“Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit sniffin’ glue” says Lloyd Bridges in Flying High, and one can imagine there are similar scenes happening right now at the Australia Institute. What do you do when, weeks after you launched a (very good) book, The Nordic Edge, which has urged Labor to follow its compass to the high-taxing northern social democracies once again, the party goes and commits to Scott Morrison’s new tax system, which flattens the rate out to 30c between $45,000pa and $200,000pa?
By the time you get to the higher end of that, you’re talking about less than 10% of wage-earners. The case for some flattening out has been due to bracket creep (which is also Jim Chalmers’ nickname — coincidence?) but that was more relevant, for Labor, in the lower levels round the $80k to $120k mark.
Flattening out the higher reaches, from about $130k to $200k, is the Libs’ main game, and Labor has clearly determined that it will leave no daylight between them on these matters; that it won’t go into an election handing the Libs one big thing that they can run a Howardian-style campaign on, where the entire frontbench says the same thing till everyone’s bored sick with it, themselves included: Labor will raise your taxes.
Real bracket creep works forwards but as we saw with Chris Bowen’s Dr Franking Credits’ monster in the last go-round, people worry about higher tax on incomes they will never have but imagine they one day might, and on the basis of such mass delusions is our fiscal policy made. Your correspondent backed Labor letting the tax cuts through when they were first put up, and it was the correct thing to do, I mean, of course, duh.
Had they not done so, the government would still be hitting Labor with it, weekly, even through the pandemic. As it is, all Josh Frydenberg has is a rather lame complaint about how Labor “says this then it says something else”, which no one really cares about. The cuts themselves are so supremely clientalist that complaining about Labor responding to perceived public demand in forming its policies rings hollow.
For a time, at the start of the Albanese reign, one hoped that this manoeuvre was to buy breathing space in which a new joined-up social democratic policy could be made — one which proposed a modified progressive tax system, together with a real crackdown on corporate overshoring, and which, crucially, told us what specifically they wanted to do with the money.
Faint hope. Instead we have had relentless low-level factional wars, or manoeuvres, and this tax policy itself appears to be an expression of a left-right stability pact, in which whatever side isn’t in power gets to pick the policies, a la Bill Shorten’s sudden “enthusiasm” for renewables targets last go-around. What a great way to draft a party program.
So the right has been pushing this but, as John Quiggin noted, the suspicion among progressives would be that this is not a political-tactical move. It’s a chance to use such reasoning as cover to do what they want to do anyway. That is, to run Australia on the basis of a permanent real estate bubble and high-end consumer spending, as we keep chipping bits off the continent and shipping it north, once, under an Albanese government, we have re-attached our lips to the CCP’s, uh, backward sections.
The Labor right’s wonk section is, as someone remarked, the only part of the political spectrum that really believes all that classical liberal crap anymore, with the IPA et al filling up with bitcoinbug Islamophobes.
But even if there’s a bit of that, it doesn’t alter the fact — one that many progressives won’t acknowledge — that Labor in Australia faces a hell of a dilemma. Australian society has been relentlessly privatised, much of it done by Paul Keating. The broad working-middle class has split — but not down the middle. Instead, the benefits-dependent and precarious and “low-prospect” workers — about 25%, maybe 30% of the population — are marooned, utterly without political leverage. The interests of what was once a united social class are now in contradiction, given the embedded nature of such divisions.
Why would upper-strata working-middle class people — ‘ere we go again, plumber and nurse, teacher and construction worker, medical admin and her husband, a juggler breaking into the industry (Northcote/Marrickville only) — feel that a higher-tax society would protect them from life risk? Why would they not see it as a drain on their prospects for life and intergenerational advancement?
Class solidarity once anchored policies like heavily progressive income tax; class decomposition is privileging their exact opposite. Progressives have to face the fact that the Whitlam spirit is gone from the party, beyond recovery or repair, because there is now no unitary working class to anchor a larger class coalition with trendies/intellectuals/the knowledge class in its various guises.
There is no longer a “natural fit” between progressive social policies and social democratic political economics. The “low prospect” groups locked out of power are unrepresented as themselves within Labor because so many actual left unions — construction, admin — have members drawn from the upper strata.
Furthermore, the official unions of low-prospect workers, such as the SDA, are de facto company outfits, subcontracted by capital to manage workers’ expectations downwards and deliver workplace compliance. The left unions’ leadership (and the Greens) maintain progressive policies — but as a general moral-political commitment, not as representation of a class-for-itself.
And were a genuine “party of the poor” to be started up, it would face the same problem as the Greens: compulsory preferencing removes leverage, which is exactly why Labor supported it when it was introduced a century ago. Kevin Rudd managed to pull something together, but only because he was an outsider, a worldly diplomat, capable (or with a team capable) of surrounding conventional politics with a comprehensive program. It appears that such people can no longer come from within Labor.
It also appears that social changes make that big picture thing far more difficult than it was even a decade ago. Such a program would be necessary to resisting tax cuts. I hate us being locked into a semi flat tax regime for years. But I can’t see a scenario here in which it wouldn’t have happened. Oh, and new COVID variants are coming. Off topic, I know, but good to get it all out of the way. Looks like we picked the wrong week to quit sniffin’ glue.
The situation seems to be that there is no hope of getting elected, if you try to suggest anything that looks like it’s going to take money away from the already-haves and the wanna-bes.
The problem isn’t that Labor has suddenly lost the Whitlam reformist spirit (I think that went 40-odd years ago!), it’s more that the early 70s revolutionary zeal doesn’t seem to reflect the zeitgeist of the nation in 2020 – so even if some in the ALP still retain a bit of Gough-ness, they’re wise to keep it in the closet for the time being.
The current playing field is more like a mine field : the LNP and mainstream media are watching from the search towers, machine guns ready, for the slightest “traditional” sort of ALP policy to emerge….but this time round, things are playing out a bit differently. The Libs desperately need the diversion, to take the spotlight off themelves, as they see a pathway through the barbed wire become more do-able, courtesy of their own ineptitude.
The ALP would be barking mad to give them what they want. Best to release policy only in the light of a public LNP failure….eg vaccine rollouts, what the ALP would do….quarantine stations, what the ALP would do. it’s hard to attack this sort of policy when it’s immediately on the back of a publicly acknowledged failure by the Feds, so it’s safe and it sends the message out to the voters: “You can change this shemozzle by simply voting Morrison et al out.”
If the ALP do win the next election, do they suddenly jump out of the cake in their “It’s Time” t-shirts, going “Fooled you!”?
I doubt it. But I reckon, as a general rule, the sooner you can establish trust with the voters, and show you are a reliable and competent leader, then that buys you, over time, the ability to change the direction of the country as a whole.
A respected and competent leader at least has a chance of winning people over to his or her big picture view of how our country can look, in the future.
So the final question is one of character, and vision. Albanese vs Morrison, whose version of Oz do we want to live in? Or maybe the more potent question that the ALP want to keep front and centre, is “Do you want to live in a country shaped by the continuing vision of Morrison?”
Albanese vs Morrison? I don’t want the kind of country that either of these men subscribe to, thanks. I haven’t heard anything from the rest of the opp bench. Are they all as boring, gutless and visionless as their leader?
I hear ya Bref – i’m sure quite a few aussies would love more guts, more vision, in their leaders. But there just don’t seem to be enough of those aussies, come polling day – wallets over principles every time, as gets demonstrated with infuriating regularity.
So what can you do? The next government will be either Labor or LNP, that’s a dead cert.
I ask myself, who’s most likely to shift the dial towards a better future, even if it’s only by a smidge?
Smidges of change is all we were offered by labor in the last several contests and it hasn’t worked.
I must have been looking at a different set of policies last election – the changes offered by Labor were rational and decent
… But Morrison, his Coalition government and their media cheer-squad weren’t – and enough of the electorate was more interested in the present than their future – Morrison and Murdoch know how to use that sort of “(F-Troop) Vanderbilt” short-sightedness, against their long-term interests.
A smidgen of tax changes, a smidgen of social housing, a smidgen of green policies. Nothing exciting enough to get them over the line, and now they’ve even removed the smidgen of tax changes. If they win this time it’ll be more a vote against a corrupt, ineffective LNP rather than enthusiasm for a bold plan of action on the part of Labor.
It was too little, too late and intended not to frighten the horses of Holt St. Shorten didn’t believe in them which is why he was unable to argue a case that wasn’t ludicrously hypocritical, depending on the given audience, apparently unaware of modern communications between FNQ and the inner city claques.
How much smaller a target can they become before disappearing from sight?
Too late, they already have.
A minority government supported by, but not in coalition with, other ethical parties as is the norm throughout northern Europe – producing stability, social housing, equity, labour justice and decency, just for starters.
We had that when PM Gillard scraped home and the Greens promised not to support a No Confidence motion but reserved the right to vote against other measures as applicable.
For reasons beyond my meagre comprehension she slammed shut that door in her last speech to an ALP annual conference with the despicable calumny that Labor had nothing in common with them, despite the evidence of the previous 3 years of succcessful government & legislation.
Bref,
They probably are.
Labor hasn’t yet worked out that times have changed in the last fourteen months.
We have a Pandemic, housing has skyrocketed, wagers are low, Morrison is doing his best to destroy SupperA, the NDIS, Medicare rebates and we have a lying incompetent Prime Minister in charge of our country.
Albanese’s Labor Party, have lost their way.
There is no evidence to the contrary.
Time servers, seat polishers & apparatchiks, the lot of them.
The few who have done anything outside politics, did reprehensible work for “international consultancies” or the big law/auditing shysters.
I doubt the Augean stables of Parliament can be cleansed, the Cotter river is not the Alpheus.
100%, Glenn. Morrison? Most certainly not. Can we please get a vomit emoji, Crikey?
“If the ALP do win the next election, do they suddenly jump out of the cake in their “It’s Time” t-shirts, going “Fooled you!”?”
The UK’s Labour Party experience might be instructive. Like our Labor Party now, by 1997 it had lost several successive elections. New leader Tony Blair cleared out all the left-sounding baggage and went into the 1997 election with a relatively clean slate. He won a massive landslide majority (thanks to the FPTP system which greatly exaggerated the swing). Did he use this opportunity to move left? Did he hell. He stayed firmly in Thatcher’s shadow and did very little. He concentrated on “eye-catching initiatives” (his words) to make himself look good, such as Anti-Social Behaviour Orders, rather than any substantial policy work. In some ways he went right of Thatcher. His cowardice was such he even failed to carry out explicit election pledges such as reversing the crazy railway privatisation carried out by John Major’s preceding government. Thatcher said with good reason her greatest achievement was “Tony Blair and New Labour. We forced our opponents to change their minds.”
It is very unlikely Albanese and his shadow cabinet have only decided to look like the Liberals for the purpose of electioneering. They are so traumatised that they really have completely given up. If they win the next election they will be utterly convinced that is their reward for being identical to the Liberals and their only task is to continue being exactly like the Liberals because that got them into power and they dare not risk being different. It will never occur to Albanese for a moment, exactly as it never occurred to Blair, that his party might have won because a majority of voters finally want something different after so many years of right-wing government.
that’s quite possible SSR, but to date, whenever something different is offered to the aussie voter, they don’t vote for it!
I really believe the root problem is that there aren’t enough voters who are left of the ALP at the moment, to win an election.
If the ALP joined forces with the LNP, to form a coalition of three, and went to an election vs the Greens, I reckon it’d be a keel-hauling of the left. I might be wrong, but as most elections end up hovering around the 50/50 either way mark, I’m guessing that the right wing leaning ALP voters going with the Tri-Coalition would make it an 80/20 result? 75/25?
It’s an interesting hypothetical, and I would be interested to hear what others think would be the result.
I personally would love nothing more than for the left to be able to carry the day, based on centre/left principles, but I don’t think it’s possible with the current aussie population. We’re just too far to the right, too aspirational, too caught up in Howard’s promise of everyone being a multi-millionaire-in-waiting, busting a gut to amass an investment portfolio so they can live the good life off their passive income.
Social justice, and a sustainable future, while hopefully climbing slowly up the list of “must-haves”, haven’t proven themselves to be vote-winners yet.
Yes, policies we might label ‘progressive’ have not won majority support in quite a long time, for whatever reasons. However, when an election comes around there are two possibilities:
Just because progressive policies failed (apparently – there is room for debate about how popular the policies really were) at the last election is a really stupid reason to abandon them and become Liberal copy-cats. It is a fundamental mistake and a betrayal of democratic principles.
But could you imagine the reaction in the ALP if they went into the next election, following the same strategy that lost them the last one….and lost again?
“How could you be so idiotic? How could you not learn?” would be the obvious scream from the ranks. And i reckon the result would be that whoever led them to that repeat defeat would be erased, never to be spoken of again, to be replaced by a dead-set, “I’m going to out-Tony-Tony Blair” leader, the only option that could stop the whole team from rioting.
I reckon all roads are still pointing right at the moment, but there is a chance that not all vestiges of Shorten’s policies have been privately dumped by the party in the space of one election cycle. I do think the strategy is to make them look dumped.
But at least they’re trying to learn from the past, instead of doggedly repeating it expecting different results.
This current strategy might lose as well! But at least in terms of a controlled experiment, you’d be able to check it off the list.
They were not ‘Shorten’s policies‘ – he has always been a visionless, ideas-free zone, an empty shell to be filled each morning by the machine Right.
He was, and remains, devoid of the ability to think on his feet.
Even down to the ‘zingers’ so rightly lampooned by Shaun Micallef because, no matter how much he practised, he could never deliver them without looking puzzled at the meaning of the sounds coming out of his mouth.
I think a lot of the current voters who were born since 1975 are spoilt brats with a sense of entitlement, a perfect fit for the LNP. You know the sort, the ones who had to have a new car from mummy and daddy as an 18th birthday present.
I think a lot of the current voters are that group that has contributed least and benefited most from the post-war years. The baby boomers.
But thank you for your trolling.
Interesting thought experiment Glenn. As i suggest below, I reckon your numbers are about right. Sadly.
Albanese is not a Blair. He has been around a long time. We know him well. Competent minister. Highly capable Leader of the House. The charisma kid?Not so much. He won’t get a chance to demonstrate that he is one of the great PMs unless those who can’t cope with more of the current rubbish get off their collective backsides and work for a change.
The scariest thing is that both Obama & Rudd did the same thing – came in with working majorities after a discreditted regime, with record levels of public support & goodwill.
And, not only did nothing their supporters expected but continued and worsened the policies of their erstwhile ‘opponents’, spurning the complaints of their voters in the name of ‘unity’.
I do not want unity with people whose policies and prejudices I find dishonourable, when not wicked.
Good points about the release of policy within current context eg the shocking privatisation of the vaccine rollout by Scovid
the official unions of low-prospect workers, such as the SDA, are de facto company outfits, subcontracted by capital to manage workers’ expectations downwards and deliver workplace compliance. ..Rundle
As most may know the Shoppies are a Catholic controlled right wing piece of rubbish and always have been.
The aim was to deliver unions into the hands of business-friendly operatives, who could then act against the interests of the members they were supposed to represent.”
The SDA is one such union, but it looks like the mad dog right wing crazies are being put down at last. There is another union now which any SDA members should join instead RAFFWU.
The SDA were expelled from the AWU and brought back into the AWU as they were big contributors to Labor campaigns
The Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees’ Association (SDA) concluded a cosy deal with supermarket giant Coles that reduces weekend penalty rates and allows Coles to cut its wages bill by $20 million a year. The SDA actually pays both Coles and Woolworths $5 million a year to help it collect membership fees, which are then used to maintain SDA influence inside the Labor Party.
These cooperative ideas also underpinned the Prices and Incomes Accords that the ACTU struck with the Hawke and Keating governments in the 1980s, which saw unions working with business to essentially restructure the economy along neo-liberal lines.
Within Labor circles the Prices and Incomes Accords are still seen as a success, even though real wages were cut and became tied to productivity trade-offs. Union membership collapsed along with the union movement’s combativity.
Not surprisingly Bill Kelty, the former ACTU secretary who negotiated the Accords, has come out strongly defending Shorten saying he was, “brave and flexible when the country needed brave and flexible union officials”.
Martin Ferguson, too, who was ACTU president from 1990-96 and later became a Labor politician, defended Shorten, saying the deal struck with Thiess John Holland was an example of “what the Hawke and Keating governments achieved”.
If you want an historical perspective have a read of this
https://blogs.crikey.com.au/thestump/2011/04/21/labor-in-sa/
“Do you want to live in a country shaped by the continuing vision of Morrison?” That thought chills me to the bones Glenn.
Could be a good ALP slogan for the election.
The Labor voter base like the permanent population, is ageing while rusted onto legacy right wing media, many would be in or near retirement and prone to LNP/media messaging, especially sociocultural issues wrapped up with (misunderstood) threats; backgrounded by changing occupations and roles.
There is no centre or left print media (usurped by the DT and/or Hun) nor regular coverage or reporting of working age population workers’ sector by sector issues; that would require employee and/or union (rep) input, bypassing top down pronouncements of CEOs, MPs or think tankers., the preferred public face of the corporate sector.
It’s a catastrophic failure of nerve at precisely – pinpoint precisely – the wrong time. For starters, it’s actually electoral suicide. There is simply zero chance of nervy swinging voters who rejected their tax package last time now electing Labor, on the basis that they are now….the Other Side Lite. Why would you? Of course you’d just stick with Coke rather than switch to…well, not even Pepsi, but Koke. It beggars belief that the ALP can’t see this: that responding to a relatively narrow loss by abandoning every potential differentiating shred so cravenly will more likely make the electorate dismiss them with contempt. This is the only lesson worth taking from John Howard’s reign: you hold your nerve, you stick to your convictions (real or faked), and you let the times come to you.
This is triply so for progressive aspirants. An innately conservative electorate wants one thing from a would-be reforming government, to give it a crack: conviction. People will give up economic self-interest…IF they are confident they’re not being taken for a ride. That’s really Labor’s problem. It’s drenched now with chancing politico-economic charlatans, who come out of the privileged classes and see the ALP as their pathway to the usual Directorships, QANGOS, property portfolios and legacy baubles.
Insanely, the times are so close to suiting the Shorten program as to be tasteable. And Labor has just blown it, for the next couple of generations at least. I suspect in fact that the next iteration of a mass progressive political movement will profoundly disruptive, possibly even anarchic, and will erupt in the context of a fully fledged class war. Which will be interesting, but as always potentially disastrous.
And all this without even starting on the actual policy merits and urgent moral imperatives of the big pls ls they e now jettisoned. Which are considerable, especially coming into what will be truly rocky period demanding real civic and executive leadership. It’s such a missed opportunity…Keating’s ‘epic times, demanding elic leadership’…squandered. Squandered: the perfect moment for….Labor leadership.
Hideously, hideously sad.
‘big policy planks’ nowjettisoned etc. Sorry.
Depressingly on the money Jack.
Do they have to label themselves progressive? Many people would know that our housing market is overheating and that young people can’t afford to buy, or even to rent something decent sometimes. A lot of this is due to negative gearing and investors snapping up properties which they come to own courtesy of massive taxpayer subsidies. Can’t take them away easily though.
Why can’t Labor put the problem out there as one that has to be dealt with because things can’t go on as they are (and explaining why), but that Labor will be working to make sure that those Mums and Dads who have a couple of rental properties won’t lose out either. And say that this is a problem they will be tackling if they win Government.
They keep using the LNP framing of policies rather than reframing them in a way that suits their agenda and values rather than the LNP’s.
Yes, I agree very much with this. Labor’s always at its best when it presents itself – and substantively is – a problem-solving outfit. A life-improving one, grounded in material world politics. They used to tackle the hard stuff of politics, the things that ‘ordinary’ people didn’t know they hated or think could be solved. That’s how the first hundred years of Federation were so democratically thrilling. They made ‘ordinary’ people embrace their own appetite and agency for collective life improvement.
It’s also why I hate the slide into the superficial progressivism of identity politics – I call it ‘soft pap prog’ progressive posturing. It doesn’t solve any problems (least of all for the nominal beneficiaries of it) and it’s a surrender – a regression – to collective fatalism.
Labor’s biggest hurdle to overcome is a lack of self-confidence. Decisions like this – on housing tax policy especially, of all things – is self-sabotage of the worst kind. Had they done as you say and steadfastly articulated the problem-solving approach they’d have been much better placed and they’d have furthered the long slow process of cementing self-respect and confidence, as an internalised virtue.
Even if they do win the election…so what? It’s not a Labor win. Yes, it’s hard in the face of relentless Murdochian anti-Labor framing. But surrendering as they have done is playing into its worst white-anting critics’ hands. Alas, Murdoch’s grubs are superb at leveraging both the upper-middle class guilt and the cynical self-interest of the contemporary ALP hierarchy, and using it to undermine their much better angels.
Thatcher said “First win the argument, then win the election“.
Labor is unable, never mind unwilling to make any argument, perhaps for fear of being wedged but more likely coz they don’t have any core beliefs worth promoting.
Why bother?
A federal MP’s salary is 2-3 times what most of the drones & podspawn would earn in the real world, plus perks and a light to non existent workload, if the current brilliant policy of collapse & cower is any indication.
It’s a sad day when “We’re going to leave the tax system as it is!!” can be the basis for making yourself the target for a scare campaign.
The Herald Sun in Victoria doesn’t believe Labor, according to a post on the Liberal Party Facebook page which recently chose me to be a recipient of their posts. Useful to see what they post. Both the Libs and the Murdoch media are saying they don’t believe Labor will follow through, so I am not sure why Labor bothered being so craven and spineless.
It’s back to the 1950s and 1960s when Labor seemed comfortable in opposition. After all, those in politics get a nice salary without the hard work of running the country.
Just feeling depressed and cynical. We’ve got a corrupt, incompetent, do-nothing Government, a situation which means its poll ratings should be in single figures and Labor’s should be stratospheric. But no, Labor can’t help sabotaging itself. I’d say, bring on the Revolution, but who would lead it?
And we have the re-incarnation of Arthur Calwell as opposition leader.
Sidney Adelaide,
Far worst than Arthur.
Albanese has a one hundred year pandemic and is up against a Prime Minister who completely stuffed the vaccination roll out and Albanese is still behind in the polls.
You would think that would alert someone in the Labor Party.
I always thought of Albo as our new Simon Crean
more a kim beazeley without the waffling blather..Like Beazeley he is well liked by liberal voters as a decent man who would never oppose their interests.
Surely “…kim beazeley without the waffling blather…” is a contradiction in terms?
When he returned as ALP, after ABC (Anyone But Crean) led to Latham, Beazley acknowledged that problem and said that he “…would cut down on the prolixity” – which sent many to the dictionary.
I can’t tell whether Albo “waffles” or “blathers” as he only ever gets a maximum of three seconds to make a comment on any of the TV news broadcasts. His usual cryptic comment in that time interval is a mysterious “Ahhh, errrrm” at which point, in the interests of balance, they move on to 5 minutes of word salad from the frequent fibber. Both “leaders” are equally unintelligible.
Some great coordination of anti-Labor articles between Crikey and Macrobusiness today…
At the risk of repeating others, we have an utterly corrupted government, a compliant media, and a public who simply does not care. Labor tried “big ideas” last time (whatever you think if that pitches coherency) so if siting tight and waiting for the LNP explodes leads to a federal ICAC, then so be it.
It would be nice if there was some grant vision to sell, but through what media? What science hating suburbanites, or inner city voodoo afficionados, would understand it?
I don’t think the ideas were wrong last time. And in fact they won all states except the mining states. And that was with a quite confused message. Too many policies with too many details to grasp in an election campaign against a slick and simplistic scare campaign by the master marketer, with help from the media.
I agree, all these commentators agonising and gutsaching are so pessimistic, surely Labor need to win the election by however means first then get going with the good stuff. Try going hard on all the lnp lies and dishonesty for a start, the cheek of the Victorian branch’s!
BB
This is from the article:
But even if there’s a bit of that, it doesn’t alter the fact — one that many progressives won’t acknowledge — that Labor in Australia faces a hell of a dilemma
I then go on to talk of why simply slating labor for selling out is simplistic
How is that anti-Labor? Read the article not just the headline
“How is that anti-Labor?”
It’s a version of damning with faint praise. Perhaps you do not see what you did. On the surface your article supports Labor, but the elements add up to a portrait of a party that’s no use to anyone (except a small number of Labor insiders seeking personal advancement come the day the Coalition finally falls over). If Labor retained a shred of integrity it would admit it has no idea what it represents or what to do, so the time has come for it to give up and walk away. That would make room for an opposition party worthy of the name, because whatever emerges with Labor gone might actually oppose the Liberal Party instead of just moaning about it while going down the same path.
When Labor loses arch luvvie, Philip ‘Pollyanna’ Adams, who called the capitulation “…gutless & shameful..” on Monday night’s LNL, it really has jumped the shark and landed in the LNP swamp.
So, let’s keep it simple. A meaningful social housing program. None of this wishy washy 5000 in 4 years, NSW alone has a waiting list of around 50,000. A bold energy program that encompasses clean energy, virtual power plants, a foray into the new storage systems and real incentives to buy EVs. An imaginative climate change approach by creating a ‘real’ green army employed in climate change projects around the country, including regrowing coastal forests (they might even get rain falling further inland again). These measures would send employment and manufacturing through the roof. Somehow other countries can do these things, but we just sit around tinkering around the edges, doing as little as possible so as not to upset the applecart.
Unfortunately there is not a single Labor placeholder who believes in any of those excellent ideas, let alone willing or even capable of arguing for them.
Take Crikey any day over Macrobusiness……. the latter are Koch like radical right libertarians masquerading or astroturfing as right on centrists, for a predominantly male audience to split centre/left, attacking any economist, journalist or researcher from the centre right through left (with infantile humour and smearing); plenty of xenophobia too.
Meanwhile claiming Labor and LNP (latter avoids scrutiny) both bad, therefore keep the LNP in power while channeling their nativist Malthusian obsessions about immigration and population growth, to get at ageing Labor voters.
Much of their ‘demographic analysis’ is informed by Dr. Bob ‘I’m not against immigrants but…’ Birrell of APRI (which Crikey has used too while ignoring more credible local and/or global demographic research), with commenters posting dog whistles, sometimes alt right sentiments and past year much editorial led Sinophobia, while the same people present on Sky, 2GB, ABC Q&A etc.
Oh, and new COVID variants are coming.
They certainly are and they’re a direct result of corruption worldwide in nations who refuse to govern for ALL and provide basic safety nets as did Labor over the years and Whitlam. Both the UK NHS and Aust Medicare have been reduced to bare bones by the greed of the psychopaths who are in the conservative parties.