Loudmouth (Joe),

Would that it would be that the usage and meaning of 'progressive' was as it appears and is commonly understood by the public.

Marxists especially, but many activists too, are known to co-opt and bend the meaning of common words. It is a deliberate strategy of the liar and propagandist.

It works too, where honest men and women are not prepared to point at every use, to challenge and call it out for what it is, bogus.

Bob Hawke is quoted as attributing his win and 'success'(others might agree or disagree) of his government to Fabianism aka the 'Progressives' aka International Socialism.

- However no-one in Labor and particularly not Shorten is mentioning International Socialism or even socialism these days. They use the 'code' instead. How ridiculous and deceptive is that!

'Progressive' is a loaded term employed often by Labor leaders. By all of them from Whitlam on. Whitlam had converted to Fabianism while in office, but didn't imagine it was necessary to mention that to the electorate or explain what it entailed.

I don't go for this secret society, secret squirrel, deceitful stuff and nor does the Aussie public. If 'Progressivism' or International Socialism is what the electorate are actually voting for, or for (say) the 'networking' (read as a package of beliefs and favouritism for jobs) Emily's Listers, then the electorate has a right to know.

Why would Emily's Listers agree in writing to a bundle of beliefs and commitments to one another that would compromise their duty to the Labor Party, not to mention misleading the electorate and NOT inform the electorate and note their membership on Q&A and so on?

Did it matter that (say) Julia Gillard was an Emily's Lister feminist? If she was sworn to prioritise her EL mates exclusively and play favourites, yes!

Importantly who can understand what these interests are about? What about false ones? How does the electorate understand and make sense of them?

Lol!....hold onto yer hats, folks!

It's all a Marxist plot.....with "code"!

otb says so.

The braying Jack (or is it a pear-shaped Jenny?) reminds me of a word I was searching for to describe 'feminism' and 'progressive'. It is 'vacuous'.

Both are murky enough for the most scurrilous rogue to hide behind.

makes you weep when you see all the overpaid abc Emily's listers carry on as if they are victims. What a joke!

I OTB,

I was trying to differentiate 'radical' from 'progressive' in a way that I could make sense of. Oher people may use those words in any manner they like. I suppose, somewhere, there is or has been a Revolutionary People's Fascist Progressive Party, perhaps a Trot offshoot. 'Radicals' have included the entire spectrum from extreme Right to extreme Left. So words are useful only in perhaps idiosyncratic ways, as an aid to making sense of the world.

I didn't know that Whitlam became a Fabian - I always thought of the Labor Party as a Right-wing party, and of its leadership moving, perhaps coincidentally, more and more to the Right, from Evatt to Calwell to Whitlam, eventually to Hawke and Keating, and that there was never anything much progressive about it. Radical in terms of union leadership control maybe, and giving lip-service to other causes, but never really progressive. And coming pretty late to the cause of women. But that's just my perception.

I suspect that the Labor Party has moved away from representing workers - representing union officials, certainly, but not workers - and more towards embodying the professional classes, bureaucrats and 'intellectuals' as they are laughingly called in Australia, since perhaps the seventies. But again, that's just my perception.

And now Turnbull, having won over much of the blue-collar working class, is wooing those same professional classes, or at least their right wing, while the Greens woo their left wing. None of which is remotely progressive, in my view.

Christ, I HAVE become a curmudgeon :)

Interesting times !

Joe

I suppose to the Twitterati - and the 'fact-finding'(bollocks!) ABC is now using surveys of the opinions of Twits to offset any survey that doesn't accord with its Green-Left slant - a 'Progressive' aka Fabian is a fruit fly (sl) who believes that highly destructive bush fires are down to 'poisonous CO2' and 'global warming' and not to Greens preventing reduction of fuel loads.

Oh, and endless handouts from government (taxpayers) from a Big State.

Maybe to put some substance to the deliberately elusive 'Progressive'/Fabian that is about and is represented by the opportunistic, self-absorbed career politicians, Shorten, Gillard and overseas, Hillary, by way of examples,

http://tinyurl.com/zz4zkvx

While accepting that the 'Progressive' aka Fabian and the 'Feminist' (and the lines blur) can never be pinned down, because it doesn't suit them. However all those encountered in public life have a vice-like grip on the taxpayer's teat and are greedy, egocentric moral BS artists, in it for themselves.