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SILENCE
Labor’s Lindsay Tanner tells the ABC his party’s bitterness and unpopularity are due to reflected anger:
LINDSAY TANNER: I would like to see more idealism in Labor. I would like to see a lot more but we should be careful not to mistake anger for idealism and a lot of the critique that you see of Labor currently is reflecting people’s anger at George Bush and John Howard. And that’s profoundly negative and reactive.
It’s always Bush’s fault, somehow. The conclusion to Tanner’s Lateline forum appearance is hilarious:
GEORGE BRANDIS: I think the problem with that, Lindsay, is Mr Latham was very visible for several years and if you read his diaries he had given up on the capacity of the Labor Party to deal with those very problems.
LINDSAY TANNER: George, I think that’s Mark’s way of coping with failure.
GEORGE BRANDIS: No, he wrote the diary entries contemporaneously when he was expecting to be the next Labor PM.
LINDSAY TANNER: Did he?
SILENCE
MAXINE McKEW: On that note, we are out of time.
(Via reader Brian)
Goodbye, everybody! I am going to Rottnest Island for as couple of days and hope to hump my brains out! For 48 hours or more I have no interest in sad cases like Lindsay Tanner rationalising the one-balled Mark Latham’s way of “coping with failure.”
Look me up on Rotto if you’re there!
Posted by Susan Norton on 2005 10 24 at 10:43 AM • permalinkI saw John Faulkner getting stuck into the ALP about the factions. Now this comes from the factional heavy who throw the NSW Left behind Keating and Latham to create both of those leaders. His reward was a very senior advisorial and or Cabinet position as a reward. Additionally both Keating and Latham had to accept much of the Faulkner agenda, an agenda that has cost the ALP its credibility and a substantial swag of it voter base. It’s time for Faulkner and the left to accept that it is the ALP Left’s influence that has most alienated the voters and led to the worst backlashes against ALP leaders in living memory since Gough post dismissal. Don’t blame the factions generally John - it was your NSW Left’s manipulation of them to get an undue influence over ALP policy that has been the single most damaging thing to the ALP over the last decade and a half. It is time for John Faulkner to personally accept the responsibility for creating the two most unpopular and unelectable ALP leaders in recent history.
Posted by platey mates on 2005 10 24 at 10:46 AM • permalinkTim, you make Oz politics sound so much more entertaining that ours.
Another pantsing. Nice work.
Of course, this Lindsay could be said to have practically pantsed himself.
Posted by Rittenhouse on 2005 10 24 at 11:10 AM • permalink>a lot of the critique that you see of Labor currently is reflecting people’s anger at George Bush and John Howard.
Let me get this straight - according to Tanner the reason people are angry with Labour is really because they’re angry with Bush and Howard. I bet that one doesn’t work on his wife when he comes home steaming drunk at 3 am: “Oh honey, that rolling-pin is not really for me is it, ow, it’s for Bush, isn’t it, ow, so stop hitting me, Christ that hurts, hit Howard instead’.
Posted by Blithering Bunny on 2005 10 25 at 03:11 AM • permalinkAfter Tanner asked “Did he?”, I could swear I heard crickets chirping.
Posted by Oafish and Infantile on 2005 10 25 at 07:01 AM • permalink
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Congratulations to Lindsay Tanner for telling some home truths about the ALP. The only hope for the nation in the long term is to have better policies from both sides of the house and if Labor supporters can get over their obsession with Howard and Bush maybe they can apply their minds to developing better policies. Certainly the Government could use some effective criticism and complacency is their biggest danger right now.