Tanner strikes me as walking both sides of the street with some of his observations. His argument is essentially that the ALP has lost it's soul by being excessively fixated with polls/popularity rather than principle. His loathing of Gillard which dates back to student politics days is said to be based on his view that she is too given to expediency. Then he criticises the Greens as a party that has the luxury of maintaining "Pure" left policies because they'll never have the responsibility of power. So on the one hand he believes that political parties should be driven more by ideology than purely practical considerations, but also the party that comes closest to that (The greens) lack legitimacy because they aren't burdened by responsibility. It's not clear to me how Tanner believes a political party should balance the conflict of expediency versus principle.
