It’s easy to shrug off being exposed as a liar if you’ve gamed the whole system.
Anthony Albanese was asked today if he was worried about hundreds of small businesses making memes of him as their new “47 per cent partner” – an unsolicited shareholder who, despite not contributing any value, will pocket a sizable chunk of whatever the business fetches when its owner and founder retires from the industry.
The memes are flippant but effective. Albo said during the election campaign that he would not impose himself on these businesses by increasing the tax on their “capital gains” (which are more a measure of inflation than capital gains, but that’s another story). Now he’s being widely depicted as a creepy interloper who has barged his way into small-business staff rooms like Jason Tickle preening in a women’s change room.
Normally, such an embarrassing, widespread, grass-roots campaign would ring alarm bells in the Prime Minister’s Office. But not under Albo. “I think some of them (the AI-generated images) are flattering,” he said. “I thank them for picking nice photos of me.”
His cockiness is on a level with James Bond (played by Daniel Craig) in Casino Royale, when his martini is poisoned by villain Le Chiffre during a hand of poker. Bond scurries out to his Aston Martin, is revived with an antidote and defibrillator, and returns to the table, apologising to Le Chiffre for his brief absence, saying, “That last hand nearly killed me.”
But that was 20 years ago, when it was still plausible that confident, white, handsome, stylish, patriotic heroes could prevail against the forces of evil.
These days, all that cockiness belongs to double-chinned, slurring slobs in skinny jeans like Albo, who respond to provocation by thanking their adversaries for making them look good. In his own fertile imagination, Albo is Bond outsmarting the evil small business owners.
The zeitgeist is currently on Albo’s side, though. Not only have large parts of Western culture embraced the narcissistic nihilism of grifters like Albo, but the nation’s evolving demographics ensure he will remain in office as long as he likes, regardless of how offensive he is to certain formerly key groups of voters. At least, that’s how he sees it.
Albo can smugly dismiss the concerns of traditional Australians because he has calculated that they don’t matter any more. In fact, empathising with hard-working, independent, English-speaking Australians would now be the political equivalent of Lady Gaga dressing modestly and releasing an album of Gregorian chants. The bloke knows his constituency, and they are wealth leeches, not wealth creators.
Albanese has bet the farm on us traditional Australians thinking that when he says he has immigration under control, he means he is focusing on skilled workers, not unskilled peasants whose only job prospects are selling illegally imported cigarettes in an ethnic ghetto where English is the third language behind Hindi and Centrelink legalese.
By the time hard-working traditional Australians realise what’s up, the demographic fix will be permanent, and Labor will have engineered enough dumb but loyal migrants in key electorates to guarantee office in perpetuity, which in truth will be until the money runs out and the imams impose a caliphate or China swoops in to steal the resources we were too environmentally ideological to dig up ourselves.
My money’s on the caliphate, especially now that more ISIS brides are booking their flights back to the Land Down Under. It used to be that one of the first things a returning Australian or new immigrant did upon landing at Kingsford Smith Airport was jump in a bus or taxi to Bondi Beach, where all the wonders of Australian culture – half-naked babes and bronzed surfers, glistening water, challenging waves and beachside bars and cafes – were concentrated into a single, beautiful 1km stretch of sand surrounded by a natural amphitheatre of suburban homes and apartments. It used to be a glorious sight to behold.
But should any of these repatriated bag ladies go to Bondi, you can guarantee it won’t be to reacquaint themselves with Aussie culture. Rather, it will be to confirm that ASIO was correct when it raised the terror threat in Australia in August 2024 from “Possible” to “Probable”.
Given the rate with which the government is enabling the next attack, ASIO should introduce a new category of terror threat: “Encouraged”. I’d argue we’ve arrived at that level already.
Credit where it’s due, though. Not all of Labor’s powerbrokers can pull off Albo’s smugness, even when they hold as many aces as Albo does. NSW Labor Premier Chris Minns has a comfortable electoral lead (51-55% on two-party preferred) and is focused intensely on gerrymandering conservative electorates into Labor ones by rezoning them for high-density developments and filling them with the handout-loving migrants Albo is recruiting from Mumbai, Gaza and Syria.
So that should make him confident enough to impose whatever insane woke Labor agenda he fancies, which in fact he did last July when his government made it legally possible for citizens to change their gender on a whim.
But today, he walked back some of that, saying: “If you’re born biologically male and you change your government certificates to be female, it will not mean that you can change from a male prison to a female prison.” The same applied to playing in women’s sport.
It’s rare to see a Labor politician equivocate like this, especially in relation to something as sacred to the left side of politics as gender fluidity and all the genital mutilation that entails. What next, support for coal-fired power stations?
Perhaps Minns has detected a wind change, starting in Britain, whose politics is usually four or five years ahead of us. Nigel Farage’s Reform party last week stormed home in council elections, winning 677 of 1641 seats. Labor won a paltry 98 and the Conservatives picked up an embarrassing 319.
Reform’s biggest threat isn’t from the timid establishment, but from the even more boldly patriotic Restore party, which has a policy of deporting not only all illegal migrants and criminals, but also all foreign-born people who openly hate Britain. Only three months after registering as a party, Restore won all 10 of the council seats it contested. It will have a major influence over Britain’s next general election, in 2029, and could, in my opinion, win the election outright.
Could One Nation pose a similar threat to the establishment in Australia?
You’d have to hope so. No other party has the courage to say what Pauline Hanson has been saying for decades. If she was still running a fish and chip shop in Ipswich, she’d now be posting memes about Albo jumping over the counter and stealing her capital gains while pretending to work the deep fryer.
But she’s not in Ipswich. She’s sitting in the Senate, accumulating the sort of authenticity and empathy in the electorate that Albo could only dream of.
The people who Albo sardonically thanked today for making him look good are in One Nation’s heartland, which is bigger than he realises. Despite what the memes satirically depict, Albo has never worked amongst them, nor even paid them much attention. Dismissing them might be the dumbest of all the excruciatingly dumb things he’s ever done.
