The emptiness of modern Labor is now on full display: maligning refugees, promoting fossil fuels, tinkering around the edge of social crisis, pandering to the wealthy, condoning mass murder, adopting policies of Abbott, Turnbull and Morrison.
Labor’s reaction to the High Court’s decision to outlaw outlaw outlaw indefinite detention of immigrant offenders was to panic. This played perfectly into the hands of the Dutton-Murdoch axis of evil, who framed the issue on their own terms, portraying Labor as allowing the release of paedophiles, rapists and murderers into ‘the community’.
Tuesday’s Daily Telegraph front-page headline spells it out: ‘ASYLUM CREEPERS’. It’s quite a brilliant headline, maligning (legal, innocent, non-terrorist) asylum seekers, not just stateless immigrant offenders, and cultivating fear and loathing among the punters.
One might think Labor had learnt from twenty-seven years of trying to be Liberal-lite that it rarely works. John Howard, Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison all had the instinctive ability to go as low as required in a race to the bottom, and the spineless Malcolm Turnbull allowed himself to be dragged down there. Peter Dutton will always be better at being Peter Dutton than Labor will.
Only John Howard’s over-reach in 2007, after winning four times on the trot, and Scott Morrison’s monumental incompetence and mendacity in 2022 allowed Labor back into power. Howard lost to the instinctively conservative Kevin Rudd. Anthony Albanese in 2022 immediately dropped any pretence to progressive views he might once have voiced.
Labor has approved a string of fossil fuel extraction projects while claiming it intends to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It justifies this by saying the coal and gas will be exported so they don’t count, by using the drug-dealers........