imajulianutter,

It is not possible in the word limit to deal with your claim that state Labor governments have been dumped because of failures in “education, health, transport, emerging suburbs infrastructure, city roads, housing affordability”. However, I can say something about the Victorian Labor government and education. Its achievements in education were so good that, for the first time in the 44 years I have been active in politics, education was not an election issue. The Coalition did not campaign on it because Labor had invested $3billion in rebuilding schools in the state, given us the best-staffed primary schools we had ever had, restored the traditional academic disciplines of history and geography to our schools, set up a professional registration system for teachers, the Victorian Institute of Teaching, brought in the Victorian Certificate of Learning as an alternative to VCE and done much more. It did all this while running a budget surplus every year and cutting state taxes by more than $2 billion as a percentage of GSP.

You can find a longer list of Labor’s achievements and the previous Coalition’s mess at:
http://community.tes.co.uk/forums/t/462500.aspx

You can find longer discussions of the Victorian election at:

http://blogs.crikey.com.au/pollbludger/2010/11/27/victorian-election-live-2/comment-page-23/#comments

http://blogs.crikey.com.au/pollbludger/2011/01/01/2011-episode-one/

http://blogs.crikey.com.au/pollbludger/2010/11/29/after-the-blast-2/comment-page-11/#comments

http://blogs.crikey.com.au/pollbludger/2010/11/29/after-the-blast-2/comment-page-20/#comments

One poster points to Labor's fate in Queensland as proof Labor must move to the Right, abdoning social wage expansion. With this sort of mindset we never would have had Medicare or the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme.

And yet the issue which really message Labor up in QLD was privatisation. Three prominent unions turned against the party as a consequence. What could have been merely a defeat was turned into a rout.

Labor leaders have to ask the question whether they stand for anything. Progressively ceding all political ground of principle to the ideological opposition is not a good way of mobilising your constituents.

Privatisation impacts on cost of living and hence hurts Labor's core constituency. This shouldn't be a matter of "Labor Right vs Labor Left". We're all supposed to have a commitment to social democracy. For those in the Party who don't - they have to ask themselves what they're really there for. I'm there because I want to make a real difference for social justice.

BTW - the term 'out of touch' just seems to be a term of Liberal propaganda; ie: something which is systematically said again and again with the hope it will 'sink in' with repetition.

Sorry I meant "messed Labor up in QLD".

Tristan there comes a time with every pendulum, when it has swung as far as it can go, & it is tine for it to go back the other way. Your social democracy has done this. The entitlement, handout mentality has taken over, & all those who are really mostly a waste of space, now expect to live as well as the hardest working individuals.

Welfare has to be given, not demanded & taken. Surely those providing the assistance should expect some advantage from their hard work. If there is no advantage for you & your family, why do it?

There are so many who's only reason for being "unfortunate" is that they are lazy, that many get sick of handing out.

When the bloke struggling to pay his mortgage in the back blocks of the gold coast sees a housing commission development in millionaires row, on the beach front, he starts to wonder, how far the help has to go.

Perhaps it's time to demand a little less, before that pendulum comes roaring back & hits you in the face.

Chris C,

You see to put a lot of faith in the opinions of Crikey contributors. I tried their site, a free trial.

I was atonished they expected me to pay to hear labor spin.

Mate you make things sound as though Labor should still be in power in Vic, NSW and Qld. Why can't you see, judging by the actual election results, you and Crikey's contributors opinions are trash in those states?

Yooowhooo Tristan, it's imajulianutter from Queensland. I don't think labor should move to the right at all.

I think they should just ditch you leftie uni educated ulogues and your idealised tomfoolery and focus on the needs of people who work for a living, who struggle to pay car regos, electricity bills, for petrol, to put clothes on their kids and their own backs, to educate their kids, to pay their rents, and to save for their own home.

That you say that is moving to the right just shows how out of touch you really are.

imajulianutter,

I’m not putting any faith in Crikey contributors. I am putting faith in my own statements, which is why I linked to my contributions (i.e., the ones under my name, which is given on my posts to the sites linked to and which I gave in my first post on this thread). I said nothing about NSW or Queensland, in which Labor was rightly defeated. I simply provided detailed evidence that your claim that Labor was turfed out in Victoria because of, among other things, education was untenable, the evidence being Labor’s record of achievement, which I gave fact by fact, and the fact that the Coalition did not make education an issue in the election, a statement I supported by copious quotation from election analysis. If you think the facts I gave regarding Labor’s achievements in education are not so, you are free to provide alternative facts. If you think Labor’s education record was an issue in the Victorian election, you are free to quote from news article from the time showing that to be the case. It is so easy to make an unsupported assertion and to keep making it until everyone believes it. I prefer to hear some facts. Your statement that my opinion is trash is just another assertion, easy to make and impossible to prove because to prove it you would actually have to produce detailed evidence that I was substantially wrong, and you have not produced even a little bit of evidence that I am even slightly wrong. Labor did spend more than $3billion in capital expenditure on schools – it’s in the budget papers. Labor did leave our primary schools the best staffed they have ever been – it’s in the statistical reports. And so on.

The threads I linked to on Crikey do not require any payment.

I did not say or imply that Labor should still be in power in Victoria. Labor lost the election for a number of reasons in its own control, but education was not one of them.