DEAD PARTY WALKING

If an opinion poll is to be believed then most of the country and over half of Labour's own supporters have given up on Phil Goff-and the Labour Party .

The 3News Reid Research poll showed that 78 per cent of voters overall and 55 per cent of Labour Party voters did not believe Goff's Labour could win the election. Phil's still talking his chances up but we all know he is a dead man walking. He'll soon be walking into the sunset still muttering about his 'grand vision' of a society with no GST on fresh fruit and vegetables.

Mmn, why wouldn't folk want the Labour Party back in power?

You remember the last Labour Government don't you? That was the Labour Government that presided over widening social inequality, that got comfortable with the filthy rich and left anti-trade union laws largely untouched. That was the same Labour Government that held up the wideboys of the finance sector as people to be admired and then sat on its hands when those same wideboys ransacked and pillaged the country.

That's the same Labour Government that found it politically convenient to bash beneficiaries and brought in legislation to make life even more miserable for beneficiaries.

It's not hard to remember this Labour Government because many of its members are still sitting in Parliament today. Mallard. Dalziel. King. Dyson. Cosgrove. Goff. The list goes on.

Indeed leader Phil Goff is a neoliberal zealot from way back. He supported and implemented the 'reforms' of Rogernomics. Despite the massive damage that neoliberalism has inflicted on working class communities in this country, he still says there is 'no alternative' to neoliberalism. He says we must still 'worship ' at the altar of big business and that we must pledge our allegiance to the forces of international capital.

Is it little wonder that people have turned their backs on a party that has nothing to offer but more of the same old crap we've had for nearly thirty years?

But there are people who have stood by Labour over the years and they remain committed to Labour today

Our so-called 'union leaders', for example. They will be calling on you to vote Labour in November. These are the very same 'union leaders' who have failed to defend workers against the neoliberal offensive. Rather they have, in clockwork fashion, collaborated with neoliberalism

What they don't tell you is that the Labour Party also thinks that ordinary people must pay the price for an economic crisis we are not responsible for.

We must move beyond the politically bankrupt Labour Party. We must build a new progressive movement in this country. It's undeniably a difficult task but not an impossible one.

We must build our own alternative to neoliberalism. It is long overdue.

Rise like lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number!
Shake your chains to earth, like dew
Which in sleep had fall'n on you:
Ye are many - they are few.
Percy Shelley