The Year Summarised ...

[pim]

newmatilda.com/2012/12/20/year-media-old-boys-got-it-wrong

This is a timely and important article that lays into the mainstream media and the role they've played all this year. Read it!

And when you've read the New Matilda]/i] piece, go to Rob Oakeshott's personal site and read his end-of-year blog www.roboakeshott.com/node/1539 responding to a vile Gerard Henderson piece attacking him and Tony Windsor for supporting the Gillard Government.

Personally I think Oakeshott and Windsor are the unsung heroes of this 43rd Australian Parliament. I live in SA and will be working on Kate Ellis' campaign - and the good news here is that the Libs, rather than parachute some high profile candidate, have endorsed a former Labor staffer (I kid you not!) who is a lightweight. She is not a serious candidate and is an indication that the Libs do not expect to take the seat of Adelaide from Labor next year. My brother lives near Bowral, is in his 70s and not well, but is talking about volunteering to move up to the mid-north coast for a few months to help out on Oakeshott's campaign. I'm not holding my breath on that one. Not that I question my bro's sincerity, just his health!

But Geopol and Tonto, I wish you both good health in 2013. We're all gonna need it! Because I still think this coming election is going to be about "Which leader do you dislike more? Gillard or Abbott?" This is going to be a negative campaign like we've never seen. The Liberals have enough advertising footage of material that reminds people why Gillard has a legitimacy problem and a character problem to spam the airwaves with advertising with a different ad every day next year right up until the elections.

And a special target for their toxic campaigns of demonisation and vilification will be Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott. Tonto, I know you've had health problems - I don't mean to be disrespectful or gratuitous here! But Geopol I know you don't live in either Oakeshott's or Windsor's electorate but have you thought of volunteering to help out on Oakeshott's campaign? I reckon the guy deserves all the help he can get next year. It's going to be ugly.

[geopol]

That, like many of your posts over the years, is interesting and constructive. Like your brother I have not had good health over the last four months, having suffered a heart atack and then open heart surgery. I am much blighted and pretty useless as some of my posts probably illustrate. I too have the highest reguard for Oakeshott and Windsor, but can offer little physical support. There have been ocassions when medication seems to have done me more damage than the operation and the aftermath of it. Best wishes for 2013 and I hope like hell that those bastards led by Abbott are not elected to power, but I suspect they will be. I read recently that such a government will most likely be more vengeful than Howard's and more lazy and incompetent than McMahon's... Heaven help us!!!

[pim]

Hi Geopol, bloody hell mate! Sorry about the heart problems. Forget everything I just said and take it easy.

In many ways the Gillard Government is not going to be appreciated during its lifetime. I agree with you that it will probably be defeated. As for me personally I'm a young and sprightly 66 and still enjoy robust good health - he says touching the wooden top of his desk and crossing his fingers!!! So I have no excuse. If Gillard is going to go down next year I want to be able to tell myself that I did my little bit to support her Government during the 2013 elections. I've already put my name down to be a member of Kate Ellis' campaign team next year so it'll be letterboxing, street stalls, office work (I do have some familiarity with the ALP software called "Electrac"), postal votes, pre-poll etc etc.

An election defeat in 2013 in many ways will be the outworking of the bad "karma" that Gillard stored up in the way she became PM, but also the bad karma that Labor has accumulated ever since the Keating wipeout in 1996 and Kim Beasley came to the leadership and promptly curled up into a defensive ball when Costello came out with his "Beasley's black hole" jibe about the Budget deficit. And that was all the way back in 1996. In an important sense Keating - much as I love the man - has to take some responsibility for the porkies about the "L-A-W Law" tax cuts that never happened. But Beasley rolled over in Opposition and surrendered the entire Hawke/Keating legacy on economic policy to the Liberals. And the Liberals have dominated the economic narrative ever since. Even during the Rudd Government and the Gillard Government the Liberals have continued to "own" the economy as an issue - and Labor has let them get away with it. Wayne Swan ran scared from the Liberals on the issue of the Budget Surplus when in fact he should have been a warrior and ripped the Liberals to shreds. As Keating said on one occasion, you need a bit of mongrel in you, and Labor hasn't had enough "mongrel" in the right places and at the right times when it comes to dealing with Liberal snake oil.

So they'll lose in 2013 and for a while the Liberal narrative will appear to be confirmed - you know how it goes: "We left the mother of all budget surpluses in 2007 and look what Labor did with it - and what they've done since." I know there is a counter narrative, and the problem is that Labor has been missing in action when it comes to explaining the counter narrative.

It's all bad karma, it's been building for a long time and they're going to pay for it.

But the Liberals are storing up bad karma too. The personal attacks, the toxic politics, the appeal to the baser instincts of the electorate, the lies and mendacity of the way they've been conducting themselves ... all this will one day come back and bite them on the bum. But not in 2013.

There's a good chance that Abbott will fail to gain a Senate majority next year and that Gillard's legislative architecture will survive an Abbott Government. The Liberal snake oil on climate change and global warming will catch up with them. After all, if we trust the science - and we do on this board - then the problems associated with climate change and global warming will get worse between 2013-2016. And if you take every other area of urgently needed public policy for which Labor had a legislative respnse, and measure that against the Liberal approach of "middle class welfare as usual", by 2016 I should imagine the chickens wll be coming home to roost for the Liberals and their policy-free zone.

But Labor needs to get away from the Beasley model of "small target and wait for government to fall into our laps". I believe it will be in Opposition after 2013 and there need to be conversations within the Labor Party about how to prepare yourself for it. Not grandstanding in the public arena where it will be misconstrued and misrepresented by Labor's enemies but within the councils of the party. Because once Labor gets its act together there's no stopping it. Look at post-Whitlam Labor: it wasted two years after 1975 gnawing on its entrails about the Kerr Coup and "we wuz robbed". Then, when the 1977 elections produced an identical anti-Whitlam landslide to 1975, the penny dropped, Whitlam stood aside, Hayden took over and the real work began. Once Labor got its policy act together, even though they started from a very low base after the 1977 elections, they ended up being only two elections from being returned to Government.

They can do this again. It won't be under Gillard and it oughtn't be under Gillard. I won't even speculate there, but if it's going to undertake the job of reconstruction and present as a credible force it's going to have to:

1. Draw a line under the whole Gillard/Rudd saga. If Rudd makes mischief during and after the 2013 elections, expel the bastard. There's no room for traitors.

2. Reclaim ownership of the Hawke/Keating years which Labor had disgracefully let go of under Beasley. Embrace the truth about those years and don't allow the Liberal myth-making to pass unchallenged.

3. Claim ownership of the Gillard legacy and be proud of it. Don't allow the Liberal lies to become orthodox "history" by default.

4. Acknowledge the richness of the Labor heritage, through Gillard and going back to the Hawke/Keating with Medicare and the economic restructures, and build on that heritage in the way that Hawke/Keating proudly proclaimed themselves the heirs of Whitlam and built on the architecture that Whitlam had bequeathed them. And which Labor failed to do under Rudd and Gillard by their cowardly distancing themselves from Hawke/Keating.

It can be done. But not with the type of culture that exists within Labor at the moment. The critical period will be in the first year after a 2013 defeat and how quickly they can get up off the floor. Hayden showed you can recover from a shattering defeat within two elections and go on to a lengthy and productive term in government. By contrast Beasley showed how to ensure a lengthy term in Opposition with a return to government, when the pendulum eventually swings your way again, in a position of political weakness to the point of political impotence. The lessons from Rudd/Gillard are that good policy does not automatically mean good politics. You can enact policies that in hindsight will be hailed as visionary and foresightful, but which at the time will be condemned as wasteful and profligate, simply because you haven't understood the importance of a good political narrative and you haven't taken the people with you. If Labor endures the ashes of defeat in 2013, but learns that lesson, then there will be hope for it.

[Earl Grey]

[pim]

I don't often disagree with Petty but I'm not sure I'd characterise each and every one of the above as "magiificent"!!

I think Oakeshott and Windsor have been magnificent. Katter at least can lay claim to some integrity. Bandt suffers by association with an outfit that espouses as political Holy Writ the principle of "The Perfect as the Enemy of the Good". Thanks to the Greens we didn't get an ETS back in 2009 and Abbott is Liberal leader with an excellent chance of becoming PM. Wilkie is a petulant loose cannon and to describe Slipper and Thomson as "magnificent" is just simply grotesque.

[Freddy]

You know what ?
As long as Abbott is Oppo, I don't think that the Libs are certainties to win the election. If we average out the Polls (Newspoll, Nielson, and Morgan) then the polls are at ~50-50, all within MOE. The Libs cannot win on those figures as long as their Leader personal aproval is in the toilet.
That being the case, then the Libs at some stage will have to change leaders, if they are serious about winning next year