Crikey

Is the seat of Brand rather boggy and sad? Its Member, Kim Beazley, seems to be remarkably Eeyore-like in his political prognoses in The Sydney Morning Herald today.

“We’ll all be rooned” is his general thrust:

The loser of this year’s federal election will struggle to survive as a political force, the former Labor leader Kim Beazley says…

The union movement would be wiped out within a decade and “that would remove one of the essential underpinnings of the Labor Party…”

If Mr Howard lost, “there is a serious question mark over the future of the Liberal Party”. Labor would win the NSW election in March and Mr Howard would remain the only governing Liberal. “After some years of Labor state governments, Liberal oppositions are still struggling to get a third of the seats in state parliaments.”

Mr Beazley noted the state Liberal branches were already in poor shape and if Mr Howard lost the election, the Liberals would not govern anywhere…

First the union movement. It’s called voting with your feet, Kim. It’s called freedom of choice. Freedom of association. The ALP and its industrial wing have had problems with this concept for a long, long time. Get over it. Pinning your party’s structure on a fundamental breach of human rights – the closed shop – was a very dumb idea.

And the ALP? Well, if the unions have made themselves irrelevant to ordinary Australian workers, then the Labor Party has to change. And they can look to New Labour for some ideas on what to do – and what not to do. (We don’t have a House of Lords. That should help.) A proper party leader would have realised this and done something.

Beazley’s better in his assessment of the Liberal Party – but, as always, he’s failed to deliver a killer blow.

If he had said something along the lines of: “The Liberal Party organisation has all been centralised in Canberra. They only remain a political force because of the public money they steal for their taxpayer funded campaign unit, the Government Members Secretariat, and the way they play the politics of patronage to chase donations from the top end of town” he would have been right – and given his opponents a real slap in the face.