Shorten has never given off a leader vibe to me. I don’t know about sincerity - just not enough charisma. That was always my greatest fear of him being Labor leader. Possibly proven true now, although I think ultimately it was other factors that shot him in the foot.
Palmer & Hanson “stole” so many votes from Labor this election… which then preferenced to the Libs.
I think Labor & the Greens need to combine…
I am depressed about the result also but I don’t think Franking credits was the turning point.
The general consensus is that the scare campaign that the Coalition ran around coal mines and coal fired power stations being shut down is what shifted workers (and their friends and families) in Qld and WA towards voting for the Coalition.
The coalition managed to convince people it was going to happen in the short term by pointing to things like the closure of the coal generation plants in South Australia and Victoria. It didn’t help Labor that Bob Brown ran a strong anti-coal campaign right through the middle of the mining areas in Qld either.
Bu eventually, at some point, climate change IS going to pit the mining unions and their workers (which are a big part of Labors support and voting base) against the main stream of the party.
Something similar happened with logging unions a couple of decades ago, it wasn’t pretty then and it won’t be pretty when it happens with coal.
I think it was a lot of things.
The liberals ran a scare campaign on just about all of the ALP’s policies and people believed them. Whether it was “they’ll take your Utes”, “they’ll tax your death” etc.
I strongly believe that the Australian public trust the Liberals by default.
Thus the ALP has to do spectacular things to be elected.
Sadly, they werent actually fraudulent according to an AEC spokesperson. Sailing bloody close to the wind, though.
Here’s how we (Labor voters) just lost the next election… Australia has tired of chop/change political leadership due to Kev/Julia, then the Tony / Malcolm / ScoMo. So - Labor would be foolish to change leaders before the next election. Yet, who stepped up (“un-opposed”)? Another Shorten. Not a Prime Minister in the making… At least, I don’t see it.
Albo has a lot of support. He’s probably more left than Labor would like at this time but if he takes measures to bring people together like Hawke, there’s no reason he doesn’t have a good chance of being PM in 3 years.
Mind you LNP trolls are already out, saying no one will elect a wog prime minister. Nice.
I voted Labor this election and for the last several elections, the last time I didn’t was a long time ago (and it was a protest vote to the Democrats) so I’m not exactly a LNP troll.
I understand why Albanese was elected but honestly the smart move would have been to get behind someone from the right of the party (yes I know they didn’t have the support this time). Factional politics should have been put aside just this once.
Why? Well it’s clear that Australian politics are drifting to the right, the Libs have gone from centre right to right, the former far right (One Nation, Clive Palmer) is now the middle right and the far right is now attracting votes in a way it never did before.
The flip side of that is it leaves the centrist area open and unoccupied for the first time in decades and if the Labor party were to move their policy emphasis and more importantly how the party is perceived towards the center then they’d pick up enough swinging voters to get elected.
Then and only then after they’re elected they can continue with their agenda (you can’t do shit without being in government).
Albanese, no matter how good a leader he is, no matter how much internal support he has, is going to struggle to attract centrist voters. He might manage to bring back some younger voters in the mining areas in QLD and WA if he scales back the parties coal rhetoric but that’s not going to be enough to get majority government at the next election.
Albanese? Seems like a nice guy but not the right person to get the job done now.
Looking forward to watching the newest mockumentary to follow up the one on the lib spill. The ad for it was hilarious:
"The story of how Bill Shorten defied the odds…
…and pissed in the pool."
Savage.
I loved it - the Killing Season 2.
My personal favourite was
"I told bill, you’ve got a problem with your policy platform… He said “what’s the problem?”… I said, “the problem is that you’ve got one”.
So true. Australians prefer scare campaigns with no basis in reality over a well thought out policy platform.
Last election everyone was fuming, how dare Labor run a scare campaign about medicare… when the medicare thing was real (eg that the Liberals made the temporary 2013 rebate freeze a 6 year freeze, meaning that as the costs of providing services rose providers would either have to take cuts themselves or pass the cost on), but the coalition runs about 100 scare campaigns and they’re apparently vote worthy.