Grave Diggers in Democratic Garb: Albanese and Starmer's Rhetorical Façade, By Paul Walker

At the UK Labour Party conference on September 28, 2025, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese stood shoulder-to-shoulder with his "mate," British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, pledging an "absolute resolve to stand together and defend democracy itself." It was a moment of transatlantic solidarity, evoking Churchillian echoes amid global turbulence, Russia's shadow over Europe, China's economic vice, and the spectre of populist uprisings. Yet, like so many political theatrics, the vow dissolved under scrutiny, revealing not defenders but despoilers. Albanese and Starmer, hard Leftist Labour kin across hemispheres, wield the language of liberty as a smokescreen for policies that erode it: secrecy that starves accountability, controls that choke dissent, and manipulations that adopt elite interests over the electorate's will. They are not guardians of democracy but its grave diggers, shovelling earth with one hand while clutching a trowel in the other, much like a vandal hurling rocks through windows and dubbing himself a glazier. Their actions betray a shared contempt for the messy vitality of open societies, substituting performative patriotism for the hard work of genuine stewardship.

Albanese's tenure, now cresting its third year with a supermajority mandate from the May 2025 landslide, exemplifies this democratic duplicity. Fresh from re-election on promises of transparency and "vibes-based" renewal, his government has plunged deeper into opacity than even the scandal-plagued Morrison era, according to a July 2025 Transparency International report. Cabinet documents, once grudgingly released under Freedom of Information laws, now vanish into black holes of "national interest" exemptions, with FOI approvals plummeting 40% year-on-year. This isn't bureaucratic inertia; it's deliberate entrenchment. With Labor's iron grip on Parliament, the risk of "entrenched secrecy" amplifies, as critics warn, turning accountability from a right into a relic. Albanese's February 2025 intervention in a parliamentary inquiry, penning a letter to shield foreign mining giants from scrutiny over environmental breaches, further underscores this. By lobbying to quash probes into corporate polluters, he didn't just protect profits; he subverted the democratic process itself, choosing Beijing-backed firms over public oversight. Small wonder Senate Hansard erupted in August 2025 with accusations that such moves "undermine the very fundamentals that the Australian people live and breathe."

Yet Albanese's most insidious assault lies in his migration sleight-of-hand, a "bait and switch" that hollows out sovereignty under the banner of border control, discussed today at this blog. Campaigning in 2022, he vowed restraint; post-victory, net overseas migration exploded to 1.227 million in 33 months, the largest peacetime surge ever, via airlifted economic migrants, while demonising the negligible boat arrivals. This isn't defence; it's demographic engineering, flooding infrastructure and diluting wages without plebiscite or debate. Voters, per Scanlon polls, clamour for caps, yet Albanese gaslights: "Stopping the boats" is control, he insists on ABC's Insiders, ignoring the 316,000 annual NOM that strains housing and erodes social trust. In a nation born of convict grit and frontier fairness, this top-down remaking, rubber-stamping visas with $42 million in expedited hires, betrays the egalitarian ethos. It's democracy not defended, but diluted: Citizens reduced to spectators in their own transformation, their voices drowned by imported ballots and corporate cheers.

Across the Channel, Starmer's premiership, now 14 months in, mirrors this hypocrisy with a British twist: A lawyerly precision in lawfare that cloaks authoritarian drift. His September 2025 "fightback" speech at Labour conference railed against Reform UK's Nigel Farage as a moral transgressor, accusing him of "crossing a moral line" on immigration while vowing to reclaim "patriotic renewal." Yet this from the man whose government, per a January 2025 Human Rights Watch report, is "seriously undermining democratic rights," particularly the freedom to protest. Under Starmer, the Public Order Act's draconian clauses, expanded post-riots, have even jailed Leftist climate activists for "conspiracy to disrupt," with sentences rivalling those for violent crimes, while police powers to preempt "static protests" near homes evoke Orwell's pre-crime. Farage's critics? Branded racists in a deflection that reeks of desperation, as The Telegraph lambasted in September 2025: Labour's "dirty tactics" as the "final nail in its coffin," slurring opponents to mask policy failures.

Starmer's "Democracy Taskforce," launched in September 2025 to combat foreign interference, epitomises the farce: A body ostensibly shielding elections from disinformation, yet accused by Byline Times of "dodging democratic scrutiny" by withholding minutes and agendas. Critics, including former shadow ministers, decry it as a Starmerite power grab, centralising oversight without parliamentary input, while his January 2025 broadside against Elon Musk's "lies and misinformation," conveniently sidestepped Labour's own donor scandals. On immigration, Starmer's Britcard digital ID, mandatory for work by 2029, promises border toughness but delivers a surveillance state, centralising biometrics in a "hacker's dream" that could exclude the undocumented from society without due process. Clive Lewis, in a blistering Guardian op-ed, warns this "cosying up to firms that profited from austerity" nourishes "popular cynicism," undermining democracy by design. Starmer, the erstwhile human rights barrister, now engineers a Britain where dissent is pre-empted and data devours privacy, defending "values" that his policies quietly dismantle.

The kinship between these grave diggers runs deeper than shared podiums: Both are technocratic modernisers, cloaking control in compassion. Albanese's migration boom and secrecy echo Starmer's ID mandates and protest crackdowns, a pattern of elite capture where rhetoric rallies the base ("defend democracy!") while actions advance the agenda of unaccountable power. In Australia, voters face a "Big Australia" without say; in the UK, citizens a "patriotic" panopticon without safeguards. As The Saturday Paper dissected Albanese's 2025 mandate in July, it's "contested and misunderstood," a supermajority squandered on opacity rather than openness. Starmer's Labour, per the Institute for Government, lacks a "clear governing philosophy," defaulting to managerialism that starves the soul of politics. They invoke democracy as a shield, against "autocracies" abroad, per Albanese's UN speech, while forging fetters at home.

In the end, Albanese and Starmer are no more democracy's defenders than a rock-thrower is a window cleaner: Their tools shatter what they claim to polish. The shards, trust eroded, voices silenced, borders blurred by fiat, litter the landscape of their "resolve." True stewardship demands not vows in Liverpool halls but vigilance in Canberra courts and Westminster debates. Until these Labour lords trade trowels for transparency, their graves for liberty deepen, and the voters they profess to protect peer into the pit they've dug.

https://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2025/09/albanese-is-killing-democracy-not-defending-it/