RSS Feed
October 28th, 2011 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda AAP
Past and present Labor figures attack the party for lacking direction and espousing policies that are “interchangeable” with those of the conservative coalition in a new book by an ALP insider.
Author Troy Bramston has been a speechwriter for Kevin Rudd, adviser to the Labor government and an ALP member for two decades.
His book, Looking for the Light on the Hill (Scribe), includes a wealth of fresh interviews with Labor stalwarts and never-before-published research.
Polling taken in June showed only 12 per cent of all voters believed Labor was clear about what it stood for and who it represented. The figure for Labor voters was a miserable 30 per cent on the same question.
“Labor is not only suffering from an identity crisis across the board, but it is suffering from a crisis of faith among its own core voters … it needs to win back its own core vote,” Bramston writes.
In his first wide-ranging interview since resigning as national secretary in May, Karl Bitar laments the current stable of Labor ministers.
“By the time many of our politicians and officials reach senior positions of power, they are no longer driven by the core policy values which brought them to be involved in politics in the first place,” he says.
“That’s one of the reasons why Labor has this problem of defining its policy purpose in the 21st century.”
He says Labor and coalition policies are drawing closer together, creating confusion for voters and leaving grassroots members disenchanted.
“If you took all the policies Labor has taken to the last few state and federal elections, put them on a table and mixed them with all of the coalition’s policies, and then asked an average voter to choose which policies belong to Labor and which to the coalition, they would struggle to do so,” Bitar says.
“Even most party members would struggle with this exercise.”
Federal Labor minister Mark Butler argues Rudd’s dumping of the carbon pollution reduction scheme as prime minister seriously eroded the party’s credibility on the key issue of climate change – a credibility problem that lingers today.
“It killed Kevin Rudd and it badly damaged our credibility,” Butler says in the book.
“We simply gave up and it hurt us.”
Union leader and ALP national presidency hopeful Tony Sheldon says the party’s priorities are wrong.
“We have become a party of corporate Labor,” Sheldon says.
“Corporate Labor needs to become community Labor.”
Bramston also trawls the well-worn path of criticism of Rudd’s dictatorial style and how he burned out staff at a great rate.
In one anecdote, Bramston, who sat in on budget and national security meetings, said the then deputy prime minister Julia Gillard was seen as more capable than Rudd.
“As an administrator, Gillard also scored highly – ministers and public servants would regularly hold back material to go to the prime minister’s office until Gillard was acting prime minister, to ensure that it got dealt with quickly,” Bramston writes.
The author also rejects the notion that Gillard’s takeover of the leadership in June last year was rushed and sudden.
He argues that many caucus members had been agitating for change for months before.
One told Bramston that during that period Gillard would not canvass support as such, but she would “ring out of the blue and ask for an assessment as to how the government was travelling”.
Bramston offers his owns solutions for the party’s woes, including a mission statement outlining the party’s seven enduring values: economic justice; social justice; environmental sustainability; internationalism; nation-building; equality of opportunity; and democratic liberalism.
He ends the book on a hopeful note, arguing that Labor can win the 2013 election with some “radical” change.
Views: 0
Posted in 
Tags: 
