Okay, but my original statement was ; â?? the next-gen power challengers led by Bob Hawke, Clyde Holding who eventually called themselves â??Labor Unityâ??.â??

Yep. They were challengers to the power holders of the FPLP, and in the period, they distinguished themselves not by coming from a different ideological starting point but simply by coming from outside the Federal Parliament.

I was describing the spectrum of interests as it existed between â??63 and â??75 which I assume you no longer contest now that youâ??ve refreshed?

I *am* refreshed, in fact, quite chipper, but I still don’t know what you mean. You’ve described your life involvement in the ALP of twelve years more than thirty years ago. What’s to contest?

I wasnâ??t talking about the 1980s

No indeed.

You are right to suggest PR doesnâ??t â??createâ?? factionalism. And â??entrenchâ?? may have been a misleading term. What PR does is force factions into compromise and deals, instead of one party grabbing the lot as used to happen in the ALP.

Thanks for agreeing with me entirely. I appreciate the sentiment, and I think both of us applaud the political outcome of PR, the best voting system as yet devised by humans. Please feel free to concur with me any other time you like. Just stick up your thumbs, smile, and say “Right again! You’re the man, Liam”!

It was actually the development of al fresco dining in the inner cities and a growing taste for fine food and wine among the bien penseurs that facilitated the rise of the pseudo/soggy/marshmellow left.

I’ll let that pass, to the keeper, or the sommelier, I suppose. No I won’t: “Marshmallow” has no “e”, a letter that itself was an innovation of the late 1980s. Ahem.

The blue collars were driven from the inner cities to the northern and western wastelands.

That I can’t let slide, as a lover of my city—Sydney. The best and most enduring thing about Sydney is the culture of its Western suburbs, not at all the bits bounded by overpriced water. I’d love to know why it is you apparently hate suburbanites so much. “Wastelands”? Now that’s just offensive.
I think you’d enjoy Michael Thompson’s stuff, especially Labor Without Class, Pluto Press, 1999(abouts). He’s right into sticking it up imaginary élites and raising fictional proletarian class-based analyses onto non-Marxian pedestals, and all from his spot of Balmain real estate.
His is just the kind of perversity that makes Wests Tigers when they win the heirs of the Balmain greats, but nothing but that shitty team from Campbelltown when they lose.

Itâ??s a strange argument to suggest Keating et al didnâ??t come out of the NSW Catholic Right Labor tradition, but whatever.

Not really, it’s not. He was a Catholic and a right-winger, but just being a bog-wog and a De La Salle boy doesn’t make you part of the NSW Catholic Right. That requires a far more activist stance—and required, even in the 60s and 70s—on the issues of concern to the Vatican: abortion, most of all.

Their strategy – long lunches

And a brilliant strategy that should be a weekly event. Viva la Psuedo/Soggy Left.

No, Iâ??m not. The Labor Unity/Labor Forum groupings solidified as a national Right faction only in the 1980s. Read Macintyre and Faulkner on this, and my comment more closely. They got organised in response to the efficiency of the factional Left after the Whitlam years.

“SOLIDIFIED in the 80s”?
Okay, but my original statement was ; â?? the next-gen power challengers led by Bob Hawke, Clyde Holding who eventually called themselves â??Labor Unityâ??.â??

I wasnâ??t talking about the 1980s, but the period when Labor Unity, Socialist Left etc were actually formed ie the early 1970s which was direct result of Fed intervention, which was in turn reponse to Whitlam having won enough seats in ’69 to make the ’72 election winnable.

So the â??solidificationâ?? of LU in response to later political contexts wasnâ??t relevant to my point. I was describing the spectrum of interests as it existed between ’63 and ’75 which I assume you no longer contest now that you’ve refreshed?

You also mentioned â??the organisation of the Steering Committee (later SL) after its defeats in WA and Vic.â??

The defeats in WA and Vic occurred in the period I was referring to, as was the organization of the SC and SL which was undertaken at the time by Bob Hogg and others as Holding, Hawke, late Ian Turner and others organised LU.

No, the basis of the entrenched factionalism the party enjoys is entrenched factionalism. Deals made together between factions implicitly lock out non-factional candidates: PR itself has nothing to do with factionalism.
For comparison, the Italian Parliament uses PR, and theyâ??ve got the most unstable Party system on the planet. If the â??Occupationâ?? youâ??re referring to is the Iraqi one, the Party difficulties there stem from sectarian voting blocs acting in very rational self-interest, which is a human deficiency, definitely not a flaw in the PR voting.

It is proportional representation that enables every faction get representation in proportion to the vote it receives. As a consequence parties are forced into coalitions and alliances and govts can be notoriously unstable as in Italy.

This is the direct opposite of the â??winner take allâ?? system that applied in the Labor Party prior to Young and Burnsâ?? decree.

You are right to suggest PR doesnâ??t â??createâ?? factionalism. And “entrench” may have been a misleading term. What PR does is force factions into compromise and deals, instead of one party grabbing the lot as used to happen in the ALP.

I see you appear to have no response to my other points in which I point out your exceptional wrongness, or Markâ??s, for that matter.

Sorry, didnâ??t think you mean’t them to be substantive points. I only said neo con â??likeâ??. At least one Grouper still remaining in public life, Ray Evans, would have supported the invasion, I think?

As for the NSW Right â??technocratsâ??, this was not the term that was used at all to describe them in the 60s and 70s, more a term applying to them since theyâ??ve grown up. Itâ??s a strange argument to suggest Keating et al didnâ??t come out of the NSW Catholic Right Labor tradition, but whatever.

You have nailed it beautifully. Basically what happened was the sanctimonious bourgeois Left raped and stole the ALP. Their wretched progeny now breed in university humanities departments, the Fairfax press, Gay BC, and the blogosphere. Their legacy? John Howard

It was actually the development of al fresco dining in the inner cities and a growing taste for fine food and wine among the bien penseurs that facilitated the rise of the pseudo/soggy/marshmellow left.

Again, it was the Chipp Dems who led the way. Their strategy – long lunches in the late ’70s designed to separate the emerging Labor middle classes from the blue collars – proved spectacularly successful. Capacity for clear and logical thought was systematically undermined with the result that connection with the past struggle on behalf of the working classes was irrevocably broken. The blue collars were driven from the inner cities to the northern and western wastelands. No shame over perpetrating this dispossession was ever felt by the PSML, the first signs of the cognitive dissonance that is their distinguishing characteristic today.

Liam, you are amazing. Just learned more in the last five minutes than for the whole year of Politics 1.

You have nailed it beautifully. Basically what happened was the sanctimonious bourgeois Left raped and stole the ALP. Their wretched progeny now breed in university humanities departments, the Fairfax press, Gay BC, and the blogosphere. Their legacy? John Howard.