Via The Australian comes Albo, new Labor leader in waiting:
“The language used was terrible … unions and employers have a common interest. Successful businesses are a precondition for employing more workers, and that is obvious.”
“There are common interests that are there … and if elected I would look for solutions, not arguments. We have to articulate a vision for how we increase wealth and not just share wealth.
“The core of Labor’s agenda has been job creation and we need to do that in the context of a global economy that is vulnerable and a changing domestic economy that is going through transition. We need to be able to explain how government can ensure change is in the interest of working people.”
“All of our policies need to be looked at … but not our values,” Mr Albanese said.
…Despite once famously describing his political mission in life as “fighting Tories”, Mr Albanese said his membership of the Left faction had no bearing on what direction he would take the party.
…He gave an unequivocal commitment to steer the party back to the policy centre, which had provided the ballast for 13 years of Labor government under Bob Hawke and Paul Keating.
Keating and Hawke both just endorsed Bill Shorten as their reform torch bearers and all three got their arses handed to them.
This is incoherent.
Meanwhile, arguably Labor’s biggest electoral liability, Sally McManus has no idea, either:
“We’ve got to look to our purpose – our purpose as unions is to change workers’ lives through collective action, we are not the campaigning arm of the ALP.”
So says Tim Kennedy, the National Union of Workers national secretary, one of a number of union officials and thought-leaders questioning whether the Australian Council of Trade Union’s estimated $25m spend on the election was worth it.
But the ACTU secretary, Sally McManus, has defended the campaign, arguing that working people can’t pass up the opportunity to fight elections and change laws she says are stacked against working people.
McManus blames two factors for the shock loss: Clive Palmer’s big ad spend and a subterranean social media campaign falsely claiming Labor would introduce a death tax.
Clive Palmer certainly had an impact in channeling the pro-change vote straight back into the Coalition. But I humbly suggest that the reality of Labor’s 2 million aged Chinese visas was more a problem than a death tax lie.
Therein lies the challenge for both Albo and Sally “you’re racist” McManus. They need somehow to get more nationalist to recapture QLD yet they aren’t the types, to the bone.
