LABOR leader Anthony Albanese is incapable of steering his fractured Party towards its working class base, according to ALP historian Troy Bramston.
The inner Sydney MP, who toyed with communism during his time at university, has been accused of leading Labor over a cliff while pandering to its radical Green Left parliamentary wing.
Mr Bramston, who has authored several political books, said there was no doubt the Labor Party was ending 2020 “demoralised and despondent”.
BACKWARDS
“There is increasing criticism about Anthony Albanese’s leadership, not only within the parliamentary Party but within the union movement, among party officials and party elders as well,” Mr Bramston told Sky News anchor Peta Credlin.
“They think the Party is basically going nowhere and that it may even go backwards at the next election.
“No one, in fact, thinks they can win the next election because 18 months on Labor hasn’t done the serious soul-searching they needed to do after the last election.
“They’ve failed to answer the question on how they bridge a divide between people living in the outer suburbs, who tend to be more conservative, with people living in the inner cities who tend to be more progressive.”
Mr Bramston said Labor’s vote was flatlining at around 33-34 per cent in opinion polls and that Anthony Albanese was well behind as preferred prime minister.
Labor has been engaged in a public civil war since its crushing defeat in last year’s “unlosable” federal election – which it dubbed the climate change election.
BACKFLIPPED
In September, senior Party members secretly backflipped on its environmental policy and embraced gas exploration while acknowledging Australia would not be a low-carbon economy “anytime soon”.
The move repeated calls for Labor to focus on a pro-jobs agenda.
Mr Albanese, however, has struggled to put workers’ interests ahead of his environmental agenda.
Mr Bramston said Labor’s powerful Right faction had become restless after the Party had won only one federal parliamentary majority (2007) in 27 years.
“It’s still the largest faction in the Labor Party and it’s reasserting itself on policy and strategy.
“The big question everyone in Labor is asking is should Anthony Albanese lead them to the next election?”
He said Mr Albanese’s chase for Green Left votes was a dead end for Labor.
“Frankly, the Party has moved to the Left. It’s not the same Labor Party that was led by Bob Hawke and Paul Keating.
EMBLEMATIC
“Its MPs and membership have moved to the Left and the trouble for Anthony Albanese is he represents an inner-city Sydney seat – so he’s emblematic of that progressive wing of the Labor Party.
“He’s a life-long faction man and his constituency is not the same constituency that Labor needs to win in the suburbs, the regions and rural areas.”
Mr Bramston said many working-class voters now viewed Labor as patronising and condescending.
“While they have these blue-collar jobs and working-class values, they’ve actually shifted to the Coalition or to One Nation,” he said.
“This is a big challenge for Labor and I just can’t see – and many people agree with me – that Anthony Albanese is the one to win these voters back to the Labor side.” PC
From the front page of today’s Sun-Herald in Sydney: “Labor is expected to dump Bill Shorten’s [housing] policies, but remains undecided on how to best tackle tackle housing affordability.”
So Albanese has been leader of the Labor rabble since May 2019, and in all that time he hasn’t managed to determine what his policies on housing are. Maybe he’s not bright enough to figure it out. Perhaps he’s bone idle. Maybe he is caught between a rock and a hard place in a directionless party that is riven by factional hatreds, and whose endless and self-indulgent navel-gazing has long since left it estranged from those hard-working blue-collar Australians whom it purports to represent (and who can smell the stench of political hypocrisy from a mile away).
The difference between Albanese and a lame duck is that a lame duck has far more authority than Albanese ever could. He is, politically speaking, a dead man walking; there is no way that he can save his own skin, let alone talk anything close to sense into the egotistical and self-serving mediocrities in Labor’s parliamentary wing.
He’ll probably be dumped before the next Federal election; if not, he’ll certainly be dumped shortly thereafter.
This of course only refers to Federal Labor. Labor at state level is performing a lot better .. Victoria is a Labor a State, as is WA and Queensland. Labor are also pretty safe in the NT and ACT. The way things are going in NSW they may have that as well next election. Tasmania is held by the Liberals with an ultra thin margin. Labor still wields a lot of power. The Liberals need to lift their game in most states.
How can people believe in a party that can’t identify what it stands for?
The trendy inner city vs salt of the earth worker debate is intellectually interesting for the political class, but for the voter it’s irrelevant.
This stuff needs to be worked out before a party is formed.
While the divide continues, endless opposition will be the result.
Does Australia still have a working class? Where is the manufacturing? Where are all the factory jobs? Where, especially as this article says, if so many blue-collar workers are pulling high salaries, is the old working class?
So if Australia no longer has a working class, what does Labor have but the woke inner-city Left as their base?
The problem is crystal clear for those who wish to see. i.e. Labor has become a captive of the trendy left valueless middle class and have contemptuously abandoned the needs & aspirations of working class. It’s the same political disease that has infected the US Democrats, which is why the working class (“deplorables”) turned to Donald Trump.
The proletariat have finally awoken from their slumber and realised the Labor Party is a political fraud.