Albo’s weighty burden to stay on the right course
Many years ago a heartbreaking story hit the internet about a beloved Marvel and Star Wars filmmaker with the alarming headline “Jon Favreau Critically Injured”.
The lead par read: “Writer-director Jon Favreau is in critical condition and receiving treatment in hospital for severe spinal injuries that occurred as a result of filming Disney’s The Mandalorian series.”
It concluded: “The injuries are said to have been sustained due to the extreme weight the actor encumbered while pulling the entire Star Wars universe out of a massive hole.”
For any true Star Wars fan that’s a pretty sweet punchline. And it’s fair to say that Anthony Albanese is probably feeling a bit like Jon Favreau right now.
The PM has broken his back to drag Labor back to the centre of the political spectrum and restore it as the party of mainstream Australia.
The tax cut package is emblematic of that. Yes, it is a broken promise – but it is a broken promise that squarely benefits working and middle-class Australians.
And, of course, tax cuts in any form are anathema to the hard left, who are overwhelmingly of the upper-middle class – Teals and Greens – and staunchly opposed to workers keeping more of their own money.
This mission to disabuse the ALP of its folly as a Quixotic leftist crusade is one replete with irony given Albo’s background as a factional warlord of the left but in the same way it proves the authenticity of his effort.
As hard as it might be for many on the right to see or believe, the PM has over the years torched his rhetorical leftness by both accident and design – which is a wonderful thing.
And yet the lunar left always finds a way to insert its toxicity into Labor’s newfound sensibility.
This brings us to this week’s critical by-election in Dunkley, one of those seats that has the annoying habit of voting in its own best interests rather than, say, on a regional conflict in the Middle East.
Labor has some pretty good news for these voters, namely that well over 80 per cent of them will trouser more money under its tax cuts than under the previous stage 3 reforms. And thousands will get money back when they once would have got none.
In normal times that should be more than enough to get loyal Labor volunteers out in their hundreds, which would be of unparalleled benefit to the ALP and Albo.
The party’s majority is still thin and a loss would reverse the historic Aston result in one fell swoop, as well as potentially set Labor on a course to minority government.
In other words the very survival of the first majority Labor government in a decade is at stake.
But what are the left-wing warriors of Labor doing? According to reports they are, like the sooky Achilles of the Iliad, sulking in their tents. Refusing to come out – perhaps even hoping for defeat – in protest against the PM’s position on Palestine.
According to a report in the Herald Sun, “some younger Socialist Left members have refused to help campaigning, from doorknocking to phone banking, and those doing the work on the ground are from the party’s right”.
Yes, notwithstanding the fact that the PM has called for a ceasefire and urged Israel not to advance on Rafah, and notwithstanding that Labor changed its platform to recognise “occupied” Palestinian territories, harming its standing with many Jewish groups – and of course notwithstanding the fact that whatever Australia says matters pretty much bugger-all – these activists are still determined to die on this hill and don’t care if they take the party with them.
The Herald Sun also reports that even the Left faction’s supposed powerbrokers have been unable to rally the radicals of Ramallah to the Labor cause. If so, what is the point of them?
Indeed, if any of this is true it is not just deeply shameful to the Victorian student socialists who think their state branch is a nascent Trotskyist reimagining but also highly embarrassing to the commissars who are supposed to be running them.
If Labor wins Dunkley on Saturday it will be entirely due to the shift to the centre and the accompanying tax cuts that have defined Labor like little else since regaining power.
And if it loses there will be only one pimple on the landscape to blame – the lunatic activists who have already turned the state of Victoria into a basket-weaving basket case and now want to do the same to the rest of us.