Hollow men led Labor to disaster

Hollow men led Labor to disaster

Voters punished Labor for lacking principles and conviction. It is time for the party to ditch the thugs and recover some values.

THE one thing we can be sure of is that Labor has suffered a huge reverse. While we wait to learn which party will form government, it's instructive to ponder what it did wrong.








When the going got tough, Rudd threw overboard the economic reform that, along with rolling back the WorkChoices false reform, had been at the centre of his case for election: introduction of an emissions trade scheme.


Even those relieved to be free of a ''great big new tax'' were shocked by such a cowardly repudiation of one of Labor's core values.

Sensing this, the Liberals immediately switched from criticising the scheme to criticising Labor's abandonment of its ''greatest moral challenge''.





It was they who (acting behind Gillard and Wayne Swan) persuaded Rudd to abandon his climate change commitment, they who staged his beheading in a way that offended so many Labor supporters, and they who advised Gillard to rush to an election while her honeymoon lasted, when she should have allowed more dust to settle and given voters more time to get to know her.

These are the same geniuses who've delivered the debacle of the Carr-Iemma-Rees-Keneally New South Wales government (which itself contributed to Gillard's drubbing). They're uncomprehending bunglers of the first order.




It's a snare and a delusion. Senior ministers get so used to relying on media stunts and emotional button-pushing that their ability to explain and defend complicated policies atrophies.




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