Opinion
When he hasn’t been flitting around the world on taxpayer-funded holidays, Anthony Albanese seems to have spent his entire time in office stepping on one rake after another, and trying to convince everyone that “I meant to do that!”. Sometimes, as was the case with the disastrous “Voice” referendum, he was telling the truth. More often, though, his series of bloodied political noses have been the result of sheer, hubristic incompetence.
Now, he’s done it again.
Only Albanese could manage the spectacular comic mis-timing of dragging his whole cabinet to Western Australia right as the deadliest political kryptonite for Labor governments detonated in that very state. And, in a spectacular double-whammy, another issue especially touchy in the resources-dependent state blew up in his face.
Not that he was to know asylum-seeker boats would be arriving early to greet them or that BHP would blow a hole in the government’s critical minerals strategy by announce the mothballing of its nickel operations.
But perhaps he should have.
The tactical role of government is to be on a constant state of alert for events, pre-armed with clear and reassuring statements in response.
The Australian
Yet, as we’ve seen too often, most recently and egregiously with the idiotic decision to simply turn loose hundreds of very dangerous foreign criminals, Albanese’s government is in a constant state of crisis-ridden bewilderment. “Playing catch-up” is too generous a description of what is more like a parliament of headless chooks.
Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil is preparing a major border security funding package in the May budget following warnings from Australian Border Force and Operation Sovereign Borders commanders that an ageing fleet and a lack of pilots have slashed aerial and maritime patrols.
No doubt this will go as smoothly and efficiently as the government’s emergency legislation response to the High Court decision that prompted Labor’s panicked release of hundreds of rapists, paedophiles and murderers from immigration detention. In other words, it’ll be a complete cock-up and fix nothing while the bad wogs run amok.
They wouldn’t even have to play this weak attempt at catching up if they hadn’t deliberately tied their own shoelaces together in the first place.
The Australian can reveal the government is working on a budget boost to upgrade the OSB fleet after ABF Commissioner Michael Outram outlined critical deficiencies including pilot shortages, “blowouts” in deep-level maintenance time frames and increasing reliance on Defence assets […]
ABF figures show a 20.7 per cent decrease in aerial flying hours and 12.2 per cent fall in maritime patrol days in 2022-23, compared with aerial and maritime surveillance hours logged in 2020-21.
Even remote Aboriginal Australians can do a better job of patrolling the border than this pathetic government.
The Australian can reveal Indigenous residents in WA’s Dampier Peninsula, where 39 asylum-seekers were apprehended on Friday, have observed fewer aerial patrols in recent years and pitched to consecutive governments their interest in operating drones to help thwart people-smugglers and illegal fishers.
A senior Indigenous man used an inexpensive drone to alert ABF to both the asylum-seeker boat landing site and the campsite used by the arrivals.
Of all the policies that Australians have detested from Labor and the Greens, failing to protect Australia’s borders is one of the most visceral. As always, of course, Labor make the mistake of pandering to the tiny cliques of nosey-nannas, leftist professional protesters, and ambulance-chasing lawyers ignoring the fact that most Australian voters take border protection very seriously.
The opposition isn’t about to let them forget it.
Opposition home affairs spokesman James Paterson, who grilled Mr Outram and former OSB commander Justin Jones at last year’s Senate hearing, said the government had allowed the first line of defence against people smugglers to “decay”.
Senator Paterson said Ms O’Neil must provide Border Force with resources it needed to ensure borders were secure.“The Albanese government was publicly warned last October by their own head of Australian Border Force that maritime surveillance operations were in a dire state,” Senator Paterson said. “Four months on, we are seeing the fruit of that weakness: at least two boats making it all the way to the Australian mainland, something which used to be extremely rare.”
Under attack from the Coalition less than two weeks before the March 2 Dunkley by-election, Anthony Albanese rejected claims by Peter Dutton that Labor had cut border protection funding.
The Prime Minister, who held a cabinet meeting in Perth on Monday, dismissed the Opposition Leader’s claim that abolishing temporary protection visas and releasing 149 dangerous non-citizens had emboldened people smugglers.
The Australian
Maybe he even believes that. No one else does, though.
This isn’t just a rake that Albanese’s stepped on, he’s taking a swan dive into a woodchipper filled with kryptonite.