Anthony Albanese has enjoyed the period since his re-election, imagining himself to be the Wizard of Oz. After Xi Jinping rolled out the red carpet for him, he convinced himself that he had neutralised any threat China might pose and did not need to spend a dollar extra on defence, whatever our closest ally and leader of the free world might argue, and regardless of the escalating expenditure on defence and national security by allies and enemies alike.

The last eleven days have been an excursion by Albo into la-la land. First, he gave speeches at the United Nations in New York on Australia’s heroic role in making even larger imaginary cuts to its carbon emissions that nobody bothered to attend, let alone applaud.

And why would they? Between 2005 and March 2025, Australia’s emissions only decreased by 28 per cent, and the vast bulk of those emissions cuts came from uncompensated land-clearing restrictions imposed by state governments on farmers in NSW and Queensland. Take out those changes to land use and emissions have been cut by a paltry 3 per cent.

In opposition, Albanese denounced the Coalition government’s reliance on the one-off land-use reductions as ‘absurd’ and set a target of cutting emissions by 43 per cent by 2030 compared with 2005.

And how is he going? Australia has not a hope in Hades of reaching Labor’s 2030 targets, indeed, if anything, at best, national emissions have flatlined since Labor came to power in 2022.

As for Climate and Energy Clown Chris Bowen’s target of generating 82 per cent of electricity from renewables, it relied on installing forty 7MW wind turbines every month from 2022 until 2030, and 22,000 500W solar panels every day for eight years, or 60 million by 2030.

Thankfully, that hasn’t happened. Renewables were about 32 per cent of total electricity generation in 2022, so fossil fuels contributed 68 per cent of electricity. The most recent data from the government shows that fossil fuels contributed 64 per cent of total electricity generation in 2024, including coal (45 per cent), gas (17 per cent) and oil (2 per cent). That hasn’t stopped Bowen from wasting billions of taxpayer dollars on green hydrogen, which has generated precisely no energy at all.

But that wasn’t all. On his adventures in la-la land, Albanese also recognised the imaginary state of Palestine, which meets only one of the four preconditions for a state, namely that it has a population. Under the Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States (1933), which is the classic reference in international law for the criteria of statehood, a state must control a specific piece of land, there must be an organised political authority with control over the territory and population, and the state must be able to conduct diplomacy, sign treaties and interact as a subject of international law. At present, most of the representatives of Palestine aspire to occupy the entire area from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea and claim that their democratic neighbour, Israel, is an ‘apartheid’ state with whom they refuse to negotiate. Thankfully, they control only a portion of the West Bank of the Jordan River and the Gaza Strip through the corrupt connivance of the Palestinian Authority and the outlawed terrorist organisation, Hamas.

From there, Albanese visited King Charles at Balmoral, where, one imagines, they chatted amicably about the imaginary catastrophe of climate change and the heroic work both are doing to avert this cataclysm.

Then it was off to give a rousing talk to the UK Labour party conference, where Sir Keir Starmer told the Labour faithful assembled at the Liverpool Exhibition Centre that his good mate Albo was ‘an inspiration to those of us on the left’ and a ‘key partner’ in the fight against ‘divisive politics’. That would be news to the 61 per cent of Australians who voted against Albanese’s proposition to divide Australians on race and create a race-based Voice to parliament.

The introduction might also have rung less hollow if Albanese wasn’t such a close chum of Jeremy Corbyn, who is plotting to divide the Labour vote in the UK.

Julia Gillard and Wayne Swan who sat grim-faced in the audience might also be excused for seeing Albo as something less than a colossal figure of Labor unity given Albanese’s support for prime minister and then foreign minister and then prime minister again, Kevin Rudd, who managed to so divide the Australian Labor party that he kept them out of government for almost a decade. Gillard and Swan clapped dutifully, perhaps grateful that Rudd was safely ensconced on the other side of the pond in the US, fighting ‘divisive politics’ in his own unique way by failing to organise a meeting between Albanese and Trump.

Starmer, however, seemed to be genuinely impressed that Albanese had turned up at Downing Street armed with a four-pack of beer named after himself, to defend not just his ‘mate’ Starmer but ‘democracy itself’. It’s thirsty work waging war on the weather, but perhaps the climate comrades took a moment to toast Palestine too.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, China has just imposed a ban on imports of iron ore from BHP. It is also instructing the Solomon Islands police in kung-fu fighting and running rings around Australian diplomats in the South Pacific, steering Papua New Guinea and Vanuatu away from signing defence agreements with Canberra.

L. Frank Baum published The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in 1900 as a political allegory about the populist movement in the America of the 1890s. The lesson for Albanese is obvious: you can’t change the weather with incantations, nor conjure up a green industrial revolution with fantasy economics. The Wizard promised to make the world sparkle with gold and silver; Albanese promises to turn Australia into a renewable energy superpower. Both visions are built on yellow-brick roads to nowhere.

The sober reality is that Albanese needs to spend far less time playing wizard abroad and far more time focusing on the defence threats China poses to Australia and the South Pacific. If he wants to copy China on anything, he should copy its utter indifference to emissions cuts and its ruthless focus on energy and strategic security. He needs to spend far less time fantasising about the imaginary state of Palestine and far more time on the Pacific. And if he wants to learn anything from Baum, it is that every wizard’s curtain is eventually pulled back to reveal a fraud.