According to Labor electoral genius, House Government Whip, former Minister of Defence and Federal member for the Hunter, Joel Fitzgibbon, this electoral result was "a good outcome".
For once I find myself agreeing with this nepotistic, entitled, reality-challenged blowhard. Saturday's vote removing the Australian Labor Party from office in New South Wales was indeed a very good outcome for the people of this state.
The bastards deserved everything the electorate gave them. They had become incapable of even understanding that being elected to government requires you, as a minimum, to believe in acting responsibly in the interests of the people you govern.
It was not a victory of one view of what is in the best interests of the people over another such view, as is ordinarily the case in such battles in advanced democracies. It was more a crushing defeat of a party who didn't even know anymore that the interests of the people it governed mattered. The Union movement, who run the ALP, has a lot to answer for. It put the maintenance of its power over others above all other interests. After 15 years of refinement, this is the end result: dumped and abandoned by the electorate.
I reckon that if the ALP is ever to be a force again here it needs not to return to nineteenth century working class labour collectivist socialism, as some would have it. Rather it should openly proclaim advocacy of progressive middle class liberalism, including all its seductive shallow populist fallacies. We know that the electorate can still be suckered by such saccharine nonsense. Unlike the working class pathologies of Marxist rhetoric, which the electorate understandably no longer is capable of falling for.
Al least if they were clear sighted enough to badge themselves as trendy progressives they might claw back some ground from the Greens. They might also then be an electable alternative to a fiscally rigorous and socially conservative establishment. The good news is that this looks unlikely to happen, in the short term anyway, because the Union heavies and hard leftists appear to have gained ground in the rump of the party that remains.
For once I find myself agreeing with this nepotistic, entitled, reality-challenged blowhard. Saturday's vote removing the Australian Labor Party from office in New South Wales was indeed a very good outcome for the people of this state.
The bastards deserved everything the electorate gave them. They had become incapable of even understanding that being elected to government requires you, as a minimum, to believe in acting responsibly in the interests of the people you govern.
It was not a victory of one view of what is in the best interests of the people over another such view, as is ordinarily the case in such battles in advanced democracies. It was more a crushing defeat of a party who didn't even know anymore that the interests of the people it governed mattered. The Union movement, who run the ALP, has a lot to answer for. It put the maintenance of its power over others above all other interests. After 15 years of refinement, this is the end result: dumped and abandoned by the electorate.
I reckon that if the ALP is ever to be a force again here it needs not to return to nineteenth century working class labour collectivist socialism, as some would have it. Rather it should openly proclaim advocacy of progressive middle class liberalism, including all its seductive shallow populist fallacies. We know that the electorate can still be suckered by such saccharine nonsense. Unlike the working class pathologies of Marxist rhetoric, which the electorate understandably no longer is capable of falling for.
Al least if they were clear sighted enough to badge themselves as trendy progressives they might claw back some ground from the Greens. They might also then be an electable alternative to a fiscally rigorous and socially conservative establishment. The good news is that this looks unlikely to happen, in the short term anyway, because the Union heavies and hard leftists appear to have gained ground in the rump of the party that remains.
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