Giving free, frank and fearless advice to a prime minister is not as easy as it sounds. Political leaders are human and like the rest of us don’t fancy being told they are wrong, much less being told that the public think they’re absolutely on the nose. Advisers well know the sensitivity of their leader and realise that a potential result of being too truthful with the analysis is to be frozen out of the inner circle or, even worse, got rid of altogether. Sacked advisers have no influence on anything and no income, either.

Over the years I had a few experiences of the problem. Bob Hawke in his mid and later years as prime minister bristled if told that the pollster was finding his appeal was no longer as charismatic as it used to be and that a different approach might be needed. Yet he was a remarkable enough man to on occasion swallow his pride and go along with suggestions. The anger with his pollsters Rod Cameron and Margie Gibbs and me when he threatened us with the sack mid-campaign for daring to brief the press on one occasion that Labor was not actually in front duly passed. The three of us are convinced that playing the underdog eventually got us across the line in an election we should not have won.

I have never discussed such matters with Bob but have always thought that one reason I may have been helpful to his winning ways was that I was never dependant on him for a job, never present in his office on the Monday after a victory looking for a reward. Any advice I gave was not going to be an embarrassment in front of others later.

We used to meet in the months leading up to an election not in his Parliament House office but informally at the Lodge on a Sunday morning. It was an atmosphere where you did not have to be big-noting - there was no one else there to impress. He could listen to the views a liquor store owner and restaurateur picked up from his Canberra customers and take or reject them as he wanted. I like to think it was a useful counter-balance to the sycophancy that is natural from people on a PM’s staff.

I can’t help thinking that Julia Gillard would benefit from her own outside adviser - someone prepared to tell her that giving people more of what they don’t like is not the way to promote a Labor revival. She needed someone to tell her that spending five days in western Sydney where people detest her is not the way of resurrection. Instead they kidded her that things will get better if people just knew her better.

Alas, someone in her office has persuaded her she looks good riding a horse through western Sydney wearing no clothes.

 

Richard Farmer

 

So, Prime Minister, Julia Gillard is planning an expedition to Sydney’s western suburbs, to try & reconnect with Labor’s once traditional working class constituency. Apparently Ms Gillard will mount her campaign to recapture Labor’s heartland from the four & a half star resort, the Rooty Hill RSL.Says it all really.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard is spending a week in Rooty Hill.  She’s abandoned Kirribili and the mansion overlooking Sydney Harbour to ‘slum’ it with the locals in Western Sydney, but only for 7 days mind. We plebs are all well and good but live there permanently? No way.

Voters evidently want to reciprocate the feeling. Labor will be wiped out in Western Sydney. Ed Husic is the Labor Party member for Chifley, the Federal seat which includes Rooty Hill. The swing against him at the 2010 election was over 11% on first preferences.

Despite that, Husic held the seat with more than 51% of the first preference votes.

However such is the depth of hatred for Labor in this working class seat that he could lose it.

Specific polling in Western Sydney shows a swing against Labor of 12% compared to 2010.

That would give Husic less than 40% of the first preference vote in the forthcoming  September election, a swing against Labor in his seat over the 2010 and 2013 elections of a just under 25%.

That is 12,000 of the 50,000 Labor voters in 2007 deserting the ALP.

I have written recently about how Labor is making Abbott and his ship of fools look good. The reasons seem simple enough.

Labor has presided over a shift in wealth from labour to the rich and capital to try and address the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.  The decline in profit rates has dried up the pool out of which reforms in the past have been paid for. We are in the period of reformism without reforms.

On top of that Labor in New South Wales governed for 16 years by being the most right wing and neoliberal State Labor government in years, setting the ALP’s low benchmark very low indeed.

Revelations at the Independent Commission Against Corruption about the fiefdom of corruption that was important sections of this failed Labor government have only sickened workers across the Western Sydney region.

Workers have no left wing alternative to vote for, to hear different arguments against austerity and racism, to organise a fight back against the bosses.

In this period when the only option seems to be Gillard or Abbott, working class voters are plumping for Abbott. That is because we have two parties of the bosses fighting for our votes.

Abbott will of course be a viciously anti-working class Prime Minister, if we workers let him.

Can we defeat him? Yes, not at the ballot box – Labor’s decline is complete for the time being – but through strikes and demonstrations. It has been a  long time since class war by us has been thought about in any real and sustained and widespread sense.

To keep Abbott on the defensive after he wins the next election will require a new militancy in the trade union movement.  Most of the trade union bureaucrats are scared of their own members’ shadow. They will be useless in any fightback against Abbott.

We need to organise now in our unions to beat Labor’s attacks and by doing that strengthen our muscles for the battles ahead.

Julia Gillard can have all the stunts she wants. It shows the contempt Labor has for working class people that they think a few days among the proles will change our votes. The more people in Western Sydney see of Gillard the less her vote and that of the Party’s will be.  Fight back now.

John Passant

Is It Rooty Hill for Gillard?

from Crikey …..

 

Keane: all roads out west lead back to 2010

 

BERNARD KEANE

While the other 21 million Australians look on in, at best, bemusement, but perhaps something less palatable, the major political parties get on with re-staging the 2010 election campaign in western Sydney.

That was the campaign marked by a weird alliance between politicians and the media to abandon policy substance in favour of focus-grouped slogans and cheap rhetoric around populist ideas like cutting immigration (remember the race to avoid being in favour of a "big Australia"?). Not to mention the ghost of Kevin Rudd haunting the Gillard campaign.

Two and a half years on, not much has changed.

Politicians on both sides appear to assume that to appeal to "western Sydney", which apparently is a monolithic entity, you have to drop your IQ a few points and/or beat up on foreigners. Like, more so than usual.

The nauseating Scott Morrison led the way last week with his attempt to exploit a rare instance of an asylum seeker being charged with a criminal offence. His leader wasn't too far behind, blatantly lying in insisting the government "doesn't know where they are".

We await Morrison and Abbott committing to electronic ankle bracelets for priests and politicians, both of whom have far higher rates of criminal prosecution and yet who are allowed to roam our streets in freedom with the community none the wiser.

Labor has taken a somewhat higher road, but it, too, led to xenophobia. Julia Gillard assured western Sydney Labor supporters last night that she wanted "to stop foreign workers being put at the front of the queue with Australian workers at the back".

Gillard's speech was very good, even if it repeated the core theme of education, NDIS and managing the economy for workers. She again she hammered the importance of accepting the impact of a high dollar and becoming more innovative and higher-skilled in response. Oddly, Joe Hockey's attempt to grapple with the same issues in a significant speech last week wasn't all that different (minus Gillard's gratuitous reference to WorkChoices); Hockey even made a point of saying Australia's high wages were a good thing.

But in tailoring the message to western Sydney, Gillard applied a gloss to her theme that could at best be described as deeply protectionist, and less charitably might be compared to an economic version of the filth Morrison is peddling. Foreign workers aren't wanted around this neck of the woods, either if they come here on a 457 visa or if they exploit the stubbornly high dollar to out-compete our manufacturers.

Not all foreigners want to come here by boat or take our jobs, of course. Some want to import drugs. Thus, the PM announced a "National Border Targeting Centre, to target high-risk international passengers and cargo". And, as part of her promise of "tackling gangs and guns", she dwelt at length upon gun crime in Sydney's west, promising a National Anti-Gang Taskforce and a National Gangs Intelligence Centre. The cost: $64 million. Thank you, taxpayers.

"This government has been working to meet the evolving threat," she declared about guns'n'gangs.

Curious. According to the most recent report of the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research, violent crime is down 4.8% a year in Fairfield/Liverpool, down 13% a year in outer south-western Sydney, down 14% a year in inner-western Sydney, stable in central-western Sydney, down 11% a year in outer-western Sydney and down 5.7% a year in Blacktown. And three of those areas have recorded declines in violent crime every year for five years; the others have been stable over five years.

The bureau also noted that while there'd been a spike in drive-by shootings in April and May last year, firearms offences were running at about the same numerical level as in 2008, despite the west's rapidly growing population.

That is, the facts suggest the "threat" of violent crime in western Sydney is devolving, not evolving.

Gillard was not the only one drumming up concerns about gangs and guns. Tony Abbott promised $50 million for CCTV in Sydney (never mind those Liberal concerns about privacy and freedom). As Labor's Andrew Leigh pointed out, this was the epic great occasion Abbott had announced his CCTV pledge. Then again, it must be a cracker of a policy if it's worth announcing five times.

But of course that's the problem when you target people in a specific community: they're unlikely to be overly interested in politicians who observe the tricky line between state and federal responsibilities, preferring instead the rugged constitutional individualists who brush aside such niceties in favour of a "just fix it" ethos.

Nor are they likely to be impressed with a politician who is foolish enough to wonder whether another $64 million, nearly all of which is ultimately about prosecuting the ceaseless "War on Drugs", is the best value for money in terms of addressing the crime that most harms communities. Sexual assault, for example, is one of only two crimes in NSW to increase in annual terms over the last five years, but that has mainly been in regional towns, rather than in the more electorally glamorous western Sydney.

The media is lapping all this up: the country's most senior politicians a mere 45 minutes' drive from the CBD where virtually every major Australian media company has its headquarters, engaged in campaigning, which is far easier to cover than all that pesky policy stuff. Just capture the colour and movement, just get the vox pops. They might complain about Gillard having thrown the switch to the days of campaigning rather than the days of governing, but they love it. If only the election ad revenue would start flowing in from the political parties to bolster those 12-13 bottom lines.

So here we are, back where the 2010 campaign left off. After that campaign alienated voters so much that politicians themselves wondered what had gone wrong, many people thought that 2010 would be the nadir and things would get better. But what if they get worse?

from Crikey …..

Deja vu: Gillard's gang taskforce is nothing new

CHRIS SEAGE

You can tell it’s an election year. The announcement yesterday by Prime Minister Julia Gillard of a $64 million national anti-gang taskforce to fight gang-related crime across Australia will no doubt be appealing to voters who are fed up about bikies out of control and cowardly drive-by shootings in their suburban streets, particularly in western Sydney. Gillard loves law enforcement agencies at the moment. Didn't the recent drugs in sport scandal led by the Australian Crime Commission take the focus off the anti-Gillard press?

Gillard’s new taskforce is nothing new, and indeed many in law enforcement circles attribute much of the successful inroad into organised crime to the work done by former prime minister Kevin Rudd, who gave the inaugural national security statement to the Australian Parliament in December 2008, where he placed organised crime for the first time squarely in the Australian national security context and called for greater co-ordination across all law enforcement agencies.

What Gillard has done is simply rebadge current initiatives with claims the taskforce is based on the FBI’s Violent Gang Safe Street Taskforce model, which has resulted in over 55,000 arrests in the US since 2001. The FBI Safe Street Taskforce is built on co-operation between local, state and federal investigators. "To track the criminals, you have got to track the money," Gillard said yesterday.

The reality is that the level of co-operation between federal and state authorities has never been greater. Rudd made it clear to law enforcement agencies back in 2008 the government wanted a piece of the criminal financial pie estimated to cost Australia between $10-15 billion a year, and he pushed the Australian Taxation Office into playing an increasingly important role in working with law enforcement agencies across Australia. The results show that consolidated revenue is the big winner, with ATO statistics revealing it has stripped $335 million out of the clutches of criminals in just the last three years.

Right now the ATO is involved in five national taskforces and 24 joint-agency operations involving state and federal police, including Task Force Polaris, established to investigate organised crime on the waterfront around Australia, Strike Force Edinburgh, investigating outlaw motorcycle gangs alongside NSW police, and the Purana taskforce with the Victorian Police, investigating Melbourne’s underbelly.

Polaris is made up of 49 criminal investigators and intelligence analysts from the Australian Federal Police, the Australian Customs and Border Protection Service, the ATO, the Australian Crime Commission, the NSW Police Force and the NSW Crime Commission.

On February 4, 2010, the Commissioner of Taxation was appointed to the board of the ACC, further demonstrating the value of the ATO as an attribute to law enforcement. He is also a member of the Heads of Commonwealth Operational Law Enforcement Agencies (HOCOLEA). Other members of the ACC board include the commissioner of the AFP, director-general of ASIO, CEO of Customs, secretary of the Attorney-General’s Department, chairperson of ASIC and the commissioner of every state and territory police service in Australia.

Another significant development in July 2010 was the introduction of the ACC-led National Criminal Intelligence Fusion Capability, which co-locates investigators, analysts and technical experts to maximise the use of public and private-sector data and facilitate real-time intelligence sharing and analysis. Fusion brings together people from key Commonwealth agencies including the Australian Federal Police, Department of Immigration and Citizenship, Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre, Australian Taxation Office, Centrelink, Customs and Border Protection and State and Territory law enforcement authorities.

In 2010 John Lawler, chief executive of the ACC, said the concept of Fusion encapsulated the strategic direction of the ACC and was just one example of how the agency was instigating a joint attack on serious and organised crime.

"The focus of the ACC is on the value we add to the work of our partner agencies and the national, and increasingly international, linkages we can provide. Rather than duplicating the work of our partners, we are constantly looking at ways to best utilise the data, skills and resources available to more effectively disrupt the highest threat criminal targets," Lawler said.

Gillard said yesterday that the AFP-led Criminal Assets Confiscation Taskforce would support the new taskforce through asset confiscation in relation to gang-related crimes. The multi-agency taskforce draws its resources from the AFP, the ACC, ATO and the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions. In just two years it has confiscated $138 million dollars in cash, share portfolios, luxury cars, jewellery, motorcycles, light planes, jet-skis, sail and motor boats, artwork and other collectibles from criminals.

Some might question what the difference is between Gillard’s National Anti-Gang Taskforce and what is already happening.