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If a USYD Honi Soit editor hates Labour then they are finished. Only backward bogans like Chook still believe modern Labour stands for anything.....
http://www.spectator.co.uk/australia...gressive.thtml
Lament of a progressive
Michael Koziol
Saturday, 19th May 2012
The Labor party exhibits a visionless, parochial and backward agenda
So it has come to this: we are so disillusioned with the characters and plot of Australian politics that we’ve started fantasising about a Peter Costello comeback. The famous ‘low-altitude flyer’, whose contribution to the nation’s history amounts to not kicking over the paint bucket for 11 years, seemed to sense a bar so low that even he could pass it and re-enter the Australian political landscape. As much fun as a decade of watching Costello not challenge Tony Abbott for the Prime Ministership might be, we’ve been there, done that, and Costello should just go away and embrace irrelevance.
Julia Gillard might wish she could do the same, now that it has become clear she possesses by far the worst judgment and instinct of any Australian prime minister. Who else would have seen fit, while being accused of inciting class war, to actually declare one by suggesting members of Sydney’s North Shore are not ‘real people’?
This is dangerously close to the backwater nonsense you sometimes hear about ‘real Australians’, a term which is wielded by both racists and the conservative, embarrassing rump of the Old Left. Perhaps Gillard reckons she can score a few points among the old bases by jettisoning the North Shore types who typically aren’t Labor voters. But as the Daily Telegraph immediately pointed out, the Shore isn’t nearly as homogenous as the Prime Minister might think.
More crucially, Gillard forgets that there can be solidarity beyond the coalface as well. While the North Shore of Sydney might have a reputation for manicured elitism, its self-identity differs not very much from that of the city’s east, or Melbourne’s mansion belt, or the western suburbs of Perth. And so when she kicks the North Shore she also kicks the haves and the aspirants nationwide. Dumb.
If this were Gillard’s first lapse of political judgment it would be forgivable, but as we all know, it’s a minor stumble compared with her regular efforts. The debut of the Real Julia, the mean and tricky Malaysian ‘Solution’ and its attempt to trap Abbott, abandoning the pokies deal with Andrew Wilkie, standing by Craig Thomson, gleefully backing Peter Slipper — how can anyone claim Gillard is a shrewd political operator after these atrocious mistakes?
The only real defence of Gillard made with some credibility used to be that she was an amazing negotiator, and in this regard she became engulfed in platitudes. She really should be out there brokering hostage releases or corporate mergers. But of course even that veneer has cracked, with a Labor caucus member admitting to the Australian Financial Review: ‘The only people who say Julia Gillard is a good negotiator are those who have negotiated with her. That’s because they always walk away with exactly what they want from her.’
A good negotiator would have granted the Greens a more robust Emissions Trading Scheme, not a policy ending in ‘tax’. A good negotiator would have done what Kevin Rudd tried, too late, to do: get the miners to co-invest with the government in national infrastructure. A good negotiator would have shown her backbench recalcitrants the wisdom of poker machine reform instead of capitulating to them.
A leader with better judgment would have seized the day on gay marriage and stared down the Shoppies. The right-wing Victorian union might be propping up Gillard in the ALP, but not even they can prop up a leader on 27 per cent of the primary vote. Judgment.
A better leader would stop trashing Tony Abbott, who is already unpopular, and start trashing the Liberals, who are very popular. Gillard seems to think Australia will vote against Tony Abbott: that could only ever be true in one of 150 seats. Judgment.
A better leader would have reined in her ministers when they set about besmirching the name of Labor’s only successful leader in the past 15 years. She should have foreseen the possibility that, two years into
a failed experiment of titanic proportions, returning to the leader they so wronged in 2010 might be necessary. Judgment.
But in light of all these decisions, the most disappointing realisation is that under Gillard, Labor has become the party of the past. At almost every turn she
exhibits her visionless, parochial, backward, red-brick-shack-in-Altona politics. Population growth? Don’t want it. Refugees? No thanks. Foreign policy? Doesn’t interest me. Gay marriage? Too progressive.
Gillard’s attachment to this outdated notion of Australia is pathetic, especially while she chastises Abbott for being ‘on the wrong side of history’ on carbon pricing. This, of course, he is — but Gillard herself is so welded to the past as to make this claim unbearably hypocritical.
Unquestionably Gillard has had to face several distinct battles during her tenure. The minority parliament makes things difficult, sure, but there is nothing about it that should decimate your political instinct or your ability to sell publicly the decisions of that minority parliament.
As the nation’s first female PM, Gillard has at times been a victim of lingering sexism, but also a victim of apologists: the ones who say her fledgling position is a result of that sexism. Of course it isn’t. It’s a result of bad instincts, abysmal communication and poor priorities.
I can think of only three areas in which Abbott is more progressive than Gillard. The first is that he is better at Twitter, which is an important new form of communication and engagement, and it can be safely asserted that people who are bad at Twitter are bad at most things.
The second is his recent pronouncement, in a Budget reply characteristically lacking in budgetary matters, that he would get more Australian students to learn a second language. It’s an outward-thinking, world-embracing, positive idea with both economic and social promise. I’m sure Gillard would agree, but Abbott said it and now he owns it.
The final example, and this is a big call, is that Abbott hasn’t completely closed his mind to gay marriage. Perhaps this impression only arises because he is rarely asked, the answer being assumed. But one of our top marriage equality campaigners, Dr Kerryn Phelps, holds out hope. And it wouldn’t be unthinkable for an Abbott government to declare that government just shouldn’t stand in the way of two people’s love.
Abbott has moderated (from the extreme periphery) in the past, evidenced by his ‘evolved’ views on abortion and paid parental leave. And unlike Gillard, he seems responsive to human connection, leaving room for his sister Christine, who yearns to marry her female partner, to perhaps change his mind. Yet a political party which is genuinely progressive, but also not crazy (read: the Greens), still eludes us. Donald Horne famously described us as a country ‘run by second-rate people’. He was being generous.
Michael Koziol is an editor of Honi Soit and a media student at the University of Sydney.
http://www.spectator.co.uk/australia...gressive.thtml
Lament of a progressive
Michael Koziol
Saturday, 19th May 2012
The Labor party exhibits a visionless, parochial and backward agenda
So it has come to this: we are so disillusioned with the characters and plot of Australian politics that we’ve started fantasising about a Peter Costello comeback. The famous ‘low-altitude flyer’, whose contribution to the nation’s history amounts to not kicking over the paint bucket for 11 years, seemed to sense a bar so low that even he could pass it and re-enter the Australian political landscape. As much fun as a decade of watching Costello not challenge Tony Abbott for the Prime Ministership might be, we’ve been there, done that, and Costello should just go away and embrace irrelevance.
Julia Gillard might wish she could do the same, now that it has become clear she possesses by far the worst judgment and instinct of any Australian prime minister. Who else would have seen fit, while being accused of inciting class war, to actually declare one by suggesting members of Sydney’s North Shore are not ‘real people’?
This is dangerously close to the backwater nonsense you sometimes hear about ‘real Australians’, a term which is wielded by both racists and the conservative, embarrassing rump of the Old Left. Perhaps Gillard reckons she can score a few points among the old bases by jettisoning the North Shore types who typically aren’t Labor voters. But as the Daily Telegraph immediately pointed out, the Shore isn’t nearly as homogenous as the Prime Minister might think.
More crucially, Gillard forgets that there can be solidarity beyond the coalface as well. While the North Shore of Sydney might have a reputation for manicured elitism, its self-identity differs not very much from that of the city’s east, or Melbourne’s mansion belt, or the western suburbs of Perth. And so when she kicks the North Shore she also kicks the haves and the aspirants nationwide. Dumb.
If this were Gillard’s first lapse of political judgment it would be forgivable, but as we all know, it’s a minor stumble compared with her regular efforts. The debut of the Real Julia, the mean and tricky Malaysian ‘Solution’ and its attempt to trap Abbott, abandoning the pokies deal with Andrew Wilkie, standing by Craig Thomson, gleefully backing Peter Slipper — how can anyone claim Gillard is a shrewd political operator after these atrocious mistakes?
The only real defence of Gillard made with some credibility used to be that she was an amazing negotiator, and in this regard she became engulfed in platitudes. She really should be out there brokering hostage releases or corporate mergers. But of course even that veneer has cracked, with a Labor caucus member admitting to the Australian Financial Review: ‘The only people who say Julia Gillard is a good negotiator are those who have negotiated with her. That’s because they always walk away with exactly what they want from her.’
A good negotiator would have granted the Greens a more robust Emissions Trading Scheme, not a policy ending in ‘tax’. A good negotiator would have done what Kevin Rudd tried, too late, to do: get the miners to co-invest with the government in national infrastructure. A good negotiator would have shown her backbench recalcitrants the wisdom of poker machine reform instead of capitulating to them.
A leader with better judgment would have seized the day on gay marriage and stared down the Shoppies. The right-wing Victorian union might be propping up Gillard in the ALP, but not even they can prop up a leader on 27 per cent of the primary vote. Judgment.
A better leader would stop trashing Tony Abbott, who is already unpopular, and start trashing the Liberals, who are very popular. Gillard seems to think Australia will vote against Tony Abbott: that could only ever be true in one of 150 seats. Judgment.
A better leader would have reined in her ministers when they set about besmirching the name of Labor’s only successful leader in the past 15 years. She should have foreseen the possibility that, two years into
a failed experiment of titanic proportions, returning to the leader they so wronged in 2010 might be necessary. Judgment.
But in light of all these decisions, the most disappointing realisation is that under Gillard, Labor has become the party of the past. At almost every turn she
exhibits her visionless, parochial, backward, red-brick-shack-in-Altona politics. Population growth? Don’t want it. Refugees? No thanks. Foreign policy? Doesn’t interest me. Gay marriage? Too progressive.
Gillard’s attachment to this outdated notion of Australia is pathetic, especially while she chastises Abbott for being ‘on the wrong side of history’ on carbon pricing. This, of course, he is — but Gillard herself is so welded to the past as to make this claim unbearably hypocritical.
Unquestionably Gillard has had to face several distinct battles during her tenure. The minority parliament makes things difficult, sure, but there is nothing about it that should decimate your political instinct or your ability to sell publicly the decisions of that minority parliament.
As the nation’s first female PM, Gillard has at times been a victim of lingering sexism, but also a victim of apologists: the ones who say her fledgling position is a result of that sexism. Of course it isn’t. It’s a result of bad instincts, abysmal communication and poor priorities.
I can think of only three areas in which Abbott is more progressive than Gillard. The first is that he is better at Twitter, which is an important new form of communication and engagement, and it can be safely asserted that people who are bad at Twitter are bad at most things.
The second is his recent pronouncement, in a Budget reply characteristically lacking in budgetary matters, that he would get more Australian students to learn a second language. It’s an outward-thinking, world-embracing, positive idea with both economic and social promise. I’m sure Gillard would agree, but Abbott said it and now he owns it.
The final example, and this is a big call, is that Abbott hasn’t completely closed his mind to gay marriage. Perhaps this impression only arises because he is rarely asked, the answer being assumed. But one of our top marriage equality campaigners, Dr Kerryn Phelps, holds out hope. And it wouldn’t be unthinkable for an Abbott government to declare that government just shouldn’t stand in the way of two people’s love.
Abbott has moderated (from the extreme periphery) in the past, evidenced by his ‘evolved’ views on abortion and paid parental leave. And unlike Gillard, he seems responsive to human connection, leaving room for his sister Christine, who yearns to marry her female partner, to perhaps change his mind. Yet a political party which is genuinely progressive, but also not crazy (read: the Greens), still eludes us. Donald Horne famously described us as a country ‘run by second-rate people’. He was being generous.
Michael Koziol is an editor of Honi Soit and a media student at the University of Sydney.
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