Albanese and Burnham, living in the ’70s. By Greg Sheridan in The Australian.
Both Burnham and Albanese are committed to left-wing economic and social policies that replicate the 1970s, the last era of catastrophic Anglophone social democratic failure. Both men bizarrely idealise the 70s. It’s perverse, as though a 12-year-old boy chose cabbage and brussels sprouts for a birthday treat.
Burnham thinks all Britain’s mistakes began with Margaret Thatcher in 1979. Albanese (who has devoted his life to “fighting Tories”) and his ministers take inspiration from the disastrous 70s Whitlam government while determinedly becoming the complete opposite of the successful 80s Hawke government, which they never reference.
London is so “exciting” now — like the third world!
Norway and Denmark have successfully controlled illegal immigration. They are placid, co-operative societies. The worst you could say is they’re perhaps a bit dull. …
But, but, but — unlike London, Copenhagen and Oslo are clean, safe, friendly, affordable even. Public transport is cheap, accessible and easy. There’s not much anti-social behaviour. In days of walking we never felt the slightest tension. Unlike London, people didn’t talk constantly of knife crime or having their mobile phones snatched.
Mass immigration has overwhelmed Britain’s NHS. But it’s not just the health system in crisis. Government generally doesn’t work any more. Neither does much else. One in four working-age Brits officially suffers a disability. A million 18 to 24-year-olds are involved in neither education, employment nor training.
The British state has never been bigger or more inefficient. Taxation represents nearly 39 per cent of GDP, higher than at any time since World War II. Just like Australia, seemingly everyone in the government sector works from home, which means they don’t work much at all. An English friend needs a minor update on his passport and has been told this could take six months and cannot be accelerated. …
The unsentimental markets think Britain, and Burnham, a bad bet and charge it more to borrow money than any other advanced country.
Just like Australia, Britain has a dismal productivity record. Like Albanese, Burnham’s predecessor, Keir Starmer, heavily re-regulated industrial relations and empowered trade unions. Both nations follow net-zero obsessions resulting in both having among the world’s highest energy prices. Manufacturing flees both nations. Labour, in neither London nor Canberra, does anything to free up the supply side of the economy.
There are a whole lot of things Burnham wants to do. They all involve spending money he hasn’t got. Reprising Albanese, none of Burnham’s initiatives will accelerate economic growth. …
Indicating how pandering to activists and extremists will go, Burnham made just one foreign policy statement. Ukraine? Russia? Iran? China? No, in a country awash with antisemitism fuelled in part by hate-filled anti-Israel demonstrations, Burnham apologised that Labour had been too soft on Israel, not strong enough for Palestine. Social cohesion is even worse in Britain than Australia.
The 1970s was our leaders’ happy time:
In the 70s Britain was a bad joke, needing an IMF bailout, crippled by strikes, the sick man of Europe. That’s Burnham’s happy time, Labour’s happy time.
In Australia, Whitlam’s government was so disastrous more Australians left the country than migrants came in. Whitlam was rejected, twice, in landslide election losses. But in Labor myth Whitlam is the perfect leader.
Thatcher’s election led to 18 years of Conservative rule. Brits became wealthier, many more owned their homes, London became the global financial centre, the UK had a powerful military and was central in defeating communism. For Burnham, this Thatcherism was all bad.
Australia and Britain today embody the crisis of social democracy. Burnham and Albanese are left-wing leaders of antique vintage, as though their respective electorates somehow mistakenly bought a Morris Minor or FJ Holden as the new family car. Their economic policies are impoverishing, building structural obstacles to growth. Social policy is woke, foreign policy often fatuous. Only in the vapours of Labor myth is the view today Olympian. For those forced to live in the real world, the outlook is bleak.
Sigh. It will take Farage/Lowe and Hanson to begin to break the stranglehold of our entitled, bureaucratic, stupid ruling class. And if Trump 1 is anything to go by, they won’t be enough at first.