The news that Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has bought himself a luxury multi-million dollar clifftop pad perched high above the delightful Copacabana beach on the New South Wales Central Coast, with ocean and coastal views stretching all the way south to Sydney, certainly piqued the public’s interest. As Ben Fordham, the excellent host on radio 2GB pointed out, breaking the news to his breakfast audience, ‘The optics aren’t crash hot’. Mr Fordham was referring, of course, to the negative impression created by an increasingly unpopular Prime Minister flouting his wealth as voters struggle with a cost-of-living crisis magnified by soaring housing prices, crippling mortgage rates and stubbornly high interest rates. Much of it due to out-of-control government spending. The PM’s timing could not have been worse.

‘I know what it’s like to struggle,’ explained the Prime Minister, in a futile attempt to re-position himself as the lad from the single-parent, inner-west housing estate. ‘I understand that I’ve been fortunate.’ Indeed. Less fortunate, however, are those for whom Mr Albanese has stewarded the Australian economy.

It is an immutable law of recent Australian politics that the worse you are as a prime minister, and the more left-wing you are (these two things being mutually reinforcing), the more lavish the lifestyle you will lead once you’ve vacated the Lodge. Malcolm Turnbull, unequivocally the Coalition’s worst and wokest leader, nowadays confines himself to gazing across the sparkling Sydney Harbour as he fires off angry social media posts against the Murdoch press from his Point Piper mansion. Kevin Rudd famously snapped up tennis star Pat Rafter’s multi-million dollar Sunshine Beach shack from which – when he’s not gadding across the globe pretending to be of relevance to somebody or other – he gets to gaze across the pristine Noosa dunes, his peace of mind disturbed only, one imagines, by the threat of those imminent ‘climate-induced’ rising sea levels. Mr Albanese’s choice of a clifftop abode may reflect a similar nervousness about rising oceans, but the imagery of the Prime Minister perched atop a steeply dropping cliff is better suited as a metaphor for his likely plummeting approval ratings over the coming months.

The anniversary of the failed Voice referendum is an apt reminder of the abysmal failures of the Albanese government on virtually every score. This magazine accurately predicted the likely result of such a poor array of ministers, describing in May 2022 the newly-appointed cabinet as being possibly of the lowest combined intellect and calibre of any cabinet in Australian history. So it has turned out. On every policy front, this government has either been disastrous or disgraceful; take your pick.

The insane renewable energy policies pursued by Chris Bowen and Tanya Plibersek are wreaking havoc upon the economic prosperity, future investment, agricultural businesses and natural environment of our beautiful land and its oceans. Driven entirely by hard-core left-wing ideology, the nation is being crippled by a mad rush to install wind factories and monstrous turbines, solar panels and transmission lines in the name of net zero. Meanwhile, one hare-brained climate-induced scheme after another –  be it green hydrogen, electric vehicles, pumped hydro, etc –  inevitably comes grinding to a halt when faced with economic reality. Added to which, the development of those projects that the nation desperately needs, from gold mines to uranium mines, are skewered thanks to the Pythonesque red, green and black tape of indigenous, workplace and climate leftist ideologies.

Immigration, at the highest levels ever known in Australia, is a chaotic mess, with thousands of potential terrorist sympathisers from the Middle East being shunted in, to the legitimate fears and consternation of Australian Jewry. Defence is a joke, with the Chinese no doubt rubbing their hands and chortling at the incompetence of this government. Industrial relations have jumped in a time machine back to the 1970s and productivity, as Judith Sloan points out this week, is floundering.

Moreover, sitting atop this mountain of incompetence is, depressingly, the worst Foreign Minister in this nation’s history, a nasty hard-core undergraduate-style socialist who has betrayed and alienated one of our key allies, Israel, and sown fear, hatred and division within our ethnic communities.

All that can be hoped for now is that the generous Australian electorate, normally inclined to give even the most incompetent first-term governments the benefit of the doubt, despatches Mr Albanese and his cronies off into the wilderness at the forthcoming federal election. Or at least to the Copacabana clifftop.