Wasn’t this all the things that were being said about Beazley during the Howard years? Who gives a sh*t about a United Caucus when the Country is being ran into the ground.
The Howard government destroyed this country because Labor wouldn’t change.
The country’s issues are bigger than the health of the Labour Party.
Come the next election in 4 years, there is a real chance that Fairfax and the ABC no longer exist… i guarantee that will be a popularity contest.
Business tax decrease is largely to reduce the incentive to move money to offshore havens. The vast majority of company tax is borne by SMEs who end up paying their personal marginal tax rate if they take it out as dividends anyway.
Business owners can do a little bit of distribution via trusts to keep their tax rates down but a lot of those benefits have been watered down over the last 20 years.
Biggest beneficiaries will be the banks and their shareholders but that’s only because they are the largest corporate tax payers and don’t use any complex tax minimization schemes.
Are you serious?
Blaming Labor because Howard was elected.
And yep let’s vote in Government based on how well the Leader does on TV, and we get another farking show-pony like KRudd or a NutJob like Trump.
All you guys are doing is stating how stupid Voters are, probably correct.
Are you an Accountant ?
I hope not, as you have no idea how much tax avoidance small business manages.
Yep, Labor won Government, Rudd was unbearable and impossible to work with, mostly because of this personality worship from the media. Government was kept on track by Swan and Gillard. Julia took over and did a great job, media helped destroy her, and build Rudd up again, and the Labor Caucus were weak as P1SS.
That avoidance has nothing to do with the business tax rate
Or alternatively, stating how you can have the best policies in the world at your disposal, which are useless with a leader that doesn’t cut through.
Shorten can’t cut through. He was better before the elocution lessons and the turd polishing. He used to come across as basic and honest. Like Albo. He has never, ever come across as intelligent, like Plibersek.
He is literally the worst foil for Turnbull that Labor could go with. Jesus, how can caucus and the members not see this? Albanese sitting across from Turnbull would show him up for the silver spoon banker ■■■■ that he is.
So Aceman, you don’t care about anyone else except yourself, the crux of Liberal Party philosophy.
Fair enough, at least you admit you are selfish.
But it has a lot to do with the reality that our Tax system is farked.
What a shallow view of the World.
If Albo was sitting in that seat, there would be ten behind him sharpening knives. Albo may be clever but he is another divisive prikk, who does not have broad Party support.
When it comes to Bill, you guys just want to hate, and if you care so much, join the ALP and vote against him.
Can you name a tax system that isn’t?
It’s not the system, it’s the actors within it.
My number 1 priority is providing the best for my family. If that is being selfish then yes I’m happy to be called that.
Being raised on the land by Liberal supporting parents it’s only natural that I went that way. Once we moved to the City both my parents and myself have spent the majority of our time being small business owners so the Libs were our best fit. I don’t agree on some of their policies but abhor unions so little chance of me supporting the ALP
Mate, uniting the Labor Caucus means 9/10ths of fark all if you can’t unite the voting public. And Bill just can’t. He has all the charisma of a wet sock. Get someone that the public can actually relate to or you will lose again, and condemn this country to another round of Turdball and his gang of fascist nutters. And it won’t be us getting the government we deserve because we voted a popularity contest, but your party machine being too far up itself to care about what the public thinks, and responding accordingly, therefore consigning itself to yet another, self inflicted, utterly avoidable period in opposition. If you treat the voting public with the disregard that you are talking about you deserve to lose, and sadly it is us that will pay the price for your arrogance.
I follow politics, I talk about politics with friends, coworkers and family. I’ve heard precisely 1 person say anything good about Shorten and that’s Bacchus.
He is universally unliked. He’s not polarising like an Abbott where people either love or hate him. But the consensus is “untrustworthy, boring and self serving”. A leader must connect with his people, not just to win office but to use political capital to enact change.
And whose fault would that be? The stupid voters?
One thing that Labor leaders should have is obvious compassion.
Bill has compassion for workers rights, I think, but it all comes across as self serving with him.
EFA
So on one hand you want the Labor Party to have some popular clown as its Leader so morons who have no farking idea will vote for them.
And on the other hand you condemn Labor for being populist, losing its way and not standing up for its principles.
I have been fighting elections since 1969, and have seen Leaders come and go, have seen Governments elected that were always going to be crappy, seen racists and bigots like Hansen rise and fall, and have seen a Party with the best policy lose because of the “Leader”.
Boot, just like a Footy Club; the ALP is larger than one individual and its Leader, aka Bill Shorten, runs the Parliamentary Labor Party and little else. He has united a disjointed team and has the best group of people in his Shadow Cabinet that any Labor team has ever assembled. I don’t really care that you and others dont like him, I do and I beleive in him.
And for farks sake, you want to blame Labor for what the Liberals do, what a big sook you and all these others are. Take redponsibility for how you vote, you elect Governments, and if you don’t want to vote for Bill then don’t, just don’t whinge about the Mob you put in.
I don’t think it’s popularity.
Hawke and Howard connected with a majority of the population. This connection allowed them to enact complex policy changes that reshaped the country. This is a key feature on why both are highly regarded.
I don’t want a popularity contest. I want a true leader that can connect with their followers, being the public.
I going to defend Bacchus here a bit and say that having your caucus unified is a genuinely necessary part of getting meaningful policy enacted. (Note that this doesn’t necessarily mean it’ll be GOOD policy getting enacted).
The media loves a leadership struggle and is very eager to find one even when one doesn’t exist, partly because it feels all high-stakes and exciting, but mostly because the press gallery are largely incompetent ■■■■■■ who’ve never bothered doing the hard boring work of learning about policy, so prefer to cover politics as a personality contest. If you’re going to get policy changes through, you absolutely 100% can not allow the media to sidetrack the political conversation with ‘leadershit’, as I’ve heard it called. An that means no cracks can show in the party. Otherwise, you get situations like Gillard vainly trying to govern with Rudd leaking at her 24/7 - I remember when Gillard was going a presser on Gonski, and didn’t get asked a single question about education, it was all leadershit. The Abbot/Turnbull thing has the same vibe, though tbh I think the media have been much easier on Turnbull, partly cos they always are easier on righties than lefties, partly cos once the media fall in love with a guy (Rudd, Turnbull) they have a lot of problems admitting they got it wrong.
HOWEVER, all that is dependent on getting into govt in the first place.
My personal concerns with Shorten reflect my concerns about the ALP as a whole. I believe the party is largely timid and poll-driven and visionless and locked into an eternal cycle of the ‘small target’ strategy that worked electorally for Howard and Rudd. Where is the federal ALP on climate change? The Libs policy is a disaster, but they’re saying basically nothing and (as far as I’m aware) have announced no policy. And this might be a deliberate strategy to minimise discussion of what was (for the ALP) a damaging issue last time around, but it allows the outwardly crazy libs to spin ‘climate hoax!’ conspiracy theories and the venal cynical ones to frame the issue as entirely one of energy supply reliability. Where is the ALP on mandatory detention? Where is the ALP on the butchering of the NBN - the NBN was one of the best and most visionary policies the last ALP govt brought in. My electorate was due for FTTP NBN roll-out the month after the 2013 election. Abbot/Turnbull cancelled it, and FTTN roll-out still hasn’t started five years later and won’t for another two years. I’m in a seat that was marginal in 2013, and the ALP hasn’t even mentioned that stuff in any of their letterbox drops. If the ALP won’t defend its best and most popular policies even when the Libs alternative has been disastrous, how the hell is it going to sell the controversial ones?
I don’t think small-target works any more, electorally. We’re seeing internationally the rise of all sorts of populist political movements (mostly on the right, but on the left too), the common factor between them is that they perceive SYSTEMIC crisis, say so, and are prescribing dramatic policy change to address it. But the ALP seems to be still living in a Third Way Blair/Clinton fantasy where hey, it’s all mostly alright except the current mob are incompetent and we’d do a better job tinkering around the edges than they would.
The libs have smelled the coffee (well, most of them have, I think Turnbull is struggling). They see that the old certainties of the 90s and 00s are fading, and that there is the possibility for major change because in an Australia where manufacturing is dead and house prices are wildly out of reach and secure full-time work increasingly an interestingly quaint historical custom, people feel something is wrong and are willing to try strong medicine to fix it. They just passed a titanic tax cut which has more in common with Bush Jr or Trump than anything in Australian political history, and they’re openly talking about selling the ABC, and they gave up talking with conviction about climate change as a real thing years ago. They are staking their claim to be the ones with the strong medicine. Which is horseshit, but people will believe it when they think things are fundamentally sick and the other lot don’t seem to be taking it seriously. And even if it loses them an election this time round, they’ve gotten it into the conversation, so next tine they win office, it’ll be a regular established part of political debate and much easier to make it happen.
The ALP have … announced that they’re going to get rid of negative gearing. Which hey, great policy and long overdue. But seriously, this is a time in history when boldness is politically necessary. This is a time where you can lay out a vision of a significantly changed country and you’ll get political traction because there’s a lot of people who believe significant change is necessary (if there weren’t, why are we getting record numbers of votes for non-major parties every single election?) Rack the top tax bracket up to 60%, close the family trust loophole, break up the big banks and the supermarket oligopoly (hell, bring in some general anti-monopoly laws with real teeth and it’ll catch google and facebook too), quadruple the ATOs and ASICs budget and tell them to go out and chase the big guys first, create a Department of Infrastructure that actually employs construction workers and people who physically build and fix things rather than contracting it out to Downer or Transurban or whoever at great expense every time, ■■■■ off Cuddy Station and anyone else who’s screwing up half the country’s water supply by trying to grow cotton in the ■■■■■■■ desert, put a 20c spin limit on pokies, build the damn NBN and do it right, bring in an industry policy worth a damn, nationalise the energy grid, ceremonially castrate CEOs who use offshore tax-dodging tricks in Fed Square. Be VISIONARY.
But these sound too radical and scary, and so the ALP won’t talk about any of this stuff. But the Libs will talk about, and do, THEIR radical scary stuff, and that’ll mean that theirs is in the political conversation and will stand a good chance of eventually become reality, while the ALPs will get talked about over beers after party conferences sometimes but will never come close to happening
I’ve said it before, but it’s amazing how the majority of policy has drifted rightwards even in my time. I remember when building a private tollroad in Melbourne was an outrage. Now every new major road in the city is assumed to be a tollroad by default. The federal ALP, right now, support an asylum seeker policy that back in the 90s would have been looked at as a Pauline Hanson pipedream. Casualisation and contractorisation of the workforce is an absolute norm. The Victorian ALP is, right now, privatising the bureaucracy that tracks land titles ffs. And they sold the ports a while back. Why? If the ALP aren’t going to push back against the privatisation of yet another publicly owned monopoly utility, at a time where big business is one of the few organisations in the world less liked than government, then what the hell is the point?
Edit Oh, and even as I rant, the federal ALP have agreed with the Libs on a bill intended to clamp down on foreign interference in Australian politics. There is an exemption for companies that are not state-owned, but it applies to every other organisation, state-run or not. This means that it applies to Greenpeace and Amnesty International, but not on Exxon or KPMG or Serco etc etc etc. So basically, it exempts the big businesses who would most often support right-wing causes, but clamps the non-profits who support left-wing causes.
Golf claps, ALP, golf claps.