‘Woke Left is destroying Labor’: Political legend unloads on his own party
An ALP stalwart has sensationally claimed Labor’s Left are obsessed with climate change, identity politics and cancel culture.
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It’s a hot and sticky Sunday afternoon in Dimbulah in the early 1950s and a young Keith De Lacy leaves his family’s tobacco field with his father, Ernie, a former cane cutter and the local president of the Communist Party.
Local branch members or comrades meet on their day of rest on the sandy bed of the Walsh River, 100km west of Cairns, swapping stories and anecdotes, railing against the so-called educated “elites’’ and progressives who mostly voted Conservative.
These men are not your average motley crew, they are well-spoken, well-dressed and well regarded in their communities.
They are the same men Ernie and Keith see at the hotel that evening, swapping yarns over a few beers.
Keith had a far-from-privileged upbringing, as the second eldest of four children for Irene and Ernie, who did it tough during the Great Depression but who instil in their children an appreciation of education, a collectivist mindset and appreciation of hard work.
Now 81, Keith De Lacy lives in an apartment overlooking the Brisbane City Botanic Gardens. It’s a stone’s throw from state parliament, where he spent his best working years as one of Queensland’s most-respected treasurers during the Goss government, from 1989 to 1996.
His father and those hardworking, solid “red raggers’’ of his childhood are ultimately the reason he joined the Labor Party in 1970.
De Lacy’s faith in Labor was born out of those early days when workers gravitated to the party to protect themselves from opportunistic employers.
But now, he laments, it is a far cry from today’s Labor Party, which he says has lost its moral and ethical compass.
The Labor Party, De Lacy believes, faces an existential crisis that could ultimately lead to its political extinction.
De Lacy has outlined his crisis of faith in the party in a wide-ranging new memoir, A Philosophical Journey, in which he eviscerates the Labor Left’s obsession with climate change, identity politics and cancel culture, and its love affair with the Me Too and Black Lives Matter movements.
He pulls no punches.
He says the Rudd government accelerated the electoral carnage as the Labor Party threw its lot in with the elites, when Labor’s reason for existing over many decades was to fight them.
The so-called progressives, De Lacy says, “have nothing more than a patronising, sneering contempt for working class people and their culture’’.
He accuses the “woke’’ brigade within the Left faction of Labor of alienating average Australians. “Certainly in terms of philosophy, the woke Left of the Labor Party is destroying itself through overreach … simply by overdoing it,’’ De Lacy says.
He writes of a “massive cultural evolution’’ over the past few decades, underscored by a mindset highly critical of the society in which we live, which “sees only the bad and ignores the good’’.
“It is supported by a range of ideological carcinomas, some newly minted, and others given a new lease of life in a grand postmodern reinvention,’’ he says.
“They are killing themselves. Most Australians are not in the front line of politics, yet they have a reasonable and sensible view of the world.
“Yet the Left are telling them that ‘you are a racist’ and your sons and grandsons are sexual monsters.
“They just won’t cop that, and nor should they. My point is that our society is suffering from a disease called ‘overreach’.”
In his book, De Lacy refers to film producer Harvey Weinstein, who was outed as a sexual predator and “millions of women with an agenda jumped on board, and sexual harassment became the cry’’.
“The Me Too movement exploded out of the blocks. But it burst into overreach within the blink of an eye,’’ he writes.
“Many men were tried in the media and the court of public opinion with no presumption of innocence.
“Inevitably it became a political tool.’’
De Lacy says the Me Too movement is in danger of losing the support of the mainstream.
“There are many women out there who have sons and husbands and vex how these loved ones are going to negotiate the rocky shoals of the Me Too tsunami, the new rules of engagement,’’ he says. “Men are being turned off, especially the notion that all men are rapists.
“Many male executives are now reluctant to relate one-on-one with females to offer comfort and support, whether working, travelling or mentoring.
“The worst outcome is that it turns it into a woman versus man contest (and) serial predators use it as a cover.’’
De Lacy says the Black Lives Matter movement suffers from the same disease, stoking the fires of racism to overcome racism.
“Hysterical activists are the greatest dead weight an otherwise noble cause can have,’’ he says. De Lacy says protesters turned off Mr and Mrs Average, and the proof was in the 19-year term of Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen as premier.
“Sir Joh, a superficially mediocre leader, served more than seven terms, ably assisted by well-meaning opponents who became intoxicated by a cause, to their own detriment,’’ he writes.
“I hate to say it, but the reconciliation overtures of Indigenous Australians are in my view now in danger of being killed by the self-defeating exuberance of the Black Lives Matter protests who unfairly stain the motives of all Australians, to the extent that the potential referendum looks to be a dead duck, killed by friendly fire.
“The Australian philosophy is to live and let live, which can manifest itself as, I have nothing against it, but if you try to shove it down my neck, you can go jump.’’
In his book, De Lacy talks of Karl Marx, the true father of identity politics, who did not believe in individualism, but that people were members of a class.
“The Labor Party was therefore a logical manifestation of group identity, representing the working class,’’ he says.
He says the Labor Party formed to pursue workers’ rights democratically, yet “it seems okay these days for trade unions to break what they term unjust laws, or for groups to ignore democratic verdicts and glue themselves to a public road”.
De Lacy says women enjoy a vital and expanding role within society, however, he says you wouldn’t know this if you listened to so-called progressives and feminists, who promote the identity politics of discrimination.
“We seem more determined than ever to put people into identity prisons based on race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class,’’ he says.
“People in identity grouping become prisoners, sentenced to a life of grievance, blame shifting, non-performance, unhappiness, emotional anger and even hatred.
“Once you can absolve yourself of personal responsibility, once it is always someone else’s fault, or the fault of history, there is a loss of agency – no way out. There is only misery.’’
De Lacy talks of the term “white privilege” or as some refer to it as “stale, pale and male’’.
“This constant refrain of ‘white male privilege’ can be a bit tiresome, especially the obligatory guilt associated with it.
“Many of the people who I see occupying the higher stations in life these days come from working class backgrounds.
“Most people who get to the top do it through hard work and application.
“And attitude. Not because of intrinsic privilege. Most people (not all) who end up on Struggle Street do so because of their own personal shortcomings, not because privileged oppressors got in the way.’’
De Lacy points to Chelsea Clinton, who landed a job at NBC as a special correspondent paying $900,000 a year, while her mother, Hillary, flies around America condemning white privilege.
“There is a crisis of values out there,’’ he says.
“We are paying the price, as are many vulnerable women and children.
“Boy-girl relationships are destined for a major rewrite going into the future.’’
While De Lacy’s memoir should be a clarioncall to people such as Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese and Deputy Premier Steven Miles, it also reveals him as a family man with a deep and abiding love for his late wife Yvonne, who died three years ago, after they had been married for 56 years.
They met when he was 21 and she was 19. She was cook at the Queens Hotel in Cairns.
De Lacy was running a tobacco farm and was cooking for eight men.
“I asked her if she’d help me do the cooking for the men, and she said yes,’’ he says. “That was it. We pretty well got married straight away.’’
Their first daughter, Jonnie, was born 12 month later and De Lacy settled into family life. He supplemented the farm’s income with backbreaking, filthy and at-times dangerous work as an underground miner.
But, keen for adventure and to secure his family’s future, De Lacy took his young family to Papua New Guinea, where he worked as an agricultural officer and was later principal of an agricultural college.
The De Lacy family spent nine years in PNG and in this time he completed a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Queensland, and his other daughters, Jacqui and Toni, were born. The De Lacy clan now extends to five grandsons and two great grandsons.
In 2014, when Yvonne was battling kidney failure and required hours of daily dialysis. De Lacy donated a kidney to give his wife a better life.
Was that a difficult decision?
“No, not at all,’’ he says.
“That’s what you do. I only ever had her. That was us. I miss her very much.’’
De Lacy has lived a full life but in his twilight years – he has serious health issues – he worries about the future of a political party that he says faces an existential crisis.
Elected as MP for Cairns in 1983, he became treasurer following Wayne Goss’s Labor victory at the 1989 state election, and remained in the role until the party’s defeat in 1996.
De Lacy was regarded by many on both sides of politics as one of the state’s best fiscal managers. In fact, two economic leviathans of Queensland, Sir Leo Hielscher and Jim Kennedy, both aged in their 90s, agree Queensland has never had a better treasurer than De Lacy.
His currency to assess and judge the modern-day Labor Party is unquestioned. He knows his book will ruffle feathers, and he will lose friends.
But De Lacy places more credence on authenticity than losing the odd mate.
From his inner-city apartment window, he points at Parliament House. “I spent half my life there,’’ he says. “If those walls could talk.’’
We enter his study, where he points to a Courier-Mail spread on the “Class of ’93”, in which the newspaper’s then political doyen Peter Morley ranks the performance of the Goss government ministers.
Morley puts De Lacy at the top of the class, referring to him as a steady hand on the tiller of the state’s finances.
His fiscal austerity and commonsense and cautious approach to balancing the books is a far cry from today where, he says, the Palaszczuk government spends like a drunken sailor, unconcerned about paying down a debt which has ballooned to $100bn.
“I lie awake at night sometimes, thinking, ‘how will they ever pay that off?’,’’ he says.
“The answer is they never will. It’s a big load to carry for future generations.’’
It’s certain the death of his wife and his own mortality has hastened De Lacy’s memoir, a trip down memory lane, exquisitely exploring Queensland politics over the past half a century.
But the real story here is the complete and utter evisceration of the modern day Labor Party from a stalwart who is watching a car crash unfold before his eyes.
De Lacy remembers the day Wayne Goss asked him to be treasurer.
“He said, ‘De Lacy, I think you’re up for more’,’’ he says.
“Goss was a champion. He had as much ability as any politician I’d ever seen. He was probably not quite knockabout enough and didn’t relate to people as well as others.
“But he probably deserved a bigger career than he got.’’
But De Lacy has little time for former Labor prime minister Kevin Rudd and his long-time treasurer, Wayne Swan. He was unimpressed with the role Rudd played in the Goss government as director-general of the office of cabinet.
“The only person Rudd ever worried about was Kevin Rudd,’’ he says.
“He had an ambition bigger than the Gulf of Carpentaria. Kevin had really taken over the government through Goss.
“He set up these so-called gulags where they’d just put these poor buggers in a corner – you couldn’t sack them because of the unions – and forget about them. Rudd liked the gulags.”
Swan was no better, De Lacy says.
“Swan was very much anti-business and, again, he was into putting people in corners.
“Swan was real deep into his philosophical class war, the politics of envy. Swan couldn’t see anything other than through a political eye. Not what was best for Australia or Queensland, or even the Labor Party. It was all about Wayne – not what was best for the national interest.’’
Swan remains the national president of the Australian Labor Party.
In the book, De Lacy recounts a story where Labor bosses, sick of losing to the National Party, try to recruit former Coalition minister Russ Hinze.
De Lacy was dispatched to his Oxenford home where Hinze – all 140kg of him – greeted De Lacy in nothing but a pair of shorts.
“What can I do for you, young De Lacy?’’ was Hinze’s opening line.
Needless to say, Hinze declined the Labor offer.
“Russ Hinze was hardly highly admired but I liked him because he never ever pretended to be something different to what he was,’’ De Lacy says. “(Former Labor deputy premier) Tommy Burns and I once went with him to Tommy’s electorate in Lytton and we finished up at a pub.
“Russ shouted the bar, and he was singing The Red Flag with the workers.
“Could you imagine what old Joh would have thought of that?
“What a character. There was something legitimate about him. Mind you, he’d put anything into his back pocket. He used to say ‘you’d be a mug not to’.’’
After politics, De Lacy had a successful businesscareer, becoming chairman of the wildly successful Macarthur Coal, where the obligation to look after taxpayers was now transferred to shareholders.
He was chairman of Ergon Energy, Queensland Sugar, Cubbie Group, Trinity Property Group, CEC Group, Hynes Lawyers, Nimrod Resources, China Oil and Foodstuffs Corporation (COFCO) Australia, and Integrated Food and Energy Development (IFED). It was in this time De Lacy saw what he says was the Rudd government’s extreme policies on climate change and the damage it was causing jobs and the economy.
“The mindless pursuit of renewables hurts the very people – miners mostly – who had relied on the Labor Party in bygone eras,’’ he says.
“The Labor Party has now joined the elites when it used the fight them.’’
In the book, De Lacy writes he has no regrets.
“I acknowledge there are many noble aspirations in the ALP manifesto, though these are greatly diminished by being full of superficial slogans and a general scrambling in the wilderness as they attempt to translate these aspirations into achievable and beneficial policy outcomes,’’ he says.
“For instance, a party, any party, saying they are for jobs, jobs, jobs doesn’t create jobs.
“I know this will go down like a hamburger at a vegan Christmas party but I believe that the policy road maps that I champion today … are closer to true blue Labor than the present official offering. Especially since the green, progressive elite started to kick the door down.’’
De Lacy says a good life can be measured by being true to yourself and your principles, which makes you authentic and feeds your self esteem.
It also means being disciplined, presenting well and facing up.
“Be gracious and respect others; make space for them,” he says.
“To a certain extent, there is no better measure of a successful life, or a happy one.’’
On that score, Keith De Lacy tops the poll.
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