labor led by the mad.

Another great bolt article - it just highlights that labor and their deluded followers just don't get it.



ABOR is in la-la land. Both its last two leaders now claim they won the election.
Worse, the two men campaigning to be Labor's next leader insist on keeping the last leader's most devastating mistake.
Is Labor led by the mad or the deaf?
It was bizarre enough that Prime Minister Kevin Rudd gave a 23-minute concession speech on election night boasting he'd saved Labor.
"We have preserved our Federal Parliamentary Labor Party as a viable fighting force," he shouted, despite ¬Labor recording its lowest ¬primary vote in a century.
But Julia Gillard at the weekend outdid even Rudd for self-delusion.
"Are election victories the only measure of political success?" she asked in an essay for The Guardian.
In fact, she claimed, as Prime Minister she'd won the battle of ideas. "Labor ... has won the battle on workplace relations so profoundly" that even Tony Abbott, now Prime Minister-elect, disowned the former Liberal government's WorkChoices.
Abbott had also been forced into a "humiliating backdown" over Gillard's proposed school funding "reforms", and had agreed to her disability scheme. Nor had he objected to Gillard's Asian Century white paper.
What a thin portfolio of ¬victories. Two unfunded and yet unrealised schemes, blah blah about Asia and a workplace regime that Abbott will actually loosen with a crackdown on union power.
The list of Labor "reforms" Abbott will dismantle is much longer - the carbon tax, our weak border laws, the green bureaucracy machine, some massive handouts, the NBN over-investment, restrictions on free speech, the mining tax and more.
But Gillard, dazzled like too many Labor MPs by the mirage of her "achievements", then asks: "So, given all this, ... why was Labor repudiated by the people?"
The truth is Labor lied, cheated, squandered, bungled and divided.
But here's Gillard's version - Labor lost because it dumped her.
"The decision ... to change leaders in June this year ... sent a very clear message that it cared about nothing other than the prospects of survival of its members of parliament."
Gillard's message: Labor would have done better had it left her to fight the election on her policies, rather than chosen Rudd to fight on his - policies she describes as "poor", "bizarre", "hugely expensive" or appealing to "cheap populism", tinselled with "the frippery of selfies".
Gillard writes: "Kevin clearly felt constrained in running on those policies where Labor had won the national conversation, because those policies were associated with me. Yet there was not one truly original new idea to substitute as the lifeblood of the campaign."
Gillard refuses to accept she was electoral poison, particularly loathed for breaking a promise not to give us a carbon tax. Former Labor senator John Black, now a demographer, reckons Rudd saved about 25 seats Gillard would have lost.
Perhaps it's natural that ¬Labor's last two leaders cannot admit they destroyed their party.
But what's Bill Shorten and Anthony Albanese's excuse?
Both are now running in a ballot to be Labor's next leader, yet vow they'll stick with ¬Gillard's worst mistake.
Even now Gillard insists, "Labor should not in opposition abandon our carbon pricing scheme", and Shorten and Albanese, in declaring their candidacies, each swore to defend the tax Labor imposed on us by deceit.
Incredible. How could a damaging tax that makes no difference to a global warming that actually paused 15 years ago become the core item of Labor faith?
And how can Labor go to the next election promising to bring back a carbon tax Abbott will have scrapped - ¬especially after it was clearly rejected at this election? Labor would be murdered.
Yet neither Shorten nor ¬Albanese can yet drop the tax, thanks to one of Rudd's last idiocies as leader.
Rudd forced Labor to adopt a new way of choosing its leader, with half the vote to be decided by a ballot of party members.
So Shorten and ¬Albanese must for the next month sell themselves to Labor members who lean well to the Left, when the next election will be decided by voters who last time voted Liberal.
That means both must for now defend the carbon tax - still the great totem of the Left. Only as leader can they drop it.
American politics is full of such reversals by politicians who must first appeal to their base for nomination and then to voters for election. Hawks in the primaries become doves in the campaign.But would Australians trust such conversions or conversions or hypocrites?
I doubt it, when trust is now gold in politics. Rudd and Gillard lost the voters' trust, and Abbott last Friday told his MPs to earn it.
But there go poor Shorten and Albanese, forced to say one thing on the carbon tax today, knowing they must say a very different thing tomorrow.
Or are they really as delusional as the leaders before them?