Nice piece posted to Ray’s home blog that neatly sums up the problems with the Labor party.
Its a must read in my humble opinion
Cheers Comrades
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Just reiterating, Iain, that the piece is a guest post @ my blog written by footy tipster and pro-Lib supporter ‘Stuart W’. Stuart was trying to get out his anti-Labor stuff in the footy thread, so I invited him to write a separate post.
I think he’s right about Gillard and a couple of things but we knew all that. As I’ve said before, the fundamental ‘problem with Labor’ is Gillard.
You know, “The fish rots from the head down …. “
As I have said here before Ray, the further to the right the ALP goes the worse it gets…
Look at the Qld election, the main reason given in the exit polls was privatisation, a right wing policy that old Labor wouldn’t have touched in a pink fit.
As for Rudd, mate you have to be joking. He is another from the failed right of the party and a bloke with no people skills at all, yep just what we need.
The funny bit is watching the wingnuts attack the ALP for failed conservative policies and at the same time suggesting we vote for Catholic, conservative Abbott…..Talk about confused (as usual).
Anyway Ray, as an ALP supporter, you are doing a poor job of supporting them. By repeating the wingnut and Abbott line that Gillard is the ‘worst PM ever’ and supporting the conservative Rudd you are part of the push that will see the destruction of the once great ALP.
It seems to me it’s all about PR. The ALP/Greens government have done a great job. Julia Has stuffed up the PR campaign and by not going hard on the mining Tax and Carbon price, has hurt her personal standing amongst the traditional ALP left and centre left, something they may never recover from if supporters like you don’t, you know, support….
I understand you don’t like the mining price thing, but it’s minor. Focus on the good big picture stuff that has kept the country strong in the face of a world wide conservative/neocon crash. If we don’t, we will see further real damage done to Australians by the Christian conservatives that are drooling at the thought of the power they may have following the next election.
Sorry Ray, I meant to say the carbon price thingy not the mining tax, which I think you support?
That’s right Craigy. Mining tax = good thing. Sensible. No harm done. Carbob tax = bad thing. Non sensical. Huge harm done.
And I think you’ll find that Qlder’s voted so viciously against Labor for a number of reasons in rough order:
1. Anti- Gillard sentiment over her treatment of Rudd
2. Carbon tax.
3. The ‘it’s time’ factor.
4. Privatisation.
If you reckon it was because the ALP has moved too much to the right and, therefore, the more left-leaning voters deseted them, how come they deserted Bligh for the LNP & the Katter party and NOT the Greens?
Again, I think you’re off the mark here Craigy. Most ALP voters are conservative.
“Most ALP voters are conservative”…….only recently Ray and compared even to Keating the current mob are much further to the Right.
Katter may be to the right on some issues, but he was anti privatisation, a rightist policy. If Bligh hadn’t sold of the farm she would have done much better and kept those votes.
It’s always going to be tough for the Greens in red-neck Queensland. They only have two newspapers and they both belong to the discredited News Ltd, who has sworn to destroy them.
BTW you are wrong on the priorities of Queensland voters, cost of living was the main reason they gave (I can give you the results if you need them), and they think things will get cheaper under Newman…..yeah right……
Then the sale of the electricity assets, not because she said she wouldn’t, it wasn’t a trust thing, it was because people are sick of selling off the farm for dodgy reasons, they prefer the leftist policy of leaving big assets in public hands.
The Carbon tax IS the main issue in Queensland, against federal Labor, but was down the list in the state election.
I also think you have brought the alarmist line on the carbon price, it will change very little on all the evidence. Still you fall for the ‘Carbon price will rooon us’ scare, run by the wingnuts. I think you’re smarter than that.
Craigy the fundamental reason that Labor got obliterated up her was because Bligh went to the last election promising not to sell off the family silver and then did just that three months later by selling anything she could . The people just have a very low tolerance for being taken for granted by the pollies. Move to the federal level and what do you see?
A PM who lied to the public.
what makes you think the rest of Australia are any more tolerant of that sort of behaviour than we banana benders?
Gillard is the problem for Labor because she is seen to be a teller of lies, further federal Labor are utterly wedged on a few other issues which makes their chances at the ballot box well as dire as they were for the Queensland Branch just a couple of weeks ago.
Most notably too the Green vote up here went backwards so clearly the Greens are not past their peak as well and on their way back to obscurity where they belong 😉
Iain, the Gillard ‘lie’ is a beat up and you know it. The fact the ALP are in trouble is that they have lost their core support on the left and they don’t do the ‘tough’ rightist stuff well.
In Queensland, the fact is Queenslanders are against conservative policies like privatisation of state assets. If they weren’t they wouldn’t have cared about the ‘lie’. Queenslanders are social conservatives only.
For Christ sake Iain, your own leader, Abbott, has admitted to being a serial liar and you will still vote for him wont you?
We will see who is right about:
1. The effects of the carbon price and how it destroys the economy
2. The future of the Greens after the next election.
I reckon your wrong on both issues, but we will have to wait and see.
I mean, look at how the mining tax has driven them all broke, like the wingsnuts predicted?
Given you don’t like lies, how you can have faith in these conservatives, who tell the biggest porkpies in the media they control, with no concern for Australia, is beyond me.
No Craigy Stuart nailed it in his article not only was Gillard’s back-filp seen as terrible betrayal of a “core promise” that ‘there will be no carbon tax under a government that I lead” but it showed just how weak and how desperate Gillard was to get into the lodge because she simply paid too high a price to the Greens for their support when it was clear to blind Freddy that the Greens would not do a deal with Abbott.
The Greens after the next election will be going backwards quite simply because of the uncertainty that we have seen since the last poll.Good bad or indifferent people prefer to have a government that can govern rather than one that does grubby deals to get into power or to get any of their legislation through.
As for the carbon tax people will cheer when it goes believe you me, even those on welfare who would lose the so called compensation.
Iain, we will wait and see. But if the wingnuts are as right about the greens and the carbon price as they were about the mining tax then you will be eating your words. Do you really think your leader will keep his word and remove the carbon price once in power?….Really?
Absolutely Craigy because he knows that to fail to do is to take on Gillard’s mantle of falsehood and to ruin his chances of having a long period in office. The fact that the world price has all but collapsed will make the dismantling of this stupid scheme even more urgent.
Yeah? Where have they gone then, Craigy? They haven’t shifted to the Greens, so it appears your premise is incorrect. The ‘core’ vote they have lost is from the ‘middle’ – people who are basically conservative but could vote either way depending on a number of factors. This is evident in both the polls and the QLD election.
And I think you both (you & Iain) underestimate ‘the Gillard factor’ in the QLD result. They hate her for knifing Rudd. Twice. And the character assassination of him just before the QLD election played a major role in that massive anti-Labor vote. Sorry, Iain, but on State issues alone, the ALP would not have been wiped out as they were.
And Craigy, make no mistake, if things stay as they are with Gillard as PM then in the 2013 election voters will swing dramatically to the coaltion, not the Greens.
Rather than asking ‘what’s the problem’ with Labor, perhaps it’s easier to ask,
‘what the heck have they got right in the last five years?’
As far as I see it, nothing. Of course the country keeps rolling along. We survived the GFC. Labor claim this as a victory, but any thinking person realises that the groundwork for that was already intrenched by the Libs, bestowing a huge surplus on Labor to splash out and claim it as their own.
Similarly, Australia’s successful economy, courtesy of previous governments, is robust enough to weather both internal and external forces. Unfortunately, it is Labor’s ‘internal forces’ that have begun wreaking havoc with our stable economy, and for no good reason, other than pandering to their minority partner, the Greens, and a misguided belief in anthropogenic global warming.
These are sensible moves at state level. In Queensland alone, incoming Premier Campbell Newman has found myriad useless government departments devoted to nothing more than spending money on green pipe-dreams. Victoria’s premier, Ted Baillieu is belatedly reducing their carbon emissions target.
At Federal level it’s a different story. Gillard and her ship of fools are determined to bring in the Carbon Tax on July 1, at $23 a tonne, while the rest of the world is not falling for this scam. The EU price yesterday fell to €6.34, that’s about $7.24 AUS compared to our self-inflicted $23.
How, in anyone’s language does this make sense? It doesn’t. Why are we trashing our economy for a spurious ‘save the planet’ campaign.
The Carbon Tax won’t alter the climate, it won’t generate new jobs in ‘green industries’. Just look at overseas companies like Solyndra who have benefited from massive subsidies, but are now bankrupt.
Labor doesn’t have good weeks in politics, and this week is no exception. After the long list of failures, previously listed on this blog, add this week’s list of embarrassing, if not criminal, failures to the list.
These include the failure of Fair Work Australia, after three years, to provide a report about the Craig Thomson fiasco. The Director of Public Prosecutions reckons the tabled report, which took three years, is unusable. More obfuscation and cover-up in an attempt to keep a criminal member sitting in Parliament to boost Gillard’s minority numbers.
This is a government that has to go, a government that will go at the next election, and a government that will take with it those fringe-dwelling Greenies who have contributed to this destabilising of our once robust economy.
That might have made a good ‘guest post’ on its own GD.
Gotta ask you how you think the Libs would have reacted to the great GFC #1 of 2008-9. Well? I’ll answer – they would not have injected liquidity into the economy and, instead would have cut taxes, mainly to benefit the wealthy top end. Result: We would have gone into deep recession with massive unemployment and we’d still be in it. And everyone would be saying “this govt has got to go”.
To put aside your conservative fixed position of pissing & moaning and cut to the quick, your only real and valid criticism of the Labor govt is the carbon tax, and I agree with you on that – the price is too high and it will have too big an impact. So does Rudd. Solution : Return Rudd, address Gillard’s ‘folly’ and what have you got? You’ve got a real election next year.
Ray there is no reason to believe that the Libs would have done as you suggested or that the result would have been as you suggest had they taken that course of action either. That said the most important difference would have been better oversight of any stimulus package and an early end to programs when they were no longer needed.
Yes there is, Iain – Turnbull said that’s what he would do at the time, instead of the stimulus. He said tax cuts would stimulate the economy. Not much benefit to someone out of a job. Isn’t it about time you rusted-ons at least conceded what the whole world has? That Australia’s response to GFC #1 was far better than any other country’s. Credit where credit is due. It’s easy to criticise the implementation but the fact is that the money was put into the economy thereby stimulating demand and consumer confidence. A rushed program was always going to have its problems but I doubt the Libs would have managed it any better, if at all.
I think one of the reasons Labor will be shown the door next year is their profligacy. People truly do want to know why we are now $230 billion in debt (public only), what it’s been spent on and how long we are going to be paying it back. Labor has a massive problem with fiscal control and prudence and being saddled with the Greens (not known for their advocacy of the free market) only makes it look worse. The sheer waste of taxpayer monies is not only baffling but frustrating.
That and the insinuation that we’re too dumb as a group to understand Labor’s “vision” for the nation and if only they could “sell” their message better, then all would be rosy. Puh-lease.
[…] The problems with Labor (iainhall.wordpress.com) […]
What about those useless Desalination Plants, I remember Bob Carr insisted the NSW one be signed off before he scurried away as premier. Brax ordered a bigger more costly one at Wonthaggi than was recommended, and rammed the legislation through. The cost to Victoria will be a million dollars a day for the next 30 years. I don’t know enough about the Qld one to comment, but no doubt it’s chewing up money as well. Three labor state govts, three costly white Elephants all built when dams were a cheaper more logical option.
Where’s the money going? Someone must be getting it. I smell a rat. Could this be some sort of Labor rort, with the money filtering back to their coffers. I’d love to know.
Hi Stuart and welcome to My Sandpit `;)
The Queensland de sal plant is just as useless and just as much of a drain on our resources as the ones down south