The problem with Labor.

Veritas wrote:

I think the point is that they are too progressive even now.
A point I have been making for years.
Finally the media have said something about it.
Let's see if it continues...
Next week Labor will unveil its election review, let's see if they can address the truth for a change.
Claire O'Neill a big ALP Progressive tried to address this issue today and still cant quite bring herself to grasp the truth...  she again returns to it was the messaging not the policies themselves.  Progressives cannot tolerate dissent.

As I see it, the Australia Labor Party was created for the working class, i.e. the factory workers, railway workers, and other "blue collared" workers.
Then in came Bob Brown and the Greens.
The Coalition is no longer the "conservative" party.  Turncoat praising ScoMo for something? Just shows that Morrison is about a step up from Turncoat.
The Abos are trying to take over the land.
Albo as the next PM will make Oz really stuffed.
I might just find a bit of rope.

I think the point is that they are too progressive even now.
A point I have been making for years.
Finally the media have said something about it.
Let's see if it continues...
Next week Labor will unveil its election review, let's see if they can address the truth for a change.
Claire O'Neill a big ALP Progressive tried to address this issue today and still cant quite bring herself to grasp the truth...  she again returns to it was the messaging not the policies themselves.  Progressives cannot tolerate dissent.

I don't care how progressive Labor get. I have never and would never, ever vote that way.

[size=32]‘Modern Labor the problem, not voters’[/size]
The more progressive Labor gets, the more its vote sinks. The party must become a broad church.
By Paul Kelly

• From Commentary
  

October 29, 2019

For the Labor Party, the post-­election challenge transcends the difficult task of moving its policy framework back to the centre. The ALP confronts a far more daunting task — remaking its politic­al identity and values, a challenge that might become a bridge too far.
Over a generation, the Labor Party has been transformed by its embrace of progressive ideology. It is now a fusion of middle-class, tertiary-educated, progressive ideo­logues and old-fashioned social­ democrats tied to a union movement devoid of industrial power.
The problem for Labor is that progressive ideology is electoral poison. Its purpose is to subvert the values of nation and society and elevate those of group identity and individual self-realisation or narcissism. This is not the Labor way.



While it is becoming the gospel of elites in the education, media and corporate world, it is the source of profound distrust among many “forgotten” or “quiet” Australians.
Tough road ahead ... Labor leader Anthony Albanese. Picture: AAP
How else to interpret the irrefut­able voting statistics? The more progressive Labor gets, the more its primary vote sinks. This is the reality confronting Labor. Progressivism works for single-issue causes and the infiltration of institutions. But it hasn’t worked for a Labor Party that needs half the two-party-preferred vote in a country becoming more culturally fragmented.
The problem is Labor’s identity. Since 1996, Labor has won one out of nine federal elections as a majority government. Its primary vote has shrunk, being 33.3 per cent last election, 34.7 per cent at the 2016 election and 33.4 per cent at the 2013 election. Labor bene­fited from the Whitlam revolution 50 years ago by expanding its ­support base but the party is now the prisoner of progressive special interests.
Anybody who doubts this should read the ALP platform. It is a dismal, turgid document riddled with social and cultural rent-seeking. It should be abolished and rewritte­n to save the party.
Progressivism is no longer seen in terms of social democratic economic reform, Labor’s core business. It has been recast as a movement dedicated to radical climate action, identity politics and dismantling traditional cultura­l norms of behaviour and values. It seeks to transform indiv­idual and social virtue in the quest for a new moral order. Because much of the political media is progressiv­e, it cannot comprehend the problem with progressivism and cannot comprehend Labor’s defeat.


Progressivism has many manifestations: it wants individuals to change their lives and become virtuous­ to save the planet and repudiat­e the climate deniers. It is internationalist, wanting government to honour the human rights of non-citizens and asylum-seekers and deny border protection based on national sovereignty. Its historical vision is that of immoral Western societies founded on invasion­, racism, sexism and patriarchy that dictates a dismantling of existing cultural norms. And it champions identity politics where people should identify accordin­g to race, sex and gender, erecting a power structure of “victim­” and “oppressor” and creati­ng almost impossible patterns­ of community conflict.
The above does not constitute the ALP program. But don’t be fooled: each of these ideas is influencing the Labor ethos. Progressivism has marched into the party’s culture as old working-class cultural­ conservatism is driven out. Because progressives seek to redefine what constitutes virtue, they unnerve and divide the community. Their message is: change your thinking and values. This is why they pose such a threat to a party seeking majority democrat­ic support.
Australians have typically been pragmatic and incremental about change. But progressivism offends this outlook because it is self-righteous, self-obsessed and intolerant and, as a consequence, invariably divisive. Bill Shorten’s agenda was remarkably divisive, succumbing to the trap.
Painful defeat ... former Labor leader Bill Shorten with his wife Chloe on election night earlier this year. Picture: Alex Coppel
Labor sought to reward the young and punish the old, extol the inner cities and denigrate the regions, punish mining and support renewables, advance LGBTI rights and mock Scott Morrison’s religion, launch a tax assault on almost every asset class in the cause of fairness and signal support for identity politics, undermining the notion of a shared common good.
Is it any wonder Morrison won by opposing Labor’s radical change agenda? Many comment­ators think this was confined to economics and tax. But that’s wrong: Morrison also won on cultur­e and values exploiting Labor’s embrace of progressivism.
This brings us to the insightful book Getting the Blues, released this week by Nick Dyrenfurth. The Labor loyalist, former Shorten staffer and director of the John Curtin Research Centre was dismayed by the election result. ­Dyrenfurth’s thesis is that Labor cannot cut through on issues that concern people: family, kids, jobs and wages, love of country and worry about seeing the country changed “without good reason”.
“Modern Labor is the problem, not voters,” he writes. “In 2019 there were parts of Labor’s platform that were good, sound economic reforms. But Labor was not trusted to implement them. The truth is Labor has never been and should never be some straight­forwardly ‘progressive party’.


“Progressive ideology, while not wrong on many subjects, rangi­ng from the justness of same-sex marriage to acting prud­ently on climate change, adopts a near Manichean view of the world: black and white, right and wrong. It starts not where people are and not by first taking account of things they care about most — family, work and place — but from where progressives would like people to be, in other words, in agreement with progressives. Ironically, progressives, while championing diversity and inclusivity, barely tolerate diversity of thought. This is an insurmountable roadblock to building a coalition to form national government.”
Dyrenfurth has nailed it. Those who think Labor can solve its generation-long problem by a few policy changes are deluded. They don’t grasp what has happened­ to the party.
He writes: “Even when its policy­ settings are right, the internal culture of the Labor Party and the values it projects are at odds with how many Australians feel. A Labor Party that defines itself primarily­ as ‘progressive’ will no longer have a broad cultural base of people who can appeal to workers, ‘small c’ conservatives, non-ideological voters, a diverse middle class, people of faith and rural and regional voters.”
Progressivism alienates too many voter categories. Labor used to have a conservative tradition but that is dead. Why would any conservative or traditional person vote Labor? The demise of the ALP vote in Queensland, Western Australia and western Sydney proves the point. Dyrenfurth’s message is that Labor must get more like Morrison: it needs to listen, yes, to the “quiet Australians”.


Dyrenfurth doesn’t use the phrase but Labor needs to become a broad church. It cannot win without this commitment — and that demands a change of identity and values. It should begin by asking­ where are the “quiet Labor­ites”, the people who used to cast a primary vote for Labor but have given up.
Intolerant progressivism will kill Labor as a majority party if it gets a tighter grip. It will narrow Labor’s cultural base but make that base more obsessive and utopian.
It will win misleading praise from elites and media while expanding­ the number of hostile “quiet Australians”. It will make it harder for Labor to win even if it has the right policies. Morrison intend­s to run on values — community, family and nation. He is just warming up.
To the extent that there is a progressive movement, it is not necessarily pledged to Labor. But it is happy to exploit Labor in its own causes. The Greens are the purist progressive party but they have hit a voting ceiling. Progressives say they are the wave of the future and some of their causes are the wave of the future. The problem is their ideology and insistenc­e that people change their beliefs and their notion of a moral life. For many people, this is profoundly offensive. The harder progressives push — and they won’t stop — the more certain the grassroots backlash.


Dyrenfurth says “Since the 1970s Labor has become an aggressi­vely secular, ‘small l’ liberal party rattling off progressive policies and talking the language of equality, diversity and inclusiv­ity. The divisive, aggravating influenc­e of identity politics — and virtue signalling — figure too much in the rhetoric of Labor activ­ists. Talk of change saturates Labor’s thinking and language. Wherever they reside, working people either blame Labor for their plight or believe Labor does not understand or care for them.”


This is because too many Labor MPs, staffers and members are progressives. The party rank-and-file and its identity are entwined­ with progressive faiths. This is supposed to make Labor more successful but Labor is becomin­g less successful. At the recent election, the richest 20 per cent of seats swung to Labor and most of the rest swung to the Coalition­, evidence of Labor’s identity betrayal. The ALP progressiv­es will say: stay the course. But the lesson of the election says the opposite.

The lesson, as Dyrenfurth says, is that Labor must deal with the Australian people in their actual life, their variety and their concern­s, not the nirvana of the progressive imagination. It means Labor talking more about responsibility, duty, patriotism and virtue­. Or does Labor vacate this to Morrison?

It also means Labor becoming a broad church and putting together­ a blend of the new and the old — being a party of nation and internationalism, the secular and religious, conservative and progressive, equality and growth, pro-worker and pro-business. But this can only occur if Labor transforms itself to become a truly representati­ve party that mirrors the nation in its totality, not the false dawn of progressive dogma.