Loons and ratbags to run Labor

[nero_bolt]

BILL Shorten was right about one thing yesterday. It wasn’t Tony Abbott who threw the Labor Party into opposition, it was the Australian people.

Problem is, Shorten still hasn’t figured out why.

Delivering what was billed as a historic, reforming speech in Melbourne yesterday the Labor leader declared he was going to rid the party of union domination and open it up to the “grassroots”.

He vowed to transform Labor into a “membership-based party”.

That sounds all noble and democratic but what it means in practice is handing the party over to the lunatic Green Left.

For all his talk about a new moral purpose, Shorten was just drawing from the old well of politically correct poison which has brought his party to its knees.

More affirmative action to increase numbers of women MPs was a clue.

So was the fact Shorten raised “the rancour over the recent Western Australian process (which) shows that in the future we need a method that provides a local voice.”

That “rancour” between Labor running mates Joe Bullock and Louise Pratt in Western Australia over Labor’s abysmal results in the latest re-run Senate election encapsulates Labor’s dilemma.

Bullock, who won Labor’s only Senate seat in WA, is a socially conservative member of the powerful shoppies union, which is headed by the outgoing right-wing faction leader and social conservative Joe De Bruyn.

Pratt, No. 2 on Labor’s Senate ticket, is an openly lesbian gay rights activist and Labor staffer, backed by the left-aligned United Voice union, who has been involved in Labor politics since her student days.

The pair are typical of the Labor Party’s increasingly schizophrenic nature.

Pratt and her union have been attacking Senator Bullock as an old homophobe since it became clear she wasn’t going to win the sixth Senate spot in WA.

Smearing him as a homophobe and bigot is a classic tactic of the dictatorial intolerant Left to shut down someone with opposing views, or someone who simply gets in your way.

Conveniently lost in all of the excitement over Bullock’s supposed homophobia were the killer truths he imparted.

He branded the Labor Party’s membership “mad”, and warned uncoupling from the common sense “ballast” of the unions would leave Labor open to every “every weird lefty trend that you can imagine, and there’d be no party left.’’

That is the inconvenient truth about the past six disastrous years. Labor saddled Australia with two hopeless prime ministers, who left a trail of destruction that will take decades to repair.

On climate policy they were wrong and deluded to try to lead the world. Cosying up to the Greens was a mistake. The only industry they boosted was people-smuggling.

Yet there has been no mea culpa, no soul searching, or apology. Just business as usual, as if making Labor membership a one-click process on the internet will save the party.

Of course the union movement is sick too, but instead of embracing the royal commission into corrupt unions as an opportunity to clean house, Shorten railed against it as a “star chamber”.

The fact is that, in the struggle for the soul of Labor, no one has clean hands.

In the end, the Left is using union corruption scandals for factional advantage to seize power for themselves.

Their beloved “grassroots” is code for GetUp style fringe-dwellers who will ensure the party remains unelectable.

Labor’s WA Senate result last month, the worst in its history, will be the new normal.

Really, if Labor wants to go further down that path, they should recruit Scott Ludlam as leader. At least he knows what he believes in.

http://blogs.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/mirandadevine/index.php/dailytelegraph/comments/loons_and_ra...

[tall_bearded]

I really simply can’t understand this constant barrage of union bashing, as if they are the root of all evil.

Are their corrupt union officials.  Yes.  Are they in the majority, not that I’ve seen, and I’ve spent many an hour sitting across the table being hammered by a Shop Steward, who seemed hell bent on making my life as unpleasant as possible.  Misguided, yes some are.  Uniformed, yes a lot are.  Outright bloody minded, yes, yes, yes most are.  Corrupt, a few but I’ve never found them to be representative of the movement as a whole.

As for business, I’ve sat on that side of the table and from direct observation I can unequivocally say that when it comes to corruption, they, as a group, win hands down.  For instance the GFC didn’t occur due to union corruption, or union ineptitude or simple union bloody mindedness.  It happened because of corrupt boardrooms  being let to do pretty much what they liked by inept and corrupt politicians from both sides of political divide.

So what would working life be like without unions? Easy enough to find out.

Go to China, where workers working for US and Australian owned multinationals are “encouraged” to live in company owned dormitories, and if they want to go out on their half day off, they are liable to be stripped searched.

Or to Bangladesh and India where you get the pleasure of using the unguarded machinery which our OH&S regs required our employers discard years ago, and if by chance you losses a hand or arm, then it’s out the door you go with a chook or two as compensation, because there are 100 people outside begging for your job. Their reality is, be grateful for the pittance the company is prepared to give, or starve

The list is endless, but they all have one common denominator.  If you work in a place where you have no right to representaion, as far as management is concerned you are nothing more than a piece of meat, to be used and discarded on a whim.

Now some here may think this is the way it should be here.  As for me I was quite happy to continue to sit opposite and lock horns with the union because this process usually provides an outcome which falls somewhere in the middle.  That is, you don’t get everything you wanedt, but a compromises that we’re both prepared to live with.

[the_hawk*]

"Loons and ratbags to run Labor"

sounds like a few Loons and ratbags are obsessed

[freakiness]

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@tall_bearded wrote:

I really simply can’t understand this constant barrage of union bashing, as if they are the root of all evil.

---

It's easy to understand once you realize that the motivation is not to destroy the unions as such but to destroy any opposition party so the LNP can retain power without hinderance.  

The means of acheiving this outcome is the good old brain washing.  Repeat, repeat, repeat, all slogans that rubbish Labor and/or unions.  If you repeat the lies enough times the truth doesn't matter, it just gets lost, drowned out by the lies.

[nero_bolt]

[spotweldersfriend]

Is that the Great Northern Loon or the Yellow-Billed Loon?

[tall_bearded]

Well the way I look at it, one must first have a brain before it acan be washed.

I vote LNP.  I have ever since Gough stuffed up the country.  But I, as so many like minded people I know,  will not vote for a party, any party, that he leads.

[tall_bearded]

by he I of course mean Abbott.

[lakeland27]

cartoons are a poor substitute for informed comments . they appeal to the lowest common denominator rather than the issues themselves .

[tall_bearded]

Yep but cartoons suffice if one poblems with the written word.

[nero_bolt]

Shorten’s real plan is to survive the royal commission

IT SEEMS a mystery. Why does Opposition Leader Bill Shorten think last year’s defeat proves Labor’s rules must change?

That’s crazy. Who voted against Labor because only union members could join?

Shorten’s speech this week, claiming “we need to change our party” by loosening membership rules and union control of preselections, seemed even crazier from the questions afterwards from the audience.

These were the party faithful, the people Shorten says should get more say in Labor, and here is what they asked: What would he do to get up a republic? What would he do for boat people? How could he stop the media criticising Labor?

BLOG WITH ANDREW BOLT

Lesson: give Labor members more say and its Leftists and closet totalitarians will run amok, making the party even less electable.

So why is Shorten pretending union connections are Labor’s real problem? Because Shorten, a former Australian Workers Union head, is not trying to recover from last year’s election but to survive this year’s royal commission into union corruption.

The royal commission will examine how certain union figures — not Shorten — ran slush funds that businesses had to “donate” to.

The most famous was set up in the 1990s by AWU Victorian secretary Bruce Wilson with the advice of his then lawyer and girlfriend, Julia Gillard.

Gillard insists she did nothing wrong and had no idea what Wilson did with that fund, which was siphoning off huge donations from bosses. Shorten was then a junior AWU official, but was copied in on a letter by another AWU official warning the union was “finished” if a call for a royal commission was not headed off. It was.

But in 1997 Shorten, then the AWU’s Victorian state secretary, was allegedly approached by state president Bob Kernohan. On 2GB in January, Kernohan claimed he said: “I’m going to the police with this.”

Kernohan claims Shorten replied: “Think of your future ... There’s a seat lined up in Parliament for you.

“Move on. Sweep it under the carpet ... Everyone else has.”

Quizzed on 2GB this week, Shorten would say only: “These claims are untrue.”

http://www.2gb.com/audioplayer/41776#.U1hMyE2KC9I  

One passage of Shorten’s speech makes clear the link between his “reforms” and such concerns: “Let me say a couple more things about Labor’s relationship with the unions. The Abbott royal commission into unions is gearing up.”

And Shorten is working on survival.