The colourful Sydney identity Graham “Richo” Richardson, who many of you may know from Sky News Australia, was once the Secretary of the New South Wales Labor party (this was 40-odd years ago). He, like Paul Keating, Neville Wran, and other senior ALP figures at that time in Sydney, was strongly opposed to the left wingers within the party: a very different stance from today.
Richardson as State Secretary used to take great delight in simply cancelling the memberships of troublemakers advocating left wing socialist nonsense and one issue causes – (what today would be viewed as “woke”). His reasoning was that it was better not to have such loons in the party, even if it meant weakening the organisational capability of the ALP at the grassroots level, because they were so odious it encouraged working class people to vote conservatively. In short – guys working on a construction site in 30-degree heat didn’t give a damn about nuclear weapons, apartheid in South Africa, or whether their boss was a millionaire.
One of the few (and you may be surprised ‘how’ few) left wingers who survived a ‘Richo purge’ was Albanese, probably due to his background being fairly deprived – (making him “culturally” different from the “Rich Kids Playing Socialists” who invariably make up left wing factions within political parties) – and being quite well liked as a person by some leading ALP politicians. (Apparently Albanese – the chap – is congenial, likeable company in a social setting).
As an aside, dear reader, and speaking of “wokeness” and “purges” and “rich kids playing socialists” – care to hazard a guess what I would do to the Young Nats membership list were I, say, President of the National party and with an eye to the future? But I digress.
Albanese has won and Australia has to endure a (temporary) Labor government. Good luck to him, I guess. Following on from my article a couple of weeks back about the crash which hasn’t even warmed up yet, Albanese may well come undone in the same way as Scullin. Scullin took office about the time of the 1929 crash, Whitlam the ’74 crash, and Rudd just before the 2008 crash. They all came undone when the sharemarket went tits up. (ALP Prime Ministers seem so unlucky in this regard).
What has delighted me about the election results is the washing away of ‘woke’, toxic, utterly foolish Liberals in Wentworth, Goldstein, Reid, Higgins, North Sydney and several other electorates. Their ‘let’s cave into every simpering lefty cause to get reelected’ hasn’t worked out too well, which is a lesson the National party in New Zealand and its leader may want to take on board. (But it won’t, of course).
I’m equally delighted at the loss of that nasty Kenneally woman in Fowler (where the people weren’t quite as stupid as she needed them to be), and it is touch and go whether a waste of space Justine Elliott will hang on in Richmond. There are a couple of other ALP seats (Griffiths, Cunningham, Cooper, Macnamara, and Wills) where preferences could bring richly deserved justice to incompetent time servers.
What was intriguing about the election results is how badly the ALP has actually done in most places, the ‘victory’ being due to preferential voting rather than any sort of mandate.
I’m delighted my dismissive view of opinion polls came to pass. I predicted that the ALP wouldn’t get more than 32% of the votes and I was correct!