Wince and a nudge: time to go, Bill Shorten
For anyone but a sadist, the Bill Shorten show is increasingly hard to watch. In the 24-hour news cycle, politics has become something of a blood sport. But even Labor loyalists and seasoned journalists have begun to wince at his cardboard delivery, tortured metaphors, grammatical howlers and limp attempts at machismo.
Like a love affair turned sour, someone has to be brave enough to say what the nation is thinking: Bill, we want a divorce.
It is difficult to imagine how depressed the Labor faithful must be with Shorten leading them into an election year. A recent article by former adviser to British Labour, John McTernan, gives some sense of the despondency.
In The Guardian, he implored Shorten not to focus on former PM Tony Abbott. Instead, he would win by championing “future and fairness”.
McTernan is partly right. Left parties do win office by staking a claim on progress.
However, the absurdity of branding the future a left-wing cause is self-evident; tomorrow is a temporal inevitability. We all recall Labor’s last campaign “going forward into the future” in a stream of strine. Do not press repeat.
But what of fairness? The ALP strategy is analogous to McTernan’s advice. It is using fairness as a wedge issue by depicting Malcolm Turnbull as a hapless puppet behind which stands an army of hard-right masters pulling the strings.
It is the stuff of conspiracy theory, but the red left never lets reality get in the way of a good story.
The ALP’s problems run so wide and deep that they constitute fatal structural flaws.
Take the fairness principle. Once the preserve of the Left, fairness has been up-ended by the naked avarice of careerists who populate labour parties worldwide and their technocratic comrades in supranational organisations.
In Australia, one need only count the funds funnelled into Labor from corrupt unions to know it is neither a party of fairness nor the party of the people. Labor is a party for the party.
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