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August 23, 2011
You have to wonder about the ALP at times. They just love to shoot themselves in the foot, don't they.
Why was Craig Thomson ever pre-selected? The factions knew that he was responsible for using his Health Services Union credit card to pay prostitutes. Now the Gillard Government is forced to hold their nose and ring fence him to ensure their political survival.
The fallout from the Craig Thompson affair has come at a time when the mining boom is causing the inevitable shakeout in the nation's manufacturing industries----eg.,One Steel + BlueScope Steel---because of the high dollar. The miners do well and everybody else (especially those in manufacturing and tourism) suffer --- apart from those having cheap overseas holidays or importing consumer goods online from the US.
So the politically powerful squeezed manufacturing sectors are being egged on by a populist conservative opposition that can smell blood in the water. It's all guns blazing to force a weak minority government, already backed into the corner, onto its knees, and then to go for the throat.
And so we have a Labor government under siege and its political capital nigh on exhausted. The Coalition continues to gain ground in Labor's heartland-----the blue collar workers in the manufacturing industry, even though the Gillard Government saw the manufacturing crisis coming in the form of the "Dutch disease" in 2010.
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Lots of businesses and contractors in and around mining towns will disagree with you that they are suffering.