It’s Woke Culture versus the Workers
The Australian Labor party was formed by the workers unions in 1890. But now, when polled, more than half of the members of one trade union say they are losing support for the Labor Party because it is too focussed on inner city Woke Ideals like climate change and gender issues. For a quarter of members the betrayal was so bad they won’t even vote Labor.
Working-class Aussies are abandoning the ALP in droves over the party’s obsession with “woke” issues like gender, race and climate change.
Joe Hildebrand, News.com
Working-class Australians — the very foundation of the Labor Party — are abandoning the ALP in droves because they think the party has been overrun by “woke ideals” and “white-collar university educated yuppies”.
Private research commissioned by the NSW Electrical Trades Union – which was itself just taken over by the Left this week – has found a quarter of union members surveyed no longer vote Labor and a further 35 per cent reported decreasing support for the party.
Incredibly, almost one in five said the Liberal party better represented working people.
They surveyed 1500 people from the Electrical Trades Union in areas around Sydney
“…the perception of Labor as captive to trendy inner-city issues is killing the party.”
“Support for the Labor Party among ETU NSW members has markedly declined in recent years – around 60 per cent of survey respondents report a decrease in their support with 25 per cent indicating they no longer vote Labor,” the report said.
“Nearly a fifth of respondents now see the Liberal Party as the major party that best represents working people like them.”
The survey found 42 per cent of union members saw “gender issues” as the biggest distraction to what government should really be focusing on, followed by climate change at 34 per cent.
One participant said, “I feel betrayed or cheated by the Labor Party. They’ve made a big push for carbon neutrality, catering to leftists in inner city Melbourne or Sydney. F**k you, we’ll vote Pauline Hanson or Clive Palmer.”
…another said, “The Liberals might be coming for our rights, but Labor are coming for our jobs.”
h/t Analytic
In Canada, we have the same problem.
Our Conservative party signed a Declaration that they would get rid of the climate tax and in the last week declared that they wanted to impose a climate levy.
And they want people to believe that it is totally different and yet follows the exact same structure.
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They have acquired the Liberl habit of making promises with no intention of keeping them.
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And just this simple, the courts can take your basic rights away.
https://www.dailywire.com/news/court-grants-albertas-request-to-forbid-jailed-pastor-from-challenging-health-order-during-trial
As the government has time to gather their evidence and science, you have no rights at all but what the government pretends you have.
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It’s weird watching one of the last bastions of conservatism in Canada suddenly go full Leftist totalitarian, isn’t it?
I didn’t see it before, but i can see Alberta leaving the confederation now.
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Tony Abbott: stop the boats, repeal the carbon tax
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But what about:
– mass immigration;
– illegal arrivals by means other than boats;
– free speech;
– reform of the justice system;
– reform of electoral law;
– wasting taxpayers money on sport and the arts;
– subsidies for ‘renewables’;
– welfare as a lifestyle choice;
– a genuine bill of rights, rather than the Left’s proposal to use a ‘bill of rights’ to confer disproportionate powers on particular groups;
– aggressive push-back against the Left’s cultural agenda;
– end the exploitation of minorities for political purposes, such as blocking development;
– taking back control of education and the national curriculum;
– home ownership for the less-well-off so that they have a stake in society and are less likely to fall prey to political exploitation; and
– ending the use of treaties to circumvent parliament.
And those are just the issues that come to mind without ruminating on it.
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Traditional compacts of alliance are reforming and the labour movement is just part of this current entropy.
Support for Trump (2020) grew markedly amongst the working poor, as they found their lived experience differed wildly from the various presented narratives.
Meanwhile – Big business, Big media and Big tech have all neatly aligned to support the unashamedly leftist Biden/Harris administration.
Better to use the labels ‘Progressive’ & “Conservative’ – or if you prefer ‘Left wing nut jobs’ & ‘Far right extremists’.
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Why not `Fantasists and Realists’?
It has the advantage of accuracy.
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If you want accuracy then Fantasists and Other Fantasists.
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labour voters went Liberal or Independent through fear of losing everything last election after Shorten actually told them so, that lack of trust will hopefully filter to the migrant base but I’m not sure.
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You watch, next election the policies will still be the same, they just won’t telegraph them like Shortone did.
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The recent attempt by South Australian voters to rid themselves of the woke yoke of renewables was totally ignored by the newly installed Libl Parti.
They just doubled down on the biggest money making scheme available to them; MalEx444 would have been proud of his new parti.
Scomos confirmation yesterday of his disdain for the working plebs of Australia was the last straw for me.
I have no respect for the man.
https://joannenova.com.au/2021/04/weekend-unthreaded-356/#comment-2421737
God save Australia.
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From Voltaire’s Bastards. ‘May the people who take over your country be kind to you.’
Will be interesting to see if the ‘We the People’ can hold the Alamo against the overwhelming odds of the Deep State, the CCP and the Masters of the Universe.
The race is on to recapture the Republican Party from the Precinct level up. Australia has the same problem, Our Politicians are beholden to the Party machines and the Party machines are entirely funded by the Fascist structure of big government and wealthy elite handing out our family silver, retirement funds, fiat currency and the taxes on the Middle Class. The Political Parties have to be retaken at grass roots level and the comfortable arrangement that has removed the ‘separation of powers’ reset to a less collegiate level.
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Good luck with the roots of the grass …
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Good luck with the roots of the grass
Thanks my tragic friend,
I find I have to dig out the giant rats tail grass rather than slashing it.
On the serious side, isn’t it funny the major political parties do not actively tout for members?
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Not to mention that travesty of a sideshow with “dancers” at the Naval ceremony. For God’s sake who or what authorised that cock up.
One can only hope we were spared further embarrassment & the Duke Of Edinburgh was not aware of the new low reached by Australian defence authority before he exited this world gone bonkers!
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The Chief of Navy responds;
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ABC described as CRAFTY and by Crikey they were.
https://www.crikey.com.au/2021/04/16/clown-of-the-week-101-doll-squadron/
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Faceplant ABC – their despicable reporting deserve a few in the firing line or fighting to save their careers.
It would not be the first time that a welcome to country ceremony has left me wondering. It is not unusual when presented in that light.
Mind you, I consider welcome to country to be racially motivated – but that is just an opinion. My world is quite bland.
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Excellent statement from the Chief of Navy. Local girls, local support. Good on them. Bu**er the ABC.
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KK,
the Liberals in SA have a real problem in getting re-elected. Premier Marshal is a failure as a leader and has “all the charisma of a dead fish” (not mine, but useful). Most of their MPs got there with support from the Birmingham-Pyne faction, so are pretty useless. The Liberal Minister for electricity is a complete waste of money, and just does whatever the renewables lobby wants.
Against that they have a tough** Leader of the Opposition who doesn’t appear in the media very often and is smart enough to have something sensible to say when he does – lately he has had lots of chances to say the government has not done its job. Obviously he doesn’t believe in interrupting the enemy while they are making mistakes. He has problems within his own party, former Minister for Electricity Koutsantonis in particular, but he seems to have been told to shut up. I think the Liberals only hope is to somehow get Koutsantonis (Silly Kout) on the TV as often as they can to remind voters of the last Labor government, they certainly can’t campaign on their achievements.
Morrison is trying to find a prop for Gupta’s Whyalla steel works, and has been told (by the useless local Libs.) that the interconnector to Dubbo is a vote winner.
**He laid charges of blackmail against an ex-MP who was trying to resurrect her political career by threatening him with slander.
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If you still think that the local Liberals know (in Spike Milligan’s words) their Madras from their Elba, consider that Mayo was at one time the safest Liberal seat in the entire country. It is now with an Independent who has won the last 3 elections. She was a party member too.
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He is still the lesser of two evils. Keep the faith, a PM is much easier to replace than a President.
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No thanks. Voting for the lesser of 2 evils all the time is why we are in the situation we are in now. I will be looking elsewhere.
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I don’t like weevils.
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OK, I’m outvoted, but remember how preference voting works. But for a few seats in Vic that go green and a couple in Qld who vote One Nation the rest is a two horse race, you can vote Shooters & Fishers 1, Palmer 2 but eventually you have to rank Labor/Coalition.
I will never rank labor above coalition as long as I am on the green side of the grass. Not being in America I am reasonably confident that I will not do so EVER.
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The problem in Australia is whilst the Libs have the opportunity to take advantage of this trend they’re not much better. The issue of energy needs to be differentiated and The Scomo who carried a lump of coal into parliament needs to return. There are great Libs who occupy back benches so I see hope but Scomos desire to plot an uncontroversial middle road is dragging him away from supporting conservatives.
At a state level the Libs are almost indistinguishable from Labour . In fact in NSW , South Aust and WA they are closer to the greens.
The Libs have a real opportunity to establish political dominance and are blowing it by supporting / or at least not opposing leftist causes. A proper culling of the ABC is needed to reduce the noise made by the left. The Libs are so distracted by the loudness of the left without considering how many people they really represent. It’s time they reviewed what it means to be a conservative and rule for them. Trying to win votes from the left is futile as they will only vote for the genuine article and you lose support of your base by doing so.
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The Liberals will do nothing. Why would they? These are individuals who have to weigh their cushy jobs and nice earners for family and friends against Fake media examination of every aspect of their lives, tax audits, expensive legal costs and being excluded from the perks of Parliamentary privileges. According to Senator John Herron , ‘You won’t even find the bathrooms if you do not conform’.
Australia needs a Trump with skin so thick and enough wealth and family support to break through. Trump succeeded in that he brought the cockroaches into the light, so the will of the people and their constitution can be tested.
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Yes Ziggy, you are so right about ScoMo returning to the bloke that carried the lump of coal into Parliament….. the middle road he is trying to fashion is leaving him looking like he has no ideals at all. As Bjalke Jo once said having one leg each side of a barb wire fence can end up being a very uncomfortable position, and the longer ScoMo treads that path, the more uncomfortable he will look. Time to look to and listen to those on the back-bench that have a bit of spine, like Canavan and Kelly, for a start.
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To be fair to Morrison, he was the choice Malcolm Turnbull fought hard to install. And Turnbull broke protocol and tradition by hanging in until Dutton was defeated and Morrison installed.
To my delight, Turnbull is totally p*ssed off with Morrison’s approach. Morrison is a classic middle of the road politician and makes sensible balanced decisions. And in this era of extremist politicians he comes across as a steady manager, a Christian, a family man and sensible. He is not irascible, easily manipulated or given to flights of fancy or easily intimidated by the Press or anyone else. That is not what Turnbull thought. He thought Morrison was controllable, a lackey. And Cormann and Frydenberg. All proved far better politicians and operators than Turnbull thought. And Julie Bishop fell on her own sword as Foreign Minister so she could get the job she most wanted. And then regretted it. Meanwhile the Black Hand is gone, all abandoned the ship they scuttled to find it still afloat.
And even the Labor party has just accepted that it makes no sense in the foreseeable future to stop coal mining and coal exports and to keep chasing Green votes, as was Turnbull’s Grand Scheme, to replace Labor with the Greens to form the all conquering Turnbull’s Liberals. The Greens are never going to preference the Liberals, so in a two horse race, they are trapped. Why humour them?
So while ScoMo is nothing like the wimp Turnbull wanted, he appears to be just a competent manager, not a visionary. As was evidenced in his execution of Abbott’s very successful plan to stop the boats.
And ScoMo’s amazing election success was the strongest sign that Labor has totally lost their way, even with the old Labor of workers, not public servants, nurses and teachers. It is still a mining country and all of our wealth comes from mining. So the woke Labor politicians are sandwiched between Green extremists and Corporate Elites and can please neither. And the disenchanted are voting anything but Green and Labor.
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You say (my bold):
and he replied to me in Dec 2020:
Given the many and varied articles to be found referring to ‘our science agencies’ and their manipulation of data, particularly the CSIRO, it would not be sensible for him to accept their findings.
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“ScoMo’s amazing election success”, really? How many seats did they win over the enemy at the time? A few. Now its down to what, 2? He only won because of North Queensland and could easily lose us at the next election as we get more and more pissed off with him and his appeasers. Up here the common word in regard to scomo is “disappointed”.
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Jo Bjelke did have a way with words. Having one leg on each side of the barbed wire fence is also a way of achieving gender neutrality 🙂
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It’s only dangerous if you move.
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I met Jo in 1979 n I was involved in covering the old QLD Houses of Parliament in 20km of plastic sheet and fumigating it to get rid of an exotic termite imported on ex US Navy furniture after the Pacific War. He wanted to know if he could leave a few polies inside when we gassed it! Not one to mince his words was old Jo.
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You are so right about the NSW Liberals Zigmaster – the Photios Phaction, represented by Matt Kean and ably supported by Gladys, Wilson and many others are totally focussed on zero emmissions and renewables *cough* taking over from reliables. Kean, in particular, is a disgrace and would be more at home in the extremist faction of the Greens.
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Matt Kean is living proof of what the Libls are up to.
Additionally he’s a very good antidote for those who might have seen a Zali S clone being more attractive from another parti.
They can vote Libl and feel safe that they have voted for the Vironment.
Sanity will be resumed at some stage in the future but I dread what’s going to happen in the meantime.
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Zig, I was uncertain about Scomo but yesterday’s speech was the clincher for me.
Morally incomprehensible.
It was pure and simple an attempt to purchase votes with our hard earned tax dollars.
There’s money and loot in them thar renewables, we can’t stop the train now, it’s got too much momentum.
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Yes, but you cannot stop it from opposition either. The smaller states are basket cases economically, stuffed with public servants who predictably vote for the party which gives them the most money. Hobart, Adelaide, Darwin, Canberra. And they get the same representation in the Senate (except Canberra) so they dominate the Upper House and a vote in Hobart or Adelaide has the same value as 8-16 votes in NSW. It’s an unfair system, but the only way Federation can work. The US and UK have the same problem. Minority rules.
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This meme has a long history … Murdoch papers have trumpeted for at least half a century that Labor is “losing its working class base”. Anyway it’s no great mystery – somebody voted for Menzies, Fraser, and Howard (and much helped by having almost 100% of the media campaigning for the Libs).
And the Electrical Trades Union is hardly typical of low-paid working class struggle – there are a lot of very well-off independent contractors who are laying cables and installing downlights.
Whatever – Labor is the natural home of the educated urban middle class, and has been for a long time. Only among the right is “woke” a term of abuse – most Labor supporters are quite proud of their “wokeness” – I certainly know that I am: a belief in social justice and human rights causes.
The opposite is just too awful – the selfish Me Generation xenophobic hate stuff that is pushed by conservatives every day. Every single social reform that even every conservative is the beneficiary of, has come about through “woke” campaigns and laws by labor parties – every single one.
Everything from the abolition of slavery and child exploitation, universal suffrage, women’s rights, gay rights, health & safety, worker wages & conditions, universal health care, widely available higher education, abortion reform, indigenous rights, environmental laws, welfare safety net, the Family Court … it is a huge list.
Everyone realises the Labor Party is a really broad church, and has been a couple of generations. But really, where else are young educated middle class going to go? They do not feel attracted to the tory suits in the Liberal Party, nor the Squattocracy of the Nationals.
We have had centrist moderate parties in the past – Andrew Barton’s Australia Party, Don Chipp’s Democrats, and maybe others – but they cannot cut through the two major parties with the wider public.
A lot of people are attracted to the Greens just on environmental grounds, but some of their other policies are too far to the left for many.
Anyway – even if the suburban sparkies with their hot utes and shiny jet skies don’t like the inner-city latte-sippers – realistically, where else are they going to go? Despite the news.com story cherry-picking the comment about Pauline Hanson or Clive Palmer, the overwhelming majority of unionists still vote Labor, and will continue to do so.
Reports of Labor’s demise because of too much wokery – are much exaggerated, I reckon.
[Yawn. WE note the long comment with a complete lack of any data. Ignore the transparent baits here. Tilba seemingly wants to get people angry… Yawn. – Jo]
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Correction … it was of course Gordon Barton.
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I have always supported Labor, but unfortunately they have strayed into a green mire and lost their way. CO2 does not cause global warming, but Albo and the ALP have gone out of their way to attract voters to their green/left agenda and its not going to work.
‘They do not feel attracted to the … Squattocracy of the Nationals.’
We are in the 21st century and I vote for the Nats because they represent the working class in the bush. Farmers and graziers are no longer the Squattocracy, we have moved on.
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TT, you can’t say “trumpeted” anymore; the correct description of that process is “broadcast”.
“Making a loud proclamation” would also do the job but is a bit too Biblical for common usage.
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The wokeness phenomenon is a virus infecting the western world.
Repubs are genuflecting to it here in the US, or simply silent out of fear.
Opposition seems only to be rising across the political spectrum from either the courageous or the immune.
For example, ‘equity’ as word in the context of something other than loans, I first heard with Evergreen College and the persecution of Bret Weinstein.
What, three years ago?
Most thought it just a one off occurrence at a small college frequented by fringe west coast vegans.
Now the word appears in product adds.
This tumor is growing out of control and will certainly burst and be terminal for some section of the political spectrum.
I ain’t sure which one.
If the contagion dominates can the host survive?
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Equity is about the redistribution of power which is very different to the traditional liberal/conservative interpretation of equality before the law and equal opportunity to access social goods like health, education and voting. Woke equity seeks to dismantle the power structures that have entrenched ‘White privaledge’. Wokism is a postmodern redemption myth that has captured the imagination of neo-Marxists. In a pluralist democracy it has every right to exist, but lthe same as any other worldview belief, like secular humanism for example, it cant be shoved down the throats of those who choose not to believe it.
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‘Wokism is a postmodern redemption myth that has captured the imagination of neo-Marxists. In a pluralist democracy it has every right to exist’
A redemption myth perhaps in conception, a revenge reality in practice.
In a pluralistic democracy, social revenge may be problematic.
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Agree with you John. A worldview based on hatred of ‘the other” will eventually be self defeating. But it may take a while for our sleepwalking politicians, afraid to offend any inner city voters, to wake up. In America, Wokism has certainly woken up white supremacists fearing their loss of identity which is problematic indeed. The U.S. culture war will not end well.
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This is also the view of many retired Labor MP’s. Perhaps what labor needs is a great reset.
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I’m not sure why … Labor has been reasonably successful over the last generation in attracting a lot more middle class punters – those who really don’t like the conservative side of politics, and like Labor’s social policies.
Not sure why you would jeopardise that. There are a lot of people out there who are not conservative.
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Shouldn’t your last comment read: “There are a lot of people out there who are not labelled conservative”. There are also a lot of people who do not appreciate being labelled racist, homophobic, islamophobic and misogynistic. These people are from the old left side of politics whose main goal was economic equality. Being gainfully employed the important issue for these people, look at the results from the Hunter electorate at the last Federal election. This is a clue to how people are thinking.
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1. I was always a swing voter, I voted for the party who were doing the best in my view.
2. I noticed that Labor would promise many things, all of which I supported, but they always did the opposite.
3. Rudd and Gillard demonstrated how evil and depraved the party members are. I now put Labor last on the ballot, even below the Greens. And they will never ever get any fraction of a vote from me again.
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Howard – Abbott – Turnbull – Morrison … they’re no slouches either.
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In these days of the UN/China virus, it’s not a two party system, it’s a uniparty.
Both Lib/Lab are in lockstep with covid lockdowns, both have green economy destroying renewable energy policies.
Hillary redefined and belled the cat when she called her opponents deplorable.
Her alternative is self-describes elites, and average joe workers are not included there …
18 January 2017: Davos Elite Seeks Fixes to Defend the System From Populists
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-18/lagarde-urges-wealth-redistribution-as-dalio-warns-on-populists
Green Lib/Lab are the elites.
Everyone else is a deplorable – racist, redneck homophobes …
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Union membership is at historic lows, and this is worldwide, but UNIONS! The fact is that for every 100 labour voters, only 16 will be in a union.
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Workers bargain for themselves and don’t need unions as such. So now the battle between the two majors is muddied, more to do with climate and energy than pay and conditions.
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El gordo, I don’t know which workers you are talking about, bu my experience as a member of the ETU and working in the regions where there is only one employer, who has a take it or leave it approach to bargaining made me realise just how valuable the union was, not only in the bargaining phase, but in the enforcement of worker rights, particularly in the interpretation of the contracts.
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Out in the bush we are mostly self employed, family affairs of one sort or another.
The emergence of the labour movement in the late 19th century was the foundation for the ALP, but now the party is more concerned about remaining relevant.
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Banks, Services, supermarkets, Petrol stations…. please don’t patronise,
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The banks and universities are closing, but of course there are public service jobs and other commercial service industries, but there is a lot of small business and no union involvement.
I’m astonished that you think I’m being patronising, its not my style.
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History is not on your side with that statement, comrade. Unions have been (and remain) critical to the protection of workers, proper representation in disputes, and for expert participation in negotiating enterprise agreements.
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Yes sir, but think back to the days of running strikes and how a union man brought it to an end with enterprise bargaining.
A gold mine to the west of me began a huge extension and employed thousands in the startup phase, then they brought in extracting machines and sacked practically everyone. In the new world order machines will replace humans, working 24/7 without complaint, so ultimately there is less security.
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All the more reason for unions to try and protect jobs and workers.
Complete automation is a false god. Where are you going to find consumers for your goods, what are you going to do with millions of people who cannot find secure and worthwhile work – let alone meaningful and rewarding careers?
The elites can build gates compounds, but it’s hardly a good life. The elites in Africa, the Middle East, and South America do it – but don’t have anywhere near the pleasant life of someone living in Noosa earning $80,000 a year. I know where I’d rather be.
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Let us focus only on Australia, in this brave new world we’ll continue as a quarry and tourist destination.
‘Where are you going to find consumers for your goods …’
The Third World needs to be uplifted and that is where the Belt and Road comes into play, creating new markets. The US is going to try and emulate China, but I’m not sure how this will pan out.
We cannot stop technological progress, so we better start preparing ourselves for a life without meaningful work.
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IIRC those who found that they had been signed up by Shorten were not pleased
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Glad you are on board with this one Fitzy. The champagne socialists are never going to be union members. Imagine having to rub shoulders with the unwashed working class.
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I was pretty much a Chardonnay Socialist throughout my working life (don’t care for champagne), in a range of disparate industries, but was always a middle-class union member. And many unions can cover a wide range of people – from the lowliest filing clerk or warehouse employee through to fairly senior middle managers.
Sometimes broad generalisations can only get you so far.
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One reason union membership is so low is because unions kill their own industries.
Our miners aren’t unionised and have negotiated an arrangement with the companies that allows them to run efficiently, in return the miners work hard and get paid well. Win Win Without them our A$ would be the Pacific Peso.
In comparison the MUA has destroyed Australian shipping. It is cheaper to get beer from Europe than Tas beer across Bass St. Pity. I liked Tas beer.
I knew a couple of MUA members who worked the tugs, they never went out of sight of land and were never at sea for many hours, their pay and conditions were amazing. With that in mind it would be cheaper to get natural gas from Singapore on a Panama registered ship than from our own gas fields direct to Melbourne or Sydney. I’m pretty sure it is the MUA that has destroyed our oil refinery industry. Moving oil on Aus ships with Aus crews, as mandated. is too expensive.
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One of the big changes I worked hard to achieve was to pay all employees a negotiated salary. The salary range set by the company and the individual salary based on the things the company considered important.
I managed a small R&D team in Broken Hill and it was the first group in the City to be all salaried. In the first year of setting it up there was a City wide strike called. We had to tell our guys to stay home to avoid rocking the boat but they all wanted to be at work. I had an argument with the MD at the time over paying them to stay away because they were on a fixed salary. It was our decision for them to stay away and they were on a salary like any “staff” member. Paying a salary avoids all the overhead of clock watching and hourly timekeeping.
The lesson there is that the vast majority of Australians are willing to give more than they take.
Salaries in the Australian mining and mineral processing industry gradually became common place. One of my key observations was that tradesmen became more diligent about completing a task. The incentive to do a shoddy job and get called back in on double time or to go slow and extend the job into overtime was removed. Invariably they preferred to hang about after the nominal end of the shift or day to make certain everything was working as it should.
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The mining unions’ Alamo was the Mt Isa strike, back in Premier Jo’s day. An agitator [Pat Mackie] took the unions out for some time. The company used the time well and opened a new shaft or some such. No one was sure if Pat was a management plant or not.
A little from wiki:
The dispute which led to the Mount Isa Mines Strike of 1964 involved numerous issues of pay and conditions and lasted an unprecedented 32 weeks.
Mackie was a member of the Australian Workers’ Union (AWU) and became the de facto leader of the strike. While it was AWU policy to resolve the dispute through arbitration before the Industrial Relations Commission, he pursued direct militant action and insisted on an enterprise agreement with the company. As a consequence the AWU expelled him from the union, which allowed the company to terminate his employment. The dispute was prolonged by the insistence of strikers that he be reinstated, a demand that was never met.
After the dispute, Mackie was banned from Mount Isa Mines, and the government unsuccessfully tried to have him deported to New Zealand.
Unionism destroyed Collinsville and its coal mine and power station. If Collinsville wasn’t the a ole of the country you could stand on a milk crate and see it from there. They elected a loud and proud communist to state parliament once.
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I believe the barny Jo had with the ETU in the SEAQ was a watershed. That was in the early 1980s.
And then there was Bob Hawk who took on the pilots. It was unusual for the Labor leader in the late 1980s to dish it up to unions but the pilots were an easy target because their conditions were so far above average.
Keating’s Productivity Commission was a powerful force for change in the mining industry and the electricity supply industry. Not specifically union bashing but it cleared the path for vastly improved working relations.
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Only 26% of Labor voters are in a union, but the are the bigger portion of those who do not swing.
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So – who is the market for Labor – a rusted on but irrelevant minority of the other 75%
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I did n’t write the comment well but you still should have followed it. Union members are rusted on Labor voters so there will be a bigger effect in non-Union who aren’t rusted on for other reasons.
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There is a big difference between “woke” and “woke up”
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The veracity of the substance of this piece is doubtful given that the level of community support for the ALP is not much different from the norm.
If ScoMo thought for an instant that ALP support had collapsed as much as claimed in this piece, he’d call an election immediately.
The truth is that rusted-on Labor, Liberal and Greens voters always support their favourite team regardless of performance. It’s just tribalism writ large.
As is always the case, the swing voters are the ones who actually decide the outcomes of elections, not the Party faithful. ScoMo’s woke leanings, in a desperate, yet vain, hope to conjure the support of the media and radical Left will likely be his undoing in the same way Kirkup hoist himself on his own petard.
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Wasn’t Trump elected mostly by the working class vote (2016)?
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And again in 2020, sadly the woke tech class decided otherwise.
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Yes it is true that a lot of working-class people voted for Trump, on a range of political and ideological grounds (including some fairly unsavoury ones). But working-class people can and do vote against their own economic interests for a whole lot of reasons not connected to wages and conditions. It must be thus – otherwise conservative parties would be overwhelmed in every election.
Trump did lose the popular vote both times as well. And in a political system in which a lot of people don’t vote, it’s much harder to predict outcomes – getting out the vote is a critical part of the process, unlike in Australia, where the major parties are just focused on the “middle 10%”, and more specifically, the 20 or 30 most marginal seats.
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The world has turned upside down, the political culture of Australia and the US is evolving.
Donald spoke the language of the working class and they voted Republican in their droves, while in Oz the federal ALP is doomed to wander the political wilderness until they find themselves.
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The ALP couldn’t care less about the workers. Since the Unions were handed control of the industry superannuation funds, a bottomless pit of effectively free money, the Union heavies no longer need their members. So, the inevitable result is alienated workers who are moving away from the ALP – leftists to the Greens, conservatives to the Coalition or One Nation. The ALP is moribund.
70
Agreed.
So where is our political culture heading?
00
To the future! To be as those who are willing and able to claim it! – Some assembly required.
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I dont know about you in Australia but in good old Enzed unions are dead and history, We got soo fed up with them we abolished them.
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That may be true in Waikikamukau but it’s not in Auckland. I retired two years ago and right up to the end, I was a member of a union.
20
Yet I don’t think many voters have any idea how much money is required (or wasted) to reach the elites net zero BS by 2040 or ’50.
NZ is the only govt that has tried to calculate the horrendous cost and arrived at about 5 trillion $ and remember NZ emits just 0.1% of global emissions while Aussies are now 1.1%.
Simple maths tells us that our cost would be about 55 trillion by 2050, China about 1500 T $, USA about 690 T $, EU 27 about 485 T $.
Lomborg’s expert team has checked the NZ calcs and agreed with their sums and he has maths, science, stats and economic experts by the score.
Here’s a recent quote from Lomborg’s NZ Herald article. You have to read the full piece through many ads. And USA cost would be 5 T EVERY YEAR. Biden is totally clueless and I’m afraid that most voters here in Australia or other countries don’t understand any of this data and the full implications of their BS and con trick.
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/bjorn-lomborg-joe-bidens-us2-trillion-climate-plan-could-fix-it/KSJ5P3LEHLJQ6EOT7S256SZPGM/
“Biden’s plan doesn’t specify the price for getting US emissions to zero. Only one nation — New Zealand — has been bold enough to request an independent cost estimate of cutting emissions to zero by 2050. They found that the optimistic cost would reduce GDP by a whopping 16 per cent. Translated to the US, this implies a cost of at least US$5 trillion in today’s money. Not just once, but every year”.
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The impact of their so called Existential threat, or crisis or emergency etc by 2070 will be ZIP and by then everyone will be much wealthier and healthier and Lomborg AGAIN uses UN data for this quote. Ditto Shellenberger, Ridley, Koonin, Goklany, Humlum, Lindzen, Spencer, Christy, Rosling, McIntyre, McKitrick etc.
You can watch this video or read the full transcript at the link. Uncommon KNOWLEDGE indeed. If the real data about their so called climate crisis was put on trial it would be thrown out of court and costs awarded against the religious fanatics. Lomborg is correct, their BS is a FALSE ALARM.
https://www.hoover.org/research/bjorn-lomborg-declares-false-alarm-climate-hysteria-1
“Bjorn Lomborg: They expect that by 2075, the average person on the planet will be 2.63 times richer than he or she is today. So what climate change will mean, is instead of being 2.63 times richer, we will only be 2.56 times richer. That’s a problem, it is not the end of the world. And you then asked me, “why is this happening?” Well, I think there’s a confluence of different things here. First of all, media loves terrible stories. They’ve always done that”.
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If civilization still exists. It’s not the disaster which is commonly considered ‘The Climate’ but the the planetary magnetic field collapse. We have no idea how serious that is going to be. Ergo we have no idea how the climate will react. The last one was the Younger Dryas and it took out all the North American megafauna and quite a lot of humans too. (The Clovis culture.) In the scheme of Magnetic deviations, the Younger Dryas was not all that extreme but it’s effects were significant.
44000 years ago was the LasChamp. It took out all the Australian megafauna. It was like the Younger Dryas in terms of temperature (below freezing).
30
?
00
Sophocles I have 41,400 years BP for the excursion and the megafauna became extinct between 45,000 and 43,000 years BP. Lake Mungo was presumably still habitable at 42,000 years BP.
Also the Younger Dryas was different, but we should discuss this on the open thread.
20
The Younger Dryas was probably caused by a massive inflow of freshwater into the northwest Atlantic Ocean, disrupting the Gulf Stream. The extinction of Australian megafauna was most probably caused by very resourceful Indigenous hunters who had big clubs and sharp spears.
21
Flannery agrees with you about the megafauna, but the Younger Dryas may have been caused by an asteroid impact in the Northern Hemisphere.
00
And just when the WOKE Liberal caravan strated rolling (downhill) in today’s Australian on Federal Parliament
“Opposition resources spokeswoman Madeleine King has said Labor will not stand in the way of new mines and believes Australia will export coal beyond 2050, as the party moves to recast itself as a middle-ground option in the climate change wars.
Ms King, a West Australian MP who took over the resources portfolio in January, said she is up for the challenge of taking on the perception in Western Australia and Queensland that federal Labor is not supportive of the resources industry.
When asked whether Labor supported the coal sector, Ms King said “you bet it does,” and stressed her belief that Australia would continue to export the resource past 2050.
“It is a major export. It is in our top three in any given time at the moment,” Ms King told The Australian.
“For so long as international markets want to buy Australian coal, which is high quality, then they will be able to.”
Nothing about using our coal to produce cheap reliable electricity.
100
Governments, schools and parents have been so busy encouraging an IT generation so as to avoid coaching them in life skills that kids are now dependant on FarceBook and Twatter for education in all things. Kids now look up to creatures like Greta Thongburg and global warming/Extinction Rebellion as religions. Their parents are now the existential threat. The approaching threat of China and Russia to world peace are meaningless. Perhaps reality will bite when The USA attempts to stall a Chinese takeover of Taiwan or Russia usurps Ukrain? We can but hope!
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Back in the day
https://redpowerphotos.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/monthly_2021_04/Screenshot_20210418-022901_Facebook.thumb.jpg.860bdb8ebcf5cbded7da73e8847a9ae6.jpg
00
My experience with unions has been that they are happy to take your money , but when you want their help they go missing . I was a member of what has become “United Voice” and I resigned after they were never in when I called and never returned calls. The Labour Party , which is heavily funded by unions has also lost interest in supporting workers and is now fully woke . We need politicians who are able to cut through the misdirection and lies and serve the majority of the voting public and not just the vocal (and misinformed) minorities. Public servants who serve the public….
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The sad part about the ALP is that they no longer care about workers or jobs and they are not even trying to hide this fact. Effectively they are now in step with Green ideology, which is all about dividing the community along race and gender lines, with the aim of creating unhinged civil unrest in order to bring down the system to make possible the great reset to Marxism. Jobs are now viewed as evil wealth creating commodities, that need to be exported to the poorer countries and the social focus is to promote “white guilt” in order to create future expectations of the poverty that will follow.
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(Satire.)
https://www.reddit.com/r/comics/comments/m7c4p/no_heart_no_brain_no_courage/
In The Wonderful Wizard of Oz Dorothy speaks to Tin Man, Scarecrow and Cowardly Lion and says “No brains, no courage and no heart…so you’re politicians right?”
80
The Canberra swamp is populated by the Miscellaneous Workers Union, as is Melbourne which is bureaucrats looking for more flexitime to post about gender fluidity and how they feel threatened in a workplace that they actually dominate!
That’s the unionism in the politicians faces every day and it’s a bigger wake up call for Morrison than Albanese.
The public has known for years that manufacturing where the old style Labor unionist was employed was killed off by climate policies and those jobs were turned into MSDS producing bureaucratic drones. They’ve now repopulated with the bottom 5% of Uni ‘graduates’ and drop outs. Their woke drivel is perpetuated by twentysomething ‘political advisers’ who all believe they’ll turn the world into a marxist utopia by identity politics and critical race theory. The success of Kamala Harris’ trojan horse Dementia Joe Biden has made the labor leftwing hopeful of that happening here.
The LNP has to look at this disaffected group as what Australia thinks is happening to society and pull back from climate and gender stupidity. The fact that a disaffected Labor unionist thinks the conservatives will take their rights has to be addressed, as the left-wing political movement sits behind the World Economic Forum’s agenda of ‘you will have nothing and be happy’! If that isn’t a grab for your rights then they are seriously deluded! That is the future which is fast approaching if the West doesn’t stand up now and say we back the politics which promotes freedom of inventiveness which drives jobs, not divisive social engineering designed to highlight differences under the guise of tolerance!
There’s no tolerance in the Labor tolerance movement!
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No – it’s mostly the CPSU – of which I was a proud member for two decades.
03
Of course, your comments thru this whole thread prove that.
20
Must be a Sydney vs rest of Australia thing. Perhaps Gladys B in NSW wins the hearts of the faltering ALP potential voters. Here in Victoria its hard to discern the difference between Labour and Liberals (LNP). The local LNP have still not laid a glove on Daniel Andrews and Labour even after all his quarantine failures and hideous lockdowns. After the last state election in Victoria (pre COVID) the opposition put up a half baked election campaign. When they spectacularly lost ( no surprise) they blamed their lack of action vs Climate change as the reason. My local state member (Liberal) only just won her seat -which is regional and very rural. Her Twitter performance was restricted to criticising Donald Trump and her Twitter bio pic has a face mask on. Next election I’m voting PHON or Independent.
90
PHON or suitable independents.
With Grines, Libls and Labas last.
50
Can I point out – not for the first time – that the ALP spells its name“Labor”?
02
Don’t labor the point about labour.
20
Yeah! Ironclad guarantee to take “U” out of work
50
Apologies – my bad!
00
That’s ok Ross, so long as you remember that it’s the Labour Party in the UK, not as some have spelt it, without the ‘u’!
00
I sense that all political parties and politicians have cornered themselves into woke wiggle room. What would they do without media.
They are not transparent, they are see-through.
Only a handful of them speak common sense, all the rest are lost in blind diplomacy with double entendres without an iota of original thought.
Left and right are in an orgy in the middle.
The left going too far left loses leaders.
The right going too far right loses leaders.
So the happy place appears to be in the middle which is the place of the swinging voters.
I vote based on character and spine and not for those that prance with weight of the fairies nuts.
I would never vote for Labour who are a stone’s throw to Commo/brotherhood.
70
The idea of net zero by 2050 is the greatest fairy story of the last 2000 years and boy there’s been some delusional BS for comparison over that long period of time.
Here Willis tries to show how impossible net zero would be, just for electricity generation. Of course he uses proper data to try and wake up the crazy fanatics, but most of these donkeys only care about the L W politics and certainly not science or maths or the ruination of the environment by the toxic S&W disaster.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/04/16/us-green-impossibilities/
60
Maybe so, but the LNP are not conservative. They are “progressive” with their neo-liberal agenda.
Big debt, big immigration, soft on free speech, shocking on gun rights.
They, like the Labor Party, are purveyors of inflationism.
I’ll never vote for them.
20
The level of anti-unionism on here is quite astonishing.
It would be interesting to check every poster’s father and grandfather (and mother and grandmother) – to see whether their lives were improved by the efforts and amazing achievements of unions in the period between say 1890 and 1990.
I think some people have no sense of history – or appreciate the degree to which the last 3-4 generations have ALL been about class struggle.
04
The ALP believe in workers, much the same way as the Liberal Party believes in freedom.
https://www.liberal.org.au/our-beliefs
Can anyone give me an example of the most recent time either of the major parties stood up for what they claim to believe in?
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In the case of the Liberal Party, sadly I cannot. I have waved a copy of that page about at a party meet and greet.
Try looking up the Labor Party beliefs. They claim to support a ‘Fair Go’ for everyone but they have troulbe trying to explain what a Fair Go actually means.
30
Tel
It is the age of feelings
The old “feeling well” and “Feeling crook” have expanded
Seems there are the “feelings of the electioneering stump”
But also a remembrance of the old saying
“Seeing’s believing: feeling’s the naked truth”
10
Standing up for beliefs basically ended with Tony Abbott’s shafting.Since then, it has all been about political expediency.
00
The biggest trade union in the world is in China, with 300 million members, and in 1982 a law was passed that they must not strike.
10
“The Liberals might be coming for our rights, but Labor are coming for our jobs.”
So it’s the liberals that want to take away our right to free speech, free choice, self determination, free thought, freedom of religion, education, political belief even freedom to join or not join a union.
It’s the Liberals that are taking away those rights?
00
So many posts about this “upperclass”. WOuld appreciate a definition. I note that not one commenter has bought into this term.
10
In terms of income, here we see the upper middle class.
‘Sydneysiders have some of the highest incomes in Australia but someone earning $180,000 would still be in the top 10 per cent of full-time workers. The city’s top workers earn at least $2600 per week before tax ($135,200), according to 2017 statistics provided by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS).’
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I’ve always thought that the upper class were Professors, medical professionals, lawyers and owners and CEO’s of major companies and all the respective hangers on.
10
Not the inherited wealthy, mining engineers or property developers?
10
Thought I had that covered but if you want them individually yes it includes them.
10
btw medical professionals? I’m guessing you mean medical specialists and anesthetists as the wages of most others is nothing special.
10
When was the last time you seen a GP driving a klunker ?
10
Some GPs yes but many, though earning a good amount, are hardly “upper class”.
10
So we have 10% upper middle class, 80% lower middle class and 10% poor.
00
So you have seen a GP driving a clunker then ?
00
This new “UpperClass” is not just about wealth & income – it’s about attitudes, politics, and views about many issues that divide progressives from conservatives. Things like climate change, race relations, and much else.
When you hear Scott Morrison say (as he did today) that “climate policy” has been driven for too long by those sitting in inner-city coffee shops and wine bars – you know he is talking about this “UpperClass” – his comments were a dog-whistle to the right-wing rump of his party (and the Big Mining Big Agriculture Nats).
01
Tilba, if only you read the posts. The Upperclass is not about progressive v conservative. RINO’s are in on it too.
It is the “Ruling Class” against the Deplorables. The Wokers against the Workers.
It is a status-seeking pecking-order thing.
Your dog whistles and rumps are just more vacuous name-calling.
20
Why the shift away from “elites” which seems to be exactly the same thing? Upperclass is a term historically riven in a class structured society and means quite a different thing to the above.
00
Union membership as a proportion of the private workforce has declined markedly…. so a survey of Union members is biased against the disaffected and toward the True Believers.
If this is how the True Believers feel……..
00
I was born in 1953. I remember that a little sad-faced man who looked liked Lenin delivering the Communist Party paper “The Tribune” to my house every week. My parents were members of the CPA, but voted ALP in order to keep out the Liberal/Country Party from office (sadly, it didn’t work, thanks to the ALP Schism of 1955). In those days, the Libs represented the ‘haves’, and the ALP represented the ‘have nots’. Currently, the ALP definitely does NOT represent the have nots…it only represents the inner-city elites who have no clue of the real world. There are no “true believers” and no “light on the hill” for ALP voters. However, the Lib/Nats don’t have much idea of the real world either (unfortunately).
20