PAUL MURRAY: Anthony Albanese and Federal Labor have lied their way into poll position this election

[Pelican Press 0]

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

PAUL MURRAY: Anthony Albanese and Federal Labor have lied their way into poll position this election

After going through the Budget process four times in three years, Treasurer Jim Chalmers finally told voters this week, right on the eve of the election, that the Federal Government is spending too much on consultants.

Such epiphanies happen rarely in modern politics, so I suppose we should be grateful.

He’d had four opportunities — the most recent just over a month ago — to perform the pre-Budget cabinet expenditure review committee process and apply a scalpel to any wasteful expenditure.

But now, with the need for some “savings” to cover an extra $6 billion in election handouts, Chalmers wants people to believe he has magically found $7b down the back of the sofa being wasted on outside advice.

That’s treating the public like chumps. It makes a mockery of the election promises costing process by blatantly inventing previously non-existent “savings.” Anyone could balance such a ********* ledger.

And there in a nutshell is the election campaign, in which Labor ramped up spending of borrowed money to buy votes and lied about debt as a matter of course.

Feel like giving the politicians a rating this Federal election?

Our Pollie Rater lets you do just that.

Rate the politiciansCamera IconLiberal volunteers got their signs behind Anthony Albanese while he was campaigning in Braddon with deputy Richard Marles and candidate Anne Urquhart. Credit: Jason Edwards / NewsWire/News Corp Australia

A Government that tried to legislate against “misinformation and disinformation” is likely to be returned to power after five weeks of concentrated lying to the nation about its future. Orwellian.

Anthony Albanese’s dishonesty got more brazen as the campaign extended, constantly repeating mistruths on which he had been publicly exposed, as if it just doesn’t matter to him.

And it clearly doesn’t. Whatever it takes, as his great Labor mate Graham Richardson famously said.

As for the voters, we make our choices. And we will have to live with them.

Maybe there should be term limits on all politicians, turfing them out after several elections before cynicism becomes ingrained in their behaviour. And before they become addicted to the perks of office.

Albanese was shown up by the *********** Financial Review’s Phil Coorey in the third TV debate when the Prime Minister claimed Labor inherited a $78b deficit and had turned it into a surplus.

Coorey confronted him with evidence that the $78b figure was only a projection in the Coalition’s 2021-22 Budget which had dropped to an actual $31b deficit by the time Labor won office.

So, in reality, Albanese had inherited an improved Budget position. But this week he continued to promote the $78b lie, even when the truth was again repeatedly pointed out to him.

Surely that says something about the bloke’s character? If it does, it’s not bothering the bulk of Australians.

Do voters tolerate their political leaders lying to them these days as long as the handouts keep coming? Or are they so disconnected they don’t notice?

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

Chalmers was as bad this week, trying to cover the reckless election spending with that invention of $7b in savings he couldn’t find for the Budget a month ago, while desperately downplaying warnings by credit agency S&P that his profligacy was risking Australia’s AAA rating.

“The AAA rating on Australia may be at risk if election promises result in larger, structural deficits, and debt and interest expenses rising more than we expect,” the S&P report says. “The Budget is already regressing to moderate deficits as public spending hits post-war highs, global trade tensions intensify, and growth slows.

“How the elected government funds its campaign pledges and rising spending will be crucial for maintaining the rating.”

What was Albanese’s response? He went on the ABC’s 7.30 Report that night and lied when asked if the credit rating was under threat.

“Well, there is no suggestion frankly; the AAA credit rating is there,” he said, denying what had specifically been stated by S&P.

“They must have been besides themselves, whoever wrote that particular report, when the coalition left us with a $78b deficit. We turned that into a $22b surplus.”

No, you didn’t. But being the ABC, Albanese was not corrected, as he had been just the day before by a Sky News reporter when he rolled out the $78b lie again.

People have probably forgotten, but when Albanese fluffed a series of questions in the first week of the 2022 election campaign, he said this: “When I make a mistake, I’ll fess up to it and I’ll set about correcting that mistake.”

That seems a very long time ago now. I’d trade an honest mistake for a blatant lie any day.

And then on Wednesday, Chalmers actually said that the Government had “got the debt down” when the pre-election Budget update figures he released that day confirmed it will hit $1.2 trillion by 2029 after busting through the one trillion barrier next year, earlier than expected. Incorrigible.

So there’s two certainties about Labor and our debt-laden economy: It will get worse — the Budget figures confirm that — and they now instinctively lie about it to try to cover their ineptitude.

Labor’s obsessive demonisation of the simplest attempt at fiscal restraint — like limiting the spending on the public service that the Albanese Government has blown out — has made sound economic management a political no-go zone.

There is certainly no way Labor will prune back any significant spending programs in the next three years after what they have said about cuts.

And too few Australians can see that the tough measures being taken by the bogeyman who turned this election on its head, Donald Trump, is what happens when governments let a nation’s economy descend into a debt crisis like America’s.

Which is exactly where we are headed with no solutions in sight.

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

It was ironic that Monday’s paper featured a picture of Albanese at a Sydney Labor event, holding aloft popular Premier Chris Minns’ hand.

Albanese has been boosted by a dishonest twisting of the Liberals’ work-from-home policy, which was contained to the Canberra-based workforce, and nothing more than a reflection of what Minns is pursuing in NSW.

The media generally has chosen to ignore the obvious contradiction between a Labor State Government demanding public servants turn up for work in the office and a Federal Labor Government saying a similar Liberal policy would spread to the private workforce. Is the NSW Labor approach having that effect?

Albanese was never forced to explain this blatant hole in his disinformation strategy. The media has been complicit in one of the biggest lies of the campaign.

Sadly, even sensible members of the Labor cabinet, like Resources Minister Madeleine King, have been dragged into the vortex of election dishonesty.

King’s claim that the Liberal plan for a small nuclear reactor at Collie would threaten the Margaret River wine industry 150km away was one of the lowest points of a grubby campaign.

I lived in France for a while in the 1980s near a nuclear reactor on the Rhone River, sited just 40km from the much more famous Chateauneuf du Pape wineries.

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

King should be more concerned with the realities of the blackouts this week caused in Spain and Portugal by a misguided rush into an unstable renewables-dominated electricity system than in fabricating scare campaigns over nuclear power.

The reality of this election is that whether Labor is returned in a ********* or majority, it will be by Greens voters, most of whom despise the Albanese Government but want to use its weakness to deliver their extremist agenda, which is not shared by 90 per cent of Australians.

At the 2022 election, of the 77 seats Labor won, seven were decided on Greens preferences in counts where the Liberals had been leading on the last distribution. Labor could not have formed government without those seats.

The Liberals were similarly beaten in seven other seats where they were ahead in the final round, which fell to Greens-preferenced independents, such as Kate Chaney in Curtin. The Coalition consequently ended with 58 seats instead of 65, which would have got it over the line.

As ABC election analyst Antony Green noted “the 2022 result is the latest to highlight that since 1990 preferential voting has worked overwhelmingly in favour of Labor”. And no other comparable country combines non-optional preferential voting with compulsory voting.

The bottom line is that even when the Nationals do well enough to contribute their share of seats for a Coalition government, the Liberal primary vote now has to be substantially higher than Labor’s to win.

That was Peter Dutton’s challenge.

Until Trump entered the election fight, Dutton had succeeded in pushing it up as an effective Opposition Leader, but appears to have failed to translate it into votes during a disastrous campaign.

If only Labor could govern as well as it plays politics or creates social media memes.

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

#PAUL #MURRAY #Anthony #Albanese #Federal #Labor #lied #poll #position #election

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up