Did Bob Brown win the election for Scomo?
The crying leftists have come up with all sorts of reasons for why they lost Saturday’s federal election. They’ve blamed the stupid redneck Queenslanders for being stupid and racist. They’ve blamed Clive Palmer and Pauline Hanson for having the temerity to run for office and have people vote for them. They’ve blamed Bill Shorten for being just too gosh-darn honest and upfront. And of course they’ve also spent time blaming the evil Murdoch media empire for brainwashing the stupid plebs of this country into voting against what patient leftists have been carefully explaining is in their own self-interest.
Now they’re blaming Bob Brown, which seems a bit of a reach.
Poor Bob. After all, it was common knowledge amongst leftie luvvies before the election that Adani was a winning issue for them. That the public was supposedly crying out for the phasing out of coal and “real action” on climate change. Greens leader Richard Di Natale pronounced: “This is a Climate Change election”. Bill Shorten opined that: “This election is all about Climate Change”. Guardian Australia editor Katherine Murphy declared that: “2019 is the Climate change election”.
So can you blame poor Bob for getting a little carried away? Sure, his plan to take a convoy of inner city hipsters in electric cars to the middle of coal country in central Queensland looks like batsh*t craziness in retrospect, but in Bob’s mind he was probably back fighting the good fight against the Franklin Dam in Tasmania. He’s getting on in years and is these days surrounded by adoring fans who fawn over his every word as though his every utterance were genius.
The fact that Queenslanders of all political persuasions don’t really like being told what to do probably didn’t sink in to the 74-year-old. The fact that Queenslanders REALLY don’t like being told what to do by southern sneering stuck-up snobbish condescending pricks almost certainly never occurred to him or to any of the other geniuses who planned his little convoy. Queenslanders as a whole are well aware of what southern leftists think of them. Being preached at by such people was bound to raise some hackles.
The town that Bob and his little procession of the pious got memorably chased out of during their ill fated convoy of the confused is called Clermont. It’s a nice little place with a long history of hostility to meddling outsiders. Near the centre of town is a mural depicting the great shearer’s strike of the late 19th century. Part of it depicts a mob of locals chasing a train load of mostly Chinese scab labour, that had been shipped in to break the strike, back onto the carriages that had brought them. The folks of Clermont are proud, independent and staunchly working-class with a history of unionism. People like this were the original bricks on which the Labor Party was built. Last Saturday the town recorded a 20% swing to the LNP. National party notables Barnaby Joyce and Matt Canavan publicly thanked Bob Brown for his efforts with tongues firmly set in cheek.
The truth is that Bob may have swung a few votes but he was only the symptom of a wider disease. The leadership of the modern Australian Left is so insulated in the inner suburbs of Melbourne and Sydney that they genuinely thought a few protests by truant schoolchildren organised by taxpayer-funded professional activists was a sign of a sea-change in public opinion. It’s not simply in Queensland either. Even in the left-wing stronghold of Victoria, the expected gains by the ALP in outer suburban and rural marginal seats simply vanished.
Former Labor leader Mark Latham was right when after the election he pronounced that his old party had taken a wrong policy turn some time ago and now has a crap worldview baked into its party culture. While we might want to cheer the short-sightedness that has led to the ALP losing 7 of the last 9 federal elections, we might not want to break out the bubbly. Not having a party that genuinely cares about workers to balance out the party looking out for the interests of business is bad for Australia. Big corporations don’t always have our best interests at heart and sometimes in their quest for ever greater profits they can damage our society severely. Sadly it looks likely that this problem isn’t going to turn itself around any time soon, the upper middle class leftie luvvie elite are in charge of the ALP and they mean to stay.
While it’s fun to watch the left try and blame Bob Brown, this loss isn’t the fault of one doddering old fool in an electric car. There’s plenty of blame on the left to go round, if only they looked in the mirror.