TENSIONS are building within political parties as branches push back against yuppie recruits who believe taxpayers owe them a lifestyle.
Young people are increasingly using aggression and underhanded tactics to force their way into paid political and “staffer” positions.
For many of them, politics is seen as the new way to become upwardly mobile.
Political Parties are populated by tribes with two over-riding but opposing ambitions; community service versus self-interest.
WARFARE
This division often forms the foundation of political factions within Parties, which Politicom will cover in detail in a future issue.
Whenever community service factions dominate, internal Party peace usually exists. But when the self-servers have the numbers, open political warfare always results.
A recent spike in the self-interest numbers has put major political Parties on a knife’s edge with tensions often spilling into public view.
Kevin Rudd’s 2013 changes to Labor’s leadership voting method (giving all ALP members a vote) and a loophole in the Young Liberal’s membership rules has seen an influx of new younger members into both parties.
RAMPANT
The ALP reports 2500 new members in NSW alone since last year’s election loss. The Liberals are also experiencing growth especially within targeted Young Liberal branches. While the Greens have reported 12 per cent growth since May 2019.
With youth comes unbridled career ambitions.
Community-minded members tend to join their Party at an older age. They often have an established career before politics. They’ve well-defined social & moral values and generally believe political Parties exist to advance the nation.
Careerists, on the other hand, are very much the opposite. They join young. They have no established career but look to the Party to provide one. Their moral and social values are flexible depending on the job offer and they see their Party purely as a platform to advance themselves.
Because they view the Party as their personal meal ticket, they often turn hostile if anyone steps between themselves and their food source.
In their minds, the Party becomes “theirs” and they spend years building a personal business model around it. If anything or anyone threatens to upset this, their lifestyle is put at serious risk.
So when a bright-eyed new member arrives suggesting a few changes that may benefit the community the new arrival is instantly silenced, often castigated and, if necessary, beaten up.
LOOPHOLE
To reduce this craziness, Labor needs to rethink its leadership contests where young members receive full voting rights but pay only $18 a year membership – 60 per cent less than senior members.
Also, and perhaps more importantly, the Liberals need to close its brand-damaging Young Liberal membership loophole.
This loophole effectively allows younger members to stack entire electorates. By doing so, they and their faction bosses can control the choice of parliamentary candidates in areas they’ve never even lived.
Such changes would reduce the high political currency placed on young recruits by factional bosses while allowing political Parties to re-focus on serving their communities.PC
IMAGE: Courtesy A Current Affair.
If you keep bringing in people from third-world countries, you will eventually find that you yourself are living in a third-world country.
This is all the fruit of high immigration levels, which have bi-partisan support in Canberra. Is it any wonder that the major political parties are on the nose?