Miranda Devine: Labor’s problem just shifted even more to the Left
With one of the two biggest political parties in the country now being well and truly infiltrated by the power-hungry EMILY’s List and Rainbow Labor, many former supporters of the party are now looking elsewhere, writes Miranda Devine.
Labor’s new leader Anthony Albanese thinks the reason his party lost the unlosable election was because “we haven’t sold the message well enough.”
The lesson the losers have taken from their drubbing is that the salesman and marketing were no good. If they really think that, then they’ll be out of office a fair while, which isn’t great for democracy, no matter which way you vote.
The truth is, Labor choked on its own woke.
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The party of the worker, founded in Barcaldine, rural Queensland, under the fabled “Tree of Knowledge” during the shearer’s strike of 1891, is caught in a cultural pincer movement.
On one side, stand the stern frauleins of EMILY’s List, representing hard-left feminism. On the other is Rainbow Labor, the political mainstreaming of the fringe LGBTQI movement. Woe betide anyone who doesn’t meekly acquiesce to their demands.
The alternative is ritual denunciation as a misogynist, sexist, homophobe, transphobe, bigot, knuckle-dragging cave-dwelling hater who crawled out from under a rock, you name it.
Labor men, like former leader Bill Shorten, mostly have succumbed to Stockholm syndrome, or been forced out.
EMILY’s List, co-founded by Julia Gillard, was designed specifically to promote “progressive” women and left-wing causes. To belong to EMILY’s List, you must be a pro-abortion feminist supporting “equality” and “diversity”. And to prosper as a woman in Labor you have to belong, as at least 75 per cent of Labor women do.
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By enshrining quotas in Labor policy it has achieved near gender parity in federal parliament. This might be a victory for females, but only a certain type of female.
EMILY’s List has only accelerated the ideological homogenisation of the party which renders it increasingly out of touch with mainstream Australia.
A Labor stalwart once described it to me as a, “barnacle that has attached itself to the Labor Party, a parasite on the body politic (which) alienates voters, especially in marginal seats”.
But it is the advent of the even more militant rainbow lobby which has created an “extinction event” for Labor.
“The big problem is Rainbow Labor”, says one Labor insider. “It acts as an LGBTQI cell inside the Labor Party, both in the state branches and federally.”
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A friend in the Socialist Left recently complained to him privately after a conference caucus meeting about how “doctrinaire” colleagues had become.
“He just could not believe how much of the meeting had been turned over to talking about sexuality/gender matters when there were so many other issues that needed to be discussed. They sucked up so much of the meeting’s oxygen.
“People wanted to move on to other issues but the protagonists kept talking and demanded to be heard.”
“Nobody had the guts to try and shut them down knowing what the consequences would be. [being called] a homophobe or transphobe etc. Hardcore LGBTQI operatives … use the ALP as a host … [They] have burrowed themselves into the ALP via the Socialist Left faction. They are in deep, fanatical about their cause and will not be easily overcome. I think that some of them do not care if their host, the ALP, becomes roadkill,” they said.
“They are limited in what they can do politically by themselves [because] they are just too small, even if they dominate within the Greens, as they do.
“But, unlike the Greens, the ALP can get into government and create or change laws … The ALP is where the action is.”
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Rainbow Labor had its first big win in 2015 when the ALP National Conference voted to scrap the conscience vote on same-sex marriage and make it compulsory for all MPs.
WA Senator Joe Bullock, a socially conservative Christian, and former boss of the “Shoppies” retail union, quit the Senate as a result, telling the ABC he now felt “isolated and lonely” inside the Labor Party. He was the last social conservative.
WA Senator Louise Pratt, a driving force of the Rainbow Labor machine, called him “deeply homophobic” for his marriage stance and made no secret of her delight at his departure.
A self-declared lesbian married to a trans-man, she has been instrumental in inserting the enormous amount of LGBTIQ content into the ALP National Platform.
In this seminal document, which is binding on future Labor governments, you can see the extent of the rainbow takeover.
No other issue, not poverty, wage growth or any of what you might think would be Labor core concerns, receives as much attention.
For example, there are 64 mentions of “sexual orientation”, 59 of “intersex”, 42 of “LGBTI”, 36 of “transgender”, 33 of “bisexual”, 31 of “lesbian”, 29 of “gay”, and several of transphobia, biphobia and homophobia. Housing affordability appears just 10 times.
The ALP platform also introduces a new Human Rights Commissioner for “Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and Intersex Status”.
And it signs Australia up to the “Yogyakarta Principles on the Application of International Human Rights Law in Relation to sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression and sex characteristics”, aka mandatory enforcement of radical gender ideology.
Those shearers who gathered for a fair go under that Queensland tree, wouldn’t recognise their party. The electorate in which they met, Maranoa, is now the safest Coalition seat in the country and recorded Queensland’s highest No vote in the same-sex marriage survey.
But, like Joe Bullock, the founders of the Labor Party wouldn’t even vote for themselves today. Why would the rest of mainstream Australia?
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