Well Patricia, it seems like we are not going to get much of a change where it really counts:

Shorten backs a bigger Australia: http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/2013/09/25/shorten-backs-bigger-australia

Same old same old senseless endless pursuit of expansionism, with the same old mindset: growth is good and only good, and faster growth is better!

Don’t worry about the enormous demand for services and infrastructure created by rapid population growth. Don’t worry about our struggles to address the current services and infrastructure problems, which are immense and forever worsening. Don’t worry about having to have an ever-bigger economy, with evermore mining and agricultural output in order to service the domestic community and supply export income... in order to just try and maintain the same average quality of life! Don’t worry about striving to live within our means. Don’t worry about the imperative of achieving a sustainable Australia!

In short, Shorten is short on logic, and just totally on the wrong track.

And I can’t imagine Albo would be any better.

We ABSOLUTELY need Labor to pursue Gillard’s ‘sustainable Australia’.

THIS is the essential change that we need as a nation. If Labor was to undertake it, I would have no doubt that it would overwhelmingly meet with support from the ordinary Australian folk and would set them up in a winning position at the next election.

The key words here are recapturing Labor values and principles! Implying as they so accurately do, that they've lost them. To more or less morph with the conservative side of politics, and open up the left for minor parties, like the anti jobs greens?
All human progress has had its foundation in the contest of ideas, and those with the courage of their convictions.
As a boy I listened to Doctors pooh hooing the idea that too much cholesterol was bad for your cadio vascular system! Then later as an adult, that bacteria rather than stomach acid caused most if not all ulcers! Courage of conviction alone, changed those antiquated views!
We do need a vision for our future and someone strong enough to express them, rather than simply say, we must have one!
That vision has to include rapid rail, sooner or later!
And if it's later it could be doubly or triply expensive.
Delayed for around a decade, the price of infrastructure invariably doubles, in real terms.
Meaning, we not only can afford to do it now, we cannot afford to delay doing it!
Rapid rail, will provide all manner of sustainable economic boosts and development.
It will allow us to defer any second Sydney airport indefinitely.
And as various links are completed, they will begin to generate funds. Funds that could then pay for the rest of a progressive roll out.
We also need to build an inland shipping canal. This will bring permanent reliable water to our arid inland and allow the agricultural development of a formerly arid area.
The additional atmospheric moisture thereby generated, could create its own micro climate, which in turn could green vast tracts of former desert heartland! This is exactly what happens in the lakes district and rain forests of central Africa!
We can't afford it?
That's because we've never ever tried to fund essential infrastructure, with thirty year self terminating bonds.
Safe haven thirty year self terminating bonds would be a natural fit with the big super funds, and immediately upon issue, put downward pressure on house prices!
Rhrosty.

Future vision also has to include quite massive tax reform and simplification. This will require considerable courage, given the powerful vested interests welded to the present convoluted complexity, with a tax loophole on every page!
Billionaires and the world's most powerful financial entities; some with annual budgets larger than sovereign nations, will fight tooth and nail, to keep most of the current tax avoiding complexity! Count on it!
You can't unscramble an omelet is the usual first response!
Or, if only we were beginning, implying, that we are virtually powerless to usher in essential reform!
Essential unavoidable reform, demanded by the approaching destiny of demography!
True, you can't unscramble an omelet; but if the dam thing is completely rotten the the whole rotten mess should be thrown out.
Yes there will be losers, but hey. the simultaneous creation of a brand new people's bank, would create an alternative career/wealth creation pathway for our own; or, nearly all those who could be adversely affected by the proposed reform and massive simplification!
Future vision that does not include quite massive tax reform, will be a pale imposter of future vision!
Rhrosty.

From what I see of Shorten and others, the only thing that can make Labor viable at the next federal election will be a very bad Coalition govt.

In other words, it will need luck, just as the Coalition had with a poor Labor govt in recent years.

Too many Labor people live in the past, referring to the supposed superior prowess of Labor.

Let's see Labor come up with solutions for the future in these difficult times, which I doubt are going away.

The Labor party was born in the aspirations of working people for the coming of socialism. They dreamt of a fairer and more productive society based on the public ownership of the means of production. Like Marx, they never actually *thought through* how production would be organised under public ownership, or *why* it would be more productive.

As soon as real socialist parties came to power, they were confronted with the question: *how* to replace capitalism with a fairer and better system? Everything they touched turned to sh!t. Lenin tried to abolish money and collectivise agriculture, with the result that millions starved to death.

Seeing that pursuit of full socialism would destroy society and the State, they immediately resiled from their core principles. They allowed some private ownership (1% of privately held land accounted for one third of food production). But they pressed on with socialism in other areas where they dreamt of getting something for nothing by taking it from someone else. The kleptocracy collapsed quicker the purer socialism was tried.

In 1920 Mises categorically demonstrated that socialism is not possible *even in theory* without regressing society back to the level of barter and causing hundreds of millions of deaths in the process:
“Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth”
http://mises.org/pdf/econcalc.pdf

Still the socialists lacked the intellectual honesty to either accept or refute Mises argument (they still haven’t refuted it).

Socialists everywhere turned to the more watered-down version of national socialism, of which the most notorious example was the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. Property is held in nominally private hands, subject to the State’s overriding prerogative to dictate or appropriate whatever it wanted.

This could only be viewed as “right wing” from a starting point of full socialism.

"We are socialists, we are enemies of today's capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are all determined to destroy this system under all conditions."
Adolf Hitler
http://constitutionalistnc.tripod.com/hitler-leftist/

(Google “Hitler economic policies” and see if you can find any that today’s Labor party *disagrees* with.)

In the west, socialism was lionised in the intellectual class. The market rate for their services is low precisely because the ordinary working people don’t value such services. But the State – being literally a legal monopoly of aggression, extortion and fraud - has a never-ending need of legitimisation, and access to ready funds. So the State and the intellectual class form a symbiosis as between themselves; and a parasite as between themselves on the one hand, and the productive class of businesses and workers on the other. It is in the interests of the parasite class and its indoctrination arm to spread Marx’s false exploitation theory of employment, even though all Marx’s predictions proved wrong, and the living standards of the workers have risen to their highest levels in the history of the world under capitalism.

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry at the conceited invincible ignorance Labor supporters talking of Labor’s “new world”. Let’s get one thing straight. In the final analysis, all Labor has got is socialism, or deserting its principles. That’s it.

The result in practie is the ugly amalgam of corrupt wasteful thuggery that so disgusted the electorate in the last government. Either Labor pursue the dystopian socialist dream of government monopoly bureaucracies running every aspect of human life; in which case all they are doing is re-packaging the same old sh!t sandwich, endlessly re-named each time it fails, from communism to socialism, to national socialism, to democratic socialism, social democracy, the New Deal, the Third Way, the green economy, the blue economy, the “new world” – anything the ignorant will fall for.

Or they degenerate into a party of mere kleptocracy – pandering with no principle to whatever self-entitled group try to use the State to gain above-market privileges to live at everyone else’s expense, or crawling to whatever opinionated intolerant want to force everyone else to obey them. That’s it. That’s Labor’s “same old same old” brave new world.