Is Keneally the reason Labor is rotting on the vine ?Keneally: the actress who couldn’tAMM 21.10.19.
Labor’s rush to get the loud-mouthed show-pony Kristine Keneally into the fold in the belief that she was a political Messiah of sorts, despite her long record of disasters, has come to bite them fiercely on the bum.
Keneally is a theatrical ham, a thespian of schoolgirl measure knowing that a pretty face in tears will triumph every time.
You can’t win. You’re a liar if you call Kristina Keneally a Labor star, but misogynist if you call her a disaster. Is this really how feminism was meant to work? Screams of “sexist!” when some powerful woman is exposed as a flop?
Take Keneally. The former (and failed) NSW premier is arguably now federal Labor’s weakest link, rivalled only by hot-gospelling Climate Change spokesman Mark Butler.
‘Misogyny’ card players costing LaborSource: Andrew Bolt, Herald Sun
Even some of her colleagues privately tell journalists Keneally causes more trouble for Labor than for the Morrison Government.But then I read this in the papers: “Other colleagues backed Senator Keneally, saying … criticism of her was bordering on ‘misogyny’.”
Misogyny? So, praise Keneally, and it’s no more than she deserves. Criticise her, and you’re a woman-hater. Heads she wins, tails you lose.
In fact, it’s Labor that’s losing ever since new leader Anthony Albanese promoted Keneally to be his spokesman for Home Affairs.
How crazy was that? Home Affairs has been trouble for Labor ever since the Rudd Labor government trashed our border laws and lured in 50,000 illegal boat people, with another 1200 dying at sea.
Labor needed a hard-head to fix the huge damage to its reputation, yet Albanese has Keneally instead, drowning Labor’s resolve in her soggy bog of headline-chasing “compassion”.
For instance, Keneally has declared the government must not expel a family of illegal boat people that every court up to our highest has ruled has no right to stay.
She also demands the government not repeal laws that limit the Home Affairs Minister’s power to stop activist doctors from flying in fake boat people for medical examination in Australia.
Now Keneally wants the government to bring home from Syria about 20 Australian widows and wives of Islamic State terrorists — women she claims, on zero evidence, are “innocent”.
That’s too much for Labor MPs such as Anne Aly, who once ran deradicalisation schemes and correctly noted that some of these “innocent” women were in fact willing participants in the horror of the Islamic State.
Anthony Albanese hasn’t played the victim card played in his defence unlike Keneally.
True, Keneally is not alone in making Labor under Albanese less a party than a rabble.
There’s Butler, now doubling down on the global-warming madness that lost Labor the “climate election” in May.
The lesson of that humiliation should be clear. Voters won’t buy Labor’s ruinously expensive targets for cuts in greenhouse gases, yet Butler is now digging in and even declaring a “climate emergency”.
Then there’s Albanese himself. He’s not only frozen with indecision — steer left? Steer right?
Worse, he, too, seems slow to learn from Labor defeats, particularly the Gillard-Rudd crash after Labor’s budget-blowing spending spree.
In fact, he last week suggested it was maybe time to “go hard” on another spendathon on the struggling economy, even though the surplus Rudd inherited and frittered away has been replaced with a mountain of debt.
What a mess. No wonder Labor is making no progress, despite our fast-slowing economy and the Morrison government’s policy paralysis.
But Labor’s troubles go beyond not learning the lessons of past defeats and doing the opposite of what’s needed. There’s also a cultural sickness that’s infecting its ability to think straight.
Consider: I’ve named three Labor underperformers — Keneally, Butler and Albanese.
But only one has the victim card played in their defence. We can attack Butler and Albanese all we like, but call out Keneally and the shrieking starts: misogyny!
How often does this now happen? Try saying Julia Gillard was a lousy prime minister who broke her “no carbon tax” promise. Misogyny!
Then there’s Kaila Murnain, who last week played this same game.
She was dumped as NSW Labor general secretary over her role in accepting an illegal donation of $100,000 cash in an Aldi shopping bag, and as she left, clutching her $250,000 payout, she, too, whipped out the gender card, decrying Labor’s “culture of sexism”.
If this is the new rule, how can anyone trust praise for any woman in politics?
How can we distinguish between a Hillary Clinton and a giant like Margaret Thatcher if it’s misogyny to say Clinton’s a dud?
But this absurd victim politics — that divides commentators into liars or sinners — is now deep in Labor, as the defence of Keneally shows.
This is a symptom of the identity politics that got Keneally appointed in the first place, the trophy woman, and now has Labor backing the creation of an Aboriginal-only advisory parliament — a new apartheid.
And that makes Keneally not just a reason for Labor’s decline, but a symbol of it.
https://morningmail.org/keneally-the-actress-who-couldnt/#more-108950