Federal election 2016: ALP’s fairness means socialist ideology, by Jennifer Oriel.
Labor has gained poll popularity by mastering the art of framing.
No concept has been subjected to more radical reframing during the election campaign than fairness. By modern Left reckoning, indebting citizens to expand state power constitutes fairness. The ideals of fairness and equality have been retrofitted to serve the New Left’s voracious statism …
“Fairness” favors the less fortunate but also parasites.
Fairness is not an economic plan. It is a political ideal that typically comes at a high cost with no guaranteed return on investment. Fairness has to be funded. That funding often comes from sources the Left despises: the entrepreneurial class, the private sector and mined natural resources.
The Left’s fairness agenda depends on the redistribution of revenue from wealth creators to state dependants including politicians and bureaucrats.
But advocating “equality of outcomes” is the hallmark of the parasite:
But the Left is reshaping the fairness agenda in the image of more typically socialist ideology. It agitates for substantive equality where fairness is equated with equality of outcomes. Substantive equality requires the neo-Marxist strategy of levelling enabled by “positive discrimination” in affirmative action laws.
[Equality of outcomes] is promoted by the Labor Left, the Greens, publicly funded institutions including the Australian Human Rights Commission and many supranational organisations.
By contrast, the Right supports formal equality defined as the equal opportunity to achieve and the equal treatment of individual citizens under the law.
Equality of opportunity is fair. But equality of outcome is unfair because it ignores merit, hard work, deservedness, and ability — parasites love it, because they can share equally in the spoils while making little or no contribution.
The legacy of left-wing government is neither equality nor fairness. It is debt. …
The modern Left sacrifices the principle of fairness and the practice of equal opportunity to service the statist ambitions of its political elite. None are more disappointed than those of us who once believed Labor’s pledge to fairness meant putting the people before the party.
