A real Labor man (Bullock) will be going to Canberra. Will the true believers wrest the control from the grotesque loonies and soulless apparatchik's, the machine men? or will the soulless apparatchiks and the loonies ultra left win to the detriment of the party:
IT took Labor senator Louise Pratt five minutes to complete her ballot paper on Saturday, suggesting she had ignored her party’s helpful advice to vote above the thick black line.
“Am I sending a protest vote?” she asked waiting reporters rhetorically. “No. I voted for myself and I voted for Joe.”
Naturally so, since a failure to assign a number to her so-called running mate Joe Bullock would have rendered her ballot paper invalid.
The question is whether Pratt put him first, as her party recommended, or 77th, as she might have been tempted to do, given Bullock’s boorish remarks at a public meeting in November.
Pratt, said Bullock, was “the poster child for the Left” and “a spokesperson for that persuasion”. And what persuasion would that be?
“Louise Pratt is, as some of you would know, a leading advocate of homosexual marriage and a lesbian, I think,” Bullock told the Dawson Society, “although after her partner’s sex change I can’t be quite sure. But I think she’s a lesbian.”
The dispute between Labor’s top two West Australian candidates on the Senate ticket is clearly not your ordinary factional row.
Nor is it primarily an argument about same-sex marriage; that just happens to be the current cause dividing progressive and conservative Labor.
What we are witnessing in Western Australia is the grotesque end game in a decades-long battle for control of the ALP. On one side are members who have dirt under their fingernails, on the other those who do not.
It is a battle between the workers and the intellectuals that began in the early 1960s and flared under Gough Whitlam, a prime minister who Bullock helped vote out of office in 1975.
The truce established by Bill Hayden and Bob Hawke wavered under Kim Beazley, when Labor struggled to make up its mind about asylum-seekers.
John Howard’s Work Choices reunified Labor briefly to win the 2007 election, but it was downhill from there. The two wings were worlds apart on climate change and border security long before Julia Gillard signed a pact with the Greens.
By crossing the boundary between a legitimate debate about the Marriage Act and an intrusive discussion about Pratt’s domestic arrangements, Bullock en-sured that the home truths from the rest of his 50-minute session would be ignored.
That is a pity since, while the discussion may not suit Labor’s prevailing mood, Bullock delivered a cogent analysis of why the party is failing to win elections. “Labor should be interested in regular people,” Bullock said.
“When the Labor Party says to voters, ‘Trust us, we have your interests at heart,’ the voters don’t trust them.
“And the voters are right. The Labor Party hasn’t demonstrated that they are capable of being trusted to look after the interests of working people and their families. When they do, they will win and win and win and win and win, and the other side will never get a look-in.”
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/columnists/embracing-bullock-worth-cost/story-fnhulhjj-12268...
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