The Prime Minister of Australia seems to be consistently unable to tell the truth about future policy, especially when it’s inconvenient to his political goals.
Hence, there is a reason why he’s often called ‘Albonocchio’. Like famous little puppet who magically turned into a boy, Anthony Albanese is treating voters like donkeys.
Even the mainstream media have started calling the government out. Consider the following question Mark Riley, the Political Editor for 7NEWS, asked Jim Chalmers during the Q&A session at the National Press Club address in Canberra, following the release of the Federal Budget.
Riley asked:
Treasurer, I just wanted to take a broader look at your decision to change negative gearing and CGT and the implications that has on your government, and the complexion of your government.
The reasons you’ve given today is that the young generations are locked out of the housing market [but] that was apparent abundantly before the last election. So abundantly that in the Prime Minister’s words, we asked him and you and others at least fifty times whether you were going to change these tax arrangements and you said no.
A lot of people were compelled to vote for the Albanese government in 2022 and again in 2025 because of that promise of openness and accountability and integrity. You would be a different government.
Won’t those voters wake up this morning and say, ‘You’re not different. You’ve just proved that you’re another lying government.’
I must say, that the pause and anxious look of Chalmers before he then attempted to spin his way out of it really says it all. The current Labor government has been caught out lying again and again and again.
In the lead-up to the last election, even ‘Albonocchio’ himself impatiently acknowledged how he had literally stated ‘for the fiftieth’ that he wouldn’t touch negatively gearing. Don’t believe me? Then let’s go back and check the videotape…
Every politician needs to realise that not only does the internet never forget, but breaking a key election promise is not the same thing as simply ‘changing one’s mind’. This is not the same thing as deciding to have a cappuccino instead of a flat white.
The Labor government’s polling is rightly in free fall which is providing yet another boost to the Opposition and in particular One Nation. And now the Australian public is stuck with this tax hike for at least another two years.
None of this should surprise anyone, though since the current Labor government has repeatedly demonstrated an inability to tell the truth. In August 2023, I wrote another article in The Spectator Australia highlighting this particular character flaw in the lead up to the referendum on The Voice. All the way back then I exposed the Prime Minister as having, what do we call this now? Changed his position… Citing no less than four examples:
The Prime Minister firstly spoke from what Rowan Dean referred to as ‘both sides of his mouth’, saying to Indigenous Australians they shouldn’t ‘be content with modest change’ but then to everyone else he insisted The Voice was only a ‘modest request’. But it clearly cannot be both.
Second, Mr Albanese said to Ben Fordham that The Voice had nothing to do with a Treaty, when the Explanatory Memorandum for The Voice clearly demonstrates that it does.
Third, he said that the Uluru Statement from the Heart was only one-page when Peta Credlin had shown that it was part of a 26-page document.
And then finally, Albanese admitted to Neil Mitchell that (at the time) he hadn’t ‘even read’ the Uluru Statement from the Heart in full, despite repeatedly promising to implement it in full.
The thumbnail, which the brilliant cartoonist Ben Davis generously produced for that piece back then it just as potent – and indeed prescient – as it sadly still is today. The current government obviously has a massive problem with truth telling. The even greater problem though is the majority of Aussies keep falling for it.
