Anthony Albanese’s scathing rebuke of One Nation’s historic WA by-election win paints Labor as taking the high road… the hypocrisy is breathtaking, writes PETER VAN ONSELEN

‘They’ll say anything and do anything to win votes. Bend any facts. Peddle misinformation and disinformation. Turn Australian against Australian,’ the Prime Minister thundered on Sunday.

If hypocrisy generated electricity, Albo might finally deliver that promised $275 reduction in power bills.

In one breathtaking burst of sanctimony, the PM denounced virtually every grubby political tactic Labor has employed under his leadership.

Say anything to win votes? At the 2025 election, Albo was repeatedly asked whether he would change negative gearing or the capital gains tax discount.

‘Yes,’ he said when asked if he’d ruled it out. ‘How hard is it? For the 50th time.’

It doesn’t get much clearer than that. One year later, his government changed both.

Negative gearing on residential property will be restricted to new builds, while the capital gains tax discount will be replaced with a new system. Albo didn’t even attempt to maintain the pretence. ‘We have changed our position,’ he admitted.

Translation: what I told you before the election is no longer convenient now that your vote has been safely counted.

Even more revealing, Albo acknowledged that One Nation’s rise formed part of the political context for the changes. 

In other words, the man now accusing One Nation of saying anything to win votes broke an explicit election promise while watching One Nation’s polling numbers.

Apparently chasing One Nation voters with a broken promise is responsible government. One Nation chasing those same voters is dangerous populism.

It was hardly an isolated lapse.

Before the 2022 election, Albo promised Stage Three tax cuts were ‘absolutely locked in’. Asked whether there were any circumstances in which Labor would roll them back, he answered: ‘No.’

After the election he declared: ‘My word is my bond.’

Then he broke that bond and rewrote the tax cuts.

Whether any new policy is better or worse is beside the point. Albo makes an unequivocal promise because saying it helped him win an election. Once in office, he discards it because breaking it is politically useful.

What a moral bastion.

That is precisely the conduct he now pretends to find so morally repugnant.

Then there is misinformation and disinformation.

Do you remember Labor’s Medicare propaganda? If that’s not a case of frightening voters for political effect I don’t know what is.

During the 2025 election campaign, Labor circulated a deceptively edited video of Peter Dutton discussing Medicare. Dutton’s actual argument was that Medicare would die unless it was made sustainable. Labor cut and spliced his remarks to make him appear to declare simply: ‘Medicare is dead.’

The editing didn’t merely shorten his answer. It reversed its meaning.

The video was authorised by Labor headquarters, of course, amplified by Labor politicians and used as paid campaign advertising. A political communications expert described it as disinformation designed to mislead voters and create fear.

That was not some rogue Facebook meme posted by an anonymous supporter. It was an institutional Labor campaign operation carried out under Albo’s leadership.

On the eve of the same election, Labor advertisements falsely claimed Dutton had said he would cut another $350 billion from the budget. He had said no such thing.

During the 2022 campaign, Labor promoted the claim that the Coalition secretly intended to force aged pensioners onto the cashless debit card. Fact-checkers found no policy and no evidence supporting the allegation.

Albo doubled down regardless. Fear first. Facts later, if ever.

Labor also spent the 2025 campaign declaring that the Coalition’s nuclear energy policy would cost $600 billion. That figure was not an agreed price tag. It was the extreme upper limit of a range stretching from $116 billion to $600 billion.

Labor simply selected the most terrifying number available, stripped away the uncertainty and presented it as established fact.

Bending facts, one might say – Albo might say actually.

His own statements have repeatedly collapsed under scrutiny. He claimed Australians were $7,200 better off because of Labor’s cost-of-living measures, relying on calculations that ignored inflation and used implausible wage assumptions. 

He claimed the Coalition had ‘ripped’ $30 billion from public schools when actual funding had not fallen. He said bulk billing was in ‘free fall’ when Labor took office, despite its decline accelerating under his own government.

He even told Parliament that every single government measure had been opposed by the Coalition.

This assertion is disproved by the Coalition’s support for major Medicare, medicines and women’s health initiatives. But hey, who cares, right?

This is not a stray misspeak. It’s a pattern: exaggerate the government’s achievements, invent the opposition’s sins and trust that the headline travels further than the correction.

As for turning Australian against Australian, Albo increasingly frames politics as a morality play in which one group must be blamed to placate another.

He sold his negative gearing betrayal by pitting younger homebuyers against property investors, as though every investor were a cigar-chomping speculator, rather than frequently a middle-income Aussie trying to build retirement security.

He fiercely protects WA’s extraordinarily generous GST arrangement, despite the Productivity Commission finding that the system has become less equitable and has cost the Commonwealth tens of billions of dollars. 

He then warns that Canberra will ‘bear that in mind’ when negotiating other funding arrangements with the states. That sounds remarkably like using funding in one area to punish or pressure Australians elsewhere, while presenting himself as the great opponent of state against state politics.

And when voters in WA delivered Labor a humiliating by-election rebuke by electing One Nation, Albo didn’t respond with introspection. He branded the victorious party dangerous, divisive, dishonest and ‘hard right’.

Labor loses voters and concludes there must be something wrong with them. It’s hard to understand why the major parties are losing support, isn’t it?

Albo is perfectly entitled to criticise One Nation’s policies, personnel and rhetoric.

Much of it deserves rigorous criticism.

What he’s not entitled to do is mount the pulpit and deliver sermons about truth, honesty and social cohesion while standing atop a mountain of broken promises, manipulated videos, fabricated scare campaigns and cherry-picked figures. 

Unless he acknowledges he’s a hypocrite.

The Prime Minister’s problem is not merely that he has failed to meet the standards he demands of others. It’s that he appears incapable of recognising the spectacular irony when he does so.

‘They’ll say anything and do anything to win votes,’ Albo declared.

For once, he may have identified the problem perfectly. He was just pointing in the wrong direction.