A Country Fooled - The Dark Side of Albanese's Failed Australian Government, Ian Brighthope
A Regime of Secrecy, Broken Promises and Unfitness to Govern overseeing unnecessary insecurities, suffering, disease and death. And the people are kept in the dark.
Albanese's Australian Government: A Regime of Secrecy, Broken Promises and Unfitness to GovernThe current Australian federal government, led by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, claims an agenda of transparency, integrity and renewal. Instead, what we are witnessing is a frightening lapse into corporate-style opacity, institutional decay, and ideological drift. The verdict from the independent research institute Centre for Public Integrity is scathing: the Albanese Government has failed on five of six integrity metrics, transparency, merit-based appointments, limits on undue influence, strengthening the public service, support for institutions holding power to account, and only scraped an average score on whistleblower protections.
This is not a mere "slip up" or "underperformance" — it is a structural collapse of accountability, signalling that this government may no longer be fit to govern in the interests of the Australian people.
The transparency record of the Albanese Government is worse than that of the preceding Scott Morrison-led Coalition government. According to the Centre for Public Integrity, the government's compliance with Senate orders to produce documents, a key check on executive power, plumbed the second lowest level since 1993, around one document release every three weeks being refused by way of public interest immunity claims.
In the 2022-23 period, this Government refused more Freedom of Information (FOI) requests than it granted, unheard of in previous decades.
The proposed FOI Amendment Bill 2025 compounds the problem: it reintroduces fees for FOI requests, bans anonymous requests (thus chilling whistleblowers), expands exemptions (especially for Cabinet documentation) and further entrenches secrecy.
In short: you vote for transparency, you get a government that legislates to conceal. A symptom of totalitarianism.
The report finds that the government has shown "little appetite" for reforming the jobs-for-mates culture, despite once lambasting the prior government for appointments it condemned. It has failed to act on the 2023 Briggs Review of Public Sector Board Appointments. The "red lights" are flashing across the board. The fact that the Government still tolerates strategic advisory firms, revolving door lobbying (for ex-staffers) and has refused to publish ministerial diaries is damning.
When you allow big business and ex-government staffers to dictate policy behind opaque walls while simultaneously suppressing dissent and disclosures, you don't have a democracy. You have a corporatised state with veneer of democracy.
Albanese presents himself as a moderate consensus-builder. But the conduct of his government suggests a far more insidious agenda — perhaps one of collectivist control, suppression of individual rights and centralised decision-making. I make no apology in describing him as a communist in the ideological sense: someone who privileges the state (or state-aligned entities) over individual freedom, who presides over a swelling bureaucracy of secrecy and control, and who dismantles the very checks and balances his government claimed it would strengthen.
If the tools of accountability are being disabled under this government, if transparency is reversed into opacity, then the very contract between the Australian people and the state has been broken. On that basis, the Prime Minister and his Government are unfit to govern. They have forfeited the claim to legitimate authority.
One of Albanese's significant failures is the promise of a Royal Commission into the catastrophic consequences of the COVID-19 response, in particular the adverse events associated with the mRNA vaccines. This promised Commission was a key campaign plank, yet remains uninitiated. The Government's silence, delay and evasion on this matter reveals contempt for public trust, thousands of victims and the principle of accountability.
Likewise, the Government has not properly investigated, publicly acknowledged or compensated those who suffer "turbo cancers", vaccine-injured individuals, or long-term disease caused by mRNA vaccines. The absence of thorough inquiry, or even meaningful public dialogue, is a scandal. It betrays the vulnerable, silences dissent, and leaves unanswered questions about why the institutions meant to protect the public failed.
If a government cannot deliver on a promise to investigate one of the biggest public health catastrophes of our lifetime, how can it claim to manage the basic machinery of oversight and integrity? Trust in government and related institutions has done out the door.
Beyond leaks, secrecy and broken vaccine promises, the Albanese government is failing in one of its most sacred duties: protecting children. Multiple child-abuse stories, scandals within institutional care, and the ongoing cover-ups show a government unwilling to hold itself or its agencies to account. When the State fails children, we call it moral bankruptcy. When the federal Government gives the appearance of protecting the abusers rather than the abused children, we call it a rupture of trust.
This Government has not only failed to prevent abuse, it has failed to properly investigate and respond, and in doing so, eroded the moral legitimacy of its rule.
1.Initiate a genuine Royal Commission into the COVID-19 vaccine rollout, adverse events, the unexplained excess deaths and the decision-making processes of the public health institutions under this government.
2.Abandon the FOI Amendment Bill 2025 and instead strengthen FOI laws: eliminate fees, protect anonymous whistleblowing, abolish expanded cabinet secrecy.
3.Publish ministerial diaries, end the use of unjustified public-interest immunity (PII) claims, and appoint an independent transparency arbiter as recommended by the Centre for Public Integrity.
4.Implement merit-based appointments, eliminate the jobs-for-mates culture, and dismantle the revolving door between government and lobbyists.
5.Address all child-protection failures with critical urgency, transparency and independent inquiry, rather than letting bureaucrats bury scandal under layers of rotten denial.
The Albanese Government entered office riding a wave of hope for transparency, integrity, decency and reform. They lied. It now stands indicted by independent analysis, as among the most secretive, worst performing in transparency and accountability in decades. The fact. The Prime Minister's ideological drift (remember he declared himself a 'communist' at university), the Government's unwillingness to investigate the vaccine catastrophe, its mishandling of child-protection scandals, and its culture of secrecy all point to one conclusion: this Government is unfit to governor these ground alone.
Australians deserve better. They voted for openness, fairness and accountability. Instead they are receiving locked doors, hidden agendas and institutional rot. Enough is enough.
https://ianbrighthope.substack.com/p/a-country-fooled-the-dark-side-ofalbaneses
Comments