Droppie [infosec] 🐨♀:archlinux: :kde: :firefox_nightly: :thunderbird:🦘:vegan:​ on Nostr: Trish Roberts 𝙳𝚊𝚒𝚕𝚢 𝙵𝚒𝚜𝚑𝚠𝚛𝚊𝚙 Okay, coming ...

Trish Roberts (npub1l84…h0y2) 𝙳𝚊𝚒𝚕𝚢 𝙵𝚒𝚜𝚑𝚠𝚛𝚊𝚙 (npub1ekm…x9qq)

Okay, coming up...

Oh btw, first a whinge. Many months ago i saw someone recommend this; https://www.removepaywall.com/, but there has not been A Single Time that it has helped me. I just tried it again for this essay, & as usual i can't get it to do *anybloodything*. Does it work for you, for *anyone* reading this? 🤷‍♀️

So, just via my normal means, here's Johnny [no, wait, not redrum... i'll come in again]. 🤪<strong>Quote</strong>##





At this point, does Albo even deserve to win?A friend joked to me recently that the best news Labor has had this week was being told that I was thinking that Anthony Albanese could very well lose next year's election outright. The jibe at my forecasting record was fair comment, one I must endure - sometimes boast of - with all the fortitude I can muster.

But more important than profitless speculations about the election date and the likely outcome is whether people with a usual mind to vote Labor should do so next year - as a sort of encouragement award? Or because the alternative seems so dismal?

Does Albanese deserve re-election? Would more of the same be preferable to life under Peter Dutton? Or should Labor's seeming incapacity to break through on the cost of living, its policy timidity, and its effective abandonment of what were once seen as fundamental Labor ideas and ideals suggest that its separation from the community can only grow?

Labor struggles with some of the legacies of pragmatic decisions made even before the election. Going along with AUKUS, for example, was decided by an inner coterie of party heavies in less than 48 hours after the American, British and Australian agreement was announced. It was decided without consultation with the rest of the front bench, parliamentary caucus or the wider party. It was obviously against the party's grain, but the leaders feared, correctly, that Scott Morrison would use his coup to wedge Labor to the Coalition's advantage.

As some of his vehement Labor critics, such as Paul Keating and former foreign ministers Gareth Evans and Bob Carr have said, going along with the proposal might have been reasonable political counter tactics at the time. It would do on the understanding that it would operate until after the election when an incoming Labor government could get a full range of independent advice. Morrison had felt no obligation to brief or consult Labor. He never did on big issues.

But once Labor was elected, it doubled down on AUKUS, without ever explaining its thinking processes. It hasn't yet. It has appeared in the outcome more servile, more anxious to please and be flattered and more careless of Australian sovereignty than ever it had suggested in its pre-election indications. Perhaps that was because the background and instincts of Albanese and Richard Marles were never steeped in the area. Albanese and Marles may be good factional players, but neither is much respected as a policy wonk, let alone an intellectual or strategist. All it seems to have cost the Yanks was a little tummy tickling and some golf games. Not since Alaska has the US won a nation so cheaply.

British and American defence industry can rival Australia in delays, cost overruns and incompetent management. They, unlike Australia, can, in any event, abrogate the deal at will. No one knows how Albanese can insist the arrangements do not compromise Australian sovereignty. It's not clear to Keating, Carr, and Evans and independent commentators. Adding to those doubts is the government's failure to engage in any public consultation, or debate about what is really involved.

All of these considerations, and more, apply to the way that Australia has been a largely uncritical supporter of the US and Israel over the reduction of Gaza and the invasion of Lebanon. Labor mostly sings the Israel song, if with token gestures of concern for Palestinian victims, including 18,000 children. In more recent times, Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong has made verbal gestures and tepid criticisms suggesting a more even-handed approach, but has satisfied no one. Albanese and Wong were once fiercely in support of Palestinian rights. Albanese, in particular, seems to have swallowed whole the idea that any criticism of Israel or Zionism represents full-blown anti-Semitism. Labor's significant shift towards Israel has not been a "pragmatic" response to political defence or intelligence judgments about Australia's needs and national interests, or international human rights considerations. In line with what seems a general strategy of secrecy, and resistance to public discussion and debate, Labor has failed to confide in the public, to consult, to listen or to explain.

Labor has long had a bad conscience on respecting the human rights of asylum seekers. It became a "pragmatic" supporter of (convert to) Liberal Party policy after it was thought to be successful. It came to think, even (through Kevin Rudd) pioneer, the belief that "boat people" had to be treated by Home Affairs officials with conscious and implacable cruelty and given no hope of achieving asylum in Australia. This was on the practical ground that this, and boat turn-backs, cut the traffic (if not the problems of people escaping war and civil disaster). No one in Labor could think of an alternative policy that would not be monstered by the Coalition happy to demonise refugees. This week Labor took legislative and PR initiative in "toughening" up its powers to deal with unauthorised non-citizens. It is trying again to get around successive High Court judgements which have frustrated the capacity to detain indefinitely without trial, or without manacles.

Again, in terror of being wedged, Labor has sought to implement significant cuts in the immigration intake, particularly by restricting numbers of international students. This has been in response to a Dutton suggestion that housing problems have been aggravated by student demand. In fact, the international education industry earns Australia $30 billion a year, and student accommodation, even in the cities, is not a significant part of the housing problem. Albanese, in short, is shooting the nation in the foot by pandering to whipped-up anti-immigration sentiment without making any contribution to the resolution of the problem. He won't defend the policy because he knows it's an uphill fight. So, he surrenders in advance.

Actually, a resolution of housing shortfalls by 2030 would involve allowing migration by at least 50,000 more building tradespeople beyond those Australia could train from within its own population over that period. The houses will not build themselves, and while there are workforce and supply problems, subsidising rents, giving grants to first-home buyers, announcing new subdivisions and "announceables" will only drive up house prices. Which may well suit some Labor constituencies, already housed, who do not want to see the value of their houses decline.

It is, of course, deplorable and despicable that Dutton and many Coalition figures are helping to create and pander to anti-immigration feeling. It is worse that many will feel encouraged in this by the success of such political strategies in the US and Europe in recent times. But this does not excuse the Albanese government's pre-emptive buckle to such sentiment, its general terror of political criticism from anyone apart from the Greens. Or its failure to enter into the public square to promote and defend sound policies. This is a government, in short, that lacks guts.

It also lacks imagination. And it won't take political risks. It has a habit of leaving others out to dry the moment any brave or pioneering new "initiative" causes a negative reaction. Once within sight of the enemy, or a headline in The Australian, one sees general panic and retreat.

Even on social policy, including gambling law restrictions, Albanese has been a catastrophe and has seemed a pawn of the lobbies that have traditionally "owned" Labor. Like most of the media policies of its communications minister, tough-sounding social media laws are a PR construct, rushed into Parliament but not intended to do anything for at least a year.

It has reached the point where skilled opponents can play Albanese himself, and various other Labor bedwetters off a break. Almost anything the highly professional Labor machine does to try to counter this - especially pandering to mining companies and giving favoured treatment to their sternest critics The Australian and other organs of News Ltd - aggravates the perception problems. Its loyalty to its traditional enemies is never reciprocated.

Equally despicable is the way that Labor makes no-go zones of policy areas where it has suffered humiliating defeat, usually by own goals. There could be no better example than Indigenous affairs, once the highest priority of Albanese, now an area of policy and program paralysis after the decisive defeat of the Voice referendum last year. It is no coincidence the principle to which Albanese was committed - the idea that those made subject to Indigenous policy ought to have a right to be consulted and heard - has been, all along, the most serious deficiency of his style of government. Most significant policy and program failures have been inevitable consequences of his compulsive secrecy, suspicion of players not inside the big lobbies, and his exclusion of the public, and even the party, from consultative processes. (Oddly, however, members of the big lobbies, including many who pretend Albanese is a "good mate", regard him as a pushover - even as groups that have been pro-Labor or of the party itself find themselves treated with hostility, indifference, wariness, scepticism and distrust.)

The Albanese style depends on the fact the party has long ceased to have any form of grass-roots structure or governance. Or any pretence of participation in its counsels by anyone other than full-time party professionals, the greater majority of whom, including Albanese, have never worked outside organisations affiliated with the party, nor got their fingernails dirty. Max Kiefel, writing of the US Democrats in The Baffler this week might have been talking of Albanese Labor when he commented that the party never seemed to show they believed working class people deserve agency, a right to exercise control over the social and economic conditions that shape their lives, or that they had valuable wisdom the party itself could learn from.

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