The new Australian Labor Party, not like the 1980s. By Nick Cater in The Australian.

Fattening workers’ pay packets was once core business for the Labor Party. Not anymore. On Thursday, delegates to Labor’s triennial national conference turned a blind eye to four years of stagnating living standards, higher taxes and punishing inflation to give Anthony Albanese’s economic policy a big tick.

Then they got on to the big stuff: gas, gambling and Gaza, the hot-button issues among progressives who are the outright owners of today’s ALP. The PM has settled the identity crisis that dogged the party for half a century. Under Albanese, Labor is now unambiguously and irrevocably the party of the “long hairs”, as Jack Lang once disparagingly called the intellectuals on the fringes of the party, “dreamers … the sons of wealthy parents … overtaken by ‘misty idealism’ ”.

Since Lang’s day, the divide between the graduate and non-graduate classes has become the dominant fault line in cultural and political life. Under Albanese, Labor has plonked itself firmly on the side of the tertiary-educated elite in opposition to the socially conservative values of working-class people.

Having abandoned its former mission as the workers’ party, Labor is now free to cast itself off into the stratosphere, dealing with things much more important than the cost of living, soaring energy prices or record immigration.

It is a very different party to the one led by Bob Hawke and Paul Keating, who understood that Labor could achieve nothing without a strong economy. …

Hello?

The 60-40 divide on the voice referendum is, however, a reminder that the non-graduate class holds a clear majority.

A notional referendum question on, say, the size of the migration intake, support for net zero or the linking of the word Islamism to terrorism would produce a verdict equally as convincing.

Paul Keating was taught well by the boffins at Treasury when he was treasurer. Apart from that period of his career, Keating pretty much lived up to  his reputation as “Captain Wacko.”