Shrinking The Nation

Labor's strategy to offer solutions to problems it already caused reached its logical conclusion this week when it offered to provide Australians with $1 billion worth of free therapy sessions.

The political cycle isn’t what it used to be. Incumbent governments used to spend the first two years of a three-year term implementing difficult policies, and scheduling positive outcomes to coincide with the ensuing election.

But that’s too much hard work for a government as incompetent as this current one, led by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. So instead they’ve hit upon a much easier formula.

First, they spend most of their term in office causing unprecedented havoc — pushing up prices, bankrupting businesses, closing down power stations and opening the borders to Third World migrants who occupy all the houses and hasten the fragmentation of what was once our cohesive society.

Then, just before calling an election, they embark on an advertising campaign expressing alarm at all the carnage and offering to repair it with truckloads of freshly minted money.

I wish I was being facetious about this but the correlation between cause and effect is beyond dispute. Student debts accrued in pursuit of useless university degrees, high energy bills caused by Net Zero, mismanagement of Medicare, the cost of medicines, some of the world’s highest real estate prices and the closure of the Whyalla steelworks are all not only directly or indirectly related to Canberra incompetency but have also triggered excitingly generous promises of emergency relief from self-appointed senior ministerial saviours driving the aforementioned trucks full of money.

You’d think the electorate would see through this, but in this age of social-media-level attention spans, it works a charm. Albanese is like a teenage influencer who has spent years telling girls that eating cake all day is the definition of body-positive empowerment, then swoops in and makes a fortune by flogging them Ozempic and liposuction.

And his announcement yesterday, which took this strategy to its logical conclusion, is proof that it’s a winning formula in what passes for Labor’s re-election campaign headquarters.

The billions — or is it trillions? — Albo has announced in the campaign so far have been relatively nuanced, targeting specific people with specific remedies, focusing on whichever demographics the market researchers have identified as most likely to respond positively to a blatant bribe.

But like an angry, drunk wife-basher who stops to buy flowers on the way home from the pub, Albo knows there are always new and innovative ways to sweeten even the most obviously unattractive deal. Which is why he is now offering a billion dollars — that’s right, a billion dollars — for all of us to visit a mental health professional.

It’s genius, really. Outside the senior members of the Labor Party, its financiers in the superannuation industry, the ABC and the billionaires in the green energy movement, there can hardly be a single person whose “mental health” hasn’t copped a hit from this government’s toxic existence.

I must admit even I read Albo’s announcement yesterday and immediately imagined how therapeutic it would be to curl up on some shrink’s couch, the afternoon sun shining gently through the trees outside the clinic window, and offload the mental burden of watching a lisping, limp-wristed class warrior and his team of globalist puppets destroying this once great nation while the Coalition Opposition timidly offers a half-hearted alternative that merely slows the decline. Throw in a gentle Enya soundtrack and a prescription for government-subsidised anti-depressants at the end of the session, and the temptation to accept Labor’s soothing offer becomes almost irresistible.

Of course, I jest. It wouldn’t matter how much money or therapy he was throwing at me, the chances of Albo buying my vote is lower than Andrew Tate has of hitting the jackpot after taking Sarah Hanson-Young on a date to the UFC.

The reason — and I apologise if this is bleeding obvious — is that Albo’s generosity is faker than an Indian Uber driver’s student visa. This government’s pitch for re-election is the most extravagant in Australian history; it is also the least explained. Where is all this money coming from? They’re not telling us this side of the election, although Robert Gottleibsen in The Australian has offered a scary prognosis. Spoiler alert: we pay in the end, and it won’t be cheap.

Albo’s latest pitch, for the nanny state to sedate us while the country goes down the drain, is based on the assumption that Australia’s robust, rugged, individualistic culture — the culture of the convicts, the Anzacs and the men and women who built one of the freest, most prosperous and happiest nations in history from nothing in a mere 237 years — is dead.

We will soon find out if his assumption is correct.