Joe Hildebrand: Labor must shed the fanatic parasites invading its base

Labor is on the verge of a golden era in office and yet the usual lunatics on the Left still try to besiege the party, writes Joe Hildebrand.

Fanatic are like a chill wind. You open your back door a crack and then suddenly they’re all through the house.

The Australian Labor Party has learnt this lesson the hard way many times, each one harder than the last.

It spent more than two decades in opposition during the ’50s and ’60s when communists ran rampant through its ranks while saner souls fought valiantly to purge them.

Then, after the three-year wobble of the Whitlam years, it was back in opposition again for the best part of a decade, only rising to form anything resembling stable government under the Prime Ministership of Robert James Lee Hawke, ably assisted by a Sancho called Richo.

It was in this primordial soup that was formed the Labor Right, an initially amorphic but ultimately watertight coalition of lucid individuals, who reached the fairly commonsense conclusion that you couldn’t do much to improve the state of the nation if you couldn’t actually govern it.

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese attends a meeting at Parliament House in Canberra.

Hawke won in 1983 and Paul Keating carried Labor through until 1996, thanks almost entirely to the ability of the sensible heads of the ALP to suppress the idiocy of the dopey hippie Baby Boomers and unreconstructed commies in their midst.

Labor was at the time lauded as “the natural government of Australia”, while Whitlam’s reign was coined “a shining aberration”.

And yet in the three-quarters of a century since World War II, it is the Hawke-Keating government that has been a shining aberration while the Coalition has held the lion’s share.

Chifley’s government collapsed on the back of his radical plan to nationalise the banks, Whitlam’s collapsed after his government was embroiled in the Arab loans scandal and the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd government is a byword for a basket case by most within the party, not to mention those outside it.

As of New Year’s Day 2022, Labor had managed stable government for only 13 of the 75 years since the old train driver won his last election.

This should be serious and indigestible food for thought.

Former prime ministers Bob Hawke and Paul Keating.

That changed in May this year. Anthony Albanese, notwithstanding his leftist pedigree – in fact he has always been more of a pragmatic fixer – has been strong on national security, sensible on social policy and responsible economically.

The new government has shown all the hallmarks of recalling the Hawke-Keating golden age and then some. But Labor’s vulnerability to the lunar Left still remains and it needs a wall the size of China’s to resist it.

The first red flag was the party’s bizarre and ham-fisted reversal of Australia’s recognition of West Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.

In Labor’s defence, the initial recognition of West Jerusalem by the Morrison government was just as bizarre and ham-fisted and clearly geared towards the Wentworth by-election in Sydney’s largely Jewish eastern suburbs.

A couple of quick points here: A) Don’t screw around with major geopolitical conflicts just to win a by-election; and B) If you do, don’t commit until after the by-election.

Otherwise you have merely – to use a phrase familiar to suicide bombers – blown your load.

But just because Morrison might have recognised West Jerusalem for the wrong reasons doesn’t make it wrong.

Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong’s bungled announcement of the reversal added insult to injury. Picture: Department of Foreign Affairs via NCA NewsWire.

It is politically and historically absurd that after 3000 years of existential struggle any Israeli state would not eventually have Jerusalem as its capital.

Yet that has been the eggshell game that Australia and most other nations have played.

Then zooming in from the macro to the micro, we get the NSW Labor Party’s inadvertent – I hope – acceptance of a former Sydney University academic – aren’t they all? – who reportedly has worn jackets bearing slogans such as “Curse on the Jews” and “Death to Israel” and is a supporter both of Iran’s deranged theocracy and Bashar al Assad’s Syria.

Labor has already had its issues with links to China, which could
tap-dance the Good Ship Lollipop, compared with these two countries.

It cannot possibly welcome the presence of someone who praises such hideous regimes while also defending both North Korea and Joseph Stalin, who is rivalled only by Hitler for his murderous reign. This is batsh-t crazy stuff.

A Victorian party official tells me his phone is running off the hook after the Jerusalem fiasco while NSW leader Chris Minns is silently seething over the membership snafu.

NSW Labor Leader Chris Minns.

I would bet London to a brick that state secretary Bob Nanva is having a firm word to his left-wing underlings even as we speak.

But the fact that this is happening at all, let alone so soon after the ALP’s long-awaited ascendancy, is yet more hard proof of the hard Left’s toxicity to all it touches.

Labor is on the verge of another golden age, both nationally and in the nation’s oldest and largest state.

And yet the usual lunatics on the Left still try to besiege the party like the dead-eyed ideological lemmings they are.

Worse still, they are not just lemmings walking off a cliff – that would be a blessing – but also brainless barnacles, somehow
pre-programmed to mindlessly infiltrate, corrupt, corrode and ultimately scuttle the ship upon which far better souls sail.

The sooner the party scrapes these parasites from its hull, the longer it will survive and thrive.

And it must, because the alternative is oblivion at the bottom of the deep blue sea.