift uncomfortably behind him, defeat written in their faces.
Sinking into Quicksand. What Voice All Of Us?
The prolonged, divisive and extremely expensive Voice campaign, costing beleaguered taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars, has, after the tyranny and incompetence of the Covid years, left an already suspicious population more than willing to turn on their government, the manufacturers of their discontent.
Without a Bill of Rights there is no freedom of speech and no freedom of assembly written into the Australian constitution, but Albanese has blown all his political capital on a niche issue championing the cause of some three per cent of the population. Rather than being swept up with the emotionalism surrounding The Voice debate, Albanese has been met with a "hotbed of indifference" from a population struggling with an extreme cost of living crisis, with the spiralling cost of virtually everything becoming a central talking point across the nation.
If not straight out dishonest, the claim that the majority of indigenous Australians support "The Voice" has proved entirely questionable. Like most Australians, the indigenous are confused over exactly what "The Voice" would actually entail, and there have been loud calls to reject the proposal from a significant number of indigenous leaders.
Black against black. White against white. White against black. Black against white. This whole putrid episode needs to be put to bed. And Albanese needs to resign. Or apologise. Unfortunately humility and self-awareness are not in the Prime Minister's personal repertoire.
Blind Freddy could have told you that holding a Referendum giving one section of the population special attention over others, based on their skin colour, would rapidly degenerate into a race baiting quagmire. A white male politician exploiting the indigenous population for political advantage looks tacky. And is tacky.
There are so many examples of the utter disaster of the Voice campaign. Here's just one from the past week. At a public event attended by the Prime Minister aging television presenter Ray Martin, looking every bit his 78 years, described those who were going to vote "No" as "dinosaurs and dickheads". The Prime Minister described Martin's speech as "powerful". That is, the nation's leader insulted more than half the Australian population in yet another "deplorables moment".
In a long string of deplorable moments stretching back months.
It's no wonder the public are totally and utterly fed up with the whole shemozzle.
No one likes to be on the losing side of an argument, and the hundreds of millions of dollars squandered on the campaign, the "Vote Yes" and "I'm Voting Yes" placards, now look increasingly idiotic, and downright sad.
But that's only the beginning of Albanese's problems; and his manifest failures.
You Couldn't Lie Straight in Bed Mate
After 11 cash rate rises in a row from the Reserve Bank of Australia, mortgage payers, many of them with young families and already struggling, have been forced to find on average an extra $1250 a month.
Encouraged to borrow and invest in their own homes, a significant number now find themselves seriously struggling to make ends meet.
Albanese, while oozing fake empathy for the nation's indigenous population, has ignored multiple crises impacting households across the country; the spiralling cost of petrol, electricity, mortgage payments and groceries impacting voters exactly where it hurts the most: in their wallets Middle income families have lost out big time.
The entire nation is falling below the plimsol line, while, an ever-ready beer in hand, all Albanese can talk about is "The Voice" and the historic opportunity it provides. Right. An historic opportunity for him to be kicked out of the ball park and disappear into the nation's deeply disappointing political history.
A multi-millionaire who, for political advantage, celebrates his humble origins as the son of a single mother, in reality a childhood a damn sight better than many Australian children are experiencing in 2023, has been on the public tit his entire life.
He joined the Labor Party as a student, and before entering Parliament worked as a party official and research officer. He has never had to run his own business or pick up a shovel.
While a housing crisis afflicts the country, rents have run out of reach of many working people and large numbers live on the edge of homelessness, Albanese lives in a 40 room mansion, The Lodge, in Canberra, set in landscaped gardens. And to add insult to injury, Albanese is himself an absentee landlord, pocketing according to news reports more than $100,000 in rents on top of his already magnificent salary.
His puzzling, almost pathological lack of empathy for the struggles of ordinary working Australians, is evident in his every gesture. The behaviour can be partially explained by his wealth, and by the fact that he is surrounded by well paid public servants and his equally well paid political colleagues.
Australian Politics. Nasty, Shallow, Talentless, Vindictive.
The cracks aren't just showing in the façade of the Australian Labor Party , they're turning into gulches running every which way across the Australian political landscape.
In the early days of his power tripping reign the suggestion that Albanese would become as unpopular as his despised predecessor Scott Morrison was met with disbelief.
Now there's one common sentiment amongst a largely news averse and disenchanted population: "Albanese will lose the next election."
And you can bet your last dollar some of the most senior female politicians in the Labor ranks, known collectively and colloquially as "the mean girls", are already circling.
You don't have to be a genius to know that Foreign Minister Penny Wong would dearly like to be the first Asian born lesbian Prime Minister in Australian History.
Equally, former Deputy Leader of the Labor Party Tanya Plibersek and a former rival for the Labor leadership is still likely to be smarting from her demotion to the lowly position of Environment Minister; her self assessment no doubt being that virtue signalling over koalas is well beneath her skill set.
It is simply a matter of which one will stab Albanese through the chest, and which one will stab him in the back. And how soon they will do it.
And the old saying, the left eat their own, will come true as we see another episode of The Cannibalisation of Prime Ministers Down Under, the country already being well known for changing its Prime Ministers with remarkable alacrity. Everybody in politics loves a winner. And Albanese is no longer winning.
Net Zero. A Big Fat Zero.
There is only one reason Anthony Albanese is Prime Minister of Australia, he's not Scott Morrison. It certainly wasn't Albanese's grace, wit, charm, eloquence, intelligence, scholarship or charisma, all of which he lacks.
The odious presence of Morrison, Prime Minister from 2018 to 2022, cast a dank pall over the entire nation. Morrison's disastrous mismanagement during the Covid era, including an appalling reign of censorship, media manipulation, authoritarian excesses and the mass vaccination of the nation's children, continues to reverberate in millions of people's lives.
That Morrison quadrupled the national debt and blew tens of billions of dollars on unnecessary programs which enriched the Big End of Town while destroying thousands of small businesses is a legacy which will ultimately spill down the generations.
For more than a year, Albanese, who came to power in May of 2022, enjoyed unprecedented high polling and one of the most extended honeymoon in Australian political history. He has managed to blow his entire political capital on The Voice is testament to his deaf ear, the serial incompetence of his government, and the Labor Party's hostage to outdated ideological obsessions.
Good will has evaporated.
No one is better off after almost a year and a half of Anthony Albanese in the top job. Well, maybe high end bureaucrats, Australia's pampered public servants and the Very Big End of Town. No one else.
The commoners, the peasants, the proletariat: They are seething. Or dismissive. While Albanese has been pushing the abstract notion of The Voice, eulogising and mythologising the nation's indigenous as the worlds "oldest living culture", on the ground and in the suburbs the mood has turned entirely sour.
Promises promises. Bulldust Bulldust.
The promises made to the Australian electorate prior to the last election now all look like a sick joke. Anthony Albanese promised to change Australia "for the better" by providing cheaper childcare, power bills, electric vehicles, medicines and mortgages.
Two months prior to his election in May of 2022 Albanese addressed the Australian parliament thus: "My fellow Australians. Working together, we can build a better future. An economy with stronger wages and more secure work. Investing in Australian skills, jobs, and manufacturing. Backing clean energy and building new infrastructure across the country.
"Taking pressure off the cost of living by making child care and power bills cheaper. Protecting Medicare. Building more affordable housing. Fixing the crisis in aged care. Building an economy that works for people, not the other way around. This is the vision I want to share with you."
What an utter mess his prime ministership has turned into. Petrol prices are over $2 a litre, adding huge pressure to the family budget and having a contracting impact throughout the economy. Power bills have also soared, the promise of cheaper electricity under a Labor government an outright lie; or to use the current vernacular, "disinformation".
This year alone, from July 1, electricity prices have increase between 19.6 per cent and 23.9 per cent in New South Wales, South Australia and south-east Queensland.
Australian politicians don't regard their extravagant promises made during an election campaign as dishonesty, they simply think of it as politics. Anything to win. The public think of it as lying.
Destroying the Australian Culture
Albanese is waging war on the Australian people on multiple fronts.
Not least of these is on the issue of mass immigration, a policy which greatly benefits the Big End of Town and has always been imposed by the elites on a reticent Australian population. It has now gone into hyperdrive, with numbers increasing to unprecedented levels.
The high number of migrants flooding into the country depresses wages, escalates housing costs, overwhelms the host population and creates enormous social stressors.
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation reports: "Australia's migrant population is expected to have grown by more than 700,000 between the 2022 and 2024 financial years. Australia's net overseas migration (NOM) level, which represents the difference between incoming migrants and outgoing migrants over a 12-month period, is expected to be 400,000 in 2022-23 and 315,000 in 2023-24."
Mr Albanese did not inform the electorate during his election campaign that he would dramatically increase the immigration intake, and it is hard to find any local who thinks this is a good idea. For one simple reason: Albanese knew it would be immensely unpopular. Once in power, he doesn't care.
Platforms of Dissent
The public have many bones to pick with Mr Anthony Albanese, whose sins now stretch across multiple policy fronts. They are far too numerous to mention here, as Albanese railroads dramatic changes to Australia using the blunt wedge of an arrogant and out of touch bureaucracy.
Just one example is family law, where the autocrats and the ancient regime of Palaeolithic feminists inhabiting the Attorney General's Department have been given full reign to weaponise family law against men.
Way back in 1975 the Family Court of Australia was a Labor Party creation championed as a progressive people's court which would take the heat out of family separation. Instead, the entire jurisdiction of family law has been a hotbed of distress, dysfunction and in the blind insanity of its so-called family report writers, the subject of multiple accusations of corruption and bias.
The Labor Party is intent on winding back the extremely modest reforms introduced by the Conservatives during the early years of the 2000s which encouraged involvement of fathers in their children's lives post separation. Now Albanese and his mates are intent on winding family law back to the dark ages where the majority of fathers, the subject of routinely vicious and often blatantly false accusations rarely if ever saw their children again.
Returning to the Gender Wars of the 1970s and 1980s is just another retrograde, backward step by a clueless government out of touch with sentiment on the ground.
The introduction of a "Misinformation" bill, a massive move by government into censorship of the Australian population through the auspices of foreign owned social media companies, is yet another area causing enormous backlash from the electorate, and which the government is doing its utmost to ignore.
The announcement of a faux inquiry into the Covid era, which precludes state border closures, lockdowns and vaccine mandates was an absolute insult to the many hundreds of thousands of Australians who marched and rallied throughout the Covid era; faced with being pepper sprayed and bashed by the police in unprecedented scenes of official violence which made headlines around the world.
An Impoverished Population Cries Out: Enough!!!
Stung by the charge that he has been obsessed with campaigning for The Voice against all other government priorities, Albanese has made a blizzard of other announcements over the last few weeks.
Every last one of them has backfired. And with his credibility shot to pieces after his disastrous mismanagement of The Voice campaign, which he made his signature tune for no other reason than he thought it would wedge the opposition, his critics feel free to launch their attacks.
Albanese comes from a different era, a different style of adversarial politics. Citizens struggling to pay their bills couldn't care less about the daily sledging between politicians of different parties. All the punters know is that they're being taxed into poverty for programs they do not support and which benefit them not a jot.
One of the most egregious, at least in the minds of the public, was the commitment to purchase $368 billion worth of nuclear submarines under the AUKUS partnership over three decades, a deal even some on his own side of politics called the worst ever.
Other sleights of hand on the public purse, or at least the spending of staggering amounts of public money, was Albanese's trip to Ukraine, where he was sandwiched between Boris Johnson and Sean Penn in the queue of celebrities lining up to shake Volodymyr Zelensky's hand. It was a photo opportunity which cost the Australian taxpayer hundreds of millions of dollars in promises of military equipment, all to participate in an American proxy war critics believe we would do well to stay out of.
Albanese can spend hundreds of billions on submarines the public will be lucky to ever see, but cannot bring himself to show a shred of sympathy for the cost of living crisis decimating households across the country.
And in recent days this inept government has managed to inflame the entire east coast of the country, with its announcement that it will build offshore wind farms across thousands of square kilometres; dramatically affecting property prices, destroying an ancient whale migration route and essentially industrialising the coast not for the benefit of the taxpayers footing the bill, but for giant corporations.
No doubt these massive multi billion dollar wind turbine contracts will be Commercial in Confidence. And you can bet the many Labor seats which they border will be very hard for the government to win come the next election; as the public wakes up to the fact that their supposedly environmentally responsible wind farms are a massive money maker for the likes of Bill Gates and his cronies at the World Economic Forum. These people don't fly to Davos in their private jets each year just to virtue signal about climate change, they know there's billions of dollars to be made in this so-called Green Bonanza.
Opposition leader Peter Dutton has rarely been called a "political genius", but his appointment of the Alice Spring's based Jacinta Price as Opposition Indigenous Affairs spokeswoman has been a masterstroke. She has emerged as a powerful conservative voice, touted as a future Prime Minister, and illustrated clearly to the general public that just as with the broader population, there is no common ground among the indigenous either.
The Voice!!!
From coast to coast, Australians are sick to death of it. Just as they are sick to death of Anthony Albanese and his ugly, nasal, insincere accent.
Expect Australian political commentators to use the term, "a fish rots from the head", frequently in the coming weeks. And expect the population to just say "No".
Very informative. Thank you.
Great article John