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October 24, 2004
doing the Ali shuffle
The ALP never really fought the economic issue in the media all that well did they? They allowed themselves to be boxed into a corner and kept there. They couldn't do the Ali shuffle and dance their way out.
Bruce Petty
It was tactics at the expense of strategy. What happened to the knowledge-based economy, and the failure of Australia to become an innovator in high tech manufacturing?
Michelle Grattan concurs:
"That it failed on economic credibility is a good, simple and true point for Labor to latch onto. But how to fix? Economic credibility is not something that you can pick off the policy shelf, as Labor seems to have done (not all that wisely) with Medicare Gold."
She then says that:
"Latham makes Labor's problems sound like the car crashed because it had one loose wheel. A dash to the repair yard, find that sound new part, and everything will be fine. This ignores that much of the accident was due to driver fault, and there were plenty of problems with other bits of the vehicle."
Then she gives some indicatation of the difficulty the ALP faces in fighting its enemy on this terrain:
"The scary thing for Labor is that it knew before the election its weak spot was its economic credentials and it put a lot of effort into trying to shore up these. Yet it still failed to convince the public."
And yet the economic boom we are currently experience was the work of the Hawke/Keating ALP Government in reforming the economy. That's a good story.
How come the currrent ALP neglects to argue that case?
Why the silence about the dumbing down of the Australian nation, because of the failure to innovate and make money out of our intellectual capital? We import other people's intellectual property rather than export our own.
What happened to those kind of stories?
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at October 24, 2004 01:35 PM
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