Australians will soon have the chance to pass judgement on prime minister Anthony Albanese and his Labor government, after nearly three years in office. Earlier this week, the PM announced that a federal election will be held on 3 May.
Few politicians encapsulate the shallowness and hypocrisy of the modern left better than Albanese. Two recent events have borne this out. Back in January, the PM was warned that he risks losing vital seats in New South Wales’s mining regions. His popularity has been plummeting among the thousands of workers employed in the state’s coal industry. Miners, once all but certain to vote Labor, fear that Albanese’s Net Zero zealotry would put industrial jobs like theirs at risk. In an attempt to shore-up support, Albanese flew to the Hunter region, the heartland of Australia’s coal industry, to flaunt a job-saving investment scheme worth $2 billion AUD.
In the same month, Labor hired a prominent advertising firm to help with its inner-city campaigns. Its aim was to convince voters in Sydney that Labor is more ‘green’ than the actual Greens – in other words, the very opposite of what it was telling miners a three-hour drive away. With an increasing share of formerly working-class urban seats now heavily gentrified by the right-on middle classes, the Greens really pose a potent threat to Labor.
Whatever Labor may say to the miners, it has clearly picked a side – the urban and affluent. Despite mining employing hundreds of thousands of Australians and pumping billions of Australian dollars into federal and state governments, this is an industry Albanese is willing to sacrifice in order to get to Net Zero. Nothing will stand in the way of reaching his hallowed target of producing 82 per cent of electricity from renewable sources by 2030. That $2 billion AUD is nothing compared with the $68 billion AUD worth of investment that mining is losing each year thanks partly to green overregulation.
It’s not just miners bearing the brunt of Albanese’s green obsessions. Inflation has risen across the board. Gas prices have increased by more than 50 per cent in four years, effectively killing off what remained of Australia’s manufacturing industry. Albanese will be hoping that old party loyalty will be enough for voters impacted most by these policies to stick with Labor.
Australia is also facing a chronic housing crisis. Home ownership, once the cornerstone of the Australian Dream, has become little more than a pipedream for all but a small minority of under-30s. Still, at least Albanese himself was able to afford a $4million home on the Central Coast. ‘I won’t be prime minister forever’, was his glib justification to reporters when the purchase was revealed last year.
A leading cause of the housing crisis is Australia’s unprecedented levels of immigration. Over Labor’s three years in charge, net migration has reached 1.3million. Net arrivals hit 500,000 in 2023 alone, double the average in the 2010s.
None of this was trailed in Labor’s 2022 manifesto, yet no other policy has had such a large impact on young Australians and families. In a country where roughly 40 per cent of the land is considered uninhabitable, this influx has placed an incredible strain on an already tight housing market. For the first time in Australia’s history, working Australians struggle to even rent a home, let alone buy one.
Aside from generally making life harder for the average Australian, Albanese also managed to score one of the most spectacular own-goals in modern politics – the Indigenous Voice to Parliament referendum in 2023. This was the identitarian plan to create a parallel indigenous parliament to the actual parliament in Canberra.
Just as with mass migration, the Voice was barely a footnote in Labor’s successful 2022 election campaign. Nevertheless, it came to dominate the first year of Albanese’s government. While it was portrayed by Labor, the media and big business as the most important civil-rights issue of our time, Australians – including many indigenous Australians – were horrified by this racially divisive proposal, voting it down in every single state.
All this has taken its toll on Australians. Current polling shows the Coalition – the alliance between the centre-right Liberal and National parties – with its nose in front. Odds on to be next prime minister is the underwhelming Peter Dutton, a man who for most of his political career has been compared to a potato and Lord Voldemort. Three years ago, few could have imagined him in the lead. It is testament to how poor Labor’s short reign has been.
In 2022, Australians gave the supposedly ‘sensible’ and ‘grown-up’ centre-left a chance. Albanese proved himself and his party to be little more than stooges for a failed, technocratic orthodoxy. The Labor Party of today could not be any further removed from the Labor Party of old. Far from standing up for workers, Albanese has done untold damage to his country’s working classes. His Labor is a party for consultants, lawyers, public servants and NGO workers.
Albanese and his government deserve a thrashing at the ballot box. Here’s hoping Australians will give them one.
Hugo Timms is an editorial assistant at spiked.