by Cheryl Lacey, DGSJ, ©2026
(Jun. 2, 2026) — A response to Greg Sheridan
Labor spends our billions on left-wing autocracy[i]
The Australian May 2026
Greg Sheridan opens with five words: “Welcome to Australia, the nation Labor rigged.”
It’s fair to say this is his argument and his problem.
His piece casts Labor as the villain and the Liberals as the party that will set things right, if only we’d let them. Sheridan is a smart man and a serious journalist, which makes it harder to excuse that he identifies the diseases but misdiagnoses the cause.
There is one moment where he nearly gets there. “The tendency is towards a one-party state,” he writes, “even if different party labels are preserved.” This could have been the basis of his entire article. Instead he drops it and goes straight back to blaming Labor.
Welcome to the oldest trick in the Australian political playbook.
The Good Cop, Bad Cop Game
Once you see the pattern, you can’t unsee it. Conservative opinion writers and the Labor Party are locked in a relationship that looks like conflict but operates as a partnership. Each needs the other and each protects the other from the deeper question.
What if both major parties are the problem?
Sheridan’s piece reverts to type. Blame Labor, imply the Liberals are the remedy and repeat. It’s a reliable formula that keeps parties and their allies in business. Bias is forgivable in opinion writing, ignoring the historical record is not.
The Liberals Built This Too
The Climate Change Authority, Sheridan’s prime exhibit of progressive propaganda machinery, was established under Julia Gillard in July 2012[ii]. Fourteen months later the Liberal Party came to power. Under three prime ministers, it held government for eleven consecutive years, yet the Authority is still there. If it represents the ideological takeover Sheridan describes, the Liberals had eleven years to dismantle it and chose not to.
That choice is easier to understand once you look at what the Liberals were doing on climate during those same years. In 2015, Tony Abbott committed Australia to the Paris Agreement.[iii] Three years later, he said he wouldn’t have had he known the US would withdraw.[iv] Absent principle and leadership, he tried to please many simultaneously caught between the UK relationship and the US relationship, ultimately serving neither. The Paris architecture Sheridan treats as Labor radicalism was a Liberal buy in.
The current opposition leader, Angus Taylor, was Minister for Energy from 2018, four years before Labor came to power. In a speech to the National Small Business Summit in August of that year, he declared, “Renewables are in my blood, and have been from the day I was born.[v] As well as hydro, solar is playing an increasingly important role in our networks. Like many others in regional Australia, we use solar technology on the farm where we live.” He closed his address with a promise to ‘get power prices down’.
The 82 per cent renewables target that Sheridan frames as this government’s ideological imposition was built on foundations the Liberals laid, maintained, and personally endorsed at the ministerial level.
Read the rest here.