Greeted by the naive as a breath of fresh air, the only significant difference Anthony Albanese has demonstrated from his predecessor is that he does have more common sense. An early example was his willingness to appear on the serious media which Bill Shorten avoided like the plague.

As part of his reaction to any serious interrogation of his extremist and destructive global warming agenda, Shorten dismissed questions as to cost as ‘dumb’, abusing critics as ‘cave-dwellers’ and ‘knuckle-draggers’.

The foolishness of trying to avoid media scrutiny in a political campaign can best be illustrated by an extreme example. This was of the plight of Australians for Constitutional Monarchy during the 1999 republic referendum, a time when the mainstream media still enjoyed monopoly access.

Every major newspaper, both public broadcasters and all commercial television were committed to a Yes vote. Visiting Australia at the time, the respected one-time editor of the London Daily Telegraph, Lord Deedes, said he had ‘rarely attended elections in any country, certainly not a democratic one, in which the newspapers have displayed more shameless bias. One and all, they determined that Australians should have a republic and they used every device towards that end.’

Already battle-hardened in such campaigns as that against the Carr government’s brutal and ill-judged 1996 expulsion of the NSW governors from Government House —Keating said it lost him the 1996 election — ACM  realised that even the most hostile media could not avoid allowing part of our case to emerge. After all, without conflict there can be no political news.

Albanese could have used the banality of his announcement about the inevitable yet tedious reshuffling of the shadow cabinet to say something to indicate some movement towards becoming electable,  e.g., ruling out the theft of self-funded retirees’ tax refunds or admitting that  the Shorten-Phelps Medevac bill proved indeed to be a green light to the people-smugglers.

Instead, Albanese peppered his speech with references to the same agenda which made Labor unelectable. Take, for example, his elevation of shadow Attorney-General Dreyfus to a position which sounds like something from Orwell’s 1984, Shadow Minister for Constitutional Reform.

Whenever a politician talks about ‘reform’ (meaning improvement) reach for your lie detector. That the media blindly then adopts this description means they are either willing dupes or ignorant of the need to report fact. In announcing the Ministry of Constitutional Reform, Albanese set out a programme of change even vaster than Shorten’s.

There is to be ‘indigenous recognition’, the elites’ latest silver bullet designed to close the gap in health, wealth and education for which the elites themselves are at least partly responsible. This is despite the $33.4 billion spent on indigenous affairs ($44,886 per head compared with $22,356 for the non-indigenous).

Then there’s four-year terms, another silver bullet previously strongly endorsed by the mainstream media as a supposedly self-evident way to improve governance. Yet the first NSW government elected for a four-year term is generally agreed to be the worst in living memory.

Instead of longer terms there ought to be more elections to make the politicians accountable, provided these were to result from the people’s being allowed to recall a politician or indeed legislature.

Then there’s the constitutional ‘recognition’ of local government. This will be not so much a ‘recognition’ but rather a takeover from the states who created local government, in order to make the federal politicians even more powerful.

This result will be an increase in those twin-benefits Canberra so richly endows this nation, even more maladministration and even more waste. Is there one thing that Canberra has unconstitutionally stripped from the states which has not resulted in disaster? Just look at the shocking decline internationally of standards in our schools.

Australia already enjoys the dubious honour of being the democratic world’s most centralised federation, with the resulting annual waste equal to more than half of the accumulated federal debt. So why would we want to have the federal government poking its nose into municipal and shire councils? The first thing they’d do would be to substantially increase the rates and then apply gender fluidity rules to garbage collection.

Then there’s ‘the’ republic which even Labor eminence Graham Richardson now admits is, if not dead, comatose.

Albanese knows this, so, cloaking the agenda in convoluted prose, he talked about ‘the necessary move… at some stage… that we will have to do… to move to a republic… with an Australian head of state.’

Apart from the unexplained twice mentioned necessity to do something the people have already overwhelmingly rejected, why did he suggest that we don’t already have an Australian as head of state ?

Albanese full well knows that Dame Quentin Bryce was sent in 2009 as the Australian head of state to nine African countries to support a campaign to obtain a seat on the Security Council — Albanese was a minister in the very government which sent her.

And there was no indication in his speech that he had abandoned attempting constitutional change through a plebiscite to elicit a vote of no-confidence in one of the world’s best-drafted constitutions with nothing — absolutely nothing — to put in its place. Presumably, the secret republican constitution, like the secret republican flag and the secret republican anthem, is locked in some safe deep in the party vaults.

Not content with a programme to vandalise the constitution, Albanese has in no way retreated from Labor’s global warmist policies either to run down manufacturing and mining or to achieve the eventual destruction of our mum-and-dad farmers so that we become net importers of food. This will be balanced by Labor’s furious endorsement of the most bizarre and extremist version of gender theory as part of its declaration of war against white heterosexual males.

The election result indicates the Australian people are beginning to wake up to Labor as the party of the elites.

It’s time now for the other politicians to represent the wishes of the people and give them back their country.