It’s not hard to make the argument that on many fronts Australia has regressed in recent years.
Our standard of living in real terms has diminished over the term of the Albanese government. Whilst our GDP, masked by record migration might have increased, our percapita GDP has fallen. We have endured high levels of inflation and high interest rates.
Most importantly our productivity has languished. Without increases in productivity there is no prospect of improved standards of living. The government has reregulated labour laws placing impediments on business that are also hamstrung in their developmental ambitions by restraints emanating from strict environmental laws and the need make concessions to indigenous considerations which are often contradictory and sometimes imaginery.
One of the follies that have befallen us is climate change zealotry and the subsequent commitment to a net zero target by 2050. The major emitters of CO2 have no commitment to the target and Australia is increasing its cost of living and harming industry by this foolish pursuit of a holy grail that no country on earth is likely to ever attain even if it so desired. Concomitant with this hopeless pursuit, largely in the hope of preserving the environment, renewable energy projects are destroying our forests and taking over valuable agricultural and pastoral land, increasing our electricity prices while doing nothing of consequence to preserve our environment and contradictorily often defiling it.
Another major problem facing the nation is access to housing. It has become almost impossible for young people to access the housing market. The two major reasons for this are a short fall of supply, aggravated by our high immigration levels, and the high cost of interest rates that have remained elevated longer than they should because of reckless government spending.
In an era which the Prime Minister concedes is the most volatile since the Second World War defence spending has languished to enable the government to commit to huge spending increases in its welfare and other social services. Consequently our defence capability is being steadily eroded away.
I am sure many other citizens of a conservative bent would share such concerns with me. There are without doubt many areas where our government should be seeking improvements. Under such circumstances, it would seem to me to be a perfectly sensible thing to exhort government to “make Australia great again!”
Now a perfectly reasonable – indeed eminently sensible – conservative did proffer the hope that a conservative government under Peter Dutton would strive to make Australia great again, and she was pilloried by the Left for daring to say such a thing. The so-called “offender” was Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price.
The puerile insults levelled at Senator Price claimed she was channelling President Donald Trump. Labor have been seeking to draw comparisons between Peter Dutton and Trump to discredit Dutton believing that Trump is so despised by the Australian public that any such comparison would prove detrimental to Dutton. And of course Trump romped into victory in the US presidential election under the slogan of Make America Great Again (MAGA).
Now my regular readers will know that I am an admirer of Jacinta Price. She is an intelligent articulate woman with no necessity to rely on Donald Trump or anyone else for political rhetoric. When she says she wants to make Australia great again she does so not to emulate Trump but because she genuinely believes conservatives need to take up the cudgels to do just that! Heaven knows the political offerings of Labor seem most unlikely to achieve that end!
So I personally applaud the Senator for taking this stance and I am more than disappointed that Peter Dutton seemed to want to walk away from her comments. Who of us do not want to make Australia great again? Surely that is an ambition of any loyal Australian, even if it sounds similar to Trump’s slogan. In the wake of this dismal incident Dutton, instead of trying to distance himself from Trump should be asking Albanese why it is so wrong to want Australia, in its present parlous state, to be better.
The charismatic Italian Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, recently declared she would like to make the West great again which seems an admirable goal to me.