Out on a country road, when something jumps out in front of you, the worst thing you can do is panic and yank the wheel.
Anyone who has spent time behind the wheel outside the suburbs knows you don’t swerve wildly left or right every time the road throws up a surprise.
That’s how you turn a problem into a wreck. Yet that, increasingly, is how the Albanese Government governs.
When political pressure mounts, it doesn’t slow down and deal with the hazard head-on.
It swerves hard to the left — and the roadkill is depressingly predictable. Farmers. Miners. Fishers. Shooters. Property owners. Self-managed super funds.
In short, people who own assets, carry risk, and don’t spend their days haunting inner-city marginal seats. This isn’t about ideology so much as instinct.
Faced with a crisis — real or manufactured — Labor reaches for the comfort blanket of its progressive flank.
The Greens, activist NGOs and social-media pressure groups become the moral referees.
The policy response is fast, symbolic and loud. The costs are pushed quietly onto those least able to fight back in Canberra. Take the live sheep export ban.
This wasn’t the outcome of a calm assessment of animal welfare outcomes, trade implications or regional employment. It was a political fix, stitched together under by-election pressure to neutralise animal activist campaigns.
West Australian farmers weren’t consulted — they were traded.
A lawful industry, built over decades and serving markets no one else will touch, was written off as collateral damage.
Canberra felt virtuous. WA wore the bill.
We saw the same reflex after the Bondi Junction attack.
Within days, the national conversation jumped not to policing, bail laws, mental health systems or public safety failures but to firearms.
Never mind that Australia already has some of the tightest gun laws in the world.
Never mind that licensed shooters and primary producers are not the problem.
A tragedy demanded a response, and the response chosen was the easiest one politically: clamp down on people who already comply. Once again, the appearance of action trumped effectiveness.
Criminals were untouched. Farmers and regional shooters were reminded that they are always the safest target. Tax policy tells a similar story. The mid-stream rewrite of the stage three tax cuts was sold as fairness in a cost-of-living crisis.
What it did was shred the idea that government commitments mean anything beyond the next news cycle.
Rather than confront spending discipline or productivity reform — the hard stuff — the Government reached for redistribution optics and a familiar villain: people who earn enough to be resented but not enough to be powerful. Environmental policy has become a masterclass in cost-shifting.
Under the banner of “nature positive” reform, governments are quietly outsourcing environmental responsibility to private landholders.
Farmers and miners are expected to underwrite biodiversity outcomes through offsets, approvals risk and compliance costs, while ministers claim virtue from a safe distance.
If it works, Canberra takes the credit. If it fails, a landholder takes the blame.
Water policy in the Murray–Darling Basin fits the pattern neatly.
Buybacks — long known to drain life from regional towns — are politically irresistible because they look decisive and hurt people who don’t vote in inner Melbourne.
The social and economic damage is well documented. It just doesn’t matter enough. Climate change policy is no different. Targets aimed at appeasing the global elite are sending Australia off the freeway back onto dirt roads.
Despite the endless talk of cheaper power, the reality is quite the opposite.
Who pays the price, its started with the loss of our refining sector but it won’t end there.
The long-term consequences — higher prices, less reliability, fewer regional jobs — are quietly being kicked down the road.
When confronted with the facts, the Government puts its foot down and drives even faster towards the darkness.
Even superannuation hasn’t escaped.
Self-managed super funds, widely used by farmers and small business owners to manage volatile incomes and succession, are increasingly portrayed as tax loopholes rather than prudent planning.
Once again, asset holders were cast as suspect simply for trying to manage risk without leaning on the taxpayer. There is a common thread here.
When confronted with a complex problem — housing, energy, safety, cost of living, budget black holes— the Albanese Government looks only to the left side of the road for an exit ramp.
Productivity reform. Infrastructure sequencing. Spending restraint.
Those require political courage and uncomfortable conversations.
Instead, it chooses deflection.
Find a group that can be clipped without electoral consequence and call it progress.
The people on the receiving end are not extremists.
They are not radicals.
They are the people who grow food, dig minerals, catch fish, manage land and invest for their own retirement.
They are over-regulated, under-represented and increasingly treated as expendable.
Good governments slow down when the pressure rises.
They look left and right, venture forward cautiously or hit reverse when there is no safe way out. They resist the urge to appease the loudest voices in the room.
This Government has chosen a different approach: speed up, swerve left, signal virtue and let the damage fall where it may. Out in the bush, we know how that ends.
Keep driving like that and eventually there’s no one left on the road who trusts you at the wheel.
