Simon Rumble’s blog

Dear deluded fools left-wing ALP voters,

I have a bunch of friends who perversely vote for the Australian Labor Party while professing views diametrically opposite those the party actually implements. None of my friends supports offshore detention of refugees.  Most of my friends support real action on climate change.  Yet some of my friends continue to vote for the ALP, and some are even card-carrying members.

Challenged on this, they often murmur something about having to be in power to effect real change. Peter Garrett has achieved one thing and one thing only since joining the ALP, and that is to provide the perfect response to that justification. "You mean like Peter Garrett?"

So to those of you, read this short piece:

The reason the ALP keeps lunging to the right is that it thinks its main competition is the Liberals, and it’s trying to appeal to their voters. For the same reason, the more serious the competition it gets from the Greens (by ALP voters abandoning it for the Greens, the same way swinging voters abandon it for the Liberals), the more it’s going to have to compete for progressive votes – which means the ALP starting to actually listen to you! It means the ALP proposing policies with which you might actually agree.

 

This will not happen if you just vote ALP regardless of what it actually does.

 

Isn’t a vote for the Greens a wasted vote?

 

(discovered via Mareike Hardy's Being a woman won't win my vote)

And then a cute one.

Gripping.

At the little cafe on Unwins Bridge Road around the corner from Sydenham Station. Louis had mashed banana, prunes and yoghurt. I had the amazing bacon and egg pie, fresh from the oven. Wow!

Cafe soundtrack: walk-to-wall New Order. Good start to the day.

Rosa's Kitchen, 288 Unwins Bridge Rd, Sydenham.

 

This time it was the Adidas store and both Holly and Louis got to meet Tim. Apparently tonight's Channel 7 news will have Louis!

No way is that kid aged 2+.

Just got to meet Tim Cahill and he signed Louis' ball.

As part of her cleanup of issues the government was getting slammed with, Julia's looking at immigration and refugees next. She's given every indication that her approach will pander to the braying racists of the boganitariat.

An important thing to keep in mind are the reasons the rodent kept banging on about refugees. It started out as a way of assimilating the populist racist votes of that other redhead. Having observed the ALP tear itself apart trying to come up with a response, Howard saw it as an effective wedge issue.

The danger for Julia is that there's nowhere to wedge the Tories on this issue. Whatever liberal remnant there was in the Liberal Party was comprehensively eviscerated during Howard's long reign. The Tories will always continue to up the rhetoric, bidding up in the nastiness stakes until the whole progressive vote leaves Labor in disgust.

The only winners here will be The Greens who will win back the progressive votes only very recently won back to the Labor brand.