‘You can’t fatten a pig on market day,’ John Howard would say. As Australia’s longest-serving Liberal prime minister other than Sir Robert Menzies, the party’s founder, Howard’s words carry weight.  Little wonder that Liberals are disconcerted that opposition leader Peter Dutton has tried to calm Coalition supporters who are worried about the party’s slip in the latest opinion polls by saying, ‘You haven’t seen anything yet.’ That’s the problem.

It’s all very for Dutton to say, ‘When you see the two parties by election day, you will see a prime ministerial candidate who will be able to protect and defend our country when the Prime Minister is too weak to do so.’

The problem with this strategy is that by election day in 2022, nearly 48 per cent of all Australians had voted, and if the trend of the last few elections continues, even more will vote before polling day this year.

That’s not the only problem with Dutton’s slow-burn campaign. Prime Minister Albanese has chosen the shortest election possible, with the Easter holidays and Anzac Day further limiting the ability of either side to communicate their messages. That’s no accident. In 2022, Albanese’s most successful period in the campaign was the week he had off when he conveniently caught Covid.

Yet while Albanese hid from the public, his party relentlessly attacked Prime Minister Scott Morrison, turning his family’s Christmas holiday in Hawaii during the bushfires in 2019-2020 into a character assassination that dogged the PM until polling day.

Given this example and its devastating impact, why has the Coalition made so little of Albanese’s holiday from reality in pursuit of his indigenous folly? It wasn’t until his budget in reply speech that Dutton succinctly pointed out that, ‘The PM spent the first half of this term of parliament obsessed with the Voice, and it meant he didn’t have a plan to deal with the scourge of inflation.’ Dutton should have delivered this message a dozen times a day, ever since Labor lost the Voice referendum, and woven it into every attack on the PM.

A massive 61 per cent of Australians backed the opposition in its rejection of the Voice – almost twice as many as voted Labor in the 2022 election. The Coalition’s path to victory rests on ensuring every person who voted against the Voice understands that if Labor is re-elected, it will bring in a Voice by stealth.

The Greens have already sponsored a ‘Truth and Justice Commission Bill 2024’, which is being considered by a Joint Standing Committee on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs. The committee was scheduled to report to the Senate in February. Conveniently, that report was delayed until 29 May, after the election. If voters want to guess what the committee will recommend, they need only consider its composition –the Greens’ Dorinda Cox, who proposed the Bill, seven Labor MPs, a Teal, an independent – Lidia Thorpe – and only two Liberals and a National.

What will the Truth and Justice Commission do? We don’t have to guess. Labor governments in Queensland, Victoria, South Australia and the Northern Territory are all establishing frameworks for Voices to state and territory parliaments, and Orwellian ‘truth-telling’ commissions which are already rewriting history and laying the groundwork for treaties and for the fundamental goal of all the Voice shenanigans: eye-watering reparations.

State governments are already invoking indigenous culture to lock Australians out of national parks. The Mount Warning (Wollumbin) summit track has been closed since March 2020. At first, it was supposedly because of the dangers of catching Covid while bushwalking, then because the Wollumbin Aboriginal Place Management Plan designated the mountain a sacred indigenous men’s site. Now, thanks to culturally sanctioned sexism and modern-day political correctness, no one is allowed to climb to the summit, resulting in a 30-per-cent decline in the approximately 127,000 visitors to the region and an economic loss to local tourism estimated by the Save Our Summits organisation at $15 million annually. The Grampians in Victoria has also closed many rock climbing routes to protect indigenous cultural heritage sites. Together with the damage done by bushfires, the impact on the local economy is estimated to be between $34 and $103 million over the year.

The reality of Albanese’s government is that its worship of indigenous and environmental shibboleths is slowly but surely impoverishing Australians. The only difference under a Labor/Green minority government is that this will be speeded up.

We have already seen Labor’s federal Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek stop the McPhillamys Gold Project, valued at $1 billion, leading to an estimated 800 job losses for the region, not to mention millions in tax and royalty payments.

The Jabiluka uranium mine, blocked by Labor because of its significance to the local Mirarr traditional owners, has an estimated $155 million worth of uranium ore and allowing for the costs of mining and rehabilitating the land has been conservatively valued at $90 million.

All this pales beside the Browse gas basin, discovered in 1971 and hailed as one of Australia’s most valuable untapped gas resources, whose development has been stymied for over five decades by environmental, regulatory, technical and political obstacles. With an estimated 15 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, it is worth over $102 billion at today’s prices and would pay over $1.2 billion a year in federal government taxes and royalties for some 25 years. Yet despite being located 290 kilometres off the Kimberley coastline of Western Australia, the development has been hindered by claims of indigenous land and sea rights, which ended onshore processing at James Price Point.

The Coalition commitment to fast-track gas projects should be extended to all natural resources.

The Chinese spy ship circumnavigating Australia while it maps the 12 submarine cables that carry almost all of Australia’s internet traffic is doing the Coalition a big favour, as is Mr Trump’s threat of tariffs.

Australians must understand that we can’t rely on America for our first line of defence. We have to be able to defend ourselves, not in ten years but now. We should look to and learn from Ukraine and Israel – countries defending themselves in a hostile world.

The Coalition can win this election, but only if the electorate understands that a vote for Labor is a vote for a Voice that will put our prosperity at the mercy of a crazy clique of self-appointed custodians who will hold the rest of the country to ransom. We can’t afford that; unless we develop our resources we can’t pay for our national security, which can only come from being adequately armed to defend the nation.