I wrote recently about the mainstream media narrative of ‘yes the Liberal government has problems, but they’re no worse than the previous Labor government’- showing that these journos can’t possibly criticise Abbott without throwing in the tired old ‘but Labor was just as bad’ comment, to keep their Labor bashing credentials alive. Now we have a new play on this theme, which isn’t really a new play for this blogger as he’s been writing on this topic for some time. Tim Dunlop has contributed this week yet another edition of his narrative that the problem is the two party system – and that the Abbott government is the two party system’s symptom, not a problem in itself. Here are three recent Drum articles by Dunlop on similar themes: this one is about the problems with a two party system being unrepresentative of community attitudes, this one is a suggestion that our elected representatives could be chosen by lottery, and this one is about the community’s preference for independents and minor parties which is a symptom of a ‘a deeper democratic malaise’.

I’m going to go out on a limb here amongst left wing bloggers and will say to Dunlop, and those that agree with him, what are you talking about? What if Dunlop and people who share his views are so obsessed with their idea that our democratic system is ‘broken’ that they’re purposely looking the other way, rather than seeing all the good that has come out of our democratic system in the past, and how much good could still be done?

When Gough Whitlam died this year, there was an outpouring of grief combined with a celebration for what this leader had achieved in the very short time he led a Labor government. Correct me if I’m wrong, but this success happened in a two party system. And what about Prime Minister Julia Gillard who led a minority government successfully, in a two party system, so successfully that she was the most productive Prime Minister this country has ever seen. So this broken system that Dunlop is writing about, this system that no longer represents the wider community’s values, how was it able to produce a minority government of such amazing, but admittedly unsung and largely unappreciated, success?

I’m currently researching political narratives and framing, and I’ve learned that once a frame is secure in someone’s mind – once it’s a ‘thing’, people find it very hard to see a situation through this frame in the same way that someone else with a different frame sees it. So I would argue that Dunlop and I both think we’re equally right and perhaps we are. But let me at least argue my case as to why Dunlop’s frame clashes with mine.

Dunlop’s frame is that the previous Labor government, and clearly the current Liberal government are not interested in representing the wider community and are only interested in ‘the echo chamber of the concerns of the broader political class’. Dunlop therefore, having made this decision, lets this perception of Labor and Liberal politicians run through every judgement he makes about politics. Major parties are apparently out of touch. Minors and independents the only true representative leaders. Apparently minor billionaire Clive Palmer and his PUP Senators, Motoring Enthusiasts, Family First’s Bob Day and the now independent Jacqui Lambie amongst them.

My frame, however, is that politics is about good policies and, equally as important, implementing good policies. My values align with Labor’s values and a Labor government is therefore the best chance I have of seeing policies implemented that align with my values. I don’t just want good ideas from politicians, I want the opportunity to see these ideas become reality and therefore I will fight for Labor’s opportunity to do this. This doesn’t mean I agree with everything the Labor government does. But broadly, I do see their values aligning with mainstream Australia – at their very heart they aim for sustainable economic growth, healthcare, education, employment and opportunity for all Australians no matter what background. I see these values at the heart of Labor’s policies and for the most part, I am happy to passionately fight to see Labor achieve policy success with these values that I know align to mine. So I clearly come at this from a different view point from Dunlop. Where I see Labor government success, he sees a problem akin to Tony Abbott.

Dunlop mentions that he sees the two party system as being only interested in ‘allegiance to the economic system of market liberalism’. Yet he doesn’t mention what system he would prefer they had allegiance to. Perhaps this is where Dunlop’s disappointment comes from (and I would argue that this is not a mainstream malaise). The Liberal Party is the party of economic rationalists. The Labor Party promises to civilise capitalism – to try to reduce the inequitable power between labour and capital. But Labor has never promised to get rid of ‘market liberalism’ altogether and perhaps anyone who expects that they should is bound to be disappointed that they won’t. Again, I wonder what Dunlop would prefer from a government? A denial of globalised capitalism and a protectionist communist democracy instead? Or maybe he wants a coalition government of random small and individual factions, who have to fight out every policy to get a backroom deal done for themselves, at the expense of the wider community, and at the expense of long term planning and vision for the country? Maybe he wants a system of self-interested pork-barrelling, as outlined by Kay Rollison here. That’s the thing about Dunlop’s anti-the-system commentary; he’s very good at saying what’s wrong with the way things are now, but never quite gets to a point where he has a sensible suggestion of what could work better. And no, I don’t count a ‘lottery’ as a sensible suggestion.

And speaking of a lottery, then we have Dunlop’s preference for minor parties and independents, who apparently are another symptom of the problem with the two party system (although this is where I’m confused as to whether Dunlop sees them as a symptom or part of a solution). I’m sorry to say this about a blogger I respect, but again Dunlop, what are you talking about? The most uninformed voters I know choose the most random of independents and minor parties because it’s trendy. Because it’s hip to be ‘against the established parties’, to be an ‘anti-politician’. Not because it’s smart. Not because it’s going to be ultimately productive for their values into policies agenda. Not because they actually have any idea what on earth these independents and minors stand for. How many Family First voters realised Bob Day is on a mission to destroy the minimum wage? Seriously – poll them and see how few took any notice of Day’s very well-known values. Or what about another South Australian Senator, Nick Xenophon, who has just announced that he is starting a political party. A party based on what values? Xenophon got elected to the Senate in 2008 on the values of getting his face on TV through stunts and promising to axe pokies. I have no idea what happened to his passion for pokies policies because it’s not been mentioned in a long time. But I wonder how many people who mindlessly voted for him were aware of the lottery of votes their elected representative would contribute to in order to help the Liberals get their Direct Action joke-of-a-policy through the Senate, and more recently to reinstate Temporary Protection Visas. But that’s the thing about independents and minor parties – they escape any sort of criticism from people like Dunlop. Apparently they win the day they get elected, and after that they have a blank slate to do and say whatever they like – and no one who votes for them, or publically supports them, ever calls them out. What about when the Greens blocked Rudd’s ETS. Sorry, I haven’t forgotten because this is one policy I am extremely passionate about and I hate the idea of minor parties playing politics with it for their own electoral purposes, when the fate of our future is at stake. But no, there’s no criticism from anyone who voted for the people outside of major parties. No, it’s the major parties that are the problem apparently. The hardworking, values driven Labor MPs are heaped in with the conniving Liberals as if they’re all from the same stock. They’re just as bad as each other.

If Dunlop was clearer about what is was actually advocating in place of the two party system, I might be able to more clearly define why I disagree with him. But ultimately, it’s his prerogative to keep writing on this topic if that’s what he wants to do. And I’ll keep pointing out that I disagree with him. I believe Tony Abbott is the problem with Tony Abbott and I’m not interested in people trying to make excuses for this problem by blaming the two party political system. And I’ll be fighting, in our two party system, to get rid of him in 2016. Whether the minors and the independents are interested in supporting this campaign is also clearly, a lottery.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my marketing career, it’s that a brand does not belong to those who own it. Nike is not defined by what Nike chooses to say about Nike. Your local restaurant can claim to be sell the best meal in the city. But none of what they say matters nearly as much as how those who consume the brand identify with the brand. Perception is reality when it comes to branding. No one is ‘cool’ because they say they are. Even people’s personalities are a reflection of what others think their personalities are. Someone else decides you are shy and it doesn’t really matter what you think you are. If others see you as shy they will treat you like a shy person. People are cool because other people think are cool. People who try to be trendy are the least trendy. Trendy is other people’s perception of you.

It’s exactly the same with political narratives. I’ve been learning this the hard way by studying the political narratives of the major parties in relation to Labor’s mining tax. What I’m finding is that Labor did have a clear message when it came to the mining tax, but they never had a consistent narrative because the electorate never saw the mining tax the way Labor hoped they would. I’ve been reading everything Labor said about the mining tax from the day it was launched in May 2010 to the day Kevin Rudd was fired from the position of Prime Minister (an excruciatingly long seven weeks), and I’ve seen with my own eyes the effect that the electorate’s perception of the mining tax had on the Labor Party. In the first couple of weeks, Labor announced the policy with the confidence of people who think they’re going to be patted on the back. They felt they were the bearers of good news. But it all fell apart very quickly.

Why wouldn’t Labor expect to be congratulated for introducing the mining tax? Ordinary Australians were being told that their retirement savings would be pumped up at the expense of billionaires who would remain as billionaires while they chose to keep making billions out of mining. Every company in Australia was being offered a tax cut and small businesses were getting generous tax allowances on top of this. Infrastructure spending was increasing, equating to many new jobs in construction – an industry that employs thousands more people than mining and that has a much bigger multiplying effect on the economy. A super profits tax, by its very nature, does not affect jobs. The argument for the mining tax was sound and Labor communicated this argument clearly. The resources the billionaires were mining were owned by us. So why shouldn’t we see some benefit from them being pulled out of the ground, something that can only happen once? Why shouldn’t we each improve our own individual sovereign wealth fund, our superannuation account, during a once-in-a-generation mining boom?

The argument was sound. But for some reason, all Abbott had to do to oppose the mining tax was to say it would cost jobs (something which is completely untrue) and the whole Labor argument fell to pieces. The electorate preferred the doom and gloom negative message from Abbott which was dutifully reported as fact by an always-compliant-to-right-wing-messages-of-doom media. Even when the mining tax was still a popular policy, the electorate still turned on Labor and took the word of Abbott and his big-mining donors over the word of the Labor government. As soon as Labor realised they weren’t being patted on the back, their argument wobbled, and then cracked, and then broke. There was chaos. They lost confidence in what they believed in. If the electorate doesn’t want the mining tax, what do these ungrateful sods want? For Rinehart to keep getting richer while they all stagnate or get poorer? You can see it right there in Hansard. You can feel the Labor government pulling their hair out in despair. Their mining tax argument died because the electorate didn’t buy it. The narrative is owned by the people, not the government. The perception of the policy is owned by the voters. And once they decide they don’t like it, there’s very little you can do, or more importantly, say to change that.

There’s a lesson in this for Abbott. Not that he’s the type to learn lessons. I’ve seen right wing commentators, and even members of Abbott’s governments complaining that they need a better narrative. But a narrative is just a reflection of the story voters are seeing rolled out in front of them through everything the government does. Every policy announcement. Every policy outcome. Every press conference, every interview, every comment. All of this shows people the story of the government. You can’t fake it because it is what it is. You can manicure your Facebook profile to look like you have a glamourous, exciting, interesting life, but if your life is ordinary, unglamorous and run-of-the-mill, your Facebook friends aren’t going to be fooled. And the electorate hasn’t been fooled by Abbott. He can say all he likes about what his government stands for. He can sprout three word slogans like ‘open for business’ and he can promise a grown up government and one who takes responsibility for their actions. He can also try to focus on the parts of his first year which he thinks were successful, and hope that everyone forgets all the bad bits. But there’s no lying because we’re all here. We can see the economic figures which show the country is worse off than it was under the Labor government. We’ve watched Abbott break promises. We know we don’t like university deregulation or the end of universal health care or cuts to the ABC or innumerable other policies which have been inflicted on an unsuspecting electorate. Abbott can try to justify his cuts to welfare as good for the economy, but we can all see these are ideological attacks, inconsistent with the Australian value of fairness and egalitarianism.

People need to stop talking about the narrative as if it’s something that can be manufactured to justify behaviours of the past. Everyone’s personal story is told in the way they conduct their lives and a political narrative is no different. Abbott’s narrative of petty ideological revenge on his political enemies is as clear as day to anyone who cares to look. We own Abbott’s narrative and there’s nothing he can do about it except to change his behaviour. He’s made it clear he has no plan to do that. So his ever growing unpopularity will continue to increase. And his government will be voted out after its first term because of it.

As if a switch has been flicked, as if a group memo has gone out (perhaps from Rupert Murdoch), Australian political journalists have all very neatly and in a scarily synchronised fashion all decided there are problems with the Abbott government. I don’t want to sound ungrateful, but this is the biggest case of too little too late that I have ever witnessed. It is now official that the mainstream political press is exactly one year and three months behind the independent media who, like me, have been pointing out to our readers since the day Tony Abbott became Prime Minister, that he is not fit for the job. Actually that’s not true. I and most others were saying it for six years before that. And now, after over a year of relentless, daily horrors from the Abbott camp, including internationally embarrassing gaffes, broken promises, horrible and unfair revenge policy, rorting of the public purse, corruption and mean spirited behaviour, it’s as if they’ve all suddenly had permission to point out that there might be a problem here. Low and behold, I think they might be right! Even a broken clock is right twice a day.

But if only it ended there. No. There’s another clause in the ‘you may now point out how bad the Abbott government is’ memo which they have all dutifully complied with to the letter. Not that I think it took any convincing. You guessed it. They only have permission to call the spade of the Abbott government a dysfunctional spade if they also maintain their completely misrepresentative and downright dishonest anti-factual narrative of Labor dysfunction at the same time. So the narrative goes like this: Abbott’s government is bad. We only just noticed. We also can’t help but notice it’s just as bad, if not possibly not quite as bad, as the previous Labor government.

Don’t believe me? I hear people like Bolt, Albrechtsen and Alan Jones have been piling on Abbott in their own synchronised act of ‘let’s give Julie Bishop a run’ narrative, while carefully laying the blame mostly at the feet of Abbott’s support team. Because criticising Abbott himself would be career suicide for these types I assume. I’m not, however, going to link to these bottom-feeders. But I will link to Murdoch-Liberal-lite commentator Peter van Onselen, who today contributed this piece: ‘Wheels are falling off as Abbott careers to year’s end’. This article provides bad feedback from Abbott’s Liberal friends about his dire political situation, and also helpfully highlights this line:

‘So far, however, Abbott’s government more closely resembles the dysfunction of the Labor line-ups he fought so hard to defeat.’

Then we also have Peter Hartcher, who today contributed ‘Abbott’s rudderless ship won’t scrape by’, which quotes numerous un-named Liberal sources who are ‘panicking’ about Abbott’s terrible performance (Hartcher’s favourite sources are un-named). Hartcher then summarises:

‘Is the rising panic justified? The comparison with the Rudd and Gillard years is particularly striking. In a couple of ways it is apt.’

I won’t bore you with the ways that Hartcher thinks criticism of Abbott is an apt comparison with Rudd and Gillard, as it’s really just more bullshit from a journalist we have come to expect this sort of bullshit from. Anyone who has read Gillard’s My Story will understand Hartcher is the lowest form of gutter rat ever to inhabit the Press Club and can’t be trusted to report anything about Labor in a way that is objective and fair. Here is a quote from Gillard about Hartcher and his similarly badly behaved Press Club colleagues:

‘No journalist apologised to his or her readers when dramatically reported [leadership vote] deadlines passed in silence, nor publically discussed how they themselves were systematically used and misled in order to puff up claims about the number of Labor members who wanted to vote for Kevin Rudd. A few, like Peter Hartcher, became combatants in Kevin’s leadership war’.

So not only was this man, Hartcher, a key player in the leadership dysfunction that he then wrote about I assume every week for the three years of Gillard’s government (although I couldn’t say this for sure because I gave up reading him after the first broken-record Labor-leadership-tensions crap), he is also still a keen-perpetuator of the misleading information that the previous Labor government was dysfunctional. How this man is still employed and still welcome in the Press Club is beyond me. I’ve written before about how leadership dysfunction doesn’t automatically lead to political dysfunction. Note this isn’t an opinion. This is based on fact. Even while Gillard was fighting against Rudd’s betrayal and white-anting, she was delivering political stability, in a minority government. Here’s another quote from her book to back up my opinion with some facts:

‘Minority government delivered the nation effective and stable government. This was the most productive parliament, able to deal with the hardest of issues. During the terms of my government, members of parliament sat for more than 1,555 hours and 566 pieces of legislation were passed. This is more legislation than was passed in the last term of the Howard Government, notwithstanding their complete command of parliament with a majority in both the House of Representatives and the Senate.’

This record can’t even be compared with Abbott’s first year as Prime Minister, because any comparison would just be too ridiculous to even contemplate. Abbott’s biggest achievements are noted as turning good policy off. The Mining Tax. The Carbon Price. And his ability to stop. the. boats. Even if you’re a Murdoch hack and you think these three policy successes constitute achievements, and not crimes against Australia’s future and the lives of desperate asylum seekers, it’s still a very lonely looking policy achievement scoreboard. It can’t compare to Gillard’s success because it’s too pathetic to even begin to compare. Abbott’s budget is a barnacle covered ship that never even set sail before it became a rusted shipwreck. Abbott’s government is defined by, is awash with failure to its very core. There is no justifiable comparison with the previous Labor government that does justifiable comparisons justice.

Lastly, I’ve include Lenore Taylor. Even when Taylor is being accurate and generally reasonable in the Guardian about the awfulness of the Abbott government (and to be fair, she has been very critical since the start of Abbott’s term), she still manages to get a punch in for the previous Labor government. It does seem to be entirely compulsory for every member of the Press Club to follow this pattern. In her article today, ‘Three things that a good government would do’, Taylor wrote:

‘Abbott told his party room on Tuesday (in the same speech in which he promised to clean the barnacles and before all the confusion about what they were) that his government’s “historical mission is to show that the chaos of the Rudd/Gillard years is not the new normal”. After a truly chaotic week we can safely say that mission has not been accomplished.’

The Labor-government-was-dysfunctional narrative is just not true and everyone who repeats it is treating their readers like idiots. It’s just not true. It’s a misrepresentation of political reality. It’s certain proof of journalistic bias and misinformation. It was rampant throughout the media for the entire length of the Labor government’s previous two terms. And now the myth continues as journalists come up with ways to justify how they missed the incompetence of the Abbott government while the Abbott government was campaigning to become the Abbott government. They missed their opportunity to scrutinise the Abbott government and for that reason they should never be trusted ever again. It’s not like any of them have the courage to stand up and say ‘yes, we got it wrong. Our obsession with Labor leadership tensions led us to misrepresent the Labor government as a bad government when on all objective measures it was a surprisingly successful government. We’re sorry we did this, and we’re sorry our focus on this one political angle prevented us from properly scrutinising Opposition Leader Abbott and his plans for Australian. We’re all paying for our mistakes now’. You just won’t ever see this happen. So instead we get bullshit served up to us as truth. Even when the broken clocks are correct twice day, they’re still wrong about the Labor government.

I know the person on Twitter who suggested that we could all crowdfund the ABC to save the 400 jobs and the services that are being cut by Abbott’s savage ideological slash and burn of our national broadcaster was just trying to be helpful. But no. Sorry. There will be no crowdfunding of the national broadcaster. Unless by crowdfunding you mean paying taxes and seeing the revenue from your paid taxes being spent on the public broadcaster that we all value. Oh, hang on, I just realised tax is a form of community crowdfunding. So yes, we should continue to crowdfund the ABC. And we should continue to be horrified while Abbott and his merry-wreckers continue to swing their wrecking ball through public institutions that we, Australian tax-payers, and generations of Australian tax-payers have, through our hard work, payment of taxes, and community support, built through the community act of paying taxes and giving public institutions support.

Because that’s what’s really at the heart of this whole shemozzle, which is currently called the Abbott government, but in future will be referred to as the one-term-blip-resulting-from-the-biggest-mistake-Australia-ever-made. At the heart of the Abbott government is an ideological war to cut, slash, burn, decimate, belittle, downsize, nullify, reject, outsource, kill-off, delegitimise and ultimately wreck the public institutions that make up the Australian civilisation. Abbott and friends care to ignore that these institutions, these publically funded, owned by all Australians, including those who can afford to pay tax and those who can’t, these valuable assets to our community, are not his to wreck. It’s not his farm to sell off. It’s not his pool to piss in. It’s not his hard work that has paid for any of this.

I’m getting mightily fed up with Abbott’s attitude towards our collective assets. Abbott’s government has sold of Medibank Private. They’ve smashed the ABC and the CSIRO. The Climate Commission was the first on the chopping block and has since been generously crowdfunded by Australians worried about climate change and is now the Climate Council. Abbott’s doing his best to turn our Medicare system into a no-longer-universal-healthcare-system where ‘users pay’ for the privilege of being cared for when they’re sick. Our higher education students could soon have free-market interest rates assigned to deregulated and growing university fees. Our public schools have had massive funding cuts*. *School chaplains excluded. Our health system has had massive funding cuts and is becoming the problem of under-funded State governments who have no choice but to cut services. The renewable energy sector is disappearing, and the manufacturing industry has been all-but killed off with thousands of jobs with it. Abbott’s slashing and burning is ripping at the very heart of Australia. He’s ripping at the very heart of our communities. He’s wrecking the civilisation that we have all crowdfunded into existence and kept running. Why is he doing this? Why does a dog lick his balls? Because he can. (And he enjoys it very much).

Let’s have a look at a world where Abbott’s ideological utopia ‘user pays’ agenda overrides the collective spirit of a social democracy. Note, Abbott’s predilection for a user pays system extends only to people outside of his family and close circle of fellow neo-cons. Frances Abbott doesn’t have to pay for her own education. Abbott doesn’t have to pay for his private travel to attend campaign events or to promote his book for private profit. And Abbott’s friends, like Gina Rinehart, don’t have to pay for the government-funded infrastructure they need to continue to pillage our national wealth and to resent every cent of tax they pay for this self-entitled privilege. No, it’s just us plebs that should be forced to ‘user pay’. So this means every road is a toll road. Don’t leave for work without your credit-card linked toll-pass. You can’t get out of your driveway without it! Traffic lights would also be toll points, as would zebra-crossings for pedestrians.

You won’t step foot in a school or a hospital without individually paying for every doctor or teacher that you come into contact with. You can swipe your credit card on the way into the classroom or emergency surgery suite. Need the police? Before they respond to your emergency, they’ll check your credit limit, by which stage the intruder may have already bashed you to death. Is the government intending on sending Australian troops to war? The war won’t start without at least 10,000 interested funders and everyone who doesn’t fund the war will be put on a list and excluded from any peacekeeping in the future, and instead used as human shields. Need to use a toilet? At home or when you’re out and about? I hope you have your credit card with you.

You can’t use the sewers without it. There’s a nice big open park and playground down the road. Admittance by booking and credit card only. What about access to the internet? Yes, I know we already pay ISPs to hook up to their streams, but whenever you access a wireless network, your credit card will be charged accordingly to fund vital research work into technological innovation that used to be done by our national researcher, CSIRO, but is now done by private firms who will not make their technology available to anyone who doesn’t pay for it directly. Oh, and you want democratically elected leaders? One vote equals one dollar. How many dollars have you got? Doesn’t this sound like a fun place to live, in Abbott’s utopia?

But the good news is, there won’t be any need to pay for the ATO as there will be no taxes. So all the money you earn you get to take home (well, whatever is left after funding all of the above). What’s that? You can’t afford to see a doctor? You’re unemployed and you’re sick. Well bad luck for you! You were born into the wrong family! In Abbott’s utopia, only the rich survive. That’s actually the point. That’s the effing point of Abbott.

I know we have two years to go, but I’m ready to vote Abbott out today. Does anyone feel like helping me crowdfund a new government? I’m sick of watching this one wreck our place.

Anti-politicians are everywhere. Clive Palmer is the left’s current favourite anti-establishment politician because he is blocking some of Abbott’s nastier budget policies. Palmer has broken progressive hearts before, such as when he stood next to Al Gore and promised to help repeal the Carbon Tax only if it was changed into an ETS; he followed through on the repeal bit but failed to save the ETS. This time we’re all really hoping he sticks to his guns on higher education policy after disappointingly letting Abbott’s do-nothing Direct Action policy through today. It’s easy to forget, while appreciating Palmer’s Abbott-blocking ability, that this was the man who fought tirelessly to destroy two of the previous Labor government’s most important progressive policies – the mining tax and the Carbon Price. So Palmer’s not a progressive politician, even if he does have some really interesting ideas about asylum seeker policy. Just ask the people who voted for him – those people he’s ultimately beholden. Or look at how he makes his money.

I am torn in thinking about keep-the-bastards-honest, a-pox-on-both-their-houses anti-politicians and minor parties because there’s no doubt that sometimes some of them can be useful – like when they’re blocking Tony Abbott. Actually, it’s not fair to just say useful. Sometimes they’re entirely heroic and progressive policies wouldn’t be implemented or saved from repeal without them. But just as often, they’re unpredictable, flimsy, self-centred, untrustworthy, and politically motivated to differentiate themselves from major parties for their own vested interests and ideological purity. Yet they claim to be above all this when painting themselves as ‘not like the baddies in the majors’. But most are just as grubby as the spin doctors in the major parties when it comes to election tactics. Otherwise they’d never get elected in the first place. Don’t forget that independents and minor parties rely on convoluted preference deals to get into power, deals which are by their very nature political. Once in parliament they have to do deals – otherwise they’d be both invisible and irrelevant.

A great example of these mixed feelings is my current love-hate relationship with Russell Brand. I guess it’s not really fair to say hate, because I don’t feel the same way about Brand as I do about Abbott. Let’s just say love and frustration. I really respect Brand’s moral stance on the danger of growing wealth inequality. His possible bid to become London’s Lord Mayor is probably inspired by his campaign to reduce unaffordability of housing in London, where he grew up on a council estate. Helen Razor suggests that if Brand wants to be a politician, he should learn a thing or two about economics. But to be fair, when he says he can’t get his head around economics, he may be joking, or he may be making the very fair assessment that current orthodoxies about supply and demand economics are a function of a capitalist system that favours the very few over the rest of us. In that, Brand definitely has a point. Brand is not just any celebrity who decides to talk about politics – he is eloquent, intelligent, passionate, knows his stuff, and is incredibly charismatic – all great qualities of a leader (or politician if you want to call a spade a spade). And his values align very closely with mine. On top of this, he promoted Australia’s March in March to his 8 million twitter followers. Also, his YouTube show The Trews is truly hilarious.

So I’ve covered the things I love, but now what about the frustration? Really it all boils down to Brand’s anti-politician strategy of differentiating himself from mainstream politicians by calling for a revolution and encouraging people who value his opinions not to vote. When I first heard this, I was intrigued. The conspiracy theorist in me wondered for a moment if he was being paid by the Conservative Party to get young progressive voters off the electoral role. And even though I’ve since become a huge fan of Brand, I still can’t see how he can’t see that it’s an incredibly counterproductive action to urge support for progressive policies by telling progressive voters not to vote. I’m sure the Conservative Party are happy that they didn’t have to pay Brand to mount this campaign. Perhaps a year on, Brand is shifting away from this statement by considering running himself for Mayor – it’s hard to get people to vote for you when you’ve told them that voting at all makes you part of the problem. However, the trait that Brand shares with many anti-politicians and minor parties is that he wants everything to happen now, through revolution, and ignores the reality that progressive policy reforms are never an overnight change inspired by a single person or a small group.

Brand’s impatience makes him in the UK context just as anti-Labour as he is anti-Conservative – he heaps them together into the ‘they’re all the same’ type statements, which ends up benefiting the Conservatives. Why does this statement benefit the Conservatives? Because if they’re just as bad as each other, people may as well vote for Cameron, or in our case, Abbott. If there’s no difference in the result. Reality is, progressive reforms come about through long, hard-fought series of carefully negotiated and compromised battles to inch forward away from the right-wing ideal of letting the market rip (unregulated neoliberalism) and keeping women barefoot in the kitchen (social conservatism). I’ve quoted Judt before on this blog and I’ll quote him again: ‘incremental improvements upon unsatisfactory circumstances are the best we can hope for’.

The ideal of a revolution – a complete replacement of the status quo – as compared to steady and incremental gains in the right direction aren’t two options that you have to choose between. One is a fantasy, the other is achievable. The real option is a choice between the two major parties – one progressive and one conservative. I support the party which aligns most closely with my progressive values, and has the best chance of forming progressive government. As a Port Adelaide supporter, I’ll remind you of the famous Port Adelaide line – we exist to win premierships. The Labor Party doesn’t exist to be activists, or to be ideologically fundamental or to promise a complete overhaul of the status quo. Nor do they expect every progressive voter will agree with everything they do. The Labor Party exists to form government that can improve the lives of Australians through progressive reforms. And they need progressive Australians help them to do this.

Many left wing independents or minor parties spend most of their time bemoaning that the incremental improvements of the major progressive party aren’t fast enough, large enough, or anywhere near revolutionary. And they often spend most of their time fixated on one or two causes which they feel effectively differentiate them from the progressive major party. However, a pragmatist would say that in a country where an extreme right wing conservative such as Abbott can be elected as Prime Minister by a healthy majority and go about undoing Labor’s policy reforms (such as mining tax, Carbon Price, Medicare, ABC funding, health and educational funding, a social safety net just to name a few), it’s unrealistic to believe you’ll achieve any progress by throwing your weight (and lack of vote) behind an ideologically pure revolution, or a single policy ideal, that has no hope of success, and no hope of changing anything. And it’s unhelpful to spend all your time, energy, campaign dollars, talent and voice in the community bagging the progressive option when it’s the option you really want if you really do value progress.

You might not like everything a major party like Labor does, and the flash and colour of an independent or a minor party who promises you the world without any hope of delivering might seem like a tempting option. There’s no reason why these colourful and passionate people can’t contribute to the debate and provide fresh ideas – and sometimes some great blocking skills. But ultimately we need the workhorse – the progressive major party – to be in power if we don’t want the country run by conservative neoliberals. So who are you supporting in the 2016 election? I hope Australian progressives are realistically ready for the fight.

It’s been a sad week. I wasn’t alive when Gough Whitlam was Prime Minister, but my parents brought me up to understand that he was a hero. When I asked mum this week how she and dad, who were around my age when Gough was dismissed, could live through this time without being driven insane with the injustice of it all, she told me how they stayed up all night, too angry to sleep, plotting revenge on Malcolm Fraser. But what more could they do back then? There was no quick way to start a protest movement like there is now, via Facebook and Twitter. There wasn’t even a way to send chain emails to bring people together.

When I heard Gough had died, I sent my condolences first to my parents, who have been staunch unwavering Labor supporters since their university days. And then I tweeted that when I met Gough, just one time, at Tanya Plibersek’s Christmas Party, he said to me ‘nice to meet you comrade’. Unlike Malcolm Fraser, whose values have moved away from the Liberal Party as he aged, Gough stuck by the Labor Party his entire life. Because his values are Labor values. The public good. Equal opportunity. Universal education. Universal healthcare. And of course the pragmatism, character and political will to get good things done. In three years, Gough’s Labor government achieved amazing things which every Australian is still benefiting from. Gough makes me proud to support Labor. And I am as proud to support Labor today as my parents were in 1975.

The way you hear people speak about Gough now, from both sides of politics, you’d swear he had a term as long as Menzies. But he didn’t. He was incredibly unpopular and his dismissal apparently caused a political rift the likes this country had never seen. And not everything he did was perfect. Of course it wasn’t. He was the Prime Minister. He was making decisions on behalf of the country hundreds of times a day. No matter how great Gough was, he was human like the rest of us.

One example of this ‘less than perfectness’ that my mum reminded me about was that many progressive people were disappointed when Gough didn’t support the independence of East Timor and instead sided with Indonesia. Many progressives preferred Gough’s more left-wing colleague Jim Cairns and perhaps if today’s crop of journalists had been around then, leadership tensions would have been big news. Even though the Greens have disgracefully and offensively claimed Gough’s legacy as their own this week, presumably waiting until he died so that the great Labor man couldn’t complain, you can image just how Greens would have responded to Gough’s East Timor decision at the time, had they been there. You’ve all seen the way Greens supporters talk about the evils of the Labor Party, and how they’ve ripped up their support of Labor and written the party off for a lifetime because of Labor’s asylum seeker policy. There is no compromise with these people. There is no pragmatism. There is no acknowledgement that politicians might sometimes make mistakes or be weaker than they should be or scared or unwise. There’s no acknowledgment that major parties, by their very nature, are broad churches that must compromise in order to survive. And that’s what made the Greens opportunistic grave-robbing promotional advertisement using Labor’s greatest leader so very distasteful and so very offensive. Gough hadn’t even been buried yet and he would have already been turning in his grave. He knew how hard it was to work a great policy idea into a great policy. Which is exactly what the Greens have no experience doing, and no right to take credit for when all they really want to do is ignore this hard work and continue to attack Labor from the left.

What I’ve learned this week is that Labor leaders will always be more popular after their time in office. I think we’re already seeing this in the way that the public admire Gillard not very long after her opinion polls were as low as Gough’s. Because Labor reforms are enduring. They might not be perfect at the time, they might not go as far as the Greens would like them to, which is irrelevant when you consider the Greens don’t actually have to fight to turn ideas into policies. And of course Labor governments and oppositions will make mistakes and will be lambasted by their own supporters amongst others and will hopefully stick to their values in the end.

I have no doubt that the same values that drove Gough also drive the modern Labor Party. It’s not fashionable, nor popular, to say this. But I don’t care. I’ll be called a hack, an apologist, a rusted-on-one-eyed-in-denial-groupie, even perhaps, as I have been called, a murderer of asylum seekers. If Twitter is anything to go by, it’s far more vogue to be a left-winger whose taken a moral stand against Labor and will NEVER VOTE FOR THEM AGAIN AND WILL SHIT ON THEM AT EVERY OPPORTUNITY because of asylum seeker policy, national security laws, gay marriage, single-mothers on the dole or a range of other cherry-picked-deal-or-no-deal-make-or-break policies which seem to turn some people into angry-Labor-haters. These haters would no doubt have reacted the same way to Gough on the issue of East Timor. In modern times, it’s Bill Shorten the haters hate and we hear constantly how they can’t possibly ever vote for Labor ever again. But apparently these very same haters loved Gough Whitlam and he was perfect in retrospect. I can imagine they’ll be telling their kids in 30 years’ time that the one-term Abbott government did its best, but failed to completely undo the enduring reforms of the Whitlam, Hawke, Keating, Rudd and Gillard Labor governments. But where are these haters now now? Why aren’t they getting their hands dirty helping these reforms to eventuate and defending those they value? Where are they now when Labor needs every progressive’s eye on the one-term-Tony prize? They’re still bitching about whatever deal breaker policy it is this week which appears to override their support of every other Labor policy which we can only assume they do agree with because they haven’t ranted their opposition to it yet.

One thing I’ve learned about politics is that, like life, it’s complicated. I’m proud to stand by Labor while they keep fighting the good fight. Implementing good public policy isn’t about ideological purity. It’s about outcomes. Outcomes can be messy, ugly, and usually less than perfect and can make enemies of powerful people. Progress doesn’t often come about in a revolution – it can be just a preference over something worse. But any progress is better than no progress. And of course it’s preferential to be going forwards, however slowly, rather than backwards like we are under the Abbott government.

My support of the Labor Party isn’t about aligning my identity so closely to the party that the minute they do something I disagree with, my faith crumbles irrevocably and I turn my back forever on the movement and become bitter and twisted, and likely to lash out. I don’t hold the unobtainable expectation that the Labor party will be everything I want them to be all the time without fail. How is it even possible to be everything to everyone when everyone has different opinions about what this ideal looks like? Being a Labor supporter is about supporting progressive policies that align with my values. This means taking the good with the bad, disagreeing when you disagree and giving credit when credit’s due – all in equal measure.

I don’t think Gough got enough credit for his brilliant political career while he was in power, just as Labor gets no credit for their previous two terms, nor for the work they are doing in opposing Abbott. People always wait to say the nicest things about people after they’re dead – when it’s too late for them to appreciate the compliments. I keep this in mind while I watch in frustration modern Labor deal with the exact same situation. Gough supported Labor to the end. I’m happy to wait 30 years for Labor to get credit, as long as in the meantime, they keep reforming. Because it’s the progressive outcomes that are important. Far more important than what haters say today.

When will progressives learn to speak to people? Not at people. Speak to people. A great example of the wishy washy language that the left uses to try to convince people of the merits of their ideas is contained in this article about wealth inequality by Richard Denniss. Denniss wrote this fantastic piece in response to Amanda Vanstone’s whine about the poor-rich-people getting picked on which conveniently forgot to mention that wealth doesn’t trickle down and was therefore total bullshit. Denniss clearly knows his stuff. If you’ve not heard of him, you can read all about him and his progressive think tank, the Australia Institute in the Saturday Paper. So you’ll notice I did just say that Denniss’s piece was fantastic, but I also called it wishy washy. Contradictory yes, but keep up because what is fantastic to the left can be completely wasted on those who don’t share the left’s values. And this is what I’m talking about when I say progressives need to learn to speak to people in a way that will actually convince them to think differently about something they thought they had firm views on. Like ideological positions towards wealth inequality. For instance.

Before you go and say ‘who does this nobody blogger think she is telling a certified expert think tanker (do they actually think inside tanks?) how to communicate’, let me preface my argument by explaining that I don’t have all the answers. I don’t even have many of them. Because I too can’t understand for the life of me why anyone would have voted for Tony Abbott, and every time I get into a conversation with one of them I have to take a deep breath and walk quickly away before I lose my temper. But we need to remind ourselves that we can’t understand why anyone would vote for Abbott because we don’t think like Abbott voters. And it’s not until we work out how they think that we can possibly even begin to think about how we speak to them. Not in a weird ‘let’s hypnotise or brainwash Abbott voters to convince them never to do that again’, (although if anyone has any thoughts on this I’d be happy to hear them). But what I’m saying is that progressives need to learn how non-progressives understand the world before we can explain why progressive policies are in everyone’s best interests. Because we do believe that don’t we?

A perfect example of this is Denniss’s very logical argument about wealth equality, or fairness, being good for all of us. This is 100% true, and I’ve written before about how this concept should be adopted by the Labor Party as the overarching narrative to define their policy purpose. When I read an article about the ill-effects of wealth inequality for all of us, rich and poor alike, I nod my head and in total agreement I say ‘well that’s sorted, we need to ensure there is wealth equality, done, let’s move on’. But I would say that wouldn’t I. And so would most other people who share my values and are likely to agree with Denniss’s article. So he’s preaching to the converted. But what about non-progressives and those who don’t sit firmly in either camp? These are the people we need to think hard about and work out what they see when they read such an article. Words like ‘fairness’ and ‘equity’ are littered throughout progressive communications, and of course they are feel-good words for people who value fairness and equity inherently. But what about those who believe in the merits of a free market above all else, who when a left-winger says ‘fairness’, hear ‘you’re trying to take away money I’ve earned to give to someone who hasn’t earned it, which is not fair’. It’s the same word, but the meaning behind it, and what is understood when it is heard is completely different for people with different values.

I said I didn’t have all the answers to this dilemma, but let me at least try to give you an example of how we could try speaking to Abbott voters (who, by the way, definitely don’t read this blog so please don’t point this out in the comments because I am fully aware I’m talking to progressives plus creepy conservative Ian Hall). But just say a progressive think tanker is writing in a mainstream newspaper. When they’re talking about wealth equality and the reasons why we need to reduce wealth inequality for the betterment of all of us – it’s the growing the pie rather than divvying up the same sized pie argument – they need to stop relying on statistics. Denniss used an awesome one right at the start of his very awesome article: ‘Australia’s richest seven people have more wealth than the bottom 1.73 million households combined’. To someone who thinks that wealth inequality is a problem, this statistic clearly shows its urgent magnitude. But to most Abbott voters, wealth equality is not a problem. It is an aspiration. Those richest seven people are heroes to many right-leaning Australians. To the aspirant, free-market-loving, keeping-ahead-of-the-Joneses-by-buying-a-better-than-your-neighbor’s-new-car-every-three-years and only-being-happy-when-you-have-the-most-expensive-house-on-the-street and the-wearing most-obvious-wealth-consumption-designer-clothes section of the Australian community, anything that opposes wealth inequality sounds suspiciously like higher taxation and a slippery slope to communism. So what do we say instead?

First we ask them what they do for a living. Bill says he sells home insurance. So you ask Bill, how many people get home insurance who can’t afford to buy their own homes? Wouldn’t Bill’s market be much bigger, and his job much easier and more prosperous if more people could afford to buy their own homes? That’s why Bill should be worried about wealth inequality. Gloria owns a restaurant. So you ask Gloria, is it true that people eat at your restaurant because they have disposable incomes? If lots of people are poorer than Gloria, and don’t have any money left over at the end of the week, who will come into Gloria’s restaurant? The very rich can only eat so much. I’m sure Gloria would love it if one of the seven richest Australians came into her restaurant, because one might assume there would be a sizeable tip (although this might be a flawed assumption). But the rich have lots of other restaurants to visit. And the poorest 1.73million can’t afford to even think about visiting any restaurant, let alone Gloria’s. Isn’t Gloria worried that if the number of well off Australians shrinks, and the number of poor Australians grows, her business won’t be able to sustain her aspirational-affluent lifestyle? As I said when I last wrote on this topic, who is going to shop at Walmart if even those people who work at Walmart can’t afford to shop there? See how we’re all better off if we’re all better off?

Think like they do, and speak to them. Otherwise we’ll get Abbott again and the wealth inequality gap will continue to grow. Please help us!

Abbott’s not wearing any clothes. His nakedness is now impossible for our lazy mainstream media, and in turn mainstream voters to ignore.

I often complain loudly that Abbott got a free run in the media during his time in Opposition and while he was campaigning (sloganeering) for the top job. Someone said to me the other day that I shouldn’t blame the press for giving Abbott this free run, because Abbott did do his very best to keep his plans as secret as his daughter’s design school scholarship. I can’t deny that Abbott and his colleagues tried to hide their moral nakedness from voters until it was too late for us to do anything about it. They clothed themselves in Labor bashing, in three-word-slogans and in yellow-vest-wearing-banana-stacking-fear-campaigns and produced a thin policy pamphlet full of promises that have now been broken.

But hang on folks. Hang on. If Abbott really did fool the media into thinking he wasn’t naked, and they in turn fooled voters, why is it that untrained amateur writers like me were spot on in our analysis of Abbott long before he became PM? Why did the open letters I and others wrote to Abbott, numerous times, so miraculously predict, like crystal ball reading savants, exactly the type of Prime Minister we have ended up with? A nasty, bigoted, sexist, rich-loving, poor-hating, expert-deriding, anti-science inarticulate thug who embarrasses the nation every time he opens his mouth? Why, when so many of us were saying that Abbott wasn’t wearing any clothes, did the mainstream media do their best to sheath the man in Teflon coated budgie smugglers, which enabled him to unleash his wrecking ball so shockingly on a mostly unsuspecting public? What I’m saying is, how did people like me see what was coming, but the mainstream media didn’t? Or worse, if they did, why didn’t they tell us?

I am upset by the Abbott government in varying degrees every day. There have been lower than usual points, like the commission of audit, the release of the budget and every policy within it, the lies about Gonski funding, the Royal Commission witch hunt into Julia Gillard and unions, the war-mongering in the aid of a poll boost, and just this week, a discriminatory stance to ban female Muslims wearing religious clothing in Parliament House. This last one seemed to finally crack the veneer of ‘nothing-to-see-here-move-along’ mainstream press reporting of the Abbott government, with, frankly better-late-than-never impassioned and obviously entirely outraged writing from the likes of Waleed Aly and Peter Hartcher. As a side note, I can’t help but wonder if Fairfax will notice the spike in traffic to these articles now that they’re finally revealing the real Tony Abbott and the justified outrage at the way he behaves.

But let’s not forget that this dog-whistling-with-a-mega-phone, Cory-Bernardi-look-alike Prime Minister hasn’t changed a bit since we first met him as the aptly described by Paul Keating ‘resident nut job’ from the Howard government. Tony Abbott has always been a creep. Tony Abbott has always wanted to wage an ideological class war on Australians and he is relishing his opportunity to do this as Prime Minister of Australia. Australians are suffering from the results of this war, as the naked-man-wrecking-ball smashes through our social welfare policies, education funding and the core pillars of universal health care. I know no one likes a know-all who says ‘I told you so’, but I totally did tell you so. Because it was obvious. He was standing right there and all I had to do was look at him, scrutinise for a millisecond and I knew what a disaster PM he was going to be. I’m not naïve enough to expect that the mainstream media would describe the coming disaster in quite as colourful language as I do. I understand the need for balance in journalism as opposed to partisan histrionics in commentary and blogging. But this doesn’t excuse mainstream journalists from doing their jobs. Please guys. Just some basic facts would be useful. Next time there’s a naked man, wearing red budgie smugglers that don’t even try to hide the horrors behind them, please consider doing your jobs and warning the public not to give this man the keys to the country.

It’s really hard to find someone who voted for Abbott’s Liberal government who is willing to justify their actions without mentioning the Labor Party. I also find Greens voters share this trait, in that they often position their support for the Greens as being ‘anti-Labor’, more so than they are ‘pro-Green’. When you also take into account the mainstream media’s obsession with Labor bashing, it’s clear why Labor is permanently on the counter-attack from a pincer movement of anti-Labor-for-this-reason-or-another-culture that dominates Australian political discourse. So when people like me try to defend my support for the Labor Party by explaining by deep attachment to the Labor Party’s values and policies that are intrinsically tied to these values, I get a constant barrage of criticism and abuse from the aforementioned pincer movement. It’s fair to say that being a Labor supporter in this country is a fairly unrewarding exercise.

So why does the Labor Party, whether in government or opposition, bear the brunt of so much disappointment, criticism and abuse? I think it’s because the party’s mission is such a difficult one that it’s seemingly impossible to live up to the huge weight of expectation placed on it through its promise to protect us all from the economy that we also rely on for the continuation of our society.

Put simply, in my view, the Labor Party exists to cushion the community from the negative side-effects of a capitalist economy. But just knowing this is not very helpful if you don’t acknowledge the difficulty in achieving this quest. Because there’s an added complication to the battle between labour and capital (workers and those they work for); the Labor Party has promised to be both saviour for the labour side, and defender and concierge for capital at the same time.

A perfect example of the dichotomy between defending labour and capital is the criticism Prime Minister Gillard received for moving single-mothers from the sole parent payment onto Newstart when their youngest child turned eight. It’s worth noting that Gillard didn’t in fact introduce the policy, but rather brought all sole parent payment recipients in line with the policy Howard introduced. Yet the criticism I saw about Gillard making this change was disproportionately fiercer when compared with the criticism the Liberal government received for making the policy change in the first place. This is because Labor is expected to look after the poor, and the Liberals don’t carry this expectation. It’s when those we trust let us down that we’re most upset, but those we expect to let us down just meet our expectation when they do.

But discounting this emotional reaction, when you look at how Gillard’s decision aligns to Labor’s promise to defend labour against capital, the policy change actually does make sense. Because Gillard was no doubt hoping that the change in their pension situation, once their children are at school, would encourage single mothers to go back to the workplace. Workers are better off than people on pensions. Families where a parent works have more money to provide their children with basic necessities. You might think I’m harsh and uncaring for saying this, but I won’t apologise for pointing out that there is dignity in work, and as a society, we should do everything we can to encourage and support those who can work to do so.

In actual fact I disagreed with Gillard’s decision to move single mothers onto Newstart for two reasons – one because the decision was not also coupled with an acknowledgement that the Newstart allowance is not enough to live on, even as a temporary stop-gap between jobs. And the other is because a smarter policy would have been to encourage and support single-mothers into training to prepare them for the workplace, where there is increasingly less opportunity for un-educated people to find work. Gillard could also have focused on the reasons single mothers often can’t work, such as lack of child-care and the availability of stable part-time work.

The mistake Gillard made was wrongly positioning the policy change as a cost-saving measure at a time when her government was receiving constant criticism about over-spending, budget deficits and waste. And here lies the problem for Labor. The party is expected to look after everyone, from the unemployed and single parents, to workers, to the rich business owners, to multi-national corporations and their shareholders by keeping the economy in tip-top-profit-making shape and the budget in balance and also providing all the government payments and services required to stop people falling behind, all at the same time. Talk about an impossible expectation to live up to!

The Labor Party is also expected by many left-leaning voters to live up to the unreasonable expectation of having a policy platform that perfectly aligns with every single left-leaning voter’s policy preferences, bar none. For instance, many ex-Labor supporters on the left, who mostly now support the Greens, seem to have withdrawn their support of Labor due to one or sometimes two Labor policies they don’t agree with. Whether it be single parents on Newstart, asylum seeker policy, gay marriage or environmental policy, it would seem that there are huge numbers of left voting Australians who hold Labor up to an unobtainable standard of perfection. They want a Labor policy platform where they agree uncompromisingly with each and every policy, and anything short of this turns them into Labor haters, blind to every Labor policy they actually support and blind to the fact their lack of Labor support assists the Liberal party to win power.

The community’s belief that Labor can be everything to everyone all at the same time is crushing the party, leaving many Labor politicians, and certainly Bill Shorten, so scared of doing anything to hurt one group over another that they would prefer to say and do nothing at all most of the time.

But if Labor is ever going to get back into government, they need to get over this fear. This beige must end. So what should Labor do?

First and foremost, Labor must be brave. Forget about the pincer movement. The Liberals and the Greens, and to some extent, the media, have a vested interest in attacking Labor whenever Labor opens its mouth. Get used to it and get over it. Bravery also means sticking to your values no matter what the opinion polls say. I don’t know this for sure, but I can bet Labor sided with Abbott to let through draconian ASIO powers last week because they didn’t want to appear soft on terror. But in doing this, they have just looked even softer. So it’s a self-perpetuating problem.

Secondly, Labor must build a stronger narrative. A narrative tied to their values, tied to their policies. Not a slogan. A narrative. Not a beige ‘fairness this’, ‘safety-net- that’ wet-lettuce-leaf-key-search-phrases-white-noise-dribble. A strong and meaningful narrative is what is needed.

For the past year, Labor promised to oppose Abbott. Abbott has given Shorten a dream-run of policies to oppose, and to be fair Shorten has been passionately against Abbott’s budget and the few policies Abbott has managed to get through parliament. However what’s lacking from these policy debates is the overarching story about why Labor opposes the policies. It’s not enough to jump from an anti-Medicare co-payment campaign, to a pro-climate change action campaign, to a pro-tertiary education campaign without a rock-solid chain linking all these micro-campaigns together. Shorten has told Michelle Grattan that the party is working on such a narrative. It’s good to hear him admit this, as Labor clearly don’t have one yet. If you’re interested in reading my thoughts on what this narrative could possibly look like, I wrote about this very subject here.

Labor has two years until the next election to work out how they are going to explain to the electorate that their party is the best option to tackle the problems our community face, whilst managing the high expectations of a broad range of people, all with competing priorities. Labor can’t fall into Abbott’s trap of believing they can win because people will vote against Abbott’s Liberals. Labor needs to be better than this. It doesn’t sound easy. It’s not easy. But if Labor can’t at least start to make some improvements, Abbott will win a second term. We all know what is at stake if that happens.