This week, I caught a flight from Sydney back home to Perth.
After taking off, the captain told passengers that the cargo hold door hadn’t been closed properly and we need to fly in circles for a couple of hours to burn fuel before the plane was at a safe weight to land back in Sydney.
In short, we have to waste everyone’s time and precise jet fuel all because someone couldn’t close a door properly.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy to be safe and well, but also, welcome to the latest instalment of the competency crisis.
I’ve written about this before.
Of continually falling standards. Of reluctantly accepting poor quality. Of accountability shirking, blame shifting. Accusations of ableism if you’re just asked to do your job properly.
And where performance management is likened to bullying.
It’s all become rather tiresome.
It’s an issue which pervades every sector and layer of society.
And it extends to our political class – a morass of overgrown student activists pretending to be proficient and nodding knowingly while they have precisely no clue.
And they tend to get away with it when things are ticking along.
But when there’s a hiccup and the tide goes out, gosh, we get to see who is exposed.
The political and economic landscape since the attack on Iran is a case in point.
What started as a potential fuel supply issue has turned into a full-blown crisis courtesy of the Albanese Labor government’s crisis of competence.
Australians started panicking about fuel because they all knew – deep down – that the government had no idea how to manage this emerging situation.
When Chris Bowen tells you not to panic, it’s perfectly understandable that your first port of call is to panic.
Everything that man has ever touched has turned to the proverbial in one way or another.
And the more this government has flailed in its messaging, prevaricated in its answers and squibbed real solutions, the more confidence Australians lose and so the downward spiral gains speed.
The irony, of course, is that Albanese and his ministers were veritable armchair experts – brimming with gratuitous advice – when it came to critiquing the performance of the Morrison government on the economy and its handling of the pandemic.
In 2021, during a doorstop, Jim Chalmers said the following in relation to the vaccine rollout:
“When it comes to confidence, we want the Australian people to have the capacity to be confident about the rollout of this vaccine. But this has been a shambles from the beginning. All of this over promising and under delivering.”
Prior to the 2022 federal election, Jim Chalmers opened his address in the treasurer’s debate before the National Press Club with the following statement:
“Australia, this election is your opportunity to cast your verdict on a wasted decade of missed opportunities. But it’s also a choice. A choice between a stronger economy and a better future under Labor, powered by cleaner and cheaper energy, and responsible investments in skills and industries, and more opportunities for more of our people, and another three years of dysfunction, and drift, and waste, and rorts, and mistakes, and buck-passing, which have made it that much harder for Australians to get ahead. The defining issue of this election is the full-blown cost of living crisis which has emerged on the Morrison Government’s watch, and it didn’t just show up when Russia invaded Ukraine.”
He went on to say:
“But more of the same Government means more of the same punishing combination of skyrocketing costs of living and falling real wages from a government that takes credit for the good things but none of the responsibility for the difficult things, and a Prime Minister who has excuses for everything but plans for nothing.
“You can’t pay your mortgage or feed your kids with the excuses that we get from this Government. Australians have had enough of the excuse making, and the buck-passing, the overpromising and underdelivering.”
Gosh, this is getting awkward.
These statements have all aged like a bag of prawns on the back seat on a 40-degree day.
If this isn’t projecting your own schtick on others, then I don’t know what is.
Albanese also didn’t miss an opportunity to coach from the sidelines while he was opposition leader.
He had this to say about the former Coalition government on the vaccine rollout:
“We have a Prime Minister who never accepts responsibility. He’s too busy rolling out the red carpet for himself to roll out the vaccination for Australians. This is not just a government of smirk and mirrors; it’s a government of shirk and mirrors. It’s always someone else’s responsibility.”
Tough talk from the bloke who can’t roll out a fuel truck.
But this, in an opinion piece he penned for The New Daily, could’ve been Albanese giving his future self some good advice:
“Australians require better leadership. They want solutions, not blame-shifting and excuses. But from this Prime Minister, that’s all they get.”
Remember, the pandemic was a multitude of issues, on a multitude of fronts, all occurring at once.
Sure, the response from the then Coalition government wasn’t always tidy and perfect, but imagine if Labor was in charge during that time?
During the current crisis, we have one discrete issue and that is this government’s total inability to put one foot in front of the other.
And that risks the country grinding to a halt.
It’s now clear that the people who are meant to be in charge can’t identify, manage and mitigate risk.
They’re paralysed because they can’t spin and deflect their way out of this self-styled crisis.
So, where is the leadership they squealed about from opposition?
Well, it’s nowhere to be found.
Because you can’t have leadership without capability.
Labor may have announced a National Fuel Security Plan but there is still – at the very least – a shortage of supply to regional areas to support our major industries.
So far the ALP have delivered an announcement, a new bureaucrat and an acronym but no actual fuel to the people who keep the economy running.
I suppose the next step is to wait for the helicopter cash.
And given we are already in an inflationary environment, any attempt to wallpaper over this issue with handouts is all but guaranteed to end poorly.
Lord knows who Labor will attempt to blame it on.
The RBA? Trump?
Anyone but themselves.
Ultimately, the tragedy isn’t that they failed.
It’s that none of us are surprised.
We have been quietly lowering the bar for so long that mediocrity no longer shocks – it just exhausts.
So, welcome to the competency crisis.
We built this.
And we’re going to have to live in it.
Because we get the governments we demand, and right now, we’re not demanding very much at all.
Until we do, don’t expect the door to be closed properly.
Caroline Di Russo is a lawyer with 15 years of experience specialising in commercial litigation and corporate insolvency and since February 2023 has been the Liberal Party President in Western Australia.