Before they were even elected – and in fervent hope that they wouldn’t be – this magazine warned that an Albanese government would give Australia the lowest collective IQ of any front bench in our nation’s history. And so it has some to pass. But don’t take our word for it, just listen to the various comedians who make up the Albanese cabinet selling their wares this week. In the face of yet more evidence of the most appalling violence (domestic, sexual and otherwise) in the Northern Territory – horrors Australians have been aware of since the morning in 2007 when we woke up to the startling news that the Howard government was sending in the Army to tackle the rampant sexual abuse of minors in remote communities – Prime Minister Albanese decided to respond by sending in the clowns, himself included.

Albo’s brief ‘fly-in, fly-out’ visit to Alice Springs was not only rightly ridiculed by the mainstream media, it was made a mockery of by his own diary. Four hours in ‘the Alice’ getting a front row seat view of indigenous violence versus three days at the tennis getting a front row seat view of Slavik serving prowess. While the beer cans and rocks were hurtling through the air long into the Territory twilight, our caring, compassionate Prime Minister was chugging back the beers watching the balls whiz past him at Rod Laver arena.

Perhaps he was merely lubricating his voice. But to compound the appalling optics, the prime minister gave perhaps the worst and most vacuous speech of his thus far lamentable time in office, addressing the NT violence simply by blaming previous Australian governments. ‘We all have to do better’, or some such twaddle. This has now become the familiar response from a government devoid of any credible, pragmatic policy ideas because it is so utterly compromised by its commitment to identity politics and hard-left ideology.

But if Albo’s own performance wasn’t bad enough, Australians then had to suffer the idiotic comments of his Indigenous Affairs Minister Linda Burney, who disgracefully proclaimed words to the effect that the violence in Alice Springs would not be occurring had ‘the Voice’ already been implemented. According to this foolish individual, the lives of indigenous Australians that have been blighted by decades of abhorrent quasi-socialist government policies, billions of dollars of rampant wasted welfarism, bureaucratic and tribal corruption and bungling on steroids, and the subsequent destruction of individual and family pride and dignity – all the result of the cultural desecration caused by Gough Whitlam’s and ‘Nugget’ Coombs’ socialist beliefs – all of these tragedies would have been magically cured by one more bloated bureaucracy in Canberra.

Indeed, in this week’s Voice special, six of our top writers look at the Voice proposal from a variety of different angles.

No sooner was the Albo & Burney slapstick double act over than Jimbo the Show Pony Treasurer came prancing into the ring with his very own clown show billed hilariously as ‘reinventing Capitalism’. Despite having been supposedly in charge of managing the Australian economy – one of the world’s most successful over the last century – for under a year, and with no runs on the board to show for it whatsoever, Mr Chalmers believes it is his mission to happily tinker around with the basic underpinnings of the high-wire act that is every single Australian individual’s and business’s prosperity. The arrogance of this is as terrifying as is the stupidity, as Rebecca Weisser points out in her column.

Yet even Mr Chalmers has competition. Nothing quite gets an audience roaring with laughter more than the clown car spluttering into the Big Top, as it stutters and bangs and the wheels all fall off. Enter Energy Minister Chris Bowen, busily spruiking electric vehicles and green hydrogen as the solution to ‘climate change’ while our energy prices soar and the energy market collapses. Meanwhile, the rest of the world is rapidly waking up to the fact that nuclear is essential if we really are to wean ourselves off fossil fuels in the decades ahead (not that we need to, but that’s another story).

Read Judith Sloan this week for the full story on the silliness of the entire green hydrogen fantasy.

Burney, Bowen & Chalmers. They are quite the circus act, with a ringmaster who daily appears ever more incompetent and dumbstruck. Faced with incredibly serious problems that urgently require pragmatic and well-thought-through policy remedies, these characters offer up nothing but green-socialist fantasies and ideology.

How long till the Big Top comes crashing down?