The crushed Labor Party has learnt nothing from last Saturday’s trouncing. It is still talking about itself, not the people it claims to represent. It is leaderless. It isn’t even confident it has the right process in place to elect a new leader. Despite receiving the lowest first preference vote in history (33.85 per cent), apart from the first national election in 1901 (19.4 per cent) and the second, two years later (31 per cent), its aparatchiks still cannot accept that it has been smashed. Outgoing NSW ALP secretary Sam Dastyari, one of a number of prominent Labor figures whom disgraced factional boss Eddie Obeid claimed “wore the carpet out” in his office while being mentored wrote yesterday in The Daily Telegraph: “So we lost. Not too badly.” While there is not a person alive who can claim to have voted in 1901 or 1903, there are many who were around when Labor’s vote dropped to 42.9 per cent in 1958 after the DLP Split, when it fell to 40 per cent on the Vietnam war question in 1966, slid down to 39.6 per cent in 1977 with the arrival of the Australian Democrats, and continued south in 1990 (39.4 per cent), 1996 (38.8 per cent), 2001 (37.8 per cent) and 2010 (37.9 per cent). They probably won’t be re-assured by Dastyari’s remark and even less impressed by his exit to a comfortable Senate berth and though Labor is growing about saving Western Sydney seats, the media had rather inflated expectations of Labor losses and apart from Greenway, the Coalition won the seats it targeted. What is clear is that the two-time Labor Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has left a reeking legacy of confusion and chaos that will not be overcome until he leaves Parliament and more sensible members prevail. Nothing highlights Labor’s dilemma more clearly than its confusion over the Abbott government’s determination to remove the hated carbon dioxide tax. This is the policy which former Prime Minister Julia Gillard said she would never be a party to and led to the lie which stripped her government of any claim to integrity. During the 2010 election campaign, she explicitly ruled out a carbon tax under a government she led yet she went on to introduce a fixed price on carbon, with a plan to move to an emissions trading scheme in 2015. When Rudd returned to the Lodge three months ago, he belatedly moved toward a floating price but repeatedly claimed he had either terminated the carbon tax or scrapped it. He had actually done neither, but his relationship with the concept of truth and fact is unconventional at best. A fortnight before the election he was totally dismissive of the carbon tax, admitting: “To begin with, we didn’t have a mandate for it.” Other Labor figures including the former deputy Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and former Climate Change Minister Mark Butler also claimed in the lead-up to the election that the Labor government would terminate or abolish the carbon tax. Now, Labor leadership candidate Bill Shorten says he would fight the Coalition government’s plan to dump the tax. Coming from anyone except Shorten, who was so intimately involved in undermining the prime ministerships of both Rudd and Gillard, such a proposition would be ludicrous, as it is, it is sheer farce. The last thing the electorate wants right now is to be subjected to a nasty brawl over the scrapping of the carbon tax which has been so harmful to the Australian economy. Shorten wants to frame the carbon tax fight as a battle over climate change but, realistically, Australia’s carbon tax has had absolutely no effect on global warming. How could Shorten, should he be elected Opposition leader whenever Labor gets its act together, convincingly argue that Labor had a mandate to introduce the tax when Rudd’s denial of such a claim is still fresh in voters’ minds? How could he argue a case for the tax when Labor campaigned as recently as two weeks ago on the basis that the carbon tax had been abolished or terminated? How could he claim to have the best interests of the voters at heart when he stands up to argue for a tax that has hit every Australian with increased power prices and consumer costs? The next successful leader of the Labor Party will be a person who breaks with the Green-Left movement, not seek to pander to its unpopular policies. The carbon tax and its legacy are part of the price Gillard paid to form her unpopular Green-Independent minority government; it was not Labor policy before the 2010 election. If Shorten, or Albanese, who also remains a possible leadership contender, believe in the carbon tax, they will give Prime Minister Tony Abbott a clear mandate to demand a double dissolution of Parliament. Should that occur, Labor and the Greens will be annihilated. Maybe that’s what Labor needs if it is going to take anything from last weekend’s election result and finally get around to beginning to rebuild itself as a credible political party. - Piers Akerman. 12/9/13.
Posted on: Fri, 13 Sep 2013 10:52:16 +0000
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