...Funny it is, the Labor Party are blinded to the obvious by a total focus on internal machinations. A very low priority is the interests and opinions of the voting supporters: Labor have become an isolated floating and disconnected wreck, in an ocean of disenfranchised ex-Labor faithful.

...A beautifully simply and poignant article

Labor can no longer be deemed to be a 'progressive party' its not even a party of reform. Socialist no way. Many within the party can see the need to restructure and many talk of such desirable action. Everyone within the party from the top down talk of party reform. However, at the very next instance they go back to their same old ways, infighting, backstabbing, plotting and scheming. Just take the Gillard / Carr rubbish, same old, same old. Labor are long on rhetoric but short on action.

As others have pointed out, if Rudd really was so disorganised, with 'chaotic working habits', it was an act of lunacy to give him an important Cabinet post like Foreign Affairs. That alone should cost Gillard and the Labor Party government.

I see what's happening to Labor -- and the Coalition -- as the inevitable result of trying to govern in the age of knowledge. We're approaching the point where a substantial proportion of the electors are better-informed about the issues than their leaders are, and perfectly positioned to spot waffle, bulldust and policy that's motivated by personal gain or ideological fixations rather than evidence and reason. Politicians will continue to slide in the public's estimate until they adopt the same approach as medicine and law, and give us rational policy based on the best evidence. And then we can replace them all by computers anyway.

For me, the travails of the modern ALP have a deeper cause than the roles of factions and various faceles men. The great ideological debate of the late 19th and the 20th centuries was between socialists and liberals. Both believed in the improvement of the human condition on earth; the former through the actions of the state in nationalising the means of production, the latter through the actions of citizens operating in an atmosphere of individual liberty. The liberals won the intellectual argument. No one talks about nationalising the means of production any more and certainly not the ALP.

The problem for Labour then is what takes the place of the socialist objective? The answer so far seems to be some combination of so-called social democracy, which seems to mean government interfering in people's lives without much rationale other than empty phrases like 'social justice' or 'equity' and the environmental movement, which, far from being committed to an improvement in the human condition, sees human beings as the problem. What I might call the 'original sin' view of the world.

In this philosophical vacuum, Labour sees power as an end in itself and it will continue to do so until it finds an intellectual rationale for its own existence.

Just for the record, I regard Tony Abbott as one of the most principled people on either side of Australian politics.

The Bob Car rubbish was invented by Abbott and his slime diggers.
Bob Car says he was not offered the foreign ministers job, and he does not want to be in Canberra.
The noalition say they know otherwise, because that is what they invented to defer talking about their policies.

SV you were going great with me until you said
"Just for the record, I regard Tony Abbott as one of the most principled people on either side of Australian politics."
That's when I fell of my chair laughing. If that was true the rest of them must be shockers!
579 For 2 days Gillard said she hadn't been talking to Carr, then she said she spoke to him last Monday. What did they discuss Bob's latest fondue recipes?