At the Garma festival in Arnhem land recently, the Prime Minister of Australia, Anthony Albanese, reached peak woke stupidity. The creed of wokeness has long relied on the tenuous concept of ‘intersectionality’. This is the idea that an individual can be ‘oppressed’ or a ‘victim’ on more than one front. For example, you might be an indigenous person who is also a lesbian, therefore you are doubly oppressed by white mainstream society. This in turn has led to a ‘hierarchy of victimhood’ among the left. Thus, the more labels you can attach to yourself or your group or cause, the more ‘marginalised’ and therefore ‘virtuous’ and ‘worthy’ you or your cause automatically become.

This concept of intersectionality is one beloved of the left in Australia, too. Which is not at all surprising. Indeed, it is an indisputable fact that there is nothing in what passes for left-wing ‘thinking’ in Australia that has been created by left-wing Australians themselves: everything is borrowed holus-bolus from the left in Canada, the United States or Great Britain. Lack of originality has never appeared to bother the so-called ‘intellectuals’ of the Australian left.

To wit, the term ‘First Nations’, which is now ubiquitous under the Albanese government as a description of pre-colonial-era indigenous Australians, was of course a Canadian and American invention. While it may be possible to discern specific pre-settlement Indian ‘nations’, it is a fantasy to do the same on this continent.

But fantasies and wishful thinking are the stock-in-trade of the Albanese government and its motley collection of uninspiring ministers. Australians, and in particular Aboriginal Australians, were treated at Garma to the single most ludicrous proposition ever put forward to indigenous peoples: the intersectional economic concept of First Nations + Clean Energy + Future Made in Australia. A satirist would struggle to come up with a more perfect intersectional concept that succinctly exposes the complete absence of any serious agenda from this ideologically captured government and its estrangement from economic reality.

The proposal appears to be something like this: because of catastrophic climate change, Australia will adopt renewable energy and due to our ‘abundance’ of wind and sunlight we will become a ‘superpower’. Despite there being no evidence at all to support this fanciful proposition, and indeed plenty of evidence to suggest the opposite (such as the lack of success in green hydrogen), regardless it is now taken as a given and is the centrepiece of the Australian Labor government’s economic policies. Moreover, the success in becoming a renewables superpower will be driven by the government picking winners and subsidising them. Then, in order to rescue Outback communities from the drugs, pornography, domestic violence, abuse, cronyism and endemic corruption that has deprived generations of Aborigines of a decent, normal life assimilated into mainstream Australian life, the Albanese government will intersect ‘deprived Aboriginal communities’ with ‘tackling catastrophic climate change’ with ‘picking and subsidising the renewables projects that make us a superpower’.

Any indigenous Australian leaving Garma with a sense of optimism and hope is likely to be severely disappointed. Not once, not twice, but three times in his keynote speech Mr Albanese specifically linked the future of indigenous Australia to Labor’s climate change beliefs and an economic future based entirely on renewables. That’s it. There is no Plan B. Worse, to underscore this point, Mr Albanese in the same speech announced the absorbing of the proposed Jabiluka uranium mine into Kakadu National Park. ‘This guarantees there will never be uranium mined at Jabiluka,’ boasted the Prime Minister.

So, on the one hand, Mr Albanese shuts down the option of potentially hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars of investment and royalties flowing into a remote indigenous community via a proven economic resource, whilst on the other hand promising other communities a prosperous economic future based on nothing more than wishful thinking and climate dogma. It is almost impossible to think of a more brazenly arrogant, irresponsible and nonsensical commitment. Remember, inherent in this plan, but not stated, are numerous impossible-to-ignore counterfactuals. Namely, if climate change turns out not to be the catastrophic problem Labor claims it is, then there will never be a ‘renewables superpower’ here or anywhere else on the planet. If the world’s economies maintain their reliance on fossil fuels – as they are doing – or increase reliance on nuclear power – as they are also doing – no renewables energy enterprise will last more than five minutes in remote locations, no matter how much seed money a Labor government pours in. If remote Aboriginal communities happen to be located in areas unsuitable for wind or solar, they are doomed to perpetual poverty and disadvantage. Hinted at by Mr Albanese, but not seriously addressed, is the added reality of red, black and green tape which is already crippling potential investment.

Anthony Albanese and Labor offer up a thin gruel of fantasies and left-wing intersectionality. The only hope for Aboriginal Australia is a change of government.