The almost-certain election call today by PM Anthony Albanese is just the latest iteration of his biggest problem: reacting, not leading. At the least, with the 2023 Voice referendum Albanese lost for good whatever modicum of authority he’d ever had. Although not as immediately deadly as Brexit was for the UK’s David Cameron, the referendum loss was a slow-acting poison for Albanese’s prime ministership and the Labor government. Ever since, Albanese has given every impression of being helplessly hostage to events.
His election timing is just more of the same. First, he left the election to the last minute, then a storm in Queensland put the kybosh on his preferred date a few weeks ago. Now, he just looks panicked, noising an election announcement just days after a budget squib from Jim Chalmers.
Anthony Albanese’s declaration that the election will be called “soon” – and the expectation that soon will be Friday for May 3 - risks looking like a vote of no confidence in Jim Chalmers’ budget and panic at Peter Dutton’s reply.
By contrast, the referendum was the making of Peter Dutton. Ever since, he’s repeatedly set the political narrative, rarely putting a foot wrong. If anything, his only real mistake is, of late, growing more timid. Perhaps he’s saving the big guns for the election campaign – in which case, he better have the powder and shot ready.
The unrushed tradition for a pre-election budget is to deliver the budget and then spend at least a week selling the good news across the nation using all the advantages of incumbency.
Calling an election on Friday immediately starts the campaign and puts the Opposition Leader on an equal standing.
But beyond the logistics the political view will be that the budget has bombed, the criticism from economists and industry about the long-term outlook is correct and that the big surprise tax cuts of $5 a week in 2026 have been dismissed and derided as a cup of coffee in a year’s time.
It also looks like Dutton’s budget-in-reply speech – not even delivered until Thursday night – with a halving of petrol excise meaning a saving of about $40 on a tank of petrol now has trumped the tax cuts.
It’s also an unwritten rule of Aussie elections that you don’t call it so a campaign covers big sporting events or holidays. It makes you look dodgy and weak, like you’re trying to spend a week or so hiding from scrutiny. Albo’s last-minute election encompasses both the Anzac Day and Easter holidays. Of all the holidays Labor could besmirch with politics, those are the last two they’d want to.
And, having splurged tens of billions in new policy announcements in the last two weeks, it begs the question of just what Labor have left to campaign on.
You know Australia is governed by intellectual pygmies when we have a Treasurer who thinks a tax cut worth 70c a day is worth suspending the parliament for in an attempt to wedge the opposition as he presides over $1 trillion of debt and a budget written in the red ink of forever deficits.
Alongside his jelly-backed boss Anthony Albanese and colleagues such as the energy-wrecker Chris Bowen, this really is the worst government we have ever had. In history.
This week’s budget should be the Albanese government’s epitaph: the final headstone document to bury a government that has broken promises, squandered billions in a vote-buying spree, torched our social cohesion over the voice referendum and its lack of action over anti-Semitism, opened the migration floodgates and destroyed our energy security – not to mention presiding over an 8 per cent plus drop in our living standards that the OECD confirms is the worst in the developed world.
So, what will Labor campaign on? They’ve already started playing that hand: a rehash of a cover version of a warmed-up leftover of ‘Mediscare’. It didn’t work in 2016, and it’s looked sillier and sillier every time Labor tried it on again in subsequent campaigns. If this is all they’ve got, they’re toast.
The challenge for Peter Dutton is giving voters a credible alternative. Not just on economics, but on the whole Culture War edifice. The Voice referendum was called ‘the world’s first referendum on wokeness’ and it was a resounding victory for the sensible centre. Donald Trump’s second coming was the world’s second referendum on wokeness, and it was a sweeping victory that won Republicans the presidency, the House and the Senate – and a slew of governorships.
In 2013, Tony Abbott won a landslide victory (which he duly squandered, but that’s another story), becoming one of just a handful of Liberal leaders to win government from opposition. He did it, not by playing the ‘I-can’t-believe-it’s-not-Labor’ ‘moderate’ gambit, but by resolutely opposing the left.
And on no less than on their holy grail: climate cultism.
The effective collapse of our only manufacturer of structural steel at Whyalla is the inevitable consequence of the inexorable climb in power prices and our progressive deindustrialisation as successive governments since Kevin Rudd bought the con that climate change was the greatest moral challenge of our time. Try telling that to the Ukrainians, the Israelis or the Taiwanese.
But since the departure of Tony Abbott, every prime minister has nodded to the Greta Thunberg view of the world […]
Then there’s immigration, which averaged just over 100,000 a year in the Howard era, escalated to more than 200,000 a year in the decade to the pandemic, and has averaged 400,000 a year since then.
Dutton’s made a good start by spruiking nuclear as the obvious solution to Australia’s energy problems. Show he really means it, by rejecting the Climate Cult loudly and openly and promising to slash immigration – and follow through on it – and Dutton will walk it in.
The only question is: does he have the guts to dare and win?
