Monthly Archives: December 2023

Albo in line for a frosty reception – The West Australian

Since being elected Prime Minister just over 18 months ago, Labor leader Anthony Albanese has tried hard to make a virtue of his visits to WA. Despite WA’s sweltering summers, when he touches down for his first visit in 2024, he should come prepared for a frosty reception. Having had a bitter taste of Labor, WA voters will now be looking for a “please explain” for his broken promises. Above all else, West Australians will want to know why Anthony Albanese and Labor have failed on their pre-election pledge to change Australia “for the better” by delivering cost-of-living relief, cheaper housing and mortgages, and wages growth. Far from making things better, WA families are ending 2023 in more financial pain than a year ago. Since Anthony Albanese made his pledge in Perth in May 2022, interest rates have risen on 12 occasions and are now higher than they have been for more than a decade. For WA families with an average mortgage of $493,000, that means having to find $3434 a month, or $41,208 a year, to meet their mortgage repayments. The monthly challenge of meeting these rising mortgage costs has been made even more difficult because of Labor’s failure to tackle inflation. Just this month the Western Australian Council of Social Service identified the “harsh realities” and “skyrocketing living costs” being experienced by families in its 2023 Cost of Living Report. The report found costs for a single-parent family had increased by $67.20 a week and exceeded basic living costs by just $1.40, making it more difficult for families to save or meet unexpected expenses, such as a car repair or replacing a washing machine or fridge. Two-parent families were now having to find an extra $84.94 a week, and age-pensioner incomes fell short of basic living costs with many experiencing a “substantial decline” in their financial wellbeing. Many WA families say they are now turning to the generosity of local charities for the first time to help make ends meet. Tragically, this cost-of-living stress is forcing some to take drastic steps. Fresh data has revealed shoplifting rates are the highest on record — in WA there were 7733 offences from July to September this year, an increase of 2306, or 42 per cent over the same period last year. Labor has also failed WA first-homebuyers. Data released by CoreLogic show that since January this year the median house price in Perth has surged by 11.1 per cent to $669,609, with further increases of up to 10 per cent predicted in 2024. The combination of rising interest rates and property prices is now putting first-home ownership beyond the reach of many young West Australians. And Labor has no good news for WA renters. Over the 12 months to September, Perth rents increased by almost 20 per cent and are expected to rise further in 2024, according to the Real Estate Institute of WA. For WA’s first-homebuyers and renters, the problem is exacerbated by Labor’s failure to properly plan and model a population policy that will benefit WA at a time when our population is growing faster than anywhere in Australia. And while costs have risen, the outlook for wages is bleak. The Reserve Bank of Australia recently updated estimates for wages growth to reveal that by December 2024, real wages will be 5.4 per cent lower than they were three years ago. Labor’s failure to tackle rising costs, coupled with sluggish wages growth, means Anthony Albanese’s economic leadership has made West Australians poorer. In May 2022, West Australians put their trust in Anthony Albanese’s pledge that life would be better for WA families under Labor. With a Federal election due after August, now is the time for WA voters to ask themselves how long they’ll be willing to pay the price of Labor’s cost-of-living crisis.

Nuclear resistance a COP out – The West Australian

Every COP begins with a small degree of scepticism. For many critics, COP28 in Dubai was yet another UN talkfest, beginning with worldwide media coverage, conspicuous in its largesse, likely to fizzle out in disagreement and a sense of futility. Adding fuel to the scepticism was the fact that year’s host nation, the United Arab Emirates, a member of OPEC, and one of the world’s biggest petrostates. And this was the 28th COP since its inception in Berlin in 1995, and global emissions have never been higher than they are today. But those who disregarded the Dubai COP risked missing something important – indeed there is good reason to think that the most recent climate talks might yet be the most consequential in the quest for net zero. That’s because, in the words of Coalition energy spokesperson Ted O’Brien, COP28 was quickly becoming known as the “nuclear COP”. For proponents of nuclear, an emissions-free, reliable and cheap source of energy, the re-education of the world on the benefits of this technology has been a long and arduous process. It’s been made ever more difficult by the hysteria and disinformation propagated by organisations such as the Australian Greens. The symbol of the nuclear COP was the signing of an international pledge, which committed to trebling the supply of nuclear energy by 2050. The signatories to the pledge are among Australia’s closest allies, and include the US, the UK, Japan, and France. It should have been fantastic news for Australia. We’re already the world’s third biggest supplier of uranium and, on most estimates, still have more than any other country on earth beneath our feet. We’re a responsible international citizen and believe in reducing our carbon footprint. And while the world, as it stands, is not on track to meet the 1.5C limit established by the Paris Agreement, the international community is beginning to realise that nuclear energy could well be the solution. There are already 440 nuclear reactors across the globe, supplying 10 per cent of the world’s electricity. In 2022, nuclear energy was the biggest source of non-emitting electricity in the OECD. In the UAE, myself and a number of Coalition colleagues were lucky enough to visit the impressive Barakah nuclear power plant. Standing on what was previously a large swath of sand, there are now four nuclear reactors that supply 25 per cent of the country’s electricity. But most importantly, embracing nuclear could provide a path through the increasingly dark and confusing woods that is the Labor Government’s energy policy. Labor has talked a big game on energy, from “Rewiring the Nation”, “Powering the Nation” or, – wait for it – “Driving the Nation”. They’ve also dedicated about $25 billion to these dubious projects in the most recent Budget. The result? Power prices have risen more than 25 per cent in some east coast States in a year, record numbers of West Australians are on hardship plans to pay their energy bills, and frustrated farmers are discovering they don’t want their properties laden with thousands of kilometres of new transmission lines. Just this week, Sydney residents were told to avoid using essential appliances in order to avoid a blackout. All the while, Australia’s dependence on coal and gas, which still provides more than two-thirds of the country’s energy, remains relatively unchanged. Labor’s ideological fixation with wind, solar, and hydro, at the expense of any other technology, is harming Australian households and businesses, for little to no overall environmental benefit. The wider economy is beginning to sit up and take notice of this unsatisfactory state of affairs. Big business, which we discovered this year Labor has a soft spot for when it comes to public relations opportunities, is now beginning to embrace nuclear. This week, 70 of Australia’s most senior chief executives called for less ideology and more pragmatism in Australia’s energy transition. Like Ted O’Brien and the Coalition, they called for all technology options to be on the table, including nuclear. My message to Labor is that there is no shame in changing your position when the facts change. And the facts, overwhelmingly, show that developing countries that are serious about tackling emissions without harming their economy, are running towards nuclear energy.

Why reform would weaken WA – The West Australian

Every few years in Canberra, the topic of electoral reform arises and momentarily grips the attention of certain parliamentarians and public servants. These reforms can usually be distilled into three categories: amending the legal age to vote, ending compulsory voting, and increasing the size of one or both houses of Parliament. It is the last of these — a proposed, whopping expansion of the House of Representatives — that is currently the talk of the capital. First off, don’t be fooled by the promise of better governance, or indeed better outcomes, courtesy of a bigger Federal Parliament. Among its negative effects, and there are many, is that the planned changes will diminish the strength of WA in the Commonwealth. Late last month, a Labor-dominated committee recommended doubling the Senate representation of the ACT and Northern Territory from two to four. More concerningly, the same report produced by the committee raised the prospect of increasing the number of Lower House seats to as many as 200 — the vast majority of which would be in Sydney, Melbourne and, to a lesser extent, Brisbane. At a time when the Albanese Government’s policies are inflicting significant economic harm on WA, plans to further weaken the voice of Australia’s underappreciated economic powerhouse should be fiercely resisted. The committee wants Parliament to explore the idea of a redesigned Lower House, which would see NSW and Victoria gain an extra 28 seats, and Queensland an extra 10. WA would acquire just five extra seats, and be left with a total of 20, compared to a possible 63 for NSW. Regional voices would also be muzzled by the committee’s designs. To reduce what is known as malapportionment, or the uneven number of voters across electorates, seats would be demarcated using arithmetic, rather than the Australian Electoral Commission’s “harmonic” method. This would invariably lead to more seats in dense capital cities and fewer in country Australia. It would mean a Federal Parliament more heavily laden with consultants, lawyers and public relations experts than farmers, small business owners and people on the land. Canberra would become even more insular, a place where the focus of Government is fixed unbendingly on the interests and views of East Coast capital cities. It won’t end well — especially for WA. Indeed, after 18 months of an under-delivering, image over substance Albanese Government, we can already see the consequences of a one-eyed Prime Minister with no interest in backing our State. Record, unmodeled immigration, one of the driving forces of high inflation, has made it all but impossible to rent a home, or indeed build one, in WA. The average rent for a Perth house hit a record $600 a week in November. Labor’s recent $300 million infrastructure cuts on major WA roads will undoubtedly hurt regional communities, as well as risk lives. This slashed infrastructure spend is also a GST cut by stealth — Anthony Albanese and Jim Chalmers’ way of making us pay for the fairer GST deal the Coalition secured for our State in 2017. Bad Labor policy and increased Labor funding to professional litigators like the Environmental Protection Agency is making life increasingly difficult for the State’s critically important resources sector — royalties from which pay for roads, schools, hospitals, and social securities like the NDIS. And it’s about to get even harder for this sector, with the Albanese Government’s recent industrial relations laws placing unsustainable demands on mining companies regarding labour hire. Investors are already beginning to look elsewhere. This is an unacceptable position, but the reality of life under Labor and its misguided priorities. The takeaway from all this is hard to ignore. Labor’s proposed electoral reforms are the latest in a long line of betrayals of WA. Rather than stand up and be accountable to voters in the West, whose circumstances he is rapidly making worse, Anthony Albanese would rather drown our voices out in Parliament. Then there are the economics of such a plan. Labor has increased the size of Canberra’s public service by 10 per cent since coming to power last year, adding more than $1 billion to the annual public sector wage bill. Economists are already saying this has had an impact on domestic inflation. The financial consequences of adding as many as 50 extra parliamentarians, and the staffing allocation that goes along with it, would be comparable. I’m fortunate to travel around the country frequently because of my work, with much of that travel in regional WA. Constituents, as you would expect, are never shy of sharing whatever criticisms they might have of the politics of the day and I have received many pieces of advice. But making Parliament bigger has never been one of them. Certainly not at the expense of WA’s representation in Canberra. And, if Anthony Albanese visited the Wheatbelt or East Kimberley — or even Perth’s northern suburbs — he’d know it.