Mark Latham calls out the racist Labor campaign:
At its first election in 1891, Labor campaigned on keeping Chinese labour out of the economy and “stamping Chinese-made furniture”.
In 2015, at the poll two days ago, the party campaigned on keeping Chinese investment out of the NSW electricity network –
a disgustingly racist, dog-whistling pitch to Hansonite voters.
The only senior Labor figure to speak out against this atrocity was Martin Ferguson.
Former premiers such as Bob Carr and Nathan Rees were silent. Labor’s federal leader Bill Shorten didn’t say a word. what a bunch of gutless Turds
The party’s elder statesman, the recently retired senator John Faulkner, was not only silent, he acted as a backroom adviser to his protege, Luke Foley.
The other guilty party is Jamie Clements, the deeply cynical, logrolling NSW campaign director who masterminded Labor’s anti-Chinese advertising blitz… But this strategy has had grievous consequences:
destroying the party’s moral base, its reputation for decency and tolerance....
Last Wednesday, Foley jumped the shark politically, urging ASIO to investigate potential Chinese investors on the spurious grounds that, “you can transport data along the high voltage (power) line"…
This is the rampant NSW Labor disease: a say anything, do anything, whatever it takes ethos that allows leaders to junk longstanding principles such as racial tolerance in search of a handful of votes in marginal seats…
His stance on coal seam gas was no less illogical… The damage Foley and Clements have caused to Labor’s reputation will take many years to repair, especially in Sydney’s Chinese community…
And for what purpose? A primary vote of 34 percent, with Labor – according to the new electoral pendulum – still needing a swing of 8.4 percent to win majority government in 2019.
Only now that the battle is lost does Bob Carr find his moral compass and his voice:
Senior Labor figures, including former premier Bob Carr, have declared the fight against power privatisation lost, urging the party to get out of the way of Mike Baird’s economic reforms after his resounding NSW election victory…
Mr Carr and fellow party figures Michael Egan and Michael Costa yesterday urged Mr Foley to drop his opposition to privatisation and allow it through the upper house…
Yesterday, Mr Carr, who supports privatisation but stayed silent during the campaign, called on the party to change its mind…
Mr Egan, the former Labor treasurer, wrote yesterday that the party
“should now stop fooling itself that an anti-privatisation policy is a vote-winner for Labor’’… Echoing Mr Ferguson, he said that Labor’s arguments against privatisation were completely bogus.
“The so-called national-security argument against privatisation was no more than xenophobic dog-whistling. It was an argument I would expect from One Nation or the Greens, but never from Labor,” Mr Egan said.
What an opportunist is Bob Carr: Bob Carr ... was watching the state election results come in on Saturday evening from the sidelines of the Boao Forum in China’s Hainan province…
Carr has been carving out a fourth career as director of the Australia-China Relations Institute. Yet last week he was backing the architect of Luke Foley’s “reds under the bed” campaign, ALP secretary Jamie Clements. Confused?
Yes, I am. From 25 March:
Bob Carr is full of praise for the strategist for his role in getting the ALP to regroup.
“And what we want, is for him to be in the position for a long stretch,” he says.
Clements has ... made three key decisions that will inform the election result: he saw opportunity in the state’s north by exploiting anxiety about coal seam gas; he crossed factional lines to back the Left’s Luke Foley into the Opposition Leader’s job less than three months ago; and he decided on a campaign to oppose electricity privatisation long before Premier Campbell Newman’s fall… “For the first time since the 2007 federal election, there’s a sense of hope in the NSW Labor Party,” [Senator Sam] Dastyari says.
That’s at least two dud and disgraceful decisions out of three.
Yet numbers merchant Sam Dastyari now searches for scapegoats rather than admit the campaign he backed was a failure - politically and morally:
Former federal Labor stalwart Martin Ferguson ...has been referred by the Victorian branch of the Maritime Union of Australia to the ALP’s disputes committee with the request he be expelled from the party of which he has been a member for 40 years…
His referral to the disputes committee is backed by Victorian Trades Hall Council, the secretary of which, Luke Hilakari, said Mr Ferguson was “Judas who sold us out for 30 pieces of silver"…
Mr Ferguson appeared in a Coalition commercial saying he was “ashamed” of his party’s opposition to the policy and its claims it would drive up power prices…
Labor Senator, powerbroker and former NSW ALP general-secretary Sam Dastyari described Mr Ferguson’s behaviour as “deplorable” and “a bastard act”.
“There is no place in the Labor Party for Martin Ferguson,” he said.
My God, these hypocrites. Former NSW premier Nathan Rees seems to think racism in Labor campaigns should never be called out - until the campaign is safely over:
Rees said Mr Baird had won a mandate to privatise power but