Another woke ‘Labor’ government is heading to its doom

The first term Labor prime minister of Australia, Anthony Albanese, must go to the polls before the end of May.

Astute political commentators predict that Albo – as he likes to be known amongst those working class voters that he so unconvincingly pretends to represent – will select April 12 as the election date. That date would allow Albanese to cynically take advantage of an interest rate cut announced by the Reserve Bank last week – as well as enabling him to avoid handing down a budget before the election.

Like many social democratic political leaders in the West, Albanese is facing certain defeat in the upcoming election, no matter when it may take place. Other social democratic leaders committed to global elite programs and ideologies, for example Jacinta Ardern and Justin Trudeau – after sensing a rise in populist sentiment in the West – have resigned in advance of being cast out of office by voters no longer willing to tolerate their ineptitude and hypocrisy.  

Albanese – like German Chancellor Olaf Scholz – has, however, decided to chance his hand at being reelected by an electorate that increasingly cannot stand the sight of him and no longer believes a word he utters. This may be hubris on Albanese’s part, or he may be relying on the fact that, in Australia, first term federal governments are usually reelected.

Perhaps he is so committed to the elite ideologies that he embraces that he simply refuses to acknowledge the rise in populist sentiment that has changed the face of politics in the West in recent years, and threatens to destroy parties like the one he leads. Whatever the reason, Albanese’s political judgment – unsurprisingly – appears to be fundamentally flawed.

How has Albanese’s swift fall from grace come about? The starting point is that he has never been anything other than a fourth-rate politician. The Labor government was elected three years ago with a slim two-seat majority – not because the electorate was impressed with Albanese’s political acumen, but because the tired, divided, and incompetent Morrison conservative government was no longer fit to govern.

Albanese’s demise, in fact, commenced on the night of his election win. 

In his victory speech, apparently without consulting his colleagues, Albanese announced that his government’s key policy initiative during its first term would be the establishment of a constitutionally enshrined ‘Voice to Parliament’ – a purely advisory body that would instruct the government on matters relating to Aboriginal affairs.

Never mind that reams of advice on this vexed political issue had been given to governments for decades – with no improvement whatsoever to the disgraceful conditions in which the majority of Aboriginals who live in remote communities have to endure.

Albanese’s radical rewriting of the constitution would have provided well paid perpetual sinecures for members of the urban Aboriginal elite. What prevented members of this elite from providing immediate advice to Albanese – without the need to create a constitutionally enshrined body – was never explained.

The ‘Voice’ was a classically woke, deeply flawed, and controversial proposal. It was, of course, supported by corporate and academic elites as well as most mass media organizations – because it provided a unique opportunity for virtue signaling. Unfortunately for Albanese – because, at his insistence, the proposal entailed amendments to the constitution – the Voice required the electorate to approve it in a referendum. Albanese staked his political career on winning the referendum and spent the next 18 months, in the company of elite leaders, campaigning for a ‘yes’ vote.

The referendum was lost in October 2023 – with 60% of the electorate voting against it. One could not imagine a clearer indicator of the rise of populist sentiment amongst Australian voters and their rejection of woke programs than this decisive referendum result. Albanese simply shrugged off this expensive political debacle – which set back the Aboriginal cause for decades – saying that he was not responsible for the defeat and that in any event “Aboriginals were used to disappointment.” Albanese and his government then blithely pressed on with their commitment to elite programs in other areas (climate change, diversity politics, transgender rights, etc).

At the same time, the Albanese government did nothing to ease the cost-of-living pressures that were progressively impoverishing more and more ordinary Australians. Energy and food prices have continued to rise dramatically over the past three years, as have house prices and rents.

Albanese refused to contemplate introducing policies that would ameliorate the cost-of-living crisis – this would have meant redistributing wealth away from the global elites – that had been for some time the primary concern of most Australian voters. Instead, he delivered endless woke homilies that amounted to little more than exercises in magical thinking – while continuing to confer largesse on anyone fortunate enough to fall within the sacrosanct categories created by diversity politics.

Albanese remains so committed to this elite mode of politics – even now – that one of his key election policies is free childcare for families earning up to $580,000.

Having ignored the deepening cost-of-living crisis, and disregarded the rise of populist sentiment, Albanese sought to placate voters by adopting wholesale the Conservative coalition’s foreign policy agenda. This, of course, came as no surprise. Having adopted the global elites’ domestic policies, it was inevitable that Albanese should also adopt their foreign policy program.

And, as with all contemporary social democratic leaders in the West, it did not occur to Albanese that the billions of dollars wasted on misguided foreign policy initiatives could have been much better spent on easing cost of living pressures domestically. In this Albanese somewhat resembles a latter day Lyndon Johnson – bearing in mind, of course, Marx’s dictum that history repeats itself, first as tragedy then as farce.

Albanese enthusiastically championed the unwise and expensive AUKUS arrangement, Biden’s misguided China policy, the Netanyahu government’s atrocities in Gaza and the West Bank, as well as the tottering Zelensky regime in Ukraine. Albanese’s capitulation on every one of these issues has been so abject and complete that it is now virtually impossible to have a rational debate on any of these matters in Australia.

Predictably, Albanese’s craven foreign policy cave-in has ended in complete and utter failure – because he could never hope to ‘out-conservative’ the Conservative opposition on these issues.

Opposition leader Peter Dutton has effectively demonized Albanese on foreign policy issues in large part because Albanese has meekly accepted Dutton’s framing of the various debates. Dutton is, as one would expect, far more irrationally committed to US expansionism, China-phobia, and the Netanyahu and Zelensky regimes than Albanese can ever be.

But Albanese’s problems do not end there.

Donald Trump’s election as US president has created more difficulties for him – which go far beyond the fact that he and Australia’s ambassador to the US, Kevin Rudd (a former failed Labor prime minister who was rewarded for his political ineptitude by being dispatched to Washington), have made crude and derogatory comments about Trump in the past.

Trump, of course, is a populist leader par excellence, and has nothing but complete contempt for everything that Albanese and his Labor Party stand for.  He also, no doubt, despises Albanese’s weakness. Nor is Trump a committed fan of AUKUS.

Trump’s recent wholesale abandonment of the Zelensky regime, and his determination to end the conflict in Ukraine has left Albanese looking particularly foolish.  In fact, Trump’s decisive and principled action in respect of Ukraine has sounded the death knell for social democratic leaders like Scholz, Albanese and UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer. Albanese, however, believes he can ignore these facts, and recently made the fanciful claim that he is better placed to cooperate with Trump than Dutton – because of the “enormous respect” that other world leaders have for him.

It is difficult to imagine a more pathetic and self-delusional assertion by an Australian prime minister. Most world leaders would not know or care who Albanese was – and the best that he can hope for from Trump is that he is treated with the benign condescension that Trump reserves for leaders of bit-player nations who supinely do his bidding.

Thus Albanese – only weeks out from an election – finds himself in the worst of all possible worlds. The only bright spot on the electoral horizon is that there are 18 minor party members and independents in the House of Representatives – most of whom are ideologically aligned with the Labor party – which means that Dutton has to win 19 seats to form a majority government. Twelve months ago this appeared to be unlikely – but the recent dramatic decline in Albanese’s popularity means that Dutton now has a very real chance of becoming prime minister.

Whatever happens, it is clear that Albanese will not be able to form a majority government. Even if he remains prime minister, it can only be at the head of a minority government forced to rely upon support from the Greens and/or the elite Teal independents. This, of course, can only lead to serious and ongoing political instability.

The absolutely dire position that Albanese and his Labor Party are in has been obliquely confirmed by their first election advertisement, released last week. The advertisement states (untruthfully) that “We understand the pressure that families are under” – and then, under a large picture of Peter Dutton, states “You’ll be worse off under Dutton”.

A more telling admission that Albanese is unable to run on his political “achievements” cannot be imagined. In fact, it is virtually an admission of defeat.

The fact is that Albanese is a doomed social democratic political leader – much like Biden, Ardern, Trudeau, Starmer, and Scholz. Such leaders – because of their unwavering support for the global elites and their ideologies – are incapable of effectively dealing with the pressing economic and political problems that increasingly bedevil all Western nations.

Hence their declining support amongst voters – it now hovers around 30% at best. Scholz, in losing this week’s election in Germany, garnered less than 20% of the vote. Nor are these failed leaders able to understand – let alone effectively oppose – the rising tide of populism that is now engulfing the West.  

When Albanese loses the upcoming election, the Labor Party will simply replace him as leader with another non-entity and engage in the usual unproductive post-election postmortem. The Democratic Party in America is currently undergoing such a process – with little success. Not only can the Democratic leadership not agree on why Trump defeated them so comprehensively, they are unable to come up with a viable political program for the future. The fact that the Democrats have been unable to offer any resistance to Trump’s recent radical reshaping of American and international politics is proof positive of the party’s ideological bankruptcy.

The dilemma confronting all elite-oriented social democratic parties in the West is now tolerably clear.

These parties long ago sold their souls to the global elites whose rapacious greed, contempt for ordinary citizens and woke ideological fanaticism has generated a populist backlash and crisis of legitimacy that threatens to destroy social democratic parties (as well as mainstream conservative parties) in the very near future.

What is to be done? This has always been a difficult question to answer, but one thing appears certain – there is no point in asking Anthony Albanese – or any of his fellow social democratic leaders – for an answer.