As the title states, losing the federal election will be the best thing that could happen to the ALP and this is because the following reasons: 1. It is the only way they will ever get rid of the constant leadership speculation that between Rudd and Gillard. For as long as Labor remains in government there will be constant talk about Rudd and Gillard and the leadership. Losing the election would do two things to change that. Gillard and Rudd will then both be burnt as leadership candidates and the party as Gillard will be humiliated at the polls and Rudd will never be elected leader of the ALP. This moves me on to point two 2. Labor will be able to elect a leader without much political baggage. Look, no leader will come to the job without baggage but whomever they elect will have far less baggage than Gillard and Rudd and they will find themselves in an good situation. You might find that idiotic but when you think about it it really isn't. Abbott has always been an unpopular figure and even if he does a great job he is never going to be loved by the population the way Hawke was and Rudd was 2009. Imagine if Brendon Nelson or Malcolm Turnbull went up against someone with approval rates like Abbott has, chances are they would have fared better. If Labor pick the right leader then they will find opposition far easier than the Liberals did in the first couple of years. If they have any sense though. They will stay away from Wayne Swan (tainted by Rudd/Gillard saga) and Bill Shorten (tainted as a faceless man). People that come to mind would be Greg Combet or Anthony Albanese. 3. The Liberals have actually set themselves up to fail. I don't mean that their policies are garbage. What I am saying in a political sense they have set themselves up to fail. Governments have always lied and oppositions have always taken advantage of that but the tactics of Abbott and co have been different and until now have paid off and they will on election day too but the day they are signed in they will become a massive libability. Abbott and The Liberals have made lies and trust such a huge issue in Australian Politics that the first time they can't deliever on a major election promise they will be branded as bigger hypocrites than Gillard ever was. Now that would be ok if they have numbers to pass everything they want but chances are they will face a hositile senate which means that a repeal of the carbon and mining taxes look to be on shaky ground which means all that political capital he earned campaigning against them will blow up in his face. I am not saying that they will only be in opposition for one term (I can't predict the future) I am saying that in political terms it is would be better for them to rebuild in opposition and present a strong unified front in three years. If they somehow managed to win, all government would do is further hurt themselves through infighting and anything good they do will be overshadowed.
That's a very sharp analysis. For what it's worth I agree with it. The Opposition are in the box seat but really they're a hopeless mob. When they get into government it will be a shambles and after one term they will be out. That will give federal Labor the chance to get over Thomson, Obeid (good taste, the mods and fear of a law-suit prevent me from giving my opinion of Obeid Inc.) and Rudd. She's done a very good job and shown so much guts but Julia will not be leader when Labor goes into opposition. I'm not a fan of Albanese, he's a good parliamentary performer but I reckon Combet may be the man of the hour. Shorten has missed his chance.
I agree with a lot of what`s been said so far. However, I believe we have a right to demand that all politicians speak honestly, at all times. Perhaps we should have a penalty in place for politicians who deliberately mislead us? Possibly the withdrawal of retirement packages? That is another issue. I have issues with Abbott, but if we view the situation objectively, the union / ALP smear machine has done a hatchet job on him too. If one were to ask most union / ALP supporters why they hate Abbott, they couldn`t give logical reasons, this prejudice has been programmed into them by their mind controllers. Julia Gillard is arrogant, insular, abusive, and lacking an in depth understanding of this country, not a good PM. Back on topic. The ALP needs to break away from it`s union controllers. Working Australians need a political voice. The unions have become too big, too powerful. To a large extent, unions no longer work for their members, it`s the other way around. To a great extent, unions in this country are defunct. These dinosaurs have grown into big business, they have prospered in an environment where they themselves have been imune to the harsh realities that their members, or their enemies, employers have been exposed to. I don`t know how the ALP could ever break away from the unions, but this relationship is to akin to a church running a state, in the sense of unelected representatives of a non political organisation having too much power to disrupt the democratic process.
I find myself also agreeing with many comments. I always said before the 2007 election, if the ALP got it right, they would be in power for a long time, and if the got it wrong, they would be out for a generation. Rudd made two massive mistakes. 1) he didn’t go to the people for a mandate on his ETS - call early election 2) he back-flipped on taking over the decrepit State hospital systems. Why the core ALP party members didn’t want to help him achieve these brilliant objectives, highlights a seriously flawed State & Federal ALP methodology for the best interest of the Australian people and the country. It also highlights, these “faceless” backroom thugs would rather play “one-upmanship” private game with each other, rather than taking care of the countries business. Combet & Albanese will always be seen as Ministers in a lying corrupt Gillard Government by the Australian people. Ministers who would prefer to put each other and the parties best interests ahead of what’s in the best interest for the Australian people and the country. The ALP need to start with new fresh faces, but they have done that before, and have failed miserable. So will the Australian people seriously believe the ALP again, and vote for them, even if they have a team of new faces? Abbott and his team are throw-backs to the dinosaur era, and should never be allowed to Govern, but we don’t have much option. This election is a race to the bottom, not the top. Seriously. How many people in the private sector, who are charged with 150 counts of fraud are allowed to spend time with their family over Christmas before they are arrested? This is a bad bloody joke, and highlights these politicians are not living and working under the same laws and conditions as every other Australian. Maybe if the people of Australia start DEMANDING politicians work and live under the same laws and conditions that apply to every other Australian, then we might just start getting honest trustworthy political representation in this country for once. Not much use everyone whinging and whining by expecting politicians (Gods) to behave like everyone else, when politicians have giving themselves omnipotent power, and a different set of laws.
I think that politicians should be held to account for lies too but since the pollies pass the laws I don't think that is going to happen. Abbott was right to hammer the government for not telling the truth about the carbon tax but he hurt himself by taking it to to the level he has. The opposition has always jumped on broken promises but never to the extent of Abbott. Abbott is a perfect opposition leader but those qualities don't translate to being PM. He could still be a decent PM but he will have to rely on different skills than he does now. I don't think ALP breaking away from the unions is realistic but reforming the party and unions is. I think that unions have just the right amount of power now but lack transperancy and that can be addressed through parliament legislation. The ALP needs to reform the structure of the party. They need to put more power back into local branches and they need to engage with members. The most important things though are to dismantle the factions and take away union votes at party conferences. I agree that Rudd should have acted differently when he was elected. He should have tried to force through the ETS and called a double dissolution election. The policy might not have been popular but he had the popularity at the time to win in a landslide especially because The Liberals were a shambles at the time. I don't agree with the assessment of Albo and Combet because the blame for governments on the PM. Workchoices was more unpopular than the carbon tax and it crushed Howard but most of his cabinet didn't suffer a whole lot from it. I think that Swan and Shorten will be tainted because of it but unless new things come to light I doubt many others will be tainted because of it.
If I was a political advisor for Labor. I would start grooming Combet to take the reigns of the party.
I doubt he would get pre-selected. He and Gillard have bad blood and she would make sure the branch wouldn't endorse him.
Agreed in that sense, I was looking past the internal back stabbing and bickering, looking for decent people. The point you made emphasises the desperate futility of the ALP. Ego, greed, corruption, megalomania, and the associated factionalism, are preventing this body from effectively representing working Australians.
The problem that the ALP faces, philosophically speaking anyway, is the dissolution of its reason for existence. It has been captured by the middle class. The unions which created the party have lost it. It was a labourist party and now it has become social democratic, the effect of the takeover of the middle class. On unions - don't make the mistake of treating unions as a huge, amorphous mass, they're all very different from one another. Factions within the ALP keep it from atomising, the only way that unions such as the SDA and the CFMEU, just to take two examples, can live within the ALP is via factions.
To add further to your summary Diuretic, which by the way I agree with. To break that down even further, it is the higher end of the middle class, not the lower end. It is those that can afford ( $ ) to have an extreme social concience ( so it seems ). The lower end of this demographic still toil hard to meet expenses and most being higher paid working class. The Liberal party went through this same thing many years ago when the original idealistic liberals in the form of Fraser and co, slowly lost ground to the more aggressive conservatives of Howard and now Abbott. Hence why players like Turnbull and Hockey are kept at arms length. Labor is doing the same with the likes of Tanner going by the by and as you say, the social democratics ( middle class elitists ), taking the reigns. This will change yet again as the unions try to seize back some control after the disaster this election could be.
Just another reason why they need to lose. If they get a absolute belting at the polls then it might just force the party to wake up to itself and address the problems that the party structure is facing.
Winning the election would be good in the short term for Labor but it does nothing to address the deep problems within. The best example of my point would be NSW Labor in 2007 winning. Worst thing that could of ever happened to them.
Losses are unpredictable, there's no guarantee they'll come back from a loss. At least if you win you have another 3 years in power while the opposition scrambles around trying to reinvent itself.
Well the easiest way at the moment is to penalize the ALP MP's..seems that telling the truth is something that is a bit too hard for them. Going to be awesome to see all the excuses you and the other lefties post the day after election day...
So then we would also do the same to the Howard, Keating, Hawke, Fraser and Whitlam governments? They have all lied at some point as well.
The people that 12 months ago stood up on this forum spruiking that the ALP will win the next election....same ones that are now making excuses for an election train wreck yet to happen...oh god how funny
Do you mean, how would we determine that someone knowingly lied? I supposed we`d just have to prove that they knowingly lied. Hope that`s clear enough.
To the OP - i said this before the LAST election. My cousin is a hardcore Labor member (very one-eyed) and i told her they should have run and won or lost with Rudd. It's called ethics. She disagreed (winning is more important it seems). But seriously, if Labor gets smashed you gotta watch out. It will be Reaganomics gone crazy i fear. Our kids will be taught "2 Cokes plus 3 Sprites = 5 servings of goodness". In America, some schools funding is so reliant on corporate sponsorship that some books are written by the corporation/s and supplied so they are advertising and sometimes white-washing history to suit their agenda. It's already started in NSW with the mining companies (innocent enough? it's just the beginning: http://www.smh.com.au/national/education/mining-firm-signs-deal-with-school-20130202-2dr67.html) You'll see environment protection laws removed or severely curtailed. And quite possibly, they'll decimate the public service (not quite literally) so they are not actually able to do the job well: the problem in America. All those little things that will probably never hit the media, they'll try to do. The only thing that will stop them from doing worse will be the threat of an election. That's why they hack away at the little things, knowing they won't be noticed for some time. They'll cosy up to big business and chip away at tax revenues. What is left will be given back to those who don't need it (super tax concession that mostly benefit the wealthy, baby bonus, tax deductions for people with lots of assets in debt etc etc). I genuinely fear a successful (in their view) Liberal government.
