Crumbling from within

Saturday, 4 February 2012   State of the parties   8 comments 

What is giving this leadership contest a different flavour to those of the past, is that it is less a case of factions switching allegiance, but being unable to summon up the allegiance against someone who is intent on over-riding them.

Paving the way for Rudd

Thursday, 22 December 2011   State of the parties   10 comments 

Gillard is left with neither a factional system that could deliver an acceptable result, or the authority to over-ride them.

If there is something a touch phoney about the same sex marriage debate, it looks positively genuine compared to the one on uranium.

If the EU-appointed technocrat governments have no legitimacy, neither do the Parliaments that voted them in.

What IR debate?

Monday, 7 November 2011   State of the parties   22 comments 

Others in the media, however, are starting to look beyong the phoney IR debate and pick up the embarrassment the reality is causing the Liberals.

9/11 and the War on Terror didn’t mark the start of Labor’s problems, it marked the temporary suspension, for about five or six years, of the Coalition’s.

Too late for the NSW disease

Wednesday, 7 September 2011   State of the parties   27 comments 

This was the real NSW disease, not changing leaders, but it no longer having any electoral rationale.

This Parliament has an in-built disconnect with the electorate that is no more likely to be resolved at the next election as it was at the last.

This upside-down thinking of social reality is symptomatic of a political party in decline.

The democratic element of the ALP is not how free and fair its internal rules are for the membership, but how much the party bosses reflect something real in society.

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