I like Lindsay Tanner... I met him a couple of times... He has a passion about things like one loves wet soggy lettuce.

But he will persevere at flogging it... Tanner lives in Maybeland, the agnostic nether region of whatever maybe... What he has not understood yet is that politics is about the management of illusions and ideals while using hard cash. Labor's motivation is to promote the idea of equity and a fair go for all, including supporting the weak and the sick, in a social context using as much cash as possible from the rich. The Liberals (conservatives) motivation is to give everyone the illusion they can be richer with a conservative government while flogging the populous masses till they bleed, in order to extract more loot for the rich. The Greens promote the concept of a sustainable planet in a world where we're all frolicking naked in fields of flowers... 

Thus democracy is a shifty beast. 

I don't think Tanner talks to the same people than I do... There are plenty of convinced politicians out there who try their best to get things moving whichever side of the blanket they're on... To say that Labor has lost its soul is a bit rich... Especially when equity and the idea of equality means having to cleverly manage the small kitty since the rich are so mean. Especially when in the rest of the world, the kitty has been looted by the rich who still try to give the impression they suffered as much in the global financial crisis as the next garbo (garbage collectors)... Possibly. Garbos are important and necessary. Rich folks often are like leeches but we can't all be basket weavers. I bet you my bum dollar that these rich people got out rather well out of the crisis... As governments kept pumping more cash to replace the cash that has disappeared "no-one knows where"... the rich bums took their cut and, like clever baboons, loaded their cheeks and begged for more. Trying to manage things with a prancing clever baboon like Abbott on the other side of politics is not a piece of cake either... 
And let's be frank here... Most workers (the greater majority thereof) are reasonably well off in this country... Compared to say 40 years ago, people are more remunerated for their toils than then. Sure we can whinge... And there are pitfalls... If you're on the zero line, the real starting point is harder to reach. 
Take waterfront workers now... Say 60 years ago, they were so badly paid, pilfering was a way to support the family with extra meat on the table... You should hear the stories from the old-timers... organised like gangsters... Then, containers were invented for convenience of transportation — and to minimise the pilfering so to speak... Conditions changed — from people carrying bales of wool on their back, sweating all day for a pittance, going on strike for better conditions and wages under the leadership of unions that had a firm "closed" eye on the pilfering — to far fewer people needed for operating cranes and trucks... many scrounging bums found themselves on the scrap heap before time — and government had to help find ways of support. 
After the war (WWII) many governments in Europe had to find quickies to "repopulate' and under the doonah bribes were given to families to have kids and more kids... There, I present you of course, the "baby boomers"... Education had to be free and the whole process cost so much money that devaluations were rife — some countries just moving the currency decimal point two zeros to the left... Of course the rich knew the value of money was like that of toilet paper, thus their "investments" were in gold, in property and in luxury goods like Rembrandt paintings...
But one cannot get the thieving monkey out of us so easily... The better off "we is", the more we shift to the right and the less we care about those who are in the gutter... It becomes "if I can do it, why can't they?" syndrome. Not realising that most of us do not get up there on our own but through a chaotic but protected social exchange of reciprocity. Not all have the ability to weave through it, nor the luck... It is often good luck that we succeed... Unfortunately, in this new context, our social organised caring falls down to the level of the business of charity in order to limit the guilt that start to creep at our uncouthness in our "soul". It's very religious of us. It's back to the 19th century.
This is where Labor is at. It has to fight the obsolete ideas of the organised-labour past while maintaining a base of supporters who are less and less struggling on the waterfront so to speak and more interested in getting richer... Now the real point is can Labor still make us richer individually and collectively while maintaining a decorum of equality? because one thing is for sure, the Libs (conservatives) will make you and me poorer in order to preserve and augment the value in the equity of money for the rich, exclusively... 
Meanwhile we have to look after this planet. It's the only one we've got...
Not so strangely, an alliance between the Greens and Labor is like a natural symbiosis in the making... Though this alliance has its tiffs and bum fights, it's the only way to deliver the future for most people while limiting the damage. We can already see the damage, idealistically and in your pocket, done by new State liberal (conservatives) governments hell-bent at increasing the value of the equity of money for the rich, ahead of the value of people — you...
Under the Liberals, your place in the gutter beckons...
Gus Leonisky