'Where did the opposition go?'
By Richard Ingram
"What ever happened to the federal opposition? There was talk about one shortly after the 1996 election, but nobody's heard a peep out of anything that could be called an opposition for months now. Maybe emergency services should be brought in to conduct a search."
Peter Boyle, the national election campaign director for the Democratic Socialists, was commenting on the morning after the Labor Party announced its agreement to support the Coalition government's business tax package.
"The tax package is another handout to business", Boyle said, "and the Senate committee which investigated it said as much: it's not 'revenue neutral', but a $3.8 billion reduction in taxes on the rich.
"Now Simon Crean waves that away, because the government promises to do what it wants to do!"
Boyle said that commentaries in the establishment media indicated that the ALP leaders are claiming that backing the government's legislation is a clever electoral strategy. "Labor is saying that it's depriving the government of a 'target' to campaign against. How gutless can they be? Or is it that they think voters are too stupid to understand the truth about this tax bill?"
The "same strategy of surrender", Boyle said, was evident in the ALP's attitude to the government's anti-refugee legislation.
"Kim Beazley has been quoted in the media as saying he wants these issues out of the way so that he can campaign against the GST. But Labor has made it clear that it has no intention of repealing the GST when it is next in government.
"So what it adds up to is that Labor hopes to get in purely because of the unpopularity of the GST, without any real discussion of issues, and without any commitment to change anything that the Coalition has done."