Identity Politics in Australia, by Mark Latham.

In political history, 2019 will be remembered as the year Labor lost the unlosable election due to wrong-headed tax policies. …

The clearest example of this process is in the Labor/Green embrace of identity politics, judging people by race, gender and sexuality. Poor people with the wrong skin colour (white), gender (male) and sexuality (straight) are automatically excluded from social justice consideration.

One only needs to visit a public housing estate in Western Sydney to know that straight white men are a big part of Australia’s underclass. Restructured out of manufacturing work and forced into welfare dependency, identity politics has no solution for their poverty. Even worse, it sneers at them as an example of ‘white male privilege’, creating enormous resentment among one of the most disadvantaged groups in society. Social justice never works well as a zero-sum game, when one disadvantaged group can only prosper at the expense of another.

Labor has lost the support of a generation of straight white men (perhaps a quarter of the electorate) who see their needs being wiped by the emergence of employment quotas, workplace discrimination and accusatory domestic violence propaganda aimed at them. That’s a massive constituency shedding, driving the ALP primary vote into the low 30s. …

The rise of identity politics has divided Australia into competing identity groups, making people less inclined to trust in the collective role of government and fair allocation of public resources. It’s been a social justice disaster that Labor should abandon immediately, returning the party to the principles of meritocracy.

Oops, forgot to post these earlier. This post and the next three are from July.