How a Labor ‘true believer’ lost faith
LABOR elder Keith DeLacy has accused the political left having a “sneering contempt for working class people”, says the ALP faces a crisis which could lead to its political extinction and attacked the “overreach” of #MeToo, reconciliation and equal opportunity activists.
In an explosive memoir, Keith DeLacy, 81, the former Member for Cairns in charge of the purse strings during the Wayne Goss era from 1989-1995, says he lies awake at night worried about Queensland’s ballooning debt – now close to $100bn – that he believes will never be paid off.
Mr DeLacy says the #MeToo movement has left male executives reluctant to comfort and support female colleagues and that it is hardly the end of the world if some women choose to enter lesser paying jobs or stay home to raise a family, and that for some activists, reconciliation is only about the “intoxication of battle and the warm glow of victimhood”.
On the eve of the launch of his memoir, A Philosophical Journey, Mr DeLacy said the “woke’’ brigade within the Left faction of Labor was turning off average Australians and would ultimately “kill themselves’’.
“Revolutions always eat their own children,’’ he said.
“Most Australians are not in the front line of politics yet they have a reasonable and sensible view of the world.
“Yet the Left are telling them that you are a racist and that your sons and grandsons are sexual monsters, rapists.
“They won’t cop that and nor should they.’’
On white privilege, he said: “Most people that get to the top do it through hard work and application. And attitude. Not because of intrinsic privilege. And I hate to say it, most people (not all) who end up on struggle street do so because of their own personal shortcomings.”
Mr DeLacy, who is battling health challenges, was regarded as a treasurer of austerity and restraint, despite being part of a big-spending Labor government.
Sir Leo Hielscher, 95, who worked with 15 treasurers over 68 years in the public service, said Mr DeLacy was the best he had seen, as did former Queensland Investment Corporation chairman Jim Kennedy, 93.
In his book, Mr DeLacy eviscerates former prime minister Kevin Rudd and former federal treasurer Wayne Swan.
He says Rudd was all about Rudd, and he hijacked the Goss government with his Machiavellian ways.
“Kevin was only about Kevin,’’ he said.
“The ALP started to lose me during the Rudd and Gillard governments … it soon became clear that Rudd was not about fixing things, he was about announcing them.”
Mr DeLacy said Swan was all about class warfare.
“He was anti-business,’’ he said.
Mr DeLacy said the Left had dumped Labor’s true calling of looking after the working man to pursue zealotry climate change policy that “kills economies’’ and panders to inner-city elites.
In the book, DeLacy says the Labor Party has abandoned its grassroots – the worker – and it now contains inner-city progressives “who have nothing more than a patronising, sneering contempt for working class people and their culture’’.
Labor’s obsession with climate change, identity politics and cancel culture had resulted in “ideological carcinomas’’ that were killing the modernday Labor Party.
“The Labor Party has now joined the elites when it used to fight them,’’ he said.
Mr DeLacy believes former long-serving premier Sir Joh Bjelke Petersen was not corrupt, but naive to those around him.
“(Former cabinet minister) Russ Hinze, on the other hand, would take anything,’’ he said.
Mr DeLacy said former premier Goss, who he served as treasurer for six years, was the most gifted politician he had ever met.
“He was a champion,’’ he said.
“He deserved more in politics.’’