No long and detailed analysis from Paul Kelly for Labor this election. Just a throwaway piece of journalism from a five-minute chat on the blower was enough for Labor’s shadow treasurer and mystery man, Jim Unchalmer, to lay out his party’s unmanifesto:
“If I become the treasurer, I want it to be in a government of the suburbs by the suburbs and for the suburbs.”
“Nobody in the opposition spends more time in the boardrooms of Sydney and Melbourne than I do but if we are to grow the economy strongly, sustainably and inclusively, we need to make our regions and our suburbs a much bigger part of the story.”
“Our policy agenda is all about middle Australia. I take as my guiding light the issues that people talk about around kitchen tables in middle Australia and that is wages, it is childcare, it is more secure work and casualisation.”
“Our supporters are sick of us losing elections. They understand that we need to be more focused, we need to be more disciplined, we need to have restraint and we need to recognise that many of the problems that we would inherit as an incoming government cannot be solved overnight.
“When parties of the centre left win elections, there are three criteria. When we represent safe change; when our policies and priorities are grounded in people’s real lives in real communities; and when we are optimistic and forward looking and embrace the future. So my effort, in economic policy, is to understand and to reflect those three things.”
…“I refuse to spend my entire political career in opposition changing nothing and I think that people understand that.”
Yes, we do. What we don’t understand is how Labor will get anything done when it will have a mandate to do nothing. Not to mention that what little we do know strongly suggests that it remains bizarrely committed to:
- wages destroying and casualisation reinforcing mass immigration;
- childcare funding as the commodity cycle crashes and the budget falls apart on tax cuts for the rich;
- China groveling, and
- fossil fuels forever in any and every electorate that demands it should.
At least the Coalition is openly corrupt and strong on China. Unchalmer is a fume inside of a black box with a blank label that we know is made in China.
