Albanese Fails The Leadership Test

Dear Liberal Friends

This government will stop at nothing when it comes to failing to defend Australian values.

Time and again, when Australia needs strength, Anthony Albanese offers weakness. When the country needs clarity, he hides behind excuses. And when leadership matters, he reaches for the smallest words he can find.

Last week gave us yet another disgraceful example.

Across parts of Australia, sermons and mourning events were held for Ayatollah Ali Khamenei - a  murderous dictator who brutalised his own people, exported terror, backed violent extremism, and presided over one of the most vicious regimes on earth. And what did the Prime Minister of Australia say? That it was “not appropriate”.

As I said last week, “not appropriate” is jumping the queue at Woolies. Public mourning for a murderous theocrat on Australian soil is not “not appropriate”. It is repugnant. It is disgraceful. It is completely unacceptable.

This was a moment for a Prime Minister to stand up and defend Australia’s values with strength and conviction. Instead, Anthony Albanese offered another weak, timid, carefully calibrated line. Australians are sick of a Prime Minister who seems more worried about offending activists than defending this country.

Let me be crystal clear: what occurred was completely un-Australian. The Coalition will defend Australian values, full stop. Labor turns its back on them and goes soft when it matters most.  Australia is a free, democratic nation. We believe in equality before the law, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, respect for women, and loyalty to Australia above any foreign regime, sectarian movement or imported hatred. Those values are not negotiable.

Australia welcomes people who respect our laws, our institutions and our way of life. What Australia should never accept is extremism dressed up as grievance or religion.

A confident country knows the difference between religious freedom and the glorification of dangerous authoritarianism. Australia must never blur that line.

And this is not just a moral issue. It is a legal one too.  The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is now formally listed in Australia as a state sponsor of terrorism under the Criminal Code. Australians are entitled to expect that this means something.

That is why the line must be absolutely clear: if any sermon crossed from grief or commentary into praise for terrorist violence in a way that created a substantial risk of encouraging others to engage in terrorism, that may constitute the Commonwealth offence of advocating terrorism. Any such material should be investigated without hesitation. These sermons should be monitored and, where necessary, investigated. 

There is also another question at the heart of this issue: what message does this send to Iranian Australians who fled that regime and came here seeking safety, freedom and peace? Those Australians escaped tyranny. They should not have to watch elements of that tyranny being romanticised, sanitised or defended on Australian soil.

And there is another issue here: taxpayer money.  Australian taxpayers work hard for every dollar they earn. Their money should not be flowing to organisations that publicly mourn one of the most murderous people in the world. Their money should not go to organisations that turn their back on Australian values and grieve for a regime synonymous with terror and repression. That is why there must be an audit of any organisation that mourned the dictator’s death.

Labor’s weakness is showing up elsewhere too.

On 6 March, the Australian Human Rights Commission issued a media release calling on the Government to support efforts to bring back the ISIS brides. The Commission even expressly said the women had previously been linked to the Islamic State terrorist group, yet still pressed the Government to help facilitate their return. That intervention was extraordinary and profoundly out of touch.

Australians expect national institutions to put the safety and security of the Australian people first. Yet the Commission chose to campaign on behalf of women who turned their back on our great country, left Australia, and joined the Islamic caliphate - women who turned their back on our nation and everything we stand for.  Australians should of course remember that this is the same institution whose Sex Discrimination Commissioner, Anna Cody, has been unable to give a clear, common-sense answer when asked to define what a woman is.   When an institution cannot speak plainly about basic reality, Australians are entitled to question its judgment when it presumes to lecture the country on national security and the ISIS cohort.

And now the Commission has released a new Strategic Plan that reads more like a political manifesto than the work of an impartial statutory body. This taxpayer-funded institution declares that colonisers committed “genocidal acts” and that Indigenous sovereignty co-exists alongside Australian sovereignty. These are not established legal facts. No court has determined them. The Australian Parliament has not legislated them.

A taxpayer-funded human rights body should not read like an activist manifesto. I will be demanding answers at Senate estimates.

Then came Labor’s humiliation on FOI.

This week, the Coalition delivered a significant victory for the Australian people’s right to know, with the Albanese Government forced to abandon its deeply flawed Freedom of Information Bill.

That matters because this bill was never about improving transparency. It was about hiding information, keeping information secret, and making it harder for Australians to scrutinise those in power. It was a direct attack on one of the most important democratic safeguards Australians have: the right to know what their government is doing in their name.

The Albanese Government was humiliated. It introduced a bill designed to entrench secrecy and destroy transparency, and it was exposed. This was a bill with not a single friend outside the public service. It was opposed by the Coalition, opposed across the Senate, opposed by the crossbench, opposed by major media organisations, opposed by integrity bodies, and opposed by civil society groups.

When everyone is telling you that you are wrong, you are wrong.

This was a comprehensive defeat for a government so addicted to secrecy that it tried to legislate its way out of accountability. And the Coalition is proud to have led the fight against it.  Freedom of Information is not a favour handed out by government. It is a democratic safeguard - the mechanism through which citizens, journalists, businesses and civil society hold governments to account. Labor tried to take that safeguard away. It has now been stopped.

Australians should be under no illusion about what this tells us. This government’s first instinct is secrecy. Its first instinct is control. Its first instinct is to protect itself from scrutiny rather than submit to scrutiny. If Labor had succeeded, Australians would have faced higher barriers, greater secrecy and less accountability.   The bill may have collapsed, but the instinct behind it remains. FOI should make government more accountable, not less. Labor tried the opposite and lost.

So when you stand back and look at the week that was, the pattern is unmistakable.

When sermons and mourning events emerged around one of the most evil men of the modern era, Labor’s response was weak.

When the Human Rights Commission lobbied for help to bring back more of the ISIS cohort, Canberra’s activist class once again put ideology ahead of the security instincts of ordinary Australians.

And when it came to FOI, Labor was caught trying to make it harder for Australians to scrutinise their government only backing down when it could no longer defend the indefensible.

Different issues. Same instinct.

Weakness where strength is required. Confusion where clarity is required. Secrecy where openness is required.

Australia deserves better.

It deserves leaders who will defend Australian values without apology. Leaders who understand that national security comes first. Leaders who know transparency matters.

That is what your Federal Liberal team will keep fighting for.

Because Australia should never go soft on extremism.

It should never normalise the glorification of terror-linked violence.

And it should never be led by a government too weak to call wrong by its name.