This article raises the important question: what does a modern Labour Party stand for? Kevin Rudd tried to work through that question with his slogans about 'working families'. The current PM however seems to have abandoned those very families with her determination to introduce a carbon tax. So where does Labour go, as so-called social democratic parties throughout Europe run up hard against the long term budgetary realities of their demography?

There is no easy answer but the way forward is not to be found in pandering to the fantasies of the Green lobby and their wealthy inner urban followers. Lower cost of living, lower taxes, reduced 'nanny state' intervention in the daily lives of citizens and generally less government might be useful places to start.

Rudd was only ever an empty slogan himself. He did more to create havoc within the ALP than anyone before him has, even Latham.

Mind you, the current PM really is little more than an empty husk, particularly with her recent TV expose of her 'values' driven life-Baptist values by the sounds of it, like Costello!

What a fibber she must be too, living in The Lodge with a partner without ever marrying him!

Blimey, was that part of the upbringing her parents gave her? Were they unmarried also?

Lets have 'less government' shall we? Let's do away with public roads, health, schools, housing, transport, universities and everything else.

Back to the 'good old days' eh?

Gosh, that'll be so good, with 'smaller government' and no taxes anymore.

And I think the kiddies should get back up the chimmney and down into the iron ore pits again too.

Beef em up a little, then into the Army for 2 years national service eh?

Good on yers Senior Victorian, you're indeed a Master Mind.

I burst out laughing when I read this:

"There is evidence to suggest that there also exists a significant degree of dissatisfaction amongst NSW voters in terms of the management and delivery of services by the Labor government."

Understatement of the year so far.

I think it's worth adding one more comment. In too many countries, government has moved from being the servant of the people to becoming our master, increasingly taking from us not only the right to make our own decisions but also the responsibility that flows from those decisions.

As The Economist suggests, the state almost everywhere is big, inefficient and broke. Ma Hong, China's most highly regarded bureaucrat has said,"We are in a transition from a big state to a small state and from a small society to a big society". Societies are successful because people rather than governments make them so. We don't, in Australia, want to become like the sclerotic countries of Europe. To avoid that fate, we need to reverse the trend of the last 40 years towards ever bigger and more intrusive government.

Do explain what a 'big society' is BV.

This vacuous phrase belongs to David Cameron alone, and even he has no idea what it means, beyond selling everything, getting charity to do what government should be, and sacking thousands of workers.

Since the UK, like Australia, has exported so many jobs to China and other third world nations, there is bugger all to do in the UK these days...apart from, as here, being a shoppo or some such other dead end moronic activity.

Your last post reads like a PR piece from the Tory Party.

Do tell us all which countries we do want to emulate, I for one am all ears.

Please don't suggest India or China, the USA or Germany, the UK or France, Libya or Egypt, Israel or Russia... and so on, nor Burma either.

What about the Channel Islands? Or the Isle of Man?

Julie if you think the public service is overly well-disposed to the Labor party then why don't you go back and work for it again?

Answer: because you don't care about or cannot relate to other people enough. In case you hadn't noticed, the division between "left" and "right" is no longer a useful characterisation. There are merely people who care about others and people who only care about their own well-being.

The political ideas associated with Marxism or the "left" no longer have any currency amongst progressive intellectuals (it is their opposite numbers, the luddite xenophobes, who seem to want to keep it alive). Marxism was simply a vehicle - though ultimately an unreliable one - for forwarding the objectives of people who have faith in the good of humanity and who wanted to see a more just, fair, inclusive, cooperative society - in short, people who care about others and who want to help them to reach their potential, whatever that might be. And as it turns out, it was mainly labourers, intellectuals and public servants who had an appreciation for what happens when exploitation by elites gets out of hand.

Public servants and others in the health or NGO sectors these days are overwhelmingly people who have been drawn to a career in helping others both because it is important to us, and because we think the desire for money is somewhat infantile and not adequate recompense for any amount of our labour.

But that does not in any way mean that public servants and their non-gov counterparts espouse any particular political viewpoint. What they are interested in is correcting the failures of the capitalist market economy by helping those who are systematically disadvantaged by it. We do this partly because we have a sense of empathy for others, and partly because we understand that under a regime with no social spending, life for people of all political persuasions will no longer be worth living beyond the picket fence.