I Am Not Convinced Things Are This Off The Rails – What Do You Think?

This appeared on Sunday:

Opinion

Australia has chosen the Labor way of dependency

If Australians knew the country was at a tipping point, they deliberately chose the tip. Becoming the poor white trash of Asia is now a distinct possibility.

Pru Goward Columnist

May 4, 2025 – 10.24am

By definition, democracies are never wrong. In a compulsory voting system, there can be no doubt that the very decisive election result was intentional. So determined was the electorate to continue the Labor course of the last three years, the opposition leader lost his seat.

No doubt there will be millions of words and hours of effort devoted by the Coalition to working out what went wrong. Many others will critique their performance, their lack of policy effort and their apparent lack of hunger, but what is obvious is that Australia has chosen the Labor way.

If Australians knew the country was at a tipping point, they deliberately chose the tip. Alex Ellinghausen

It cannot have been because the electorate preferred one set of cost-of-living bribes against another; these were much of a muchness and if households really had done their own accounts, I suspect the result would have been more mixed and less decisive.

It cannot have been because the electorate feared the Coalition’s radicalism, because there was none, unless you count the nuclear power proposal, which they failed to explain.

It cannot have been because the electorate considered that the country was at a security and economic tipping point and chose to remain with the party that was demonstrably able to manage the future better. Rather, the government denied the existence of such a tipping point and the only crisis either party was prepared to acknowledge was the cost of living. Yes, the cost of living was an issue, but nowhere near the social and economic crisis of the Great Depression, which was an issue for the one-term Scullin government.

There can be no business, economic or security analyst in the country who will not appreciate the disaster now likely to unfold under an emboldened Labor government.

Becoming the poor white trash of Asia is now a distinct possibility.

There will be more anti-business red and green tape, more industrial changes designed to reduce work effort and the profit share, more effort to appease China and a great deal more government spending on programs that play to cultural differences instead of cultural unity. School curriculums will no doubt need revision to ensure acceptance of Labor’s plan for the future. The rising number of children leaving school unable to read, write or add up is already of great assistance.

Industry super funds, dominated by union officials and former ALP leaders, will seek to exert even greater influence on business investment to ensure consistency with union interests. Which would not matter so much if only unions represented working people.

If, by some remote possibility, Australians knew the country was at a tipping point, they deliberately chose the tip. Becoming the poor white trash of Asia is now a distinct possibility. Australians are clearly very comfortable with government dependency, with little or no interest in who pays for it. The long march of the left through the institutions has finally arrived at its destination. Labor can now argue it is the natural party of government.

Short of a disastrous fall in the Australian dollar and a severe depression, it is hard to see anything changing in the next three years. The slide will continue, but we will be reassured that this can be fixed with more temporary relief measures and investment announcements, which will never result in an additional house, road or cost-effective energy and go back to sleep.

The new Liberal leadership, however bold and brilliant, will not change any of this. In fact, it is likely to be mocked for its efforts if it even starts to tell this story and there are many in its ranks who will argue the party should become more like Labor, but with a leader who has hair and who smiles. Ah yes, those factions will need some work.

“The supine silence of employers, industry groups and investment houses on any of this ... has signalled their acquiescence to the new model.”

It is time for the country’s employers and investors to take the lead. The supine silence of employers, industry groups and investment houses on any of this over the past 30 years has signalled their acquiescence to the new model. They fund university chairs in medical science or metallurgy, but not in economics or political science. What did they expect would happen with a media decreasingly interested in prosperity and more interested in culture wars?

Prime Minister Albanese will see no need to bring the country’s employers and labour movements together to forge a new economic accord for productivity reform. Saturday’s result is enough mandate for him. It is something the owners of capital, to borrow a Marxian concept, must now do for themselves. There needs to be an unrelenting determination to change the story, bring young Australians on a different journey, to demonstrate that national pride is more than winning a cricket match, that there is wealth to be had and a greater fairness in reward for effort. Reliance on the Liberal Party, whose spirit was broken on Saturday night, or their voter base, which is devastated, is no longer an option. Business needs to clean out its leadership, stop apologising for believing in prosperity and do it for itself.

Here is the link:

https://www.afr.com/politics/federal/australia-has-chosen-the-labor-way-of-dependency-20250504-p5lwd2

Talk about a poor looser! I would see this editorial as an hysterical over-reaction and that Ms Goward should realise the sky has not fallen! We have survived 3 years of Labor government so I suspect another 3 will not be such a stretch!

The bottom line is that the Goward / Duttonesque way of exploiting the poor and down-trodden for their profit has been called out and balance has been restored to a reasonable balance between work and reward.

Sorry Pru the slaves do not choose to be flogged anymore! She should give up the nasty pills!

I see no evidence of becoming “the poor white trash of Asia” What drivel.

David.