It’s one thing to know that so many politicians are nasty grubs. It’s quite another to see them openly doing it, without a blush of shame. Case in point, our loathsome prime minister.
When the news of the attempted murder of independent MP Helen Haines broke, the PM was straight out the gate with the crocodile tears (as compared to the 24-hour silence he observed before saying anything at all about October 7). An unconvincingly sniffling Anthony Albanese praised Haines as “a beacon of light” and “deeply respected”.
Yet, he was singing from a very different hymn sheet, just a few weeks ago. Not even a hymn sheet: a dirt sheet.
Recently, the Centre for Public Integrity cast a rather harsh, unblinking illumination upon the government’s $560 million Major and Local Community Infrastructure Program. A staggering three-quarters of these supposedly nationwide grants were directed with surgical, partisan precision exclusively into Labor electorates and marginal seats targeted for acquisition. Among the prime beneficiaries of this institutionalised largesse was none other than the Marrickville Golf Club, nestled comfortably within Mr Albanese’s own backyard of Grayndler (in fact, right across the road from one of his many rental properties), which trousered a neat six million dollars for its troubles. The PM duly lied through his teeth about being a member, or indeed ever going there (as you can guess, we have all the receipts proving otherwise).
When independent parliamentarians had the sheer effrontery to demand transparency and point out that merit-based allocations had been discarded in favour of barefaced electoral bribery, the political establishment grew rather testy. Haines did not mince her words regarding the affair, offering an assessment that struck uncomfortably close to the bone:
“Sports rorts was pork barrelling by deception; this is pork barrelling by design. Australians are increasingly fed up with a self-serving political establishment, and pork barrelling only further undermines trust in government and our democracy.”
But our own Dear Leader is only slightly less thin-skinned than a North Korean despot. Legend has it that a budding young Korean pianist who politely demurred with Kim Jong-Un’s praise was promptly sent to the gulag for contradicting the Dear Leader. Ah, how Albanese must pine for a gulag of his own.
So, how does our dear leader respond to being publicly unmasked as the grand architect of designed rorts? Does he engage in sober policy debate? Does he defend the honour of the Marrickville fairways with dignified prose? Of course not. Instead, the prime ministerial machinery swung into its customary petty, vindictive gear. As subsequent revelations laid bare:
Anthony Albanese’s office circulated a dirt sheet to journalists baselessly raising questions about Helen Haines’ integrity after she criticised a $6million government grant allocated to the prime minister’s local golf course.
One must marvel at the exquisite pettiness of the operation. About a month prior to the tragic assault on Ms Haines outside her Wangaratta office, the prime minister’s loyal courtiers were quietly slipping dossiers to compliant members of the press gallery. The document contained no actual proof of wrongdoing: that minor technicality rarely troubles a determined political hit-job, but gamely invited journalists to dig into whether the independent member had ever accepted a stray bottle of local wine, whether she had personal connections to a regional art gallery board, or whether she and her spouse had dared to utilise ski lift passes at Mount Buller while advocating for regional tourism infrastructure (presuming, of course, they could squeeze in between Albanese’s own minister, Anika Wells’, endless parade of family members whooping it up at ski resorts on the taxpayer dime). It was the sort of desperate, scraping-at-the-bottom-of-the-barrel tactic usually reserved for student union factional warfare, designed entirely to intimidate a critic into silence.
Yet the overarching hypocrisy of the affair is breathtaking. For five solid weeks, Mr Albanese and his minions orchestrated a targeted whispering campaign against Ms Haines simply because she had the spine to expose their pork-barrel calculus. Then, the moment a horrific act of violence thrust her into the headlines, the prime minister seamlessly transitioned from shadowy political operative to grief-stricken statesman, shedding theatrical tears before the cameras while hoping the electorate would conveniently forget the grubby dossier he had authored.
It’s a masterclass in political duplicity. They plot against you in the shadows, compile unverified smears for the press and then weep over your hospital bed for the six o’clock news.
(Notably, too, the PM’s narrative around the would-be killer is already shifting gears faster than a learner driver grinding a manual transmission to splinters. Now that it’s emerged that the perpetrator is a rabidly anti-Israel environmentalist, the new orthodoxy is ‘mental health’. As if being a leftist and a loony are mutually exclusive, rather than co-morbidities.)
