The Weekend Australian publishes a whinge from a social conservative former ALP MP, Michael Thompson, complaining that there’s “No place in Labor for people like me“:
The middle-class progressives are killing the party to which I once belonged.
LABOR is being frog-marched towards political irrelevance by a coming together of the self-styled progressives from the party’s hard Left and a breed of right-wing official and parliamentarian who has forsaken the religious beliefs and traditional family values of earlier right-wingers for a new creed: “Whatever it takes”.
Were there social progressives in the Labor party when I belonged? Who knows – we did our best to ignore them! What’s happened to the ALP Right? Has it forgotten how to keep these people quiet?
And let’s be clear what Michael means by “social conservatism”:
And let’s be clear at the outset, social conservatism is a humane political and moral belief, despite progressives saying it is mean-spirited and insinuating it is racist, sexist, homophobic, environmentally irresponsible (denialist) and so on.
Did I say “be clear”? Did Mick say “be clear”? Because, well, now I don’t know what he means by “social conservatism”. Isn’t “social conservatism” about treating women differently from men (sexist), gay people differently from straight people (homophobic), adamantly refusing to do anything about climate change until the water’s lapping at our feet (denialist)… if Mick’s “social conservatism” is none of those things, then it’s not any form of “social conservatism” I’ve ever heard about. What on Earth are the principles of his preferred position? What’s his unorthodox definition? The only thing he hasn’t denied is that it seeks to impose one religious version of morality on the rest of us – that it supports indoctrinating children with their parents’ religious beliefs at school, enabling religions to discriminate against people on the basis of their personal lives, putting one particular religion at the forefront of public life, etc.
And I love the arrogance of pretending that social conservatism is necessarily a “working class value” – rather than, say, not being oppressed by the wealthy and powerful:
The working class is awake to this betrayal of its values and will be looking about for a new political home.
The DLP? Didn’t the working class long since abandon them?
Frankly, I’m surprised Mick was ever happy in the ALP, since it sounds like his main enemies were always “progressives”. The Greens are an “enemy”:
The Greens aim to be the left political party in Australia and they will happily ally with Labor short term as a means to that end; they’re the enemy of Labor and its working-class supporters.
Really? Maybe they’ll be pleased to learn that the Greens are, comparing the responses to WorkChoices, more committed to strong union rights than the ALP – isn’t that a major working class issue, Mick? And public services – something that really does help the working class. Sure, they won’t pander to bigoted prejudices Mick imagines motivate the working class but, if you were struggling to send your kids to school or pay for healthcare, what would you prefer: decent and properly-funded public health and education systems, or a government determined to discriminate against gay people?
I suspect economic progressivism is something that motivates the working class a lot more than Mick’s social conservatism.
That said, there’s one area in which he’s completely right: it is ridiculous for social conservatives to be forced to choose between an economically conservative party or a socially progressive one. We need a system that doesn’t lock power between two big, broad-church parties. The social conservative working class voters deserve a party that matches their views in parliament – just as much as social progressive working class voters deserve their own party. Clearly the ALP cannot be both these parties, just as the Liberals cannot be both liberal and socially conservative either.
We need political homes for both Mick and me. For both Petro and Tony.
That’s democracy.
ELSEWHERE: The paper’s editorial promises that they don’t really hate Labor:
Our critics will claim we are waging an ideological war against the Left and using our pages for a commercial battle with rivals. They are wrong. We have supported good federal Labor governments in the past; we endorsed Mr Rudd in 2007; we want Julia Gillard to be a good Prime Minister. We have backed the election of state Labor governments over many years and run regular columns from former Labor premiers and state ministers, including Peter Beattie, Morris Iemma and Michael Costa. We take no pleasure in watching Australia’s oldest political party agonise over its identity.
Well, quite. They’re perfectly happy to support Labor – just so long as it doesn’t actually act as a progressive party. Just so long as it doesn’t provide decent public services paid for by taxing the wealthy, or stand up to the powerful, or treat asylum seekers with compassion, or enact legislation that meaningfully tackles the risk of climate change, or work to end government discrimination against minority groups. They’re perfectly happy supporting a right-wing Labor party, almost as much as a right-wing Liberal party. Isn’t that balance, right there?
And here’s a revealing little remark, as they bash the other press gallery journalists as lefty elitists:
There is a deeper malaise, as Chris Kenny writes in our pages today, born of the tendency for journalists to come increasingly from a tertiary-educated elite with a “disdain for the vulgarity, ignorance and prejudices of working families and their suburbs”.
Ignorance and prejudice aren’t things to oppose? Not at News Ltd, apparently. At News Ltd, they’re precisely what’s being sold!
(By the way, you can’t read Kenny’s article on the website, only an extract to whet your appetite for buying the paper edition. Oddly enough, I found it surprisingly easy to resist the temptation.)
20 Comments
Is the OO’s glass jaw being chipped again? Maybe they can anticipate the chickens coming home to roost when the paywall goes up and progressives stay away in droves.
They at least made a token effort at balance in 2006/7 when featuring Tim Dunlop as blogger. Perhaps it wouldn’t harm them to appoint another progressive blogger or two. And I don’t mean a tokenistic weekly column like Philip Adams, but daily, in the mould of Tim Dunlop’s Blogocracy.
the tendency for journalists to come increasingly from a tertiary-educated elite with a “disdain for the vulgarity, ignorance and prejudices of working families and their suburbs”.
Ah yes, The Australian — the working man’s newsheet. And John Howard — the battler’s prime minister. And Bolt/Albrechsten/Akerman — the voice of the common man.
I too was able to resist buying the paper – haven’t done so since 2007 in fact.
The OO generally only uses Labor people as columnists who bash the party. So they’ve found a new pin-up? Yawn, it’s still the same old song.
I started to read his book a few years ago (after buying it at Garage Sale). l think I got as far as the 1st chapter, maybe it was only the preface. It wasn’t that good and from memory it was full of the same stuff that he’s put in the pce you’ve linked too.
Was he an MP?
Doesn’t Chris Kenny come from a tertiary-educated elite? (Must be the one without a “disdain for the vulgarity, ignorance and prejudices of working families and their suburbs”)
“…they’re the enemy of Labor an its working-class supporters”
Labor’s biggest enemy is its own prostituted ethos; their single-minded fixation with out-Torying the Coalition and snaffling the dog-whistle vote has left them high and dry. They have become fixated with Blairite “consensus” and facile focus-group politics. Poxy party.
*Sigh*, I am done with this site. I was very happy to come across this website a year ago, to find a website that fact checked people like Bolt and kept his writings in perspective was a good find indeed.
Lately thought it has just become a Green Angst site which seems to have a cry anytime someone in the media writes something negative about their policies. IMO there is as much ‘pure poison’ here as there is over at Bolt. Both sites seem to be about as biased as each other but at least Bolt comes across as entertaining to read.
Don’t let the door hit ya in the ass….actually i don’t care.
“Lately thought it has just become a Green Angst site which seems to have a cry anytime someone in the media writes something negative about their policies.”
You’ll have to give an example.
This post, for example, is not about any criticism of Greens’ policies; it’s about the social conservatives whinging that anyone in the ALP might dare be a social progressive. (We should control BOTH big parties!) And The Australian disingenuously pretending that it’s neutral on the basis that it’d be happy to support the ALP if only it was more like the Liberals.
‘Fraid I don’t see how your complaint matches this post at all.
“at least Bolt comes across as entertaining to read.”
You have floored me. Totally floored me.
‘Undecided’ is one of those comments you read in MSM newspaper blogs..they begin with ‘I usually vote Labor….’ and then continue with such transparent one-eyed idiocy that you’d have to be pretty thick to believe they’d ever voted once as they claim. A ‘plant’ as they’re more popularly known.
To make such a comparison as ‘Undecided’ does is utterly ludicrous. This is the basest Fox News style tactic.
The Weekend Australian Editorial sounds like it comes straight from the horse’s mouth (he does pen the odd editorial over there in New York). It all sounds so weirdly out-of-touch and old hat, not to mention sad and desperate.
As someone elsewhere pointed out: Thompson says that the rot started under Whitlam
so he seems to be yearning for the decades that Labor spent in Opposition…
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/WO1012/S00507/study-shows-extended-exposure-to-fox-makes-voters-stupid.htm
News Ltd editorial policy, in case you missed it.
I think accountability in the media is probably the biggest problem we face. What good is ‘news’ or ‘opinion’ when its based on complete undeniable bullshit?
Jeremy points out that he even emailed Bolt on the gibberish about Fox News creating culture change in islamic countries..the report had no attributable source and said NOTHING WHATSOVER like the claims Bolt was making.
But no correction? And we know its because he is too busy rushing to the bottom to evern find a shred of humility to begin creating credibility. I readily accept this could be leveled at any number of columnists or journalists of ANY political persuasion…but the point remains…what good is ‘news’ when it’s nothing of the kind and why are consumers so seemingly satisfied with swallowing bullshit because it fits their political preference?
Yeah, well I’m another who hasn’t bought the OO for some time now (after habitually doing so all of my adult life), and who was also a member of the ALP. I didn’t ditch them because they’d moved to the Left.
Also like many others in that position, I’m now a member of the Greens (and have been for nearly 10 years).
Thompson is a global warming denialist, nuff said.
One of the more amusing features of Thompson’s rant was his treatment of focus groups.
Having started with the claim that the ALP is now in the hands of:
He goes on to laud focus groups as the authentic voice of his socially conservative forgotten people:
(I’m presuming he doesn’t mean “ordinary” in the sporting sense). He means it in the sense that they are the repository of plebeain authenticity. Whatever one may make of that, it strikes hard at his claims above, since the use of focus groups in this debate are seen very much as at the heart of the ALP’s abandonment of “core values”, its intellectual bankruptcy, its Richo-style “whatever it takes” and sense of what it was. Really, Thompson inadvertently casts the right as the villains here and shoots himself in the foot, since the new activists are driven by ideas whereas the rightwingers are channelling voices he sees as authentic.
What one can see here is that it is Thompson who is intellectually bankrupt, for much the same reason that tjhe ALP is in the same condition — they are controlled by egregious reactionaries who care nothing at all about coherent and equitable social policy and everthing for chasing positve media column inches as measured by the latest RWDB media-driven polling.
Frankly, one has to hope that Michael’s prophecy that people like him are no longer welcome in the ALP is true. One need do no more than look at NSW, QLD and Victoria to see where the control of his kind of people leads.
Sidebar: Isn’t it amusing that he doesn’t mention the state of the ALP in NSW? The people he wants in charge have had complete licence and are about to be absolutely smashed in large part because hardly any “ordinary” Australians beleiuve a word they say. In fact, these rightwing spivs (Sartor, Tripodi and now reportedly Obeid) are now leaving the parliament in droves because they know the game is up.
I’ve shared Undecided’s sentiments for a while. Not that I’m going to ignore Pure Poison, but that many posts these days are intended to promote or defend the Greens rather than sticking to the examination of poor journalism.
The Greens are frequently attacked in the media, of course, and pointing out errors of logic and fact-checking are in PP’s domain, but spirited defences of Greens policies really should be left to other sites.
I was a volunteer campaign worker for the Greens in both the federal and Victorian state elections this year, but I’d like Pure Poison to remain a showcase of terrible journalism that I can continue to refer others to, but which doesn’t give anyone an excuse to look at the front page and assume it’s a de facto promo site for a single political party.
Sancho
Your comment is unfair. The Greens are not specifically mentioned until Thompson’s remark {the enemy of Labor and its working-class supporters} is quoted.