A Liberal frontbencher has likened Anthony Albanese to North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un in a major speech decrying Labor’s “communist” tax reforms.
Opposition housing spokesman Andrew Bragg fronted the National Press Club on Wednesday to present the Coalition’s plan to fix the housing affordability crisis and “talk honestly” about the country.
“I believe in an Australian tomorrow which is prosperous, where we treat each other as equals, where we are secure in the world, and our children have a better shot at the future than we had,” he said, adding that his “view of tomorrow makes me dissatisfied with today”.
“Weak governments have ceded power to unions, and minor parties stoke division – both have given up aspiring for our country.
“It makes me dissatisfied and grumpy.”
He declared that the “country is sick” and said the Liberal Party was the cure.
“Labor is the government for vested interests,” Senator Bragg said.
“Labor’s North Korean-style national conference confirms their strategy: reward vested interests and punish small businesses and punters.
“Labor has killed enterprise. They’ve killed small business. They’ve instituted state-sanctioned corruption.”
He said his party had “has contributed to our malaise by not being prepared to develop enough alternative policy and wear political risk”, and that “indolent” leadership over the past two decades had made Australia “more fragmented”.
Senator Bragg later took aim at the “$77bn in new taxes” introduced under Labor.
“These communist style taxes are nonsensical,” he said.
Coalition and conservative commentators described the Prime Minister as ruling Labor with an “iron fist” after the party’s highly orchestrated national conference last month.
He and senior members of his government faced claims of muzzling debate after backbencher Ed Husic failed to find a seconder to back his resolution acknowledging UN probe findings that Israel “deliberately targeted Palestinian children, resulting in genocide and atrocity crimes in the Gaza Strip and war crimes in the West Bank”.
Delegates at the conference, which sets Labor’s national platform each three years, instead backed a position that closely aligned with the Albanese government’s.
Jewish MP Josh Burns and Palestinian-Australian MP Basem Abdo underscored the display of unity by embracing after choosing “empathy over outrage” and “dialogue over division”.
Mr Albanese rejected debate had been stifled and insisted he had “no problem” with Mr Husic or any other delegate “having their say and making their contribution”.
“Ed, like every other delegate, has a right to come along and to pursue whatever they … see as their objective,” he said of his former minister.
“And that’s fine by me.”
Mr Albanese also rejected there was a lack of transparency with how consensus was built in the party, even though he conceded debate had changed since the fiery battles of ideas he took part in as a younger parliamentarian.
“The party has changed and one of the things that’s happened in the party is we are more cohesive, more united than we’ve ever been before,” he said.
“And I think that’s a good thing.”
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