Up the
Evolution!

Labor is gone
Harold Hark
12 July 2002

(Labor is gone... A phrase that reminds me of the early 90s when sportscasters wet themselves over Hawthorn's gradual slide from Footy Valhalla. Hawthorn is gone! they loved to remind everyone. The bastards.)

Labor will not follow the exhortations of John Button or Kevin Rugg or Mark Latham or whoever, and it really wouldn't matter if they did. The Labor Party lost its soul once and for all by backing John Howard's Border Protection Policy. True, Labor started the slide back in the 80's with their construction of mandatory detention centres. But, having made that inhumane error, there was no reason for them to compound it by falling in line with Magoosolini.

The faulty thinking--that they could match the heartless Illiberals--was breathtaking. But in the end, Kim Beazley really believed in the absurd notion of protecting our pathetic borders from the desperate. When Andrew Fowler asked him on Four Corners shortly before the 2001 election: "Where's the compassion in your support of the decision not to allow the fathers of the six drowned girls to return home to Australia, if they go to Indonesia to visit their grieving relatives?" Beazley never batted an eye. He didn't answer the question, either. His steadfast adherence to the repugnant refugee policy of the Illiberal Party knocked the wind out of every decent person in this country.

Now Labor is tearing its hair out over reforming Union representation, branch stacking, heir apparents...any and everything but the reason half of Australians have turned away in disgust.

Perhaps Labor will once again become a creditable party, but after a century, it would seem their race is run.

For the umpteenth time, this newsletter would like to put forth what seems to be the only reasonable alternative to the snarling Huns who constitute the Coalition: A new party.

A social democratic "party capable of making real social change, of making the country a better one for all its citizens," as John Button asked of the ALP, but which must now be accomplished by a new entity. It's been done before, it can be done again.

For openers, as we've said before, those members of the current political parties who genuinely believe in social democracy can withdraw their services from those parties and form the new party. Labor, Liberal, Democrats, Greens, even the Nationals, have more than enough full blown human beings in their ranks to start the party literally overnight.

A party meant to serve humanity's broad interests over the blinkered single interest of the spreadsheet onanists for whom all that matters is counting money and using a tiny part of their minds to come up with methods to enslave enough people to keep making it for them.

If things get bad enough--and they certainly appear to be heading that way--such a new party might indeed be born.

Until then, one half of Australians will have no real voice. And for that matter, one half of the world's inhabitants, for the sell out of the miraculous mind is universal.

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