Media fails to see real ALP agenda, by Chris Mitchell.
A deskilled mainstream media has not joined the dots this election campaign, running a daily race-call coverage without giving voters the real big-picture changes Australia may face after May 18.
When Bill Shorten told Leigh Sales on ABC’s 7.30 last Wednesday night Labor had a bold plan for the nation’s future he was not kidding. It’s just most journalists have not realised how bold. …
The most important election policy story in decades went by with surprisingly little fuss last week. Labor leader Shorten not only promised increased childcare subsidies for families earning less than $175,000 a year, he said Labor would subsidise childcare workers’ wages for an effective 20 per cent wage rise. … The Australian and The Australian Financial Review covered it on their front pages on Monday and followed on the front again on Tuesday with stories suggesting it would be difficult to restrict the Labor wages intervention to childcare. Impossible really, I’d say. …
New Labor is not like Hawke-Keating Labor:
The real issue is the signal this sends about Labor’s plans for big government. It is ditching the politics of aspiration unleashed by the Hawke-Keating governments of the 1980s as a political strategy to offset falling trade union membership and to create new allegiance to Labor in favour of cradle-to-the-grave embrace by government. …
This is government as dance partner for life. How will Labor be able to resist claims from other low-paid workers in the human services sector for a government wages top-up? Expect aged care, NDIS and psychiatric services workers to be first cab off the rank.
These areas are ripe for increasing union membership. Shorten Labor privately sees government embrace as a way to attract workers back to unions. …
Climate debacle:
It’s just that most media apart from the serious papers have no interest in the cost of a policy that will likely drive the last of our manufacturing offshore to countries with lower emissions standards. They are allowing Labor to frame its climate agenda as a moral issue that should not be costed, even though the world’s biggest emitters will keep lifting emissions until 2030 under their Paris commitments.
