The Australian Labor Political Party

The Many Failures of the Albanese Labor Party

A Gish Gallop for people tired of Labor's Gish Gallops

Phoebe Autumn

Phoebe Autumn

— 61 min read
The Many Failures of the Albanese Labor Party
Honestly doesn't matter what's there, they don't stand for labour let alone the working class…

This will be a living piece, being quite an undertaking when you're not taking pre-cooked media releases at face value, updated as Labor's term progresses, and older news from their first term will be added as it comes to light. I have long criticised articles and image macros like this as Gish Gallops, and that rightly could be applied to this, in fact, it is a direct response to them, such as the images below – which are often weaponised against individual complaints against Labor's practices.

A typical pro-Labor Gish Gallop image macro, with my notes/rejoinders

Of course, the benefit for this is that I can summarise my assessment, link to the news sources and archive links, where criticisms will be evident or can be implied, and as a proponent of voting for someone else, this will be my vehicle for making the case for why, understanding there is no perfect party, just that Labor frequently straight-up lies about what they stand for.

Most importantly, I have been maintaining my own archival project over the past few months, however not really having a platform to share it, this seems the ideal place to highlight Labor's failures and right wing attacks in one place for easy reference. It will take some time to translate that to this, but I feel settling the framework alone will go a long way to making it possible. This will not replace my general political commentary posts, I have specifically kept my opinions on each policy area to a paragraph, where I may be more inclined to ramble in a dedicated post.

This kind of thing isn't unprecedented, Sally McManus, now Secretary of the Australian Council of Trade Unions, the body that ensures union subservience to the Labor political party, had a blog post that was unceremoniously deleted called Tracking Abbott's Wreckage, linked here as an archive. This details the policies which the Albanese government maintains today. It's interesting to see what Labor's against until they're not.

Contents

  1. Cost of Living
  2. Healthcare
  3. Housing
  4. Education
  5. First Nations Justice
  6. LGBT+
  7. Immigration & Refugees
  8. Palestine
  9. Environment & Climate
  10. Disability & NDIS
  11. Welfare
  12. Aged Care
  13. Integrity

Cost of Living

There aren't weren't a lot of articles here on government action, primarily because there's not a lot to report on in regard to legislation or regulation, we know grocery affordability has been an ongoing issue, but since a review on supermarket price gouging was supposedly begun, there has been no government action whatsoever – presumably delayed until a final report is produced, helping absolutely no one in the mean time.

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Healthcare

Ever since the Albanese government ripped $2 billion out of public hospital funding, as if COVID-19 pressures had simply disappeared, I knew there would be nothing good here. Since, there's been various announcements of Urgent Care Clinics and a mental health variant, which haven't done anything to stem the state emergency room ramping issues. Infuriatingly, the Albanese regime has threatened more public hospital funding to force the states to implement their divisive Thriving Kids autism attacks on the NDIS, a method they refused to employ to force rent controls. Mental health and dental care has continued to decline under Labor's watch as they pretend they can't do anything.

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Housing

Housing policy in Australia under Labor is decidedly neoliberal, there was no funding for public housing at all until the Greens used their position under the previous term to force a $3 billion funding commitment. The HAFF itself only provides money for community housing providers, basically corporate landlords, and so-called "affordable" housing, which is ill-defined and seemingly now is being used to displace poor public housing tenants for more expensive luxury apartment projects. The Albanese government has also recently committed to inflating the housing bubble by simply lowering the barrier to taking out more insanely high loan amounts by first home buyers, already competing against equity-loaded investors. Labor housing minister Clare O'Neil is directly and openly against lowering housing prices at all.

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Education

Another area the government is intent on sitting on its hands over, while HECS debts far outpace their value, universities cut courses, and in some extreme cases, entire schools within their organisations. HECS of course being a Hawke government invention after Gough Whitlam famously made tertiary education free and things degenerated from there. With the advent of start-up loans to push people into profitable work, as opposed to work which benefits society, and a Future Made in Australia largely related to the so-called, bloody-handed "defence" industry we're seeing vulnerable young people taken advantage of at every turn. They're still pretending TAFE is free, despite the limited courses covered, and again, most of them in anti-worker blood industries.

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First Nations Justice

What justice? Months after Labor's humiliating referendum defeat on the Voice to Parliament, a body Albanese was assuring racists like Ben Fordham that it would have no power of its own and could be overridden by government priorities, as if that isn't the status quo. This has had the flow on effect of Federal Labor backing away from its commitment to Treaty and Truth Telling, and state commitments regarding youth crime that disproportionately effect Aboriginal people being sidelined for hysterical racist law and order campaigns. There have been no movements to enact any of the results of the 1991 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody – thirty years of Labor inaction. Complicity, one could be inclined to say.

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LGBT+

Another issue Labor are retreating on, not unexpectedly however. Notably, Anthony Albanese specifically endorsed deliberately misgendering trans women in a piece published before his ascendancy to Prime Ministership, at the same time as appearing with the antisemitic canard "cultural marxism" using Chris Uhlmann to apparently endorse JK Rowling's virulently transphobic views, and it has only floundered from there. To my knowledge, the government has only seen to endorse more scrutiny on puberty blockers as Queensland systemically abuses trans kids which can be deadly even if their home life is otherwise supportive as documented in the 11 of July 2023 Four Corners episode Blocked (Note: the episode features 2 prominent transphobes, only one actually qualified to speak on childhood psychological issues, even she was stood down from her position over her bigotry), while not denying them for cis kids experiencing precocious puberty. The impending social media ban is expected to cut kids from resources and community, effectively removing an important social element of survival.

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Immigration & Refugees

This was the issue that under the Rudd and Gillard regimes I stopped supporting Labor. Labor initially tried to offload their refugee responsibilities to Malaysia, a decidedly unsafe country, and were knocked down in the High Court, they then reopened offshore concentration camp facilities on Manus Island and Nauru. It is important to note that some of these facilities were unsuitable and in some cases actively being built while asylum seekers were being sent to these camps. Child sexual abuse was reported on Nauru, as well as guards seeking sexual favours from women in offshore detention. Recently, in a media assault with UK Labour's Keir Starmer, Albanese declared he is intent on saving social democracy and one way of doing that was simply adopting and advancing Tony Abbot's violently racist refugee policy. In any case, Albanese's government have legislated to double-punish stateless people, the NZYQ cohort, who have already served their sentences to send them to Nauru, now effectively an island concentration camp, where they may be further deported, or come to harm in the local community. The deliberately poorly targeted legislative changes may affect thousands more in the long run.

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Palestine

Nothing short of complicity with the genocidal Israeli regime and its US ally. A lot of heel dragging, both-sidesing, and exaggerating antisemitic events, especially through conflation of antisemitism and anti-Zionism, Zionism being a distinct political ideology followed by end-of-the-world death cult Christians and far right Jewish people alike. This has led to Australians being tortured in Israeli prisons as flotillas attempt to provide aid directly to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip – the open air concentration camp of Palestinians that Israel maintains. Australia exports arms to Israel, despite Anthony Albanese and Penny Wong's lies on the matter. All efforts taken to date to support Palestinians have been symbolic at best, even asylum efforts have been undermined by the Albanese Labor government persecuting Palestinian grandmothers.

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Environment & Climate

Albanese famously killed the deal reached between Tanya Plibersek and the Greens for a Federal EPA on behalf of WA Labor Premier Roger Cook and Woodside Petroleum, and now seeks to weaponise his own intervention against the deal to push compromised environmental law in its place. Commitments to multinational owned salmon farms operating in Tasmania seem to explicitly call for the extinction of the Maugean Skate, and on top of regular coral bleaching events, we now have mass fish death algae events happening in South Australia's waters, ostensibly related to global warming and its effects on the ocean.

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Disability & NDIS

The Albanese government came in under the threat of Coalition NDIS cuts, and has simply adopted the Coalition position as its own, drastically cutting plans, sending debt notices to recipients, and the former minister Bill Shorten directing the agency to cut a disability activist's support entirely. The plan to divide the disability community by autism diagnosis and ageism is an interesting one, simply duplicating systems seems to be a recipe for wasteful expenditure, however the Albanese government was happy to threaten the state's public hospital funding if they didn't agree to alternate supports, also ill-defined, for autistic and developmentally disabled kids. Needless to say, I have nothing kind to say about these monsters on disability matters.

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Welfare

Nothing good to say about this. There have been virtually no positive movements in welfare legislation. Notably, Labor explicitly broke their 2022 election promise to abolish income management, even keeping Indue involved in the replacement card's processes. There have been two slight increases in Jobseeker benefits, over and above the paltry increases for inflation, however, the coercive control "mutual obligations" regime continues to cause harm, even while the illegal Targeted Compliance Framework is dismantled behind the scenes. The government, in particular Michelle Rowland MP, continues to lie about the 57 robodebt royal commission recommendations, specifically because they are attempting to legislate against the 57th one in their Freedom of Information "reforms". The National Anti Corruption Commission has done nothing for robodebt victims, much like Services Australia itself, having continued to raise debts against people on its poverty payments.

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Aged Care

Like all the vulnerable groups Australian Labor is failing, some deliberately, we knew there would be a crisis involving the aged population at some point or another. this year saw Labor stalling on home care packages until forced to act, and now with co-pay, it seems older Australians are now having to pay out of pocket for basic Activities of Daily Living, such as showering and eating, something my dad who passed in 2016 did not have to pay for, even though later on he was forced to pay for some of his pathology services.

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Integrity

Or lack thereof...

But also, just Labor failing in their mission to represent workers, working class interests, and general issues related to perceived corruption not already covered by the other sections.

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