LEONARD COLQUHOUN
Current Labor MPs seem to have CVs which run like this: school, dodgy university course (mainly dodging hard subjects like foreign languages [Kevvy being the exception which proves the rule] and physical sciences, and focusing on soft-option pseudo-subjects such as XYZ Studies), position as electoral assistant, media adviser (trainee spinmeister, really), Party organiser, factional heavy, etc. Then get pre-selected, win election, off to Parliament, and Bob’s your uncle or Bab’s your auntie. Later, a visit to the props manager for hard-hat and fluoro-vest.
Current Labor MPs seem to have CVs which run like this: school, dodgy university course (mainly dodging hard subjects like foreign languages [Kevvy being the exception which proves the rule] and physical sciences, and focusing on soft-option pseudo-subjects such as XYZ Studies), position as electoral assistant, media adviser (trainee spinmeister, really), Party organiser, factional heavy, etc. Then get pre-selected, win election, off to Parliament, and Bob’s your uncle or Bab’s your auntie. Later, a visit to the props manager for hard-hat and fluoro-vest.
Their advisers, spinmeisters, and heads-of-quangos come from an intellectual mindset which sees people not as individuals, but rather as subsets in a class, or a gender, or a race. What is good for, or bad about, that class will fit everybody within that class, dangerously simplistic nonsense à la ‘Four Legs Good, Two Legs Bad’ at the end of George Orwell’s “Animal Farm”.
In the other major party, there is an equally harmful but distinctly different disconnect.
Their influence-peddlers and decision-makers don’t ride train and buses, don’t send their children to state schools, don’t use public hospitals, don’t live in risky, non-leafy suburbs – they have almost no experience of these situations, giving them no empathy with the daily lives of up to two-thirds of the voters. (Sadly, successful ALP people join them after reaching the commanding heights – look what years of ALP State governments have done for Melbourne’s and Sydney’s western suburbs.)
But beware of one of the cures on offer – handing power to a single-issue party. That sort of cure is often worse than the sickness, as the history of 20th century totalitarianism so convincingly shows, and the current activities of Islamism within Muslim nations continues to.
This comment appears at the end of this article, HERE. Comment HERE
