Tom J’s Reviews > Triumph and Demise: The Broken Promise of a Labor Generation > Status Update

hearing that there is an australian malaise around politics that is entirely the fault of rudd/gillard and nobody else

imagine that stupid idiot wayne swan thinking australia’s right had been americanised?

kelly has this weird blindness where he acts like social justice stuff is a purely political position and genuinely cannot understand that there is a personal element to people’s attachment to it, nor that it could be electorally successful. anything woke is inherently a bad political move

apparently bhp billiton had a standing in australia roughly equivalent to qantas! fucking unbelievable, i must have missed that

just inventing shit at this point. rudd is attacked for not being "the type of prime minister who would stand up to the party" (a paraphrase) despite the party and all his own ideology saying he should go the other way. apparently it is a failure of a leader to not intuitively do whatever paul kelly wants regardless of their own beliefs

god this is intolerably partisan in places. kelly spends a chapter having a sobbu about the fact that kim carr and rudd wanted to keep car manufacturing in australia despite the fact that it's uneconomic in a free markets sense. looking back from 2026 it doesn't seem particularly unreasonable that we would want to keep a domestic market that can produce something as vital as cars