The appropriately named Paul Karp at The Guardian has some very bad advice for Labor after losing the Voice:
Regardless of how Australians feel about the result of the referendum, it’s pretty clear the campaign was divisive and featured rhetoric that made Indigenous Australians feel unsafe.
Australia must now have a reckoning about how it can advance reconciliation and improve practical outcomes for Indigenous Australians without a voice.
…First, the national anti-racism framework. Labor committed to fund the Australian Human Rights Commission to do this work before the election and has begun to deliver.
…Second, a Human Rights Act.
…Third, discrimination law.
In The Guardian’s fake left worldview, the Voice can only have been rejected on the grounds of racism. Therefore, we must shift the legislative agenda to erasing racism. Presumably, the Voice can then succeed.
Lost on Karp and the fake left is that its entire premise is wrong.
The Voice was rejected because it is a culture war directed at helping 1% of the population, while Labor has undertaken a wider class war that is gutting the living standards of the vast majority.
Underlining this absurd position for a “Labor” government, the culture war platform is shared with a greedflated corporate Australia.
The fake left is so lost in the hall of mirrors that is identity activism, that it has entirely forgotten how to fight avaricious capital on behalf of workers.
If Labor follows Karp’s advice, it will present Dutton & Co with a red-carpet ride into power.
Is Albo’s fake left this stupid? Maybe.
Regardless, it begs an interesting question. Given Albo’s fake left is in league with local robber barons on every front, and paranoid about upsetting them, what fake policies can it use next to distract from its class war?
A few possibilities present themselves.
The Stage 3 tax cuts could become a target for reform. A few tweaks, such as shaving benefits for the rich while boosting JobSeeker would help.
But Albo has already declared S3 off-limits. Besides, Albo does not do real reform. He needs a new way to signal virtue, not actually to act in the national interest.
China is off-limits, too. Albo is in full grovel mode, so there is no distraction there.
There is a hodgepodge of smaller policy sets.
- The housing supply side response can distract a little, but it is a disaster in the making, so if best avoided.
- Workplace reforms are an excellent bread-and-butter issue. They are modest but come with the advantage of being hated by corporations. Then again, wage growth will fall soon as immigration has its way.
- Healthcare is good and can help bring the elderly back from Voice alienation. A concocted Mediscare debate might help the ALP.
- There is a surplus, but that’s not very good when everybody suffers from falling living standards.
Probably the best-looming fig leaf is climate change. The developing El Nino should bring a nasty bushfire season for fake left media to fan into hysteria. Albo can get on board with that even though he is doing almost nothing different from the LNP.
Admittedly, it relies on the weather, which does not sound like a strategy. The looming El Nino is not particularly strong yet, either:
But there is the good news of falling energy prices, which will help if it lasts. And Dutton is vulnerable in his nuclear fantasy.
In the absence of genuine reform that Albo has no stomach for, looking to the weather for a leadership direction is about the best Labor can hope for to distract from its immigration-led war on workers.
