Labor have won the Victorian State election, but they may soon find their win is nothing more than a Pyrrhic victory. If any party should be worried about its future, it is Labor.
Ever since Labor preferenced the Greens over the Liberals at the 2010 Federal election, which lost this once safe Labor seat to Adam Bandt, it became clear that Labor is experiencing a severe crisis of identity.
In the lead up to the Victorian election, Labor had already caved in to the Greens, back flipping on the East-West Link, a project which it originally proposed. But what good has come to the Labor party by caving in under the influence of the Greens? Well, in this election, it looks like it has lost them the state seat of Melbourne to the Greens, and the seats of Richmond, Brunswick, Prahran and Northcote are under serious threat, and will likely turn from Red to Green within the next state elections. What was once Labor heartland is under threat, and the threat is not from the Liberal party.
Labor needs to do some serious soul searching if they ever wants to govern again in their own right in Victoria and Federally. It would appear that Labor hasn’t learned the lesson that was the disaster of the Labor-Greens coalition under Julia Gillard, which amounted to the Labor Party being held to ransom.
One wonders what the Labor party even stands for these days. It certainly isn’t the ‘workers’ party, because most of them were appropriated by John Howard in the 1990s and cannot stand the Green appeasing chattering classes that the Labor leadership now panders to. What’s more, the chattering classes themselves despise those who they purport to advocate for. This does not bode a rosy future for the Labor party.
Labor – enjoy your victory, because it will probably not last for long. You have a lot of work to do if you want to remain the second party in Australia.