No matter where you go in Australia, there are many people who are worried about the state of the nation. Families are struggling to make ends meet, businesses are struggling with red tape and inflexible employment laws and investors are keeping their hands in their pockets (and what’s left of their money in the bank).
It is also abundantly clear that a lot of the despair is driven by a lack of confidence in the Labor Government. People consider the current PM and her coterie of Cabinet members to be self-interested and untrustworthy. That’s why so many people are crying out for an election. It’s also why so many within the Labor parliamentary ranks are plotting against Gillard to ensure the return of Kevin Rudd.
Thus far, while the move is gathering momentum, Labor’s faceless men are resisting the change. This begs the question; what price are they willing for the country to pay while they struggle to protect their egos?
The faceless men of Labor, those union bosses and factional heavyweights, believe that they didn’t receive enough attention and respect from Kevin Rudd, so they took the first opportunity to remove him. Amazingly, many in the Labor caucus had no idea what was going on until it was announced on television by a union numbers man.
These self-styled ‘men of action’ are now paralysed like a rabbit in the spotlight as they ponder the mess they have created. To move against Gillard would expose these members of the Labor movement’s royal family to potentially job-threatening criticism and the resultant neutering of their personal power and sense of entitlement.
Recent tales about the inner workings of the union movement suggest that power and entitlement are fiercely protected in this most sheltered of political workshops. Forgotten is the poor worker who loyally pays his fortnightly fee to these relics of yesteryear. Their hard-earned money disappears in networking lunches, valet parking, suspicious contracts and monetary largesse for political and personal purposes.
In return, the union movement gets to effectively control the Labor Party as evidenced by the reports of union bosses threatening to withhold donations should any federal leadership spill emerge.
While their paralysis continues, our nation loses more and more confidence in how the government is running the country. So much so that apparently Labor’s NSW ‘right’ have now drawn up a disaster rebuilding plan in the expectation that Gillard’s legacy will leave the Labor Party in electoral ruins.
Now that doesn’t bother me one bit, but as this government lurches from one crisis to another, their impotence and incompetence is having a devastating effect on the nation.
Every day they continue to mismanage our national interest, every week of rhetoric and spin, every month of more lies and waste, means it will take more time after the next election for a new government to restore our fortune.
It has taken Labor only four years to destroy the financial legacy of a decade of conservative government and rack up over $160 billion in national debt. It will take at least a decade of prudence and good governance to redress that damage.
It seems almost everyone in the country is concerned about the future of the nation…everyone, that is, except the union bosses and their puppets in the government who seem only to care about themselves.
Cory Bernardi is the author of seven books and has been a member of the Australian rowing team, a publican, an investment portfolio manager and spent nearly 14 years as an Australian Senator.
