For some time, I have labelled The Guardian’s allegedly lefty senior commentators the “useful idiots” of capital.
I have been kind. The alternative explanation is that they are biased, if not captured, by partisanship.
Essential Media has long been a Labor polling henhouse but head honcho Peter Lewis is taking it to a whole new level:
Rather than being driven into hand-wringing over activities in one union, Labor has an opportunity to tell a bigger story that has really defined its first term in power.
The most successful “gaffe” of the last election campaign was when Albanese got cornered into endorsing a one dollar a day pay rise. Since then, it has only got better for him.
The government’s active support of a $100-a-week increase to the minimum wage in just over two years, the broader measures to improve pay for aged care and early learning workers and the introduction of rights for labour hire and gig workers, have all contributed to getting flatlining wages moving again.
Here’s what “getting wages moving again” looks like:
I would not have thought that mindlessly parroting government lies is a good business strategy for a pollster that relies on data credibility.
But, hey, that’s just me. Mr Lewis isn’t done yet:
Note that among both Coalition and minor party voters Trump is more favourable than Kamala Harris. Also striking is the strong support for Trump among those who self-identify as struggling financially and those who are now union members.
The sense of doom that surrounded the 2016 election has also lifted, with the number of respondents concerned Trump would be worse for Australia’s relations with the United States plummeting from 63% in July 2016 to just 37% today.
Both Trump and Dutton are attempting to tap a vein of discontent that is grounded in a lived experience: the rise of global corporate power, the destruction of secure jobs, rising levels of inequality.
A central element of this strategy is to convince workers that the institutions designed to act in their interest – the political and industrial wings of the labour movement – have become corrupted and are no longer on their side.
It is here that allegations of underworld infiltration of the CFMEU is manna from heaven for Dutton and potentially devastating for the Albanese government.
Of course the institutions designed to protect labour and wages are corrupted, starting with Peter Lewis, second only to The Guardian where he publishes.
As we know, The Guardian has a fatwa against the word “immigration”, which is the most egregious wage suppression policy in Canberra, wrecking wage growth since 2012, when it was ramped up to lead instead of compliment GDP:
The CFMEU is a nice “exhibit B”. This so-called “union” turned mass immigration mobster has spent years leveraging its members into population growth construction at the expense of wider wage growth.
Honestly, if there were no biased media stacked especially against workers, Peter Lewis’s government propaganda would never have been published and workers would be just a little bit better off.
