Labor’s damaged and directionless brand
Bernard Keane, 16 Jul 2012
Was Julia Gillard among friends or enemies when she addressed the New South Wales ALP conference yesterday?
Either way, she can walk in such a gathering with her head held high. She may be one of Australia’s most politically inept prime ministers, but she has a reasonable list of reforms to her credit and her government’s economic management has been excellent. NSW Labor is not merely politically inept, it left our biggest state in a deep coma. Nonetheless, John Robertson, the self-serving opportunist who is filling in as state opposition leader for a few years until his party inevitably knifes him, had seen fit to lecture the Prime Minister about how “poorly structured” her agreement with the Greens was.
Friends of the “with friends like these” variety, perhaps.
Despite that, the PM was particularly generous to her hosts. She skipped, wholly unsubtly, over the party’s contribution to the decline in Sydney’s infrastructure, as if it hadn’t been in power for 16 years. “After almost 12 years of underinvestment and neglect from a federal Liberal government, Sydney strained at the seams. Now, after almost two years….”