In the tradition of Australian political theatre, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has unveiled his latest bid for relevance, the ‘Back Australia’ campaign.

Launched with nauseating levels of support from the mainstream media, the usual corporate titans have jumped on the government-funded bandwagon. Albo’s pitiful policy promises of a ‘new industrial era’ have been copied and pasted across Australia’s mastheads.

They are basically saying Albo will Make Australia Great Again but with different words.

Who could argue with backing Australia? After all, we’ve spent decades hollowing out our industrial base and shipping jobs to low-wage factories in Asia while patting ourselves on the back for being the ‘lucky country’.

But scratch beneath the patriotic gloss, and this initiative reveals itself as less a policy revolution than a cynical pivot by the very elites who’ve feasted on taxpayer largesse under the guise of the trendy ideals taught as facts in our schools.

The architects of this campaign supported the Voice, and recently some of them wanted your household batteries to be available for public use and to control your air conditioner. Now this same cohort of decolonisation and climate change evangelists who lapped up billions in subsidies for wind farms and solar panels want a new trough.

For over a decade, some of these players have gorged on the renewables bonanza, courtesy of Labor and Coalition governments alike, turning intermittent power sources into a subsidy-sucking black hole.

Power prices have skyrocketed, aluminium smelters have been shuttered, and families copped the bill. All in the name of ‘saving the planet’.

Andrew Hastie pushed a few buttons recently with some populist ideas that have gained traction.

Now, with the green gold rush maturing into a familiar cronyism, the grifter elites are eyeing the manufacturing revival as their next trough.

Back Australia isn’t about rebuilding. It’s about redirecting the pork barrel from climate change to economic nationalism. All of a sudden it is important to ‘Back Australia’.

The grifters don’t change, only the jargon.

Like everything else Labor dreams up, this manufacturing mirage is doomed from the start. Even the current leadership of the Coalition are blind to the Net Zero noose tightening around our necks.

As former Prime Minister Tony Abbott has bluntly observed, pursuing Net Zero emissions while dreaming of a manufacturing renaissance is nonsensical. He has argued that Net Zero must be dropped.

He’s right. Reliable, baseload power is the lifeblood of factories forging steel, refining minerals, or assembling machinery. Yet Labor’s obsession with electrification and emissions targets ensures energy costs will remain punitive, pricing Australian industry out of the global race before it even starts.

Net zero and a manufacturing revival aren’t just incompatible, they’re mutually exclusive.

Albanese’s campaign pretends otherwise, but it’s a sleight of hand.

Of course, any ‘support’ doled out under this banner won’t trickle down to the workers it’s supposedly saving. Labor, ever the union loyalists, will ensure the spoils flow first to their mates. We’ve seen this before with the false markets created by the home insulation debacle and the school halls, where false markets were created under the guise of stimulus.

Manufacturing grants will come laced with enterprise bargaining agreements that lock in feather-bedding, strike rights, and productivity-sapping rules. Why build efficient plants when you can fund endless training days and diversity workshops? The tired old labour movement and their Labor enablers will remain firmly in charge, turning what could be a genuine industrial policy into another vehicle for sectional interests. It’s not backing Australia, it’s about jobs for the apparatchiks and handing more public funds to the grifting elites.

This brings me to the campaign’s true origin story. It’s not about a bold vision for Australia, but base political calculus by Labor.

Back Australia is less about empowering local industry than neutralising a rising threat within the Coalition – Andrew Hastie.

The Western Australian MP, a hawk on national security and a vocal advocate for sovereign manufacturing to counter Chinese dominance, has been carving out a niche as the Opposition’s fresh face on economic nationalism. His calls for onshoring critical supply chains have resonated with voters amid the changing global trade and geopolitical situation in our region.

This is where Albo has shown his political nous. By co-opting the rhetoric of economic nationalism, supported by business heavyweights and advertised with White House selfies, Albanese has taken some of the wind out of Hastie’s sails.

With the Opposition already in Albo’s pocket, his move is classic divide-and-conquer. The Opposition will chase its tail while Albo claims the mantle of patriotism. Hastie will be sidelined, and we’ll be stuck with Albo.

That’s because Hastie might prove to be a Farage-like figure, something that caught Labour and the Conservatives napping. But for Albo, to be forewarned is forearmed and he has managed to dilute Hastie’s populist ideas into Labor’s marketing spin.

In the end, Back Australia is about as substantive as a bumper sticker.

Net Zero dogma continues to make energy unaffordable for many while the elite grifters and unions feather their nests. Political manoeuvring is trumping policy substance.

Put simply, this campaign won’t revive manufacturing, it’ll merely pitch public funds at prolonging its ongoing decline.

Any manufacturing renaissance must have national security at its core, with the role of government being to drive capabilities where they are needed most.

Instead, Australians are getting recycled slogans from the same elites who’ve led us to this lucky-but-losing precipice. If we’re serious about turning luck into smarts, as the campaign’s cheerleaders claim, we’ll need to scrap the subsidies, ditch the delusions, and empower innovators over insiders.

Hastie would do well to wrest his policy ideas from Albo’s counterattack if he is to have any impact on voters. But with grifters all around and even a few conservative media and business elites getting in on the ‘Back Australia’ action, I may be asking the impossible.

Dr Michael de Percy @FlaneurPolitiq is the Spectator Australia’s Canberra Press Gallery Correspondent. If you would like to support his writing, or read more of Michael, please visit his website.