The Left in Australia and the world faces a number of serious challenges.

I submit that the Left end of the political spectrum in Australia is increasingly without purpose and without strategic direction.

I submit that the Left of Australian politics faces a most peculiar challenge. That being to develop an ideological narrative that brings together its inchoate campaigns and disparate activists under the one banner.

Our lives over the past three decades have been largely shaped by neoliberal structural reforms. Not only within Australia but throughout the world it has been a central tendency of political, social and economic life.

There are many reasons why this tendency should be resisted; because it promotes a crass conception of self; because it tears at the social and cultural fabric that makes life worth living; because it widens the divide between the obscenely wealthy and the rest; because it offers no solutions for the multiple, perhaps existential, crises facing humanity; because it doesn't even offer a sound economic doctrine as shown by financial volatility and lower trend rates of economic growth relative to the post war Keynesian era.

The Left has got neoliberalism wrong; terribly wrong. So wrong that leftists the world over observe in awe as neoliberal austerity marches onward despite the global economic crisis.

A truly great threat to us all is the propaganda driven dribble like this thread
Truth will always matter
And it will always be true some can be fooled by any untruth
American extremism, driven first by tea party lost
Hijacked by Trump, is a very real danger to democracy and our very freedom
A right dictatorship is a very real threat when any one who cares for others id branded left

I'm not sure how a socialist party (Labor) could have anything BUT a socialist manifesto. That's what they are all about – socialism.

Labor is not “without purpose”; its purpose is higher taxes, more control, bigger government, open borders and and many other very nasty purposes.

Voters are the only ones who can throw a spanner in the increasingly Hard Left Labor machine. But they won't do that because they are fed up with the Liberal party's incompetence and shift to the Left. Who wants two Labor parties? I don't understand Labor voters at all, but I suspect that they and anyone else with socialist tendency would think that, if we are are really going to bugger up the country, let's go with Labor, which has proved itself so much better at buggering up in the past.

My contempt for the thread needs explaining
I AM ALP all my life and it has not been a short one CONSERVATIVES used that term to harm Labor
It works, this world this country is not ready for Socialism
Being anti Conservative only says we want a better world a caring world
Not a dream that has always turned in to a nightmare for working class people

Doing a fact check on whether Labor's policies are
socialist the following link provides the answers:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-09-20/fact-check3a-are-labor27s-policies-socialist3f/8948552

And here's another link on whether Bill Shorten is a
socialist:

http://theconversation.com/mis-red-why-bill-shorten-is-not-a-socialist-91752

The ABC can make decisions on whether or not someone is a socialist only for themselves. The rest of us will make up our own minds - apart from Foxy?