lifelong labor member sums up the labor joke

AN OPEN LETTER TO BILL SHORTEN AND ANTHONY ALBANESE

As a fourth-generation, 45-year ALP member – a life member of the party – I am disturbed with the party’s loss of direction and with its policies on the run.

The Labor Party was formed by my great-grandfather’s friends as the political voice of the trade union movement. My family has been in the ALP since 1893.

I have not made my mind up who to vote for so I would like some public answers to the following questions:

1. Bill Shorten has publicly stated that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders are not represented and he would like to see some parachuted into safe Labor seats and have quotas like the 40per cent quotas set for females. Has he thought of a quota for those not represented, like the Australian worker? I feel we need labourers, nurses, coalminers, electricians and firemen etc in Parliament.

To my knowledge there is only one ALP member now in Parliament who actually came out of the workshop. And I don’t mean via a union office or as a parliamentarian’s assistant but still in the actual workforce.

2. Do you feel it should be a condition for preselection that the person actually is an ALP member, I suggest for a couple of years at least?

3. You both state that factions are ruining the ALP. Would you support proscribing all factions?

4. Would you support democracy in Australia where 50per cent plus one in a referendum decides policy and what Australia does? A referendum could be demanded by a petition of 100,000 electors.

5. Do you support the notion that all policy comes from the tried and true practice of ideas from the branches being referred to state and federal electorate councils and then to state conferences for determination? If that had happened we would not have seen the giving away of the Commonwealth Bank, electricity assets, public lotteries and anything else not tied down.

6. Do either of you agree with Kevin 007 (licensed to kill the ALP) that it should take 66per cent of the vote to replace the national leader? Talk about Zimbabwe democracy.

7. Where did the policy for a carbon trading scheme under Rudd and a carbon tax under Gillard come from? Not from any state conference.

8. Do either of you support any tax that allows rich people to pay a levy and pollute while working-class people have to take cold showers because of the carbon tax and the sell-off of electricity assets?

9. Finally, if faced with the situation that both Gillard and Rudd found themselves in – of being unelectable – would either of you step down immediately or would you have to be tapped on the shoulder?

We have just had an election where, as a self-funded retiree, the only thing that was offered to me by the ALP was that if I divorced my wife of 45 years then I would be allowed to marry a bloke. No wonder we lost in our worst result ever.

http://www.michaelsmithnews.com/2013/10/lifelong-labor-party-member-sums-up-the-labor-joke.html