|
April 21, 2011
We are increasingly seeing federal Labor shift to the right and to make increasing use of conservative talking points in its rhetoric. In contrast to a committed politician like Andrew Wilkie Labor looks to be working from the NSW Right's focus group playbook. Some think that this is a U-turn.
The demonisation of the idle poor, the Greens and the lifestyle of the trendy inner city progressives; the attacks on WikiLeaks and Julian Assange; the affirmation of cultural traditionalism and the Bible are those memes we are accustomed to hearing from conservatives political figures when they engage in their core values rhetoric.
Gillard is a cultural conservative and the ALP is taking poll-driven conservative positions as a political strategy to appeal to what's left of Labor's blue collar base, to drive The Liberal Party further to the right, and to prepare the ground for picking a fight with The Greens over the huge subsidies for big business (the steel industry, the LNG industry, the coal miners) with respect to the carbon tax.
As Ben Eltham points out the underlying rhetoric is pretty crude:
By contrasting Green voters with the hard-working decent folk who vote Labor, Gillard is constructing a distasteful morality tale about good and bad people. Good people set their alarm clock early and love their nation and family. Bad people stay out late socialising and don't believe in the dignity of work.
Who buys that kind of nonsense?
It is increasingly impossible to go back to support the Labor Party - let alone vote for it or return to the fold. Work---ie., labouring for wages---- for Gillard appears to be an end in itself, with little connection to a meaningful life or wellbeing. The inference is that Gillard Labor is not really interested in there being more to life than setting alarm clocks early and working in a blue collar job with unpaid overtime.
Another implication is that Gillard Labor appears to be unaware that many of Labor's base in the unskilled working class are perpetually at risk of being unemployed in a global market economy because manufacturing continues to decline and the large factories, warehouses and call-centres that used to be employers of school leavers are closing. Many fast-growing sections of the economy demand sophisticated computer literacy and people skills.
Yet Gillard Labor is blaming jobless Australians for their own misfortune (they are dumb and lazy)!
I suspect that we are seeing the influence of the Labor Right in Gillard's explicit shift to the right; a right that has deep roots in a Catholic conservatism that detests, and is opposed to, liberalism.
|
I'm not able to do links yet cos of computer problems but check out Crikey's "The Stump'[I think] for an article by some bloke name Lockwood who has looked at the Catholic Right in the SA ALP with a very jaundiced eye.
By coincidence he also talks about an ALP minister named Finnigan who resigned today