The dark, double-thinking heart of Labor’s neoliberalism

Excavating the bullshit inherent in their "hard heads warm hearts" slogan

This is the promised follow-up post to one I wrote the other day about the (unlikely) resurgence or reinvention of the Liberal Party. You can read one without the other, but they are a sort of matched pair in my mind.

Labor has convinced themselves that they can go on winning by shifting to the right, assuming many of the policies and positions of the Coalition—from tax cuts, to mutual obligations for the unemployed, to the cashless welfare card—and that this, combined with a little more compassion, and a not-total abandonment of the idea of a welfare state, will be enough create the “centrist” credentials they are convinced are the key to electoral victory.

Hard heads and warm hearts as the Treasurer put it the other night at the 2023 Sambell Oration.

Labor are burnishing their conservative bone fides, positioning themselves as the natural party of government, by attacking the Greens, playing footsie with the crossbench, while appeasing the various branches of the right-wing media, incl…