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)