Whatever Labor think they are doing, it's not working

Time to stop digging and assume the higher ground

This is a quick response to what has been an appalling few weeks in Australia politics, with the suggestion that Labor is rapidly painting itself into a corner that will make it hard for them to govern with anything like the necessary authority, and that will, worse, leave them hollowed out and bereft.

Let me put some context around that.

The first thing to say is that the Australian political class, the corporate and institutional core that endures no matter who is in government, tends to be hostile to Labor.

This includes—obviously—the mainstream media, not just the Murdoch part of it, but the whole edifice, as has been expertly documented by University of Melbourne academic Sally Young in the first two volumes of her three-volume history of Australian media. (I reviewed Volume 2 recently.)

And I mean, to make the point, this was a recent page of news headlines from Nine Entertainment. Notice anything?