The full court press against Bill Shorten as the “most left-wing Labor leader in decades”, the recent ludicrous attempt to tie GetUp to the Australia-USSR Friendship Society, and finally Mathias Cormann’s announcement that a Shorten government would continue the failed experiment “of East Germany” have got people scratching their heads. Could team Turnbull be this stupid, this delusional? 

The answer surely is no, and it’s surprising that people don’t see which voters they’re targeting — older, and not-so-older voters from non-Anglo backgrounds, and either a direct or a family memory of Communism. Many of these people do believe that even the very mild social democracy Labor is proposing is a slippery slope to North Korea — and this might be especially so of Vietnamese-Australian voters and other south-east Asian groups.
 
There’s also a precedent for this — the “Estonian lady” ad made for the Libs by John Singleton in 1974. The Whitlam government had recognised the USSR’s annexation of the Baltic states, and Singo — who was at the time trying to turn himself a very early proto-Trump figure through an outfit called “The Workers Party” — had a middle-aged woman give this monologue (sadly, there is no copy on YouTube, or the internet, that I can find): 
 

ESTONIAN LADY:

I come originally from Estonia, the Baltic State. I escaped about 30 years ago when the Russians took over my country for the second time. I have lived enough under Communist regime, so I left and came to Australia. My husband and I, we worked very hard and we did well. We brought our children up so that they are well educated and they have a good living standard. Then about 16 months ago the Labor Party came to power, and I thought so, it is still a free country, but now I can see how wrong I was. Today I can see Labor is disguised socialist but for me it is disguised communist. Many Australians can’t understand, they haven’t seen it happen. I have seen it in my country, Latvia, Lithuania, East Germany and Poland, and now I can see the same thing happening here.  

The ad very effectively tied Whitlam’s leftward-moving social policies with the Baltics recognition, and it generated a howl of protest at its sleazy implications — including from many on the right, as the intro to the 1975 Quadrant article on it suggests.

Team Turnbull’s revival of such occurs at a time when many of such generation are gone to the great SBS broadcast in the sky. But it’s clearly the direction they’re pitching in, and it’s surprising how few have spotted it. Coming soon from team Turnbull, has Labor infiltrated our precious bodily fluids?