Blair and New Labour
Glen Frost writes: Re. “Rudd’s ostentatious ALP reforms — in search of difference” (yesterday). Bernard Keane writes: “Tony Blair’s successful campaign in UK Labour’s 1994 leadership election gave him a flying start and extensive media coverage as opposition leader.”
Not really; it wasn’t Blair’s election to leader, it was Blair’s removal of Clause 4 (the “nationalise everything” clause) in the Labour manifesto once he was leader that meant he radically changed direction (hence using the term “New Labour”), and his insistence on picking the ministry, which received decent media coverage. That propelled him into the homes of British people via their TV sets (and that made him electable).
Prior to that, he wrote articles in The Guardian and Marxism Today …
The truth of pink batts
John Finnerty writes: Re. “Here’s the full story on workplace deaths under Labor” (Monday). Read your excellent article. It prompted my memory of seeing something by a reporter in the Weekend Financial Review back around the time this so called “pink batts debacle” first started its run. That reporter also did his homework. He analysed fires in home insulation in years before the pink batts stimulus and arrived at 100 in 50000 installations and compared that with those in the pink batts year — again 100 fires, but this time installations were 1.5 million. A massive improvement in anyone’s eyes. He also look at deaths in the industry — note he said that because the insulation industry was not separately classified he could only use those for area the industry was combined with. If my memory serves there was something in the order of four or five deaths in year before and similar after. I am unable to locate this excellent article maybe with your greater research skills you can find it. In simple terms I believe the Labor government as allowed itself to be falsely labelled as botching this without any supporting evidence. It is a massive indictment of our media and also our coroners that they have swallowed this garbage.
Age discrimination a disgrace
Richard Davoren writes: Re. “You’ll be older too: why we need to rethink ageing” (yesterday). I have fought every “ism” all my life, but the widespread nature of ageism in Australia is both deeply entrenched and vicious and hard to tackle. Because we all age, denying the existence of older people allows many to evade the reality that they too, will age.
Governments are also guilty. Last year, I had just returned from my annual driving holiday around Europe to find a letter from the Tasmanian government advising me that I had to prove my fitness to drive a car. It seems that despite the statistics to the contrary, I am now of an age that I am a potential menace on the road.
Those burnouts on the roads near my home were not done by me. The flattened signs on the roundabouts were not done by me. The motorcycles that I regularly have to avoid on my trips back from the east coast happen because they are on the wrong side of the road, not me. It is not me who drives behind elderly drivers who are doing the legal speed limit and shouts, “pull over, you old prick!”
I have driven vehicles in dozens of countries around the world, as well as Australia and besides hitting the odd wallaby, have never been involved in an accident. My friends of a similar age group can boast the same. So why is it that TV shows like A Current Affair have developed a campaign to rid our roads of older drivers? Yes, there was a case where an elderly woman hit and killed a cyclist. There are thousands of cases where younger drivers are killing themselves and others. So why pick on the elderly, those people who, in many cases. are totally dependent on their cars?
Because they can, with impunity.
This may be the story John Finnerty is referring to regarding the truth about the pink batts scheme. http://inside.org.au/a-mess-a-shambles-a-disaster/
John Finnerty is right. Rod Tiffen wrote: “Under the (pink batts) program, the number of installations rose from 67,000 a year to 1.1 million; the number of fires rose from around eighty to 120. In other words, as Crikey’s psephological blog Pollytics has demonstrated convincingly, there is no statistical evidence that the existing problem of fires became worse with the program. Rather, because fires from insulation were now newsworthy and previously hadn’t been, this was seen as a new problem, one caused by the new policy, whereas in fact the number of insulation-related fires increased only slightly in absolute terms, and there was a decrease from previous patterns in proportional terms.”
@ Glen Frost
Interesting if Tony Blair changed something by insisting on choosing his own ministry because, at least in government, it had not been UK Labour’s way to have MPs elect the Cabinet and ministry. Indeed Atlee called it the “appalling Australian Labor Party system” and Harold Wilson said that no self-respecting PM would put up with it [or vice versa for Atlee and Wilson]. Can you give chapter and verse on the change and change back?
As I have always had a pretty dim view of Blair – not following the unlikely temporary aberration of Paul Johnson (former editor of the socialist New Statesman and latterday Thatcherite of impeccable individuality and readability too) – I was surprised to find that he had always had perceived leadership qualities even amongst the many contemporaries who must have been more intelligent than he. Apparently as a freshman at his Oxford college that was how he was seen amongst his peers. So, at any rate, not surprising that he would insist on naming his own ministry.
Richard Davoren writes “I have fought every “ism” all my life”
The contrarian in me wants to applaud him but also to doubt, so, Crikey eds what about a little competition to play with “ism” and see whether one can come up with ones one shouldn’t fight or even disapprove of. And maybe an excursion into such flights of whimsy as “I’d rather be called a Socialist than a socialite”. Come to think of it, I wonder if Richard D has fought socialism like the great Maggie T.
Yes, indeed, -isms need to be fought. Without making up ones that are merely logical but not idiomatic – after all we wouldn’t want neologisms, even if not wholly neo, would we? – there are a few which have been worthy of battle in the lifetimes of many of us. Animism – a bit passé perhaps, but Calvinism and Puritanism lead one to Methodism and that ban on upright intercourse in case it led to dancing. Anglicanism isn’t quite ideological enough this last century or so to be -ismatic but Catholicism remains a serious distraction for the energies of young ABC people (a pity if they still can’t help lusting after GD the thinking man’s pin up). Buddhism is really making a comeback with all those burning monks in China and the Burmese who beat up the poorest and most harmless Muslims so that should keep the anti-ismatics breathing fire. Any of them/you old enough to remember Antidisestablishmentarianism or was that always only a bit of fun for Welshmen who really wanted nothing more to win the prize for knowing the longest word in the English language (and being properly British indifferent to the fact that the Germans could beat them hollow with any of the their first Eleven). But let’s get up to date and recruit old codgers to the Anti-warmist brigade even if they have been hitherto on the anti-capitalist side.