Labor’s experienced former deputy leader Jenny Macklin was challenged by socialism
Labor frontbencher Jenny Macklin pulls the plug, The Australian online yesterday:
Retiring Labor MP Jenny Macklin has emphasised the importance of leadership stability, signalling to her colleagues that the Australian people would mark them down “very heavily” should they roll Bill Shorten as leader … Should Labor lose one or two seats in the July 28 by-elections, Mr Shorten would likely face pressure from … rival Anthony Albanese … Ms Macklin was rolled as deputy Labor leader to Kim Beazley in 2006 when Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard took the leadership positions. She had previously served as deputy to Simon Crean and Mark Latham.
Bill Shorten on Twitter, Friday:
Every political party in Australia wishes they had a Jenny Macklin, but only Labor has been blessed with her extraordinary mind, her caring heart and her fearless love of the good fight.
Shorten might not always have been so generous. The Sydney Morning Herald, September 19, 2013:
Senior Labor MP Jenny Macklin has announced her support for leadership aspirant Anthony Albanese, saying the former deputy prime minister’s record in government makes him best placed to defeat Tony Abbott.
ABC online, Friday:
In 2012, Ms Macklin also weathered fierce criticism from welfare advocates after pushing thousands of single parents off their payment system, and on to less generous unemployment benefits.
Macklin muses on socialism in the spring 1983 issue of The Australian Left Review:
Over the time I have been thinking about strategies for the 80s, challenging capitalism and building socialism, I have got confused about priorities. Not surprisingly, everything seemed enormous, interconnected and nothing I read really helped me think about what to do in the here and now in a better way … Our work has really been premised on the prospect of continued economic growth — how else are we going to provide jobs? This was one of those blind alleys that seem to be constructed to prevent you doing anything as everything is too difficult. … What does the dismantling of capitalism and the building of socialism involve? It is all too clear that spontaneous uprising is not around the corner.
Brigid Delaney in The Illawarra Mercury, January 2, 2013:
The families minister, Jenny Macklin, claims she can live on $35 a day. I’d like to know her secret. When I was on the dole I dreamt of how I could make it work. Where I wasn’t just surviving on the dole but living on it, properly living. In my fantasies I was no longer in a share flat in Bondi (rent: $35 a day) but was transported into a make-believe place I’ll call Dole Valley — an agrarian socialist community where everyone could live happily on $35 a day. Maybe this is what Jenny Macklin had in mind when she made her breezy assertion.
Socialist Party website, May 11, 2011:
Far from being a champion of equal pay or women’s rights, Macklin oversees the Northern Territory intervention … A scheme which pays Aboriginal people as little as $4 an hour. Another consequence of this policy has been the closing down of women’s centres and other social services in the NT … For the pro-ALP bureaucrats inside the union movement, principles are not a high priority. The reality is that both Macklin and the organisers … are politically aligned through the “socialist left” faction of the ALP. Despite the name this faction is neither left nor socialist.