News & Media

There’s nothing wrong with your vision. It’s just that you’ve had the wool pulled over your eyes.

When it comes to the ancient art of wool pulling, our federal Labor government is up there with the world’s best, employing an army of professional wool pullers that toils away endlessly to cover the eyes of the electorate in layers of soft, finely spun merino.

They’ve been especially busy over these past weeks, attempting to shield us from the reality that our defence force is incapable of defending us. If media releases were missiles and drones, we’d be impregnable but see through the wool and understand that if a serious attempt was made to invade us, it would all be over in a matter of days unless the Americans, whom it is currently fashionable to deride, came galloping to our aid.

In a pathetic attempt to hide this, the wool pullers now include the cost of items such as military pensions and veterans’ expenses as defence spending. How effective pensions will be in destroying incoming enemy drones has yet to be seen. Yes, I know we’re going to buy all manner of wondrous weapons in the years ahead. Sadly, we’ve heard it all before.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and company will all stand, hands on hearts, honouring our fallen on Anzac Day, while failing to provide the men and women of our armed forces with the means to defend themselves and the nation – hypocrisy writ large.

We’ve been asked to believe that Albanese’s recent begging-bowl tour of Asia lessened the fuel crisis. It didn’t. It was an expensive media stunt, and while he fiddled, the Victorian refinery burned. If ever there was a metaphor for a government’s energy policy characterised by neglect and incompetence going up in flames, then it there for all to see.

Meanwhile in Canberra, the spinners were preparing to spin a warehouse of wool to cover the eyes of the nation if details of our latest foray in the House of Fools and Knaves, otherwise known as the United Nations, were to emerge.

Curiously, there were no media releases announcing our vote to support Iran – yes, THAT Iran – in its bid to be part of a committee to provide policies on among other matters, women’s and human rights and the prevention of terrorism.

This is the Iran that tortures women for failing to cover their heads, has murdered at least 40,000 of its own people in recent months, is currently hanging anyone it suspects of being against the regime, and has been sponsoring worldwide terrorism for decades.

We voted to support its bid and the United States voted, unsurprisingly, against it. Thanks to our support and that of the other limp-wristers in the form of Britain, France, Canada and Spain, the vote was carried. There isn’t enough wool in the world to disguise this abject moral failure on our part.

The wool spinners in federal Treasurer Jim Chalmers’ office have been working late into the night as they prepare to shield our eyes from the reality that the economic ills of the nation are not caused by events beyond our control in the Middle East, but by government spending to buy votes, industrial relations policies that are destroying productivity and an absence of any political will to reform the tax system.

The result is an increasingly divided society as the gap between the haves and the have-nots widens to a chasm impossible to cross.

How much easier to get out the wool and blame Donald Trump for these failures, the excuse of blaming Vladimir Putin having worn too thin.

Here in Queensland you would need the output of every sheep station in the state to blind the electorate to the revelations emerging from the activities of the CFMEU and the stranglehold it had on the state Labor government.

Ministers quivered and folded before union heavies who told them when to jump and how high, the same ministers who swore an oath to “well and truly serve” the people of Queensland.

It brings to mind former prime minister Paul Keating’s contemptuous dismissal of Liberal politician John Hewson as “a shiver looking for a spine to run up”.

What a sad joke it is that has been played on all Queenslanders.

Pass the wool, will you. I’d rather not look.