Editorial: Anthony Albanese must be punished for a poor three years

Voters can be forgiven for thinking this election is all a bit of a waste of time. One mob is just as bad as the other; Anthony Albanese is a bit of a goose and Peter Dutton gives off thug vibes.

Both are multimillionaires and each of them is out of touch with the struggles of families in the suburbs. Neither of them really gets Western Australia, they don’t understand business, and certainly have no idea how young people think.

These guys — and their mates — are in it for themselves.

They don’t really care about us, so why should we care about them.

Once a great day to celebrate and come together as a nation, election day is now a burden.

The narrative, promulgated throughout the nation by the lazy and the louche in the media and in broader public life, is a cop out.

It’s an excuse adopted by far too many Australians and it allows our politicians to get away with the mediocrity they are serving up day in day out.

If we want our political class to be better, we must demand more of them. Actively.

If we want to be bored and have the wool pulled over our eyes, if we want average people doing average stuff, then carry on.

If we want word games and scare campaigns, then carry on.

If we are happy to listen to lies then we can’t complain when we elect liars.

But in order to effect change, voters cannot accept that that lot are just as bad as the other mob and so we wave you through for another term in power.

If we are being asked to decide who should govern Australia for the next three years — who should draw up the budgets and manage our economy, who should control the borders and run our immigration policy, who should head to Washington and negotiate with Donald Trump, who should oversee the defence of our nation and who should decide how the highest tax take in history should be spent — based on the past five weeks, the official election campaign, then it would be a straightforward proposition.

Unfortunately too many Australians are not paying attention to the detail, choosing instead to rely on the vibe. And the vibe over the past month has been Albanese good enough, Dutton a shambles.

The reality is, the past three years of the Albanese Government has been dreadful. It’s almost as though it has been so bad for so long that we are suffering an extended outbreak of repressed memory.

The Voice. (Oh yeah, forgot about that.) Your power bills through the roof. (Shit that’s right.) Your spending power shot to pieces. (Hang on hasn’t it always been this bad) Your local businesses up against the wall. (It’s always tough). Your mortgage payments careering out of control. (Come on interest rates were much higher in the 1990s).

It’s trite but as a nation we have been gaslit by the Albanese Government on so many levels.

They have created the economic conditions — surging power bills, a diabolical crash in the standard of living for every household only to turn around and claim to be delivering the relief to the crisis of their own making.

We ramped your power prices. But we are giving you a rebate to cover a fraction. And we won’t tell you how in the medium term any of this will be different when the money runs out to give you a tickly little top up.

The Coalition have failed over the past 5 weeks of the election campaign to successful make the case of how and why the Albanese Government has failed the previous three years.

That’s not an insignificant thing. If you can’t run a good campaign, can you run a good government.

It’s a legitimate question, and ultimately it is why the polls are showing the Albanese government, rather than being punished for their poor record, will be rewarded for their exceptional, and exceptionally misleading, campaign.

The truth is the Labor Party are expert at manipulating the left-leaning media, skewing the narrative and turning student politics games into our reality.

They have expertly exploited an Australian electorate disengaged in politics.

Mr Albanese has talked a lot about Peter Dutton adopting US-style policies, when in fact it is Labor who have imported the very worst of American politics — campaign lies and misinformation. The list in this campaign is long and ludicrous.

Rewarding that behaviour would unleash the beast in subsequent elections in Australia.

Blatant rubbish coming out of the mouths of the Prime Minister, the Treasurer and others should be punished at the polls, not encouraged.

Substance has given way to spin and we will all pay the price over time.

In WA, we backed Mr Albanese in during the 2022 campaign, in large part because Mark McGowan reassured us that it was the right thing to do, and also because Scott Morrison, despite delivering the GST deal for our state, had let us down and we couldn’t forgive him for it.

Mr Albanese insisted that our status as the economic engine-room of the nation would not be undermined — he would protect the industries and the jobs that are so important to the lifestyle we enjoy in this great state of ours.

And then he unleashed a Minister who secretly worked away on outrageous environmental laws never mentioned before the election and was only stopped through the exceptional journalism from The West Australian journalists and our sister national publication The Nightly.

He also told WA that industrial relations reforms would not impact key businesses in our state before militant unions used those very unscripted changes to march back into the Pilbara to cause unnecessary and unwanted upheaval.

We have been fortunate here that the breakdown in social cohesion, and the rise in racism and anti-Semitism under Mr Albanese’s watch has not been as rampant as elsewhere. But it is shocking and shameful and raises questions about our national character.

The Opposition have been disappointing during this campaign, but when we vote on Saturday it’s a judgment on the past three years of compounding failure. And Anthony Albanese should be punished for it.