So, what’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese up to, right now? Well, no one’s really sure. In fact, even his whereabouts are more closely guarded than Clarke Gayford’s, or which local school Jacinda Ardern will be slipping in and out of, for her next photo-op.
You see, after just three months in his new job — less than half of which he’s even spent in the country — Albanese has checked out for a week’s holiday. No wonder the #WheresAlbo and #PartTimePM hashtags have been trending again. Still, he’s surely earned it, after a two-week parliamentary session of… well, not actually doing much.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has done “sweet bugger all” in his first 100 days apart from take a holiday, says Sky News host Chris Kenny.
“We’ve got a country facing an energy crisis, an inflation crisis, a looming mortgage squeeze crisis, labour shortages, ongoing Indigenous disadvantage being exacerbated by the axing of alcohol bans and cashless welfare cards,” Mr Kenny said.
“And we’ve got a prime minister taking a holiday within his first hundred days.
“I’m surprised he’d want a holiday this early, let alone be prepared to send out this message about his government.”
MSN
One of the most perplexing features of the Morrison government, given that its leader was a former Marketing guy, was just how tin-eared it so often was. But even Scott Morrison is beginning to look like a master-class in managing his image, compared to Albanese and his cavalcade of buffoons.
With all the actual crises hammering Australians right now, from the energy crisis to China’s sabre-rattling, what did Albanese make his first — and only — order of parliamentary business? Kow-towing to the hysterical Climate Cult loons, with ridiculous legislation which will achieve nothing except driving already stratospheric electricity bills even higher.
On the economic management front, Albanese’s is showing itself to be a true Labor government: spending, spending, and more spending, while trying to keep it all swept under the budgetary carpet.
Labor’s proposed new off-budget funds are cases in point. Amounting to a total of $45bn – about 7 per cent of annual government spending – they are expected to cover social housing, new transmission lines and reconstructing industry (whatever that means). Announced during the election campaign, these funds were one means whereby Labor could demonstrate it did not intend to be a big spender – just slightly bigger than the Coalition.
In a nicely ironic touch for BFD readers, Albanese is even trying its own hand at the disastrously failed Kiwibuild.
Using a separately created fund of $10bn, the intention is to build 30,000 new homes in the first five years.
Sound familiar?
Labor’s plan is for 20,000 of the homes to be for social housing and the rest “affordable homes for the frontline workers like police, nurses and cleaners”. Given that the purpose of social housing is to provide accommodation to low-income earners at below market rents, it’s hard to understand how this fund will ever make money.
Call it “KoalaBuild”, if you will.
Then there’s “Rewiring the Nation” (like the Rudd-Gillard years, Labor is still addicted to its Maoist-sounding slogans). This is handing over $20bn “to rebuild and modernise the grid”. But even $20bn is nowhere near what it’s estimated is needed to even try to rebuild the grid to cope with unreliable “renewables”.
It’s the NBN fiasco, all over again.
Fudging the figures is never a good way to govern. To be sure, the consequence would be bigger deficits and higher government net debt, but that’s better than attempting to bury the figures in obscure balance sheets of funds that will never make money.
The Australian
Labor is doing the equivalent of a chronic gambler hiding the Final Notices from their partner. By slipping tens of billions of spending off-budget, it can lie to voters’ faces about its “fiscal responsibility”. Case in point: the NDIS. Julia Gillard claimed the NDIS was “fully funded”. The reality was that almost all its costs were off-budget. Ten years after the Gillard prime ministership is but a bitter memory, the NDIS is a budgetary monster. Its costs have soared past $30bn a year, and it’s on track to overtake Medicare as the single biggest budget expense in the next year or two.
Even where I’ll damn Albanese with faint praise, his policies are a budget hammer.
The Federal Government has promised to pick up the bill for any potential pay rise for aged care workers in a submission to the Fair Work Commission (FWC).
The independent wages umpire is considering a case brought forward by the unions, calling for a 25-per-cent pay increase for 200,000 residential and home care workers.
ABC Australia
In fairness, the pay rise is long overdue. Aged care workers are paid less than supermarket checkout operators. For work that takes a heavy toll both physically and mentally on its workforce of mostly blue-collar women.
That these women deserve a pay rise is beyond question. The question is: who’s going to pay for it? Will providers pass it on in fees to their clients? Good luck, trying to claw a cent out of geriatric boomers. Instead, it’ll be the taxpayer.
Which might be all well and good, if Labor wasn’t wasting money, hand over fist, everywhere else.