Tag Archives: leadership

Sick Labor

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Prime Minister Julia Gillard has at last begun the effort to explain her carbon price policy, but all agree she has a lot of ground to regain after scoring yet another spectacular own goal for Labor, this time by announcing a price on carbon without having any clear policy on compensating households.  This while facing a Leader of the Opposition who will say and do anything for a populist scare campaign, his biggest bogey of all being “a great big new tax”.  It is not so hard to think of how to present the issue to the public, as a journalist and a blogger demonstrate.  Why can’t Labor?

Labor has form, as former PM Kevin Rudd also scored a spectacular own goal last year by walking away from the greatest moral challenge of our time, global warming.  Then there were the running sagas of home insulation, green loans and so on, which could and should have been explained, fixed and continued but which became such a political liability they too were abandoned.  Labor has displayed staggering ineptitude.

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Australian Election: Democracy’s Problems Run Deeper Than Spin

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[Published by On Line Opinion, 2 Sept.]

The big winners in this election are the Greens and Informal.  The informal vote rose by more than the Liberal vote, and between a fifth and a quarter of first preferences (counting informals) did not go to the major parties.  Clearly the message from many voters to the major parties is “a pox on both your houses”.

The reasons for this alienation run much deeper than deposed leaders, poor communication, shallow spin, backroom boys, misleading and mendacious claims and stilted performances.  These are all symptomatic, but the real problems are the ossification, lack of principle and systemic corruption of both major parties.

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The Real Obstacles to Greenhouse Action

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[A related article was posted on On Line Opinion 2 Aug 2010.]

The smoke screen obscuring the real obstacles to reducing Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions is unlikely to be dissipated by the imminent election campaign, whatever the global warming policies the Gillard Government.

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The Australian Labor Party is Dead

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[This was published by On Line Opinion, 12 May.]

Isn’t it time we declared the Labor Party officially dead?

The party has become a façade, an empty shell, a Faux-Labor Party.  It lost its vision long since.  It has forgotten why it exists.  It has no purpose, other than to gain power for the egos that inhabit it.

Lacking a vision, Faux-Labor is purely reactive.  Lacking a vision, it cannot frame issues to its advantage.  It cannot seize the initiative.  Caught awkwardly in its opponents’ framing, it is forever on the back foot, only ever able to be less bad, never able to proclaim a noble goal and pursue it.  Its collapse in the polls is surprising only for its speed.

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Visionless Rudd Doesn’t Want to Reduce Greenhouse Emissions

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The most telling part of the Rudd Government’s “deferral” of efforts to reduce Australia’s greenhouse emissions is that it won’t even look at the issue again until 2012.  In other words, it is unlikely Labor will actually do anything in its next term, even though it leaves open the suggestion it might do something in 2013.

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Where is the Bold Leadership?

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This was published by New Matilda, 22 Jan 2010.

The Republican victory in Ted Kennedy’s former senate seat in Massachusetts may seem a long way from Australia, but there are similar forces at work in both countries.  So far, no major political party in the Anglophone world has been willing to directly challenge the right-wing ascendancy of the past three decades, and we continue to pay a heavy price for their timidity and lack of vision.

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Rudd, Labor Fail to Lead

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As Kevin Rudd twists slowly in the asylum-seeker noose of his own making, it is not only the flimsy basis of his “Indonesian solution” that is exposed to the world. Also exposed is a consistent failure to assume leadership, a failure that has defined the Labor Party for a generation, and that comes at a critical time in our history.

Full article at New Matilda