Labor: between a rock and a hard place.

Cartoon: By Nicholson.

The Labor Party is quickly backing itself into a lose, lose situation. For as many years as we care to remember, both sides of politics have prostituted themselves to the green agenda to the detriment of the population at large. Many of our traditional simple pleasures such as tossing a line out to do a bit of fishing have been curtailed to appease the environmental zealots.

Labor has gone close to self-destruction on this effort, basically sparing no expense to us, in order to grasp every green objective in order to slow its bleed of supporters to the Greens. This has lessened the difference between the two parties and in fact made it easier for their supporters to make the transition.

At the same time their efforts to appeal more to moderate voters has moved them further to the centre, which has pissed off many of their left wing. While this was happening the Greens set themselves up as a hard line party of the left, which made them more attractive to those people. For this reason they are now hostage to Bob Brown and have to depend on him to get them across the line.

Gillard’s deceit before the last election over ‘no carbon tax’ has angered much of the electorate. Those who were gauche enough to give them the benefit of the doubt feel betrayed. Abbott has little to recommend him on the issue of carbon, as he is promising that rather than introduce a “Great big new tax,” he is going to spend billions to do all sorts of good things to enhance environmental outcomes.

The trouble is that many of us are just sufficiently naïve, to think that this is not going to come out of his salary, but rather large tax increases.

Paul Kelly, Editor at large at “The Australian,” has over the years moved from a Labor shill, to something more skeptical has just blistered Labor:

Let's tell the truth about the past half decade. The green agenda has corrupted Labor values. It has seen Labor governments embrace fiscal irresponsibility, regressive income re-distribution and treat their supporters as too dumb to understand they were being played for mugs. For too long the idea that any green scheme was a good scheme was sanctified as a compliant media cheered such initiatives.

Repentance will take many forms and have multiple consequences. The electoral backlash from defective pro-green policies and the arrogance towards ordinary voters embedded in such schemes will haunt Labor, state and federal, for many years. Perhaps some tolerance for mistakes should be extended. The bigger point, however, is that Labor's culture abandoned fiscal discipline and social equity for what became the climate change cargo cult.

Paul is still comfortable with the old leftist terms about ‘social equity’ and so on, but he is at least calling a spade a spade as far as the stupidity of Labor is concerned.