Elitism

The shock defeat of the Brumby state government last weekend has unleashed the usual muttering within the ALP about how to shore-up a crumbling base.

Already, some Labor MPs - let’s call them the GOM or “grumpy old men’’ - reckon they have it pegged. Too much focus on the inner-city elites at the expense of the majority, the ordinary folk in middle and outer-suburbs. That’s their message: Labor should concern itself exclusively with bread and butter issues such as relieving cost of living pressures for ``ordinary’’ families. Nothing else.

Analytically speaking, this ‘government-out-of-touch’ critique is a soft target. Self evidently, if you lose, you were not in tune with voters. But it is rarely that simple and ignores the fact that in this instance that Labor was asking for another four years to add to its existing eleven in office. History shows this is almost always a bridge too far.

Continue reading "The big headaches are just starting for Julia" »

Type the words “Steve Fielding” and “idiot” into Google and you get 14,300 hits. Many of these entries came in the past few days, most of them on blog sites, many of which have one author and as many readers, as the nation’s smarty-pants pundits seized on Fielding’s “fiskal” fiasco as proof that the guy is as dumb as a box of rocks.

Now I’m not going to pretend that my reaction upon seeing the footage of his doorstop spelling bee wasn’t one of unbridled hilarity. I almost spat my coffee out.

And when I’d regained my composure, I called my workmates over to ask if they too had seen the Family First Senator blundering his way through a doorstop where, after referring three times to “physical” policy instead of “fiscal”, he insisted he knew what he was talking about by offering to spell the word.

Continue reading "Please explain this elitist insecurity over language" »