Chris Bowen via Domain today:
“We need to remind ourselves how to talk to the base, which is not inner city,” Bowen says in an interview.
“If you look at the election, wealthy areas swung to us and poorer areas swung away from us.
“When you consider our agenda was fairly redistributive, that’s pretty extraordinary.
“So we’re obviously not communicating with that part of society who would be natural Labor supporters if we were talking the right language to them.”
Construction, Forestry, Maritime, Mining & Energy Union official Shane Brunker agrees, claiming the federal election shows that Labor has lost touch with grass-roots supporters and needs an overhaul:
“We’ve been inside the Labor Party banging on for years about how they’re losing touch with their supporter base and this just supports everything we’ve been saying to them,” he told The Australian Financial Review…
“The party’s got to come back to being a Labor Party for the workers. Those so-called green voters within the party should go to the Greens party. If [Labor] keep going the way they are, they’re going to get wiped out next election in Queensland,” he said.
Mr Brunker said the biggest problem in the recent election campaign for Mr Shorten was pandering to inner-city voters…
Quite right. If I may be so bold, listening to Mark Latham shows how far Labor has to travel in reconnecting to “the base”:
As the below video shows, this is a long road for Chris Bowen to travel:
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not endorsing Latham’s views. The further he travels from the Labor Party the loonier he gets.
But he is in power while Labor is not and he got there by taking a nationalist turn that Labor must follow.
Just not so far!
