The ALP Miss the point

Latham has every answer but the right ones. With Carmen of Amnesia sitting in the chair it was bound to happen. Scoresby freeway controversy…Sydney’s Orange Grove development…Tasmanian Government helped derail his forestry plan…we were a bit too principled…problems within his office. Carmen, with brilliant left wing rationale, suggests the answer is in contracts. Simply force all aspiring Labour politicians to sign a pledge to work their electorates by phone, cold calling, mail-outs and all will be solved. Carmen, one of the ALP’s problems is that you really think this is an answer.

As Labor’s national executive placed candidates on notice that they will have to perform or else, Mr Latham led a detailed discussion on the reasons behind the party’s lowest primary vote for more than 70 years

Mark, it’s no good telling candidates to perform or else. What you need are candidates who perform without being told. Once you say anything that ends with …or else you have lost the game plan. You are not leading. Candidates who understand what small business people go through in their day-to-day grind are sourced from the small business world. Not from Universities, Union rolls, Education departments or Law Offices. Barry Cohen touches on the subject in today?s Australian

A caucus made up of lawyers, teachers, public servants, former ministerial staffers, party officers and trade union officials who have rarely worked in the trade they represent is unlikely to understand or empathize with those who have invested their life savings, mortgaged their homes and worked six days a week to own their own business.

Another article underlines an allied problem. Militant unions need controlling

WHEN BlueScope Steel caught one of its train drivers doing chin-ups on the outside of a moving freight train it sacked him. The result? A stopwork meeting at its Port Kembla steelworks and more than $500,000 of molten iron poured on to the ground.

If you don’t see anything wrong with that statement then go talk to the ALP. You’re a monty to get pre-selection.

BlueScope chief executive Kirby Adams said yesterday the stopwork over the train driver was but one of 110 industrial disputes, which had cost the steel-maker 40,000 working hours in the past financial year

Barry Jones, the incoming ALP President is on record as saying the Party needs to turn more to the Left. If there is one apparent fact that came out of the last election it is that the opposite is true. Australia is a Centrist-right country and no amount of wailing over latte will ever change that. Throw the Left a bone occasionally but Labour will never get the keys to the treasury while they pander to the Left’s incessant caterwauling about their answer to a better world. Their world is humane and caring but has no road maps to get there and no hard economics to finance it.