Albo is becoming a disciple of the ScoMo Messiah and creeping in under ScoMo's winning Aura. Is ScoMo Australia's Donald Trump ? Is Albo ALP's Mal ?Australian Labor Party leader: We will keep voting for government’s legislationBy Mike Head 1 August 2019
Labor Party leader Anthony Albanese this week told his members of parliament to get used to voting for the Liberal-National Coalition government’s bills, even if they claimed to disagree with them.It was another blunt signal of Labor’s further sharp shift to the right in the wake of its historic debacle at the May 18 federal election, where its vote plunged to its lowest level in a century despite widespread hostility to the right-wing government of Prime Minister Scott Morrison.
Addressing Labor’s parliamentary caucus, Albanese declared: “We will often be confronted with circumstances where we will vote on an issue which includes measures we agree with and measures we disagree with. That is exactly what happened with tax and it will keep on happening.”
Albanese made it clear that Labor’s vote last month for the government’s massive income tax handouts to the rich was no aberration. As a result of that vote, billions of dollars will be handed to the top 5 percent of the population—those taxpayers receiving more than $200,000 a year—while the millions of low-paid workers, students and welfare recipients trying to live on less than $41,000 a year will get nothing.
Clearly aware of popular outrage at Labor’s open embrace of the Coalition’s agenda, Albanese told the Guardian that Labor MPs had to hold the line despite “the disappointment that is out there.” He accused anyone who objected to this of “looking for easy answers.”
Contemptuously, Albanese dismissed any suggestion of retaining the policies that Labor took to the election, pretending to crack down on huge tax concessions for wealthy investors and property owners. “We’ve seen the movie, it just played out, and we’ve seen the conclusion,” he said.
Albanese pronounced that Labor MPs had to vote for the government’s latest bill, imposing mandatory prison sentences for “possessing child abuse material,” even though that meant overturning Labor Party policy against such compulsory jail terms.
This will be the third such vote within weeks. As well as supporting the government’s income tax bonanza for the wealthy, Labor MPs backed unprecedented legislation to allow the home affairs minister to exclude Australian citizens from re-entering the country for at least two years if the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) deems them likely to participate in “politically motivated violence.”
As soon as he was elected party leader unopposed in May, Albanese vowed to pursue bipartisanship with Morrison’s government. This is not a tactical ploy. It is part of Labor’s commitment, also spelt out by Albanese, to forge closer ties to business, boost “wealth creation” and appeal to “successful people.”
By his latest move, Albanese has underscored the ditching of the phony populism of Labor’s election campaign, during which it claimed to oppose “the big end of town” and champion a “fair go” for workers. This stance was a failed attempt to divert the mounting anger over soaring social inequality and declining working class conditions behind the election of another big business Labor government.
While the corporate media welcomed Albanese’s stand, there was nervousness that it could fuel social and political unrest. Political columnist for the Australian Simon Benson warned: “The Labor leader’s admission of political impotency … risks reinforcing a perception of a feeble opposition.”
In a bid to justify his position, Albanese compared Labor’s position in parliament to that following the 2004 election, when the Howard Coalition government held a majority in both houses of parliament. “Even though it’s only dawning on people slowly, effectively the government is in a similar position in the Senate now as 2004,” he told Labor’s caucus. “And they will get most of their agenda through parliament.”
This is a total fraud. First of all, the unpopular Howard government was able to gain control of parliament only because of the ongoing antipathy toward Labor, whose then leader, Mark Latham, pledged a renewal of the offensive launched against working class jobs, conditions and basic rights by the Hawke and Keating Labor governments of 1983 to 1996.
Second, the Morrison government barely scraped back into office. Its vote actually fell, by nearly 1 percentage point, down to 41.5 percent, and even lower in the Senate, where its vote was 37.99 percent. In fact, because 15 percent of voters abstained or cast an informal ballot, the Coalition’s vote was less than 36 percent of the electorate.
Widely detested, the government won a majority of seats on the back of preference votes from various far-right parties, which exploited deep discontent through fake “anti-elite” demagogy.
Labor’s vote plunged to a century low of 33.1 percent in the lower house and 28.79 percent in the Senate. Its support dropped most sharply in working class areas across the country that were once regarded as Labor heartlands, leaving it with virtually no “safe” seats. By contrast, Labor’s vote rose substantially in affluent electorates, reflecting its true social base.
[url]https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/08/01/labo-a01.html[/url