There are countless other factors and examples that even the internet doesn’t allow space for but the nub of it is that we have a government that is neither grounded in nor has significant exposure to the full breadth of the electorate and the mass of antipathy, frustration and disbelief that lies therein. It almost defies belief to think that it was only after she got off a plane on the weekend that Gillard realised the true public hostility towards the government’s defence of Slipper and Thomson but this is what she said with a straight face on Sunday.
And it actually makes sense. Every time the government has been criticised or attacked, it has deluded itself to think that it is just the work of Tony Abbott or the Murdoch press or some other sinister force seeking to destroy all that is good and light. Not once does the party seriously consider the possibility that the public has turned on them because they knifed a popularly elected prime minister, lied twice about “the greatest moral challenge of our time”, and sought to defend two alleged rorters caught – almost literally – with their pants down.
The ALP simply no longer knows what people are thinking. It is so consumed by parlour house politics – such as the “masterstroke” of recruiting Slipper – or patching together piecemeal and unpopular policies to appeal to tiny vested interests such as Wilkie and the Greens that it has completely lost sight of how these issues are playing out in the wider electorate. Then when they do hear the negative feedback they are so simultaneously arrogant and paranoid that they simply shoot the messenger.
And no doubt again when they read this piece the same bunch of ostriches will ignore its contents and accuse me of being yet another agent of evil attempting to destroy the party. They will rant and rail and stick their heads in the sand.
And most tragically of all they will not stop to ask themselves why someone trying to destroy the Labor Party would spend 2,000 words explaining how to save it.