No One Believes a Thing He Says

As former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern knows only too well, when the voters turn on a government, they turn hard. From media/poll darling, Ardern suddenly found herself being routinely heckled and jeered wherever she went. Even today, Ardern keeps a vanishingly low profile in New Zealand and has been spotted shopping for real estate in Australia’s millionaire enclaves (oh, well, there’s one Kiwi, at least, who won’t be making a beeline from the airport to the Manly Centrelink office).

As former Australian PM Kevin Rudd found, a few years before Ardern, record-high opinion polling is no barrier to a precipitous plunge into public ignominy. At his height, Rudd had opinion poll numbers even Ardern could only dream of – until he became a one-man punchline. While current Australian PM Anthony Albanese has many things in common with Ardern, and few of them good, popularity has never been one of them. His fall from what little grace he ever had is even more calamitous.

Albanese has long slipped past the point where anything he or his government do is greeted only with jeers.

Anthony Albanese has been met with jeers at the Bush Summit after claiming he understood concerns about the impact of the renewables rollout on the regions.

In Dubbo this week, the prime minister was asked what he’d say to a woman whose rural property is about to be sandwiched on three sides by five-metre solar panels: foreign-owned, built by foreign workers and feeding a work camp that doesn’t even spend a dollar in town. To the satisfaction of absolutely no one, Albanese claimed that “I get it”. What he actually got was a co-ordinated chorus of raspberries.

Of course they jeered. “I get it” is the last refuge of a man who manifestly doesn’t. The woman in question isn’t being consulted. She’s being told to shut up. That is the renewables rollout in the regions: a carpet of imported panels, imported labour and imported contempt, laid over productive land by people who will never have to look at it.

Albanese doubled down. Nuclear “didn’t stack up”.

“Find me an investor who’s prepared to invest in it and then we’ll take it seriously.”

There’d be plenty, if we didn’t have a government and an activist-industrial complex relentlessly dedicated to throwing every regulatory and tax roadblock in its path. Albanese’s clueless arrogance is all of a piece with the same government that has spent a decade poisoning the investment climate with moratoria, subsidies and net-zero edicts. It was the Howard government that imposed the nuclear ban, he added, as if such pathetic buck-passing is any sort of excuse. Or that the decades of Labor and Green sabotage were a footnote.

The same week, the mask slipped on the other great Albanese confidence trick: energy. Queensland and the Northern Territory have just won a carve-out from Canberra’s attempt to force the $150 billion data-centre boom onto “100 per cent renewables”. Data centres – the factories of the AI age – may tap coal and gas. Bowen had threatened constitutional override. Premier Crisafulli and Chief Minister Finocchiaro told him to get stuffed. The National cabinet folded.

This is not a policy tweak. It is an admission. The machines that will run the next economy cannot live on the weather. Intermittent wind and solar cannot power a modern, high-tech society. When the servers are hungry, even Labor’s own states reach for coal and Beetaloo gas. The net-zero priesthood will call it a “transition fuel”. The rest of us call it reality.

On immigration, the pattern is identical.

Assistant Foreign Minister Matt Thistlethwaite says Labor’s long-awaited migration crackdown – expected to focus on international students and their family members, six-month visa visitors and onshore visa applications – will aim to get the “balance right”.

No one believes him. Why would they?

Albanese can say anything he likes about migration – his track record speaks louder. Even when the official target is already at record highs, the actual intake unfailingly exceeds it – sometimes nearly doubles it. Budget papers underestimated net overseas migration by more than 350,000 people across his first term. Peak NOM hit 556,000 in a single year. More than a thousand net arrivals a day. The ‘planning level’ is theatre. The overflow is policy.

Farmers need labour, Thistlethwaite says. No, they want wage-slaves who won’t answer back or demand better conditions. Farmers also need houses, hospitals, roads, and a country that still looks like the one they grew up in. Labor has delivered none of them.

The jeers are not a communications failure. They are the verdict. Ardern fled. Rudd became a joke. Albanese doesn’t even realise his own punchline has died faster than if he’d fallen off the stage.

Which he’d only lie had never happened, anyway.