Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was at the Garma Festival of Traditional Cultures last weekend. In his speech at the Festival he touched on the failure of ‘The Voice’ referendum and made a commitment to continue to work towards the recognition of First Nations peoples. One of the strategies that was suggested was a ‘truth telling’ and healing process known as Makarrata. Opposition Leader Peter Dutton, who chose to be elsewhere last weekend announced that a government he would lead would not support a Makarrata process.
Once of Dutton’s concerns apparently was that the details of any Makarrata were not available. His view of ‘The Voice’ referendum was similar. In short, because no one could tell Dutton that at 2pm on Friday 1 May 2026 a certain event would occur, there was no hope of Dutton supporting the initiative. The demand is a bit strange really, as Dutton and his ‘shadow ministry’ are far less forthcoming when spruiking detail of policies they claim they will implement when they return to power in 2025 (because the current government is so bad). When asked for details on where nuclear power plants were intended to go and how much it would cost, Dutton and his ‘energy spokesman’ Ted O’Brien suggested that the detail would be announced in due course.
While, to the great concern and befuddlement of the actual land owners in a number of cases who were not consulted, the Coalition have subsequently announced the proposed locations of the nuclear plants. They have been far less forthcoming on the costs, technology, safeguards and how these plants would operate. So much for only backing initiatives when all the detail was disclosed for all to see.
Dutton’s claims on understanding the current energy transition energy are dubious at best anyway. He won’t even commit to maintaining this country’s commitment to emission reduction. He claims he will announce something after the next election. He could look for inspiration to examples like California with a similar population to Australia. According to this report California until recently relied on gas and nuclear power to supply it’s early evening consumption demands. In April, batteries supplied more energy than gas for the first time. The energy produced was similar to the output of 7 nuclear power stations for a number of hours. While California is known to be one the USA’s progressive states, another US state that is actively developing renewable energy is the far from progressive Texas.
In the same week as Garma, REX airlines ‘capital city’ venture was grounded. There are still a number of speculative claims from all sorts of people with different levels of actual knowledge of the reasons for REX and Bonza’s economic turbulence this year. Various politicians lined up to comment that if REX was to cease flying altogether it would be a disaster for regional Australia (which is probably true enough), but some of them went on to apportion blame to other airlines for predatory behaviours and Coalition Senator Bridget McKenzie went as far as saying:
Labor should have started reforming Sydney Airport slots a year ago, instead of allowing a company majority-owned by Qantas and Virgin to make the decisions on allocating precious slots without any oversight,”
Logically, if the problem existed in 2023 it also existed in the almost 10 years of Coalition government that preceded it. McKenzie fails to mention any measures the former government took to reduce the apparent capacity problem at Sydney Airport. McKenzie, as a former minister, would also be well aware of the timeframes relating to the preparation of proposed legislation to be considered by parliament. Yes, both sides of politics are equally as cupable for selling off infrastructure, such as airports in the past. At least McKenzie isn’t blaming the ALP for that as well.
It is said that arguing with fools only reduces you to their level where they will beat you with experience. Who knows if the Harris for President claim the Republicans were ‘weird’ was scripted or not – but it has worked. There has to be a similar descriptor for a political party that is simply sitting on both sides of the barbed wire fence – demanding detail in the policies of the government but promising ‘don’t you worry about that’ for their own policies and promises. It reminds us of the methods used by the Bjelke-Petersen conservative governments in Queensland. We know how that ended!
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