To cope with the outrageous creep of authoritarian behaviour and inescapable globalism, sometimes citizens of the West refer to themselves as ‘peasants’. Call it a bit of lingering British gallows humour.

Increasingly, that is exactly how the Labor Party views Australians – as the ‘peasantry’. Our ancestors, who lived under the thumb of feudal lords and warring barons, paid less tax. You, and your family, are among the highest-taxed people to live and it is about to get worse.

No matter how hard Australians work, Labor’s greed has erected a perspex ceiling on wealth which it lowers a notch every year, pushing the middle and working classes down.

When Prime Minister Anthony Albanese talks about ‘closing the pay gap’ between men and women (gendered terms Labor can only define when there’s an election on the horizon), it is being done by making both poorer.

Equality in poverty, that is the mantra of socialism – Labor’s eternal paramour.

The beauty of capitalism has meant the creation of cheaper markets and cut-price products. These have helped to maintain a level of comfort in challenging economic times. Selling these cheap, admittedly inferior, products has kept a generation in work and the economy ticking over. It’s not perfect, but it is better than looking down over the edge of the gulag, shovel in hand, dirt blowing in your face.

As long as there is a free market, there is hope for recovery. There is hope for freedom.

While these markets make our lives livable, the World Economic Forum (and the ‘desperate to please’ political leaders hanging on their every word), have decided that this cheap capitalism is a threat to the planet because it creates ‘evil carbon emissions’.

I suggest it is a threat to their political power.

The list of carbon restrictions grows every day. Last week we learned that Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek has found a new capitalist foe to conquer – fast-fashion.

Alarm bells first rang at the World Economic Forum with the headline, Suits you – and the planet: Why fashion needs a sustainability revolution. It was a report based on the moaning of two ‘experts’ who insisted that 20 per cent of wastewater is produced by the fashion industry and 10 per cent of global emissions. These statistics rather miss the point that something, somewhere, will always be responsible for emissions. Humans need to wear clothes and the Australian Union movement made it impossible to manufacture them domestically where we’d have more control over the environmental result. Instead of regulating China, they are coming after Western retailers.

‘We cannot afford the trajectory of fashion increasing to maybe as much as 25 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 … how do we take out fossil fuels from the fashion industry?’

Of course, the ‘change needs to be radical … we have to reduce production and consumption of fashion by between 75 and 95 per cent. We’re not talking about snipping a bit off’.

The report is casually talking about destroying the fashion industry that keeps the clothes on your back.

That report was written in 2021 and subsequently ignored during the Covid years when the imminent threat of the evil fashion industry vanished for a while.

The ‘burn it to the ground’ rhetoric of the WEF has since camouflaged itself as ‘Fashionomy’, wearing the sheep’s wool of the new favourite buzzword ‘circular economy’.

‘Sharing the circular economy knowledge and the negative impact of the fashion industry will help people to be a part of the second-hand clothes cycle, and clothing repair shops can become the new option to encourage customers not to waste their money. If the community reduces textile waste, makes savings in the family economy, and helps the growth of the local economy, we will see an impact on the development of a sustainable lifestyle, helping mitigate climate change, and supporting sustainable cities.’

Notice the change in language? If the government knocks 95 per cent of the retail industry out, and all those jobs along with it, we won’t see a ‘growth in the economy’.

With no original ideas, Ms Plibersek has warned the clothing industry – one of the largest employers in Australia – that it must ‘turn its back on fast-fashion’ and if it doesn’t mend its ways, well, the ever-loving State will be forced to intervene.

‘Government is not sitting on our hands on this issue. The federal government has put the fashion industry on a watch list,’ said Ms Plibersek.

A watch list? Like a Stalinist watch list where government critics were lined up and quietly disappeared?

Her speech was a regurgitation of the World Economic Forum’s statistics from 2021, which is no doubt where Labor sourced them.

‘It’s the responsibility of government and the fashion industry to examine how we can be more sustainable in design, the materials used, and the role of the circular economy in extending the lifespan of the garment.’

Well, it’s only the ‘role of government’ to interfere with business if we’re talking about a fascist regime. I will leave you to decide if that describes Labor’s choice of words.

‘As an industry, there needs to be environmental sustainability of business models and the way products are marketed.’

This speech was part of Ms Plibersek’s ‘ultimatum’ to the fashion industry, although One Nation does not remember the Labor Party mentioning these demands during their election campaign. It’s an urgent ultimatum created five seconds ago – a doomsday that didn’t exist until Ms Plibersek decided it did at the launch of the Australian Fashion Council’s new initiative ‘Seamless’, which is another hopeless layer of bureaucracy we believe will punish and micromanage Australia’s fashion industry. A group of busy-bodies with infinite demands.

‘Seamless’ wants its members to pay a 4-cent contribution to the program for every item of clothing imported or created. According to the ABC, this is worth $36 million a year – and $60 million if they get their wish and make the clothing tax mandatory. Every single cent of which has been taken from the retail industry.

‘Improved affordability of clothes is a good thing. Parents shouldn’t have to choose between a new pair of school shoes and paying the electricity bill.’

What was that, Ms Plibersek?

Is the Environment Minister aware that the cost of school shoes isn’t the problem – it’s the nearly doubled cost of energy thanks to … Labor’s ‘green’ energy agenda? Australian parents know exactly what’s causing the cost of living crisis. Don’t blame the fashion industry for Mr Bowen’s expensive errors. If kids don’t have shoes to wear to school, you can thank the high priests of Net Zero.

But why this sudden assault on one of Australia’s most important industries?

We may speculate that this is Labor pivoting from electric vehicles after it became obvious that Europe – and thus Australia – will not be transitioning to ecars. Labor is desperate for a distraction to stop the press from calling them liars, so why not attack retail?

Well, there are good reasons to leave retail alone.

The clothing industry in Australia is worth $23.2 billion. It employs (directly) 121,000 people – and probably another 100,000 in industries dependent on its success such as IT, transport, storage, cleaning, accounting, training, surrounding cafes … the list goes on.

There are more than 16,300 businesses, most of them small to medium, many run by family entities. As of August 2023, fashion retail was paying out $4.9 billion in wages.

Which, we must remind Ms Plibersek, is heavily taxed and helps top up the coffers of the State.

The fashion industry was severely damaged by government interventions during Covid. Countless generational family businesses closed. People ended their lives having seen their life’s work evaporate overnight on the whim of health advice. The margins which used to drive a healthy industry have been cut by greedy shopping centres, excessive power costs, increased wages, and the introduction of impossible Fair Work complexity – not to mention rising manufacturing costs, fuel costs, and green tape. All of these things have meant that businesses in the fashion industry are barely scraping by. That said, the fashion industry is trying, so hard, to survive.

A sensible government would be desperately searching for ways to salvage those businesses that survived the great Covid culling. Perhaps they might consider cutting the excess taxes, or tearing up red tape?

Instead, Ms Plibersek has put her high heel on the head of Australia’s fashion industry and pushed it down under the surface of Net Zero to suffocate on bureaucracy.

‘If it’s the fashion industry that makes the profits, then it must be responsible for doing better by the environment.’

That’s a very communist-style thing to say. Does Ms Plibersek apply that rule to the renewable industry as it cuts down our old-growth forests, rips apart private farmland, and clogs up our seas with cement and steel? Or does the government hand out billions in subsidies?

‘And for those who manufacture in Australia, it means thinking hard about what they can do to create and sell products that have a longer shelf life, while still being affordable.’

Spoken by someone lacking experience and understanding regarding how the price of a clothing item is created.

How does Ms Plibersek expect the (very few) Australian fashion manufacturers to pay their staff more, cover excessive energy prices, pay additional taxes, pay more for transport, more for rent, more for storage, more for materials, more for IT services, more for accounting services, more for HR bureaucracies, and additional costs for the environment – all while lowering the cost and eventual sale price of the product?

If Ministers cannot understand basic maths they should not be proposing complex policies with the ability to decimate one of the most important industries in this nation.

The unintentional consequences of this cannot be overstated.

It is reckless, cheap, and nasty politics aimed at painting the fashion industry as the new climate criminal. An industry that Labor has been desperately trying (and failing) to unionise against the wishes of family-run entities and small businesses.

What is Ms Plibersek’s end result? An Australian industry dominated by union workhouses with a ‘Net Zero’ sticker on the front where citizens can choose which hessian bag they want to wear?

‘I have suits from an Australian designer that uses lots of remnant fabrics that would otherwise end up in landfill,’ said Ms Plibersek.

Has she walked down the poorer end of George Street where fast-fashion is packed wall-to-wall? There she would see students and the elderly picking out jeans for $5 and jackets for $12. Those customers know these aren’t the best clothes around, but fast-fashion allows them to have a wardrobe of sorts to distract them from the otherwise nightmare reality of surviving Labor’s Net Zero revolution.

If those stores vanish, people may be able to afford one pair of jeans – jeans with patches and repair marks – the same set of clothes worn until they fall to rags like the peasants of old living in a threadbare world.

‘I repeat what I said in June last year: I am watching. If I’m not happy with industry progress, I will step in and regulate.’

Did you hear that? That government is watching. The government is threatening you. The government will come after you.

Keep that in mind when the next election rolls around.

Ms Plibersek is coming for the clothes on your back.

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