Labor's Future (1 Viewer)

[llamalope]

Labour's future? unless they can have clearly defined policies that are distinct from liberal party, and can present a united front... they are screwed

 

[Rafy]

"In a week where labor should have been beating the government up over IR reforms, Labor instead spent the time beating themselves up"

 

[migsy2202]

The Labor Party is far from 'spent'.

 

[frog12986]

The Labor Party is far from 'spent'.

The same assumption could be derived in regards to the NSW Liberal Party... even with an array of mismanaged departments and bureaucratic bottlenecks Carr still remains in an extremely strong position, with a great likelihood that he will win the 2007 election.

The same assumptions were conveyed in the late 1980's, early 90's when the Howard/Peacock debacle was eventuating, and Paul keating won an 'unwinnable' election. All that is needed is time and patience. Eventually Labor will find the right balance of leadership and policy, which differentiates themselves from the Lib's, but at the same time provides a viable alternative that is not 'too alternative'. Policies such as "medicare gold" and the like are not viable in the current climate where fiscal responsibility is at the forefront... the alternative must be appealing...etc

Moreover, the trend of federal politics has seen relatively long terms of office often eventuate as long as there is no underlying instability. As the saying goes 'if it aint broke, don't fix it'. As long as the economy is sustained at current levels/conditions such instablility will not occur.

Maybe not 2007, but 2010 will be a realistic target for Labor as long as it reaches the alternative necessary...

 

[MoonlightSonata]

Umm no. Asquithan is refusing to accept the reality. At the end of the day, I’m ultimately in the right, no matter what is said here on this thread.

The downside of being better than everyone else is that people tend to assume you're pretentious.

 

[withoutaface]

Just on the KKK issue earlier, keep in mind that they were originally established to oppose the Republicans, and the Liberals are allied with the Republicans.

 

[Rafy]

I'm not even going to bother with this guy.

 

[spell check]

Quite a lot of people on here would feel sick at some of the things that *your kind* say. Just keep in mind that i am not the kind to pussy foot around, especially when it comes to nationalism.

if you were nationalist you wouldn't support the liberal party or the leader who lied knowingly to the parliament and to australians in general regarding reasons to invade iraq

taking a country to war is the biggest thing a government could do, to lie in order to justify it is hardly nationalist

 

[heybraham]

howard is an asshole, it should be a well established fact by now.

lied about gst in his first term (planned also to introduce gst to fresh food too)
lied about telstra privatisation plans
lied about reducing oil prices by reducing taxes
lied about tampa
lied about children overboard
lied about iraq war
lied about not having a homosexual affair with Bush
took credit for his arguably improved economy which is founded from the reforms carried out by labor in the 80s. (aren't you supposed to go into debt during a recession to boom it out?)
lied about interest rate security under his government
introduced lame industrial reforms that benefit employers more than preparing Australian for globalisation

 

[frog12986]

I think this is a case of

'everything I say is correct...because I'm in year 12 and I know everything and I know everything and I know everything and I know everything and I know everthing. I'm right no matter what I'm right no matter what I'm right no matter what. I am the gatekeeper to reality I am the gatekeepter to reality I know what is real I know what is real I know what is real'

Sorry to pull rank here mately But you know jack shit and its pretty obvious that you know jack shit...and with your closed mind you will get nothing out of saying anything in this forum at all.

If you take the above position why do you even bother to say anything at all?

Proclaiming that you the are the last word on reality when you are in yr 12, vertically challenged and cannot sputter up anything more than rehearsed propaganda certainly makes you look like a deadset idiot. The news for you is that you are not the arbiter of what is real or not. Sadly you dont have the last word. Hopefully your centre of the universe attitude never matures into dictatatorial tendancies which seem to litter your posts...or maybe you suffer from the 'small man' complex. Who knows. You might grow out of it.

Even the more extreme members that debate in this forum (frog or white rabbit for example are no where near as closed minded as you)...hello frog

LOL, anti-mathmite must be extreme.....

 

[MoonlightSonata]

Perhaps he isn't real, and is the incarnation of some random?

 

[shady_03]

howard is an asshole, it should be a well established fact by now.

lied about gst in his first term (planned also to introduce gst to fresh food too)
lied about telstra privatisation plans
lied about reducing oil prices by reducing taxes
lied about tampa
lied about children overboard
lied about iraq war
lied about not having a homosexual affair with Bush
took credit for his arguably improved economy which is founded from the reforms carried out by labor in the 80s. (aren't you supposed to go into debt during a recession to boom it out?)
lied about interest rate security under his government
introduced lame industrial reforms that benefit employers more than preparing Australian for globalisation

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Fukin Repped!

 

[frog12986]

You might be right frog but at least you are not as close minded as mr Mathmite

Yeah definitely, its great to have particular views, however rigidity expresses ignorance...

 

[malkin86]

I don't know if it's just the media only looking for reactions by Beazley to Howard, but I think that the party is doing a lot of damage control/reactionary policies atm.

In the current political climate, global (eg. Latham's "home by Christmas" - last time we heard that one was in 1914, and look how that turned out), national and state (infrastructure not being added to), I think that Labor needs some changes to become a viable alternative for the Australian public.
What these changes need to be, I don't know. The thing is, it's very hard for an opposition party to show that it can deliver.

 

[Generator]

An interesting feature piece.

Quest for a winning way
Editor-at-large Paul Kelly
July 02, 2005


THE crash and meltdown of Mark Latham is an agonising episode for Labor, but the party's real test is whether it sinks deeper into the mire or devises a recovery strategy from its catharsis.

Former ALP Senate leader John Faulkner at this week's book launch offered a sober message: that while Latham must accept his responsibility for Labor's defeat at last year's federal election, there is another sense in which Latham is just an embodiment of the defects that plague the party as a political institution.

The media focus all week fell on Latham's anger, his denial and his refusal to accept his responsibility for the loss. It is easy to attack Latham and, of course, his crass indulgence invites this response. But Latham has left politics. And if Latham were the prime problem, then Labor's woes would be over, right?

Only a fool thinks that. The tribulations facing Kim Beazley during the past six months suggest a more searching and complex response is needed to Labor's problems than the suggestion that the removal of mad Mark means a Labor revival.

The main story in Bernard Lagan's balanced book Loner: Inside a Labor Tragedy is not Latham's assault on Labor after his resignation. Its real story is how Latham, after a dream start in which he led John Howard in the polls, succumbed to his own fatal misjudgments, misjudgments that reflect not just Latham's idiosyncratic flaws but the bedrock crisis of ideology and policy that has afflicted Labor since 1996 and that nobody is supposed to talk about.

"Voting for Mark was a risk," Faulkner says of the late 2003 Latham-Beazley contest. "But a risk the majority of the caucus, including me, believed worth taking. He had real and important strengths, but as Loner recounts, Mark had real and important flaws. Certainly, his colleagues underestimated his vulnerability and his propensity to over-reaction."

It seems that Latham, temperamentally as well as physically, was ill-equipped for leadership.

Faulkner says the reason Labor chose Latham was because the party was "desperate". Labor feared a wipeout under Simon Crean. This threat pushed some MPs towards caution but "extreme peril" pushed others "to an equally extreme gamble". So, for Faulkner, Latham's leadership was a gamble.

This is tantamount to saying that Labor is in crisis, yet this crisis is remarkably undefined or rarely discussed. Indeed, any student of politics might think that Labor's crisis was that Beazley was a windbag, or that Crean couldn't communicate or that Latham had too big a chip on his shoulder. These defects are only too true, yet they are discrete personality problems that don't touch the bigger problem.

This is a crisis of ideas and identity. It is about how Australian social democracy defines itself in the globalised age of a market economy amid a community demand for restoration of social order and greater personal responsibility. This has been Labor's problem since Paul Keating's 1996 defeat, a poll that brought Howard to power and saw the public reject Keating's effort to construct a new Labor ideology.

Keating today has a firm view of Labor's problem. He thinks that Australia has moved beyond the ALP policy framework. "The Labor Party doesn't understand how much Australia has changed and what the economic reforms have delivered," Keating says without any rancour. "The Labor Party, unfortunately, has returned to its old anvil; its focus now is on low-income earners and minority groups, but that doesn't work any more."

To be precise, it delivers 37 per cent of the primary vote. It is a passionate vote, but it is a minority. Short of a recession, it will stay a minority. These Labor policies are defined as fairness and, while nobody disputes that fairness is important, it is not enough. Howard runs a big tax-transfer redistribution to benefit the bottom 60 per cent. Labor has campaigned against Howard's policies under the banner of fairness at three elections and lost each time. Just how many elections does Labor have to lose before it gets the message?

Take tax policy as an example. In their tax policy Beazley and shadow treasurer Wayne Swan have chosen, again, to define Labor by fairness. There were alternative templates: a tax policy to define Australia as a creative and knowledge nation attracting and rewarding such talent or a tax system that aspired to be globally competitive.

Keating says: "Our future growth will be in services where we need to establish a creative base. Australia can't get cheap like China; we can get smart. But how smart is it to tax people at 47c plus a 1.5 per cent Medicare levy plus a 10 per cent GST? The top rate is no longer consistent with the type of society that Labor should be trying to create."

Latham saw the depth of Labor's crisis yet his unorthodoxy failed as a solution. Now Labor has returned to Beazley's orthodoxy and stoic professionalism.

Faulkner, in a dead giveaway, says "the wisdom of Solomon, the cunning of the serpent and the patience of a saint would not have been enough" to win last year. Is Howard really that good? Or is this an insight into the extent of Labor's problem?

Lagan's book fingers Bob Carr on Labor's plight. It shows how hard Faulkner tried in October 2003 (before Latham became leader) to entice Carr, that well-known diarist who happens to be NSW Premier, to accept the leadership. Faulkner made two visits, the second time with polling, saying that Crean "is fading fast" and Beazley is "just a return to the past with its own set of problems". But Carr refused, telling his diary, "I think the job is beyond me." Carr knows he will win elections in Sydney but not in Canberra.

Lagan offers a detailed account of Latham's four main blunders. Each goes to the essence of what Labor believes and each gets a chapter. They document, in turn, Latham's and Labor's confusion on the US alliance, economic management, tax reform and the balance between jobs and the environment. Each is a telling saga about a frontline issue.

The worst of the four decisions was Latham's deliberate choice to abandon the economy as an issue to Howard. "I just reached the conclusion," Lagan quotes Latham, that the economy "is Howard's battlefield [and] I am not going to sit there and get blown away until election day." Lagan attributes this blunder to Latham's reliance on Bill Clinton's adviser Dick Morris, who called it triangulation (fighting outside the normal left-right spectrum).

It was, of course, a monumental misreading of Clinton, who did run on the economy. The book shows that Labor's campaign team, Tim Gartrell and Mike Kaiser, anticipated Howard's interest rate scare but that Latham was never equipped to address it. Latham's economic tactics defied both common sense and his own previous policy beliefs.

In an interview with me after he became shadow treasurer, Latham repeatedly declared he would be an updated economic reformer. "I want Labor to be well and truly in the business of economic reform," he told me. "We built the modern Australian economy. I don't feel I'm playing catch-up here." Now we know he lacked conviction.

Latham's second related blunder, recounted in the chapter The Death of the Grand Design, was his failure to realise his ambitious tax reform, which involved cutting the top rate.

Lagan's account shows how Latham was rolled by his frontbench colleagues in the party's priorities review committee in April last year. Latham was opposed by shadow treasurer Crean, shadow finance minister Bob McMullan and deputy leader Jenny Macklin.

The upshot, according to Lagan, is that "Latham would now go into the campaign without the brazen and inspiring centrepiece he'd planned".

Former shadow assistant treasurer David Cox says: "This tax policy was Mark's grand strategy and his plan to outflank Howard." It was Latham's big play but, sadly, he scarcely argued for his own plan at the meeting.

The point is that Latham's flirtation with a different tax philosophy and policy, as encouraged by Keating, was ditched because the Labor Party would not countenance it. This is where Labor remains today.

"When Mark Latham was shadow treasurer I told him we should work towards having a top rate with a 3 in front of it," Keating says. "Maybe you can't get there overnight but that must be the aim. And the Liberals would just hate Labor saying this. [Peter] Costello would just hate it. The rich aren't paying the top rate and everyone knows that.

"My tax policy in the 1980s was about maintaining effective progression in the tax system but cutting the nominal rates. This is the sensible Labor approach -- broaden the base and cut the rates -- and it is how we cut the top rate from 60 to 49per cent."

For Keating there are two alternative ideas that should guide Labor's tax policy. The first is making Australia a genuinely creative nation and the second is being globally competitive. It is a question of values and votes. Keating argues that, unless Labor re-thinks, it won't win the votes of the middle class, the upwardly mobile, theself-employed and small business.

Latham's earlier mistake triggering the initial reassessment of his leadership was the pledge to have the troops home from Iraq by Christmas. He punted on an anti-war, anti-US line. It reflected a powerful sentiment within the party, despite what people have said since. Latham spoke not just for himself, though the policy idea was solely his own.

It horrified shadow foreign minister Kevin Rudd, who tried to persuade Latham not to take this stand. Rudd knew that such a breach with the US undermined any credible Labor foreign policy. The book documents how Latham operated - he left a message on Rudd's mobile phone saying he planned to adopt the home-by-Christmas formula and casually added that if Rudd wanted to discuss it he could give Latham a ring. Rudd rang.

It became an unhappy story that revealed Latham's reluctance to accept that being a US ally imposes obligations and limitations on Australia's freedom of action. It poses, of course, a deeper question for Labor: how it intends to operate the US alliance.

The last mistake, as documented by Lagan, was Latham's play for green preferences. This was a desperate tactic driven by chronic weakness in Labor's primary vote. It saw Latham ditch the cautious Tasmanian forests position devised by his shadow ministers Martin Ferguson and Joel Fitzgibbon and punt on election eve for a deep green purity. For Lagan, it was the catastrophe of the campaign proper. So the Tasmanian unions backed Howard, not Latham.

Latham's mistakes were his own but they did not occur in a political vacuum. They reflect a political culture beset by core conflicts about its values and how to translate those values into policy. While the main debate about the ALP concerns tactics, presentation and leadership style, the deeper strategic issues must be resolved and, unless they are resolved satisfactorily, then Labor will lose again.

Beazley knows these dilemmas and the need for policy clarity. He and Swan have signalled they will fight on economic policy. It is an imperative.

But with Howard heading Labor by nearly 40 percentage points on the "best economic manager" question, the task is daunting. Yet the message of the entire Howard era is that Labor cannot win just by playing to its strengths, health, education and fairness.

Lagan's book is called Loner and here is another message. A successful ALP leader cannot be a loner today but, rather, must be a persuader and carry the party behind difficult decisions.

That means confronting Labor's core conundrum, to which Faulkner alluded, saying "some of the very policies that gave Labor supporters the greatest sense of pride were the least palatable to the community".

Source: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,15792680^28737,00.html

 

[withoutaface]

lied about iraq war

Where's your proof that John Howard knew that the US intelligence he was being fed was false?

 

[shady_03]

I forgot.

John Howard is never to blame for anything. When anything ever goes wrong no body told him.

Where is your proof that he didnt lie...that he told the truth?

tru, all he had to do was obtain even minute details about the intellegence that the US were using and he wouldve seen that parts of their "intelligence" was based on 1996 reports, and were very outdated.

 

[withoutaface]

I forgot.

John Howard is never to blame for anything. When anything ever goes wrong no body told him.

Where is your proof that he didnt lie...that he told the truth?

I didn't make the statement, heybraham did, so the onus is upon them to produce evidence to justify it.

 

[shady_03]

Well I'm putting the onus on you now. Where is your evidence that he told the turth?

does he ever tell the truth?

Asquithian ur dumb newayz (according to TwistedD) coz ur left wing.. quote

"The left is dirty because they scorn the wealthy only to end up too poor to afford running water. Of course I don't mean that and in the end all generalisations are false anyway (think about it, eh?) but the left make far too many assumptions: Among them would be the current buzz word 'foreign debt'; Any educated person could teach them that forgiving such debt is possibly more immoral than not forgiving it. Weak minded and/or less intelligent individuals tend to be drawn to the left and the more strong minded and/or more intelligent people tend to be drawn towards the right; It is the way of things"

So u must be weak minded and less intelligent

 

[withoutaface]

Well I'm putting the onus on you now. Where is your evidence that he told the turth?

I never said that he did, I just believe that there is enough doubt on the matter to judge that particular statement as unjustified libel.