People still talked about the socialisation of the means of production, distribution and exchange The realities of government killed off Labor’s socialist objective.
To have your voice heard in the Hawke and Keating governments, you had to be an economic rationalist. No room for old commos there.
The objective remains in Labor’s platform as a reminder of the halcyon days of the party being on the Left. It’s not worth getting rid of because most ALP members have forgotten it exists.
What distinguishes the average rank-and-file ALP type or even those who have risen to great heights is they want to see the country run efficiently with an eye to helping the weakest first.
It’s more of a trickle-up theory of economics as against the trickle-down theory much loved by the Liberals. They believe, for example, if you make Clive Palmer even richer, the rest of us mortals will be better off.
In the Labor Party, socialism’s demise makes it hard to work out the differences between the Labor factions.
These days it depends on personalities and who you mixed with when you were young. Old personal loyalties count for a great deal when choosing a faction.
But Labor factions have been around for a long, long time. They love to have the odd stoush but they know who the real enemy is. When election time comes around, they pull together. The party organisation, whichever faction may be running it in any given state, is always ready to fight.
Not so in the NSW Liberal Party. The factional war there is more bitter than any the Labor Party has witnessed. And it’s not about political extremism, it’s about which brand of extreme Catholicism will come out in front. It’s about whether the left or right-wing factions of Opus Dei will control party preselections. When this lot fight, they know who the real enemy is.
It’s not Julia Gillard, it’s Alex Hawke or David Clarke.
The Liberals can’t use the faceless men tag about Labor faction chiefs any more; they have their own brand.
While Gillard’s elevation may have taken the Liberals by surprise, the fact that an election was in the offing was obvious. If Kevin Rudd had stayed on, an election would probably have been held in October or November.
The media has focused for six months at least on Labor’s decline in the polls. You had to be living under a rock not to know that Queensland and western Sydney were Labor’s weakest links.
If your organisation was in any way effective, candidates would have been selected in western Sydney seats a year ago. They would have been doorknocking for months. Their names would by now be recognised in these suburban centres.
In NSW, federal Labor is inhibited by the damage to the Labor brand by an unpopular state government. Just a few weeks ago a by-election was held in the seat of Penrith. The biggest anti-Labor swing — 25 per cent — was recorded. Penrith is within the federal seat of Lindsay, a seat the Liberals could win with a swing of 6.3 per cent. The Liberals didn’t select a candidate there until July 13.
In 40 years of elections scrutiny, I have never seen a stuff-up of this magnitude. The selected candidate is one Fiona Scott. She may in fact be a genius, but if so she is a hidden genius. Her party minders have kept her under wraps so well that no one has yet been introduced to her. A hell of a way to campaign, you might say, but the situation in the nearby seat of Greenway is even worse.
The candidate there was selected on July 17, the day the election was announced. The swing required here is 5.7 per cent but the Liberals, so intent on the factional war, couldn’t get a candidate selected until the second half of July.
Labor’s vote in western Sydney is very soft. The voters are unhappy about boatpeople, they are bewildered at Labor’s lack of a climate change policy. It is a giant mortgage belt where interest rate increases really hurt.
Labor’s faction wars can be pretty nasty affairs but candidates get selected on time and nothing gets in the way of campaigning.
In the NSW Liberal Party, the machine has stopped working. The warriors have taken aim at internal targets with unerring success. It will not save the state Labor government but it might allow Gillard to scrape home.
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