Could the Albanese Government be a one term government?
The odds are shortening (no pun intended). Shortening considerably. If they are that bad – and they are – perhaps we might have a fresh candidate in the ongoing debate about who our worst ever prime minister has been. Unfortunately, there have been very few recent candidates for the title of best ever PM. Menzies, Hawke and Howard are pretty safe at or near the top, and that doesn’t look like changing any time soon.
(Utterly without foundation, Billy McMahon is often regarded as the worst. There have been far worse national leaders than Billy).
https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2019/04/a-good-word-for-billy-mcmahon-in-no-way-our-worst-pm/
We could think of “worst ever PM” in a number of ways. Did he or she do disastrous things for the nation? Dangerous things? Evil things? Did he or she not do things that were absolutely needed? Being a bit silly on occasions doesn’t really qualify. Even the best make serious errors. (Famously, John Stone at a Quadrant dinner was twenty minutes into a speech lauding Howard as our greatest ever PM before he got to the good bits). Being in office for a long time suggests high quality, so being in office for a short time might suggest the opposite. Losing an election massively might be an indicator of low leader standing, but needn’t be. Being replaced early on by your own party can swing both ways. Rudd deserved it; Abbott didn’t.
Yes, it is still early days, but Albanese’s candidature is already a thing.
Albanese – let us dispense with nicknames, unless they are intended to insult; calling Morrison ScoMo only made it worse, on reflection – was recently called a “midwit” in Quadrant.
https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2023/05/the-midwit-shallowness-of-anthony-albanese/
A midwit is someone just intelligent enough to be dangerous. The description could work in this case. But does it explain the full deal?
Albanese, a minor spear-carrier of the old left who has transitioned to the new left without ever really understanding the precepts or implications of either – is that rare breed of politician. Stupid AND dangerous. He is yet another Chauncey Gardener, the accidental leader of whom people wonder, just how the heck did HE reach the top? Let’s face it, he is only there because the repulsive, credibly accused rapist Bill Shorten couldn’t even beat Scotty from Robodebt in 2019. He lost the unlosable election. Morrison became the least expected miracle man in history. Albanese had already decided on an impossibly small target strategy for 2022 when Covid came along, and saved him from the effort of doing anything at all. He rode the Covid scare campaign to the beach, and simply waited for the inevitable, popular exhaustion of the Liberals to take full effect.
Albanese didn’t do a thing to win government. And it shows. All of his ideas are bad. He picked lunatics like Bowen to lead critical portfolios. He simply doesn’t understand the first thing about economics. And, far more worryingly, he doesn’t think he has to. He is sending the country down the drain with his net zero madness. He has no empathy for normal people. Heterosexuals in suburbia. As many observers have noted, he shows no empathy for those who are struggling with a cost-of-living crisis. If anything, he seems to be going out of his way to worsen it.
He stood by and watched Morrison destroy our country during Covid. His only response during our suicide rush – including the one trillion dollar spend to fight a virus that no government could actually ever hope to control – was, go harder! He has broken his promise to hold a Royal Commission into the Covid response. He ignores the vaccine injured. The excess deaths. The lingering, sinister, totalitarian habits of 2020-22. He hasn’t read his Hannah Arendt. (Has he ever read anything of import?)
Now he is simply finishing the job started by his predecessor.
He is willing to throw the country under the bus with his Voice madness. So that he can claim the mantle of Whitlam and wear a big hat at the same time. It seems that is all he has.
Have endless selfies taken, with people more interesting than him. This is an annoying habit in a prime minister. The fewer selfies with successful people, the better. You shouldn’t have to need them, mate. It worked for Bob Hawke because people actually liked him. And Hawke led a first-rate government. A serious government. Which did things to improve the nation and avoided doing things that would do us harm.
Dangerous? Just look at the unspeakable ministry of truth legislation. Australia will be turned into a dystopian free speech free zone. On his watch. He either doesn’t understand, or doesn’t care.
https://politicom.com.au/albanese-unleashes-ministry-of-truth/
He has no centrist instincts. Only neo-marxist textbooks and the adulation of progressive gnomes and Canberra bureaucrats on the make.
He is boringly woke. I am not sure, but I think he was raised by a single mother in a housing commission estate. He might just have mentioned that, once or twice. That doesn’t remotely qualify him for our support, as it happens.
Foreign affairs? Well, appointing Wenny Pong wasn’t a great start. Now he is lining up with the Palestinian terrorists against Israel. He is reflexively sucking up to China, which already owns most of the country. He is linking us with the Western suicide mission in Ukraine. Talk about Howard being America’s deputy sheriff. At least Howard was aligned with a vaguely sane US President.
Immigration? He hasn’t a clue. Let’s import gazillions of foreigners to save our paralytic economy. That is the beginning, middle and end of his “strategy”. Put them all in our “global cities”, in the gerry-built skyscrapers erected by dodgy building companies now going broke. New urbanism! Albanese is up for it. It solves an immediate problem. Done and dusted. And if it delivers an even more multi-culti demographic profile, all to the good.
Once the fictional Sir Humphrey Appleby wondered whether his underling Bernard Woolley was, as assumed, “a high flying bureaucrat” or merely “a low flying bureaucrat supported by occasional gusts of wind”. Well, maybe we have a low flying prime minister supported by occasional gusts of left-wing ideology and the insouciance of a low-information electorate ill-equipped to discern the dangers that he is posing.
All in all, Anthony Albanese, the boy apparatchik with nary a modicum of real-world experience, has achieved in even less time than Whitlam a near total destruction of a nation that was already on the big slide as a result of Liberal mayhem. And back then, we had a Liberal opposition that was able to see the depth and the breadth of the threats that Labor was posing.
Albanese slithered into office with barely a third of the primary vote and no mandate to destroy the place. He has done very little to convince anyone other than the Marrickville class that he deserves any increase in those numbers. We live, alas, in unserious times. This only increases the importance of having serious governance. We do not have it.
The worst ever? It is way too early to tell, but the signs, to date, are clear, and they ain’t reassuring.
Paul Collits
9 August 2023
I am forever astounded at the moronic out of touch statements and speeches the prime minister makes.
No matter for whom you vote, a politician gets in.