Politics: How To Sell Out: The Labor Lesson.

Labor is selling out, if indeed they have anything to sell. They’re backing the Liberal party’s move to ensure that workers at small businesses can be fired without a reason. They’re supporting Liberal moves to cut tariffs, ensuring that Australian businesses face even stiffer competition from slave labour overseas. They’re doing away with core election promises like Medicare Gold and job protection for Tasmanian loggers. They’re losing the private school ‘hit list.’

Of course, the party was due for some shake ups after their slaughter at the polls, but their policy changes are predictably directionless, in keeping with the tradition of a party in love with in-fighting and retarded squabbling.

If the Labor party is going to win the next election, it will do so by providing a legitimate alternative. They can just hope that the economic cycle deals the Liberals a vicious blow, forcing people to think with their hearts, not their wallets. And when that time comes – and it will – Labor should be there ready and willing with sound policies across the board. Appeasing cash-loving geeks who aspire to be fatcats does the party no favours.

Backing Liberal industrial relations and trade policies represents a huge ‘fuck you’ to the unions and working people that Labor occasionally pretends to represent. It’s just not cricket. The key to Labor’s success lies in the hearts and minds of working people everywhere – and the vast majority of Australians are indeed working-class, whether they like it or not. Why try to appeal to big-money conservatives? You’re never going to win them over, so give up. Make people realise that they need what the Labor party can offer them.

It’s not going to happen. Labor is intent on fighting by Liberal rules. That’s their number one problem. They seem resigned to the fact that every fight is going to be played in Howard’s arena. And then they’re surprised when they get their arses beaten like scrawny, malnourished dogs? C’mon!

The Labor party needs to go on the attack. It needs to set the media agenda. It needs to show the Australian people why they were wrong to vote for Howard, and show them why the Labor party is right.

The Tasmanian forest hubbub was a mistake, no doubt about that. It was a tokenistic concession to a Greens party justifiably fishing for whatever influence they can get. It made the Labor party look like a pack of spineless nerds who’ll bow to pressure at the drop of a hat.

But why drop Medicare Gold and the private school ‘hit list?’ There will come a time when the Australian people realise that they need adequate health care and decent education. And if the economic cycle is anything to go by, that time is coming soon. Interest rates will rise, and the aspirational middle-class who voted Howard in will realise their abhorrent mistake. And when that time comes, where will they turn? If the Labor party continues on as it is, they’ll see a pack of economic rationalist back-flippers who can’t focus on something for more than a month.

What the Labor party needs now is the brains to focus, and the balls to follow through.

(Originally published in The Brag in the Fear & Loathing column).