One Nation on the rise driven by the Opposition’s incompetence

Can you name me one thing where they have been successful? If it wasn’t for massive inflows of migrants, our economy would be visibly running in reverse. The energy “transition” is a farce, with coal-fired Eraring just this week being confirmed to run for yet another 2 years. 1.2 million new dwellings promised in 5 years likely to be missed by 20%. Record numbers of households living in mortgage and rental stress. Jim Chalmers’ “surpluses” piling up as surplus debt and spending now as high as it was during COVID and tax at record levels in absolute terms and as a percentage of GDP.

These are the things that struggling households care about most.

There’s a litany of failures here, to which you can add the Bondi massacre. It’s not due to a lack of laws. Last term of parliament Albanese passed 355 acts, and since the last election 55.

It’s due to unrealistic presumptions as to what is possible, combined with managerial incompetence.

These bills that have passed the house will also just add to the pile of mostly useless legislation.

Take guns. John Howard initiated tougher gun laws in 1996. What is proposed now will make virtually no difference to how tough our legislation is. It’s a bit like deciding that, even though we have seat belt legislation, some people are still dying in car accidents, so we’ll legislate to make people wear two seat belts instead of one.

The hate crimes legislation masks the failure to enforce the current laws against terrorism. These are laws directed not at thought crimes, but at crimes against the person and property. As a free speech absolutist I can say Amen to the proposition that any person, minister of religion or other, who promulgates violence against members of any community, on whatever grounds, ought to be guilty of a crime, no matter what his religion might say.

Just as freedom of religion cannot allow suttee, stoning, honour killings, child marriage, or female genital mutilation, neither can it allow preaching harm to your fellow citizens.

This legislation allows the government to list organisations as terrorist organisations, and there are 31 on that list (with 23 having a connection to Islam, 3 are ethno-nationalist, and the remaining 5 neo-Nazi).

Hamas and Hezbollah are both on the list, so anyone advocating for them, or supporting them is caught by our criminal code. That includes replacing your profile image on X or BlueSky just after October 7 with a paraglider, or displaying the flags of Hamas or Hezbollah in your bridge walks.

If the full force of the law had come down on those displaying these symbols two years ago it might have dawned on march participants that this is not a reality TV show, and that creating a hostile atmosphere towards Israel and Zionists can easily lead to the torching or graffitiing of synagogues, chasing Jewish youths around Melbourne in your motor vehicle, or even a massacre on our most iconic beach.

The social environment could have been completely different, by application of the law. So too could the security environment if our intelligence agencies had been properly resourced and funded. Head counts now are down on what they were ten years ago.