Labour DLP

Summary

Policies & Commentary

Labour DLP (hereafter referred to as DLP) would dearly like you to believe that they are the “real” Labo(u)r Party, who preserved the Old Ways back in 1955 when they split off from the Australian Labor Party, who were captured by – gasp! – Socialists. So keen are they to convince you of this that they count members of the ALP who died before the DLP was even formed – including former Labor Prime Minister Ben Chifley – as their own, apparently of the belief that if they just cross their fingers hard enough, history will change to reflect their wishes. They claim to be all about upholding “traditional Labour principles,” not the “radical social agendas” and “‘woke’ obsessions” of the Australian Labor Party.

Which Labor/Labour is which? What’s going on here? Well, the DLP have helpfully added the “u” to their name this election, lest we confuse them with the pink commie ALP traitors. Not, I suspect, that any of us will have trouble differentiating the two parties after even a cursory glance at what the DLP stand for.

The DLP proudly proclaim that “We look to what sustains the flourishing of all people, because we believe that every person matters.” That sounds great, doesn’t it? A real commitment to equity and diversity. Is it, though? Let’s see.

Well, what do you know? This claim falls down at the first hurdle. The DLP want nothing less than the complete repeal of laws pertaining to reproductive choice and voluntary euthanasia, and they’d like “conversion therapy” back, thank you very much. Apparently if you’re a person facing an unwanted pregnancy or terminal illness – or if you’re just plain LGBTQIA+ – you don’t count as “all people.” You don’t get to “flourish,” except in ways that the DLP thinks are correct. And, given that the party has its roots in Catholicism, you could be forgiven for suspecting there’s a narrow religious agenda at work here.

They don’t stop there. The DLP has a few things to say about education, too. In their own words:

• “Outlaw the teaching of radical social values in public schools such as the so-called “safe schools” child sexualisation program.
• End other politicisation of education – including all teaching on supposed “global warming”, all teaching of gender and race related material, end bogus aboriginal ceremonies etc.” (sic)¹It’s not clear whether the DLP is aware that failing to capitalise ‘Aboriginal’ is offensive, or whether they do know and intend to offend.

Yes, you read that right.

What a pack of bigoted lies we have here. The Safe Schools program does not seek to sexualise children, and I’m confident in saying the DLP know this. To claim otherwise, they would have to wilfully refuse to look at the evidence that shows, beyond doubt, that Safe Schools is about building a supportive and safe environment for students who identify as LGBTQIA+. It’s about providing accurate information for those who may be questioning their gender and sexuality. It’s about helping kids who face bullying simply for being who they are, who are at risk of harm or suicide because of intolerance and outright hate. Thirty seconds on Google will get you clear information about Safe Schools, and it stretches credulity to the point of snapping to suggest the DLP are just misinformed.

As for the rest, good grief, where do I start? The DLP reveal themselves here to be both anti-science and racist. For god’s sake, “bogus” Aboriginal ceremonies? What gives them the right to judge the validity of another culture’s sacred practices? (Certainly not the presence of Indigenous candidates or advisors in their party, because as far as I can see, there aren’t any.) If someone fronted up to a Catholic church and called praying the rosary “bogus,” I think the DLP would be the first to howl in outrage, but it seems they think it’s just fine for them to sit in their white privilege and make judgments they know nothing about.

This kind of blatant bigotry isn’t just confined to schools, oh no. The DLP have racist, misogynistic, homophobic, and transphobic plans for society as a whole.

They claim to stand up for women. But, as we’ve already noted, not when it comes to the bodily autonomy of someone who’s pregnant. And not when it comes to addressing inequity in the workplace. The DLP want all affirmative action hiring practices stopped. Oh, but they also want a “homemaker’s allowance,” so I guess that’s all right, then. The little lady can stay in the kitchen where she belongs.

We’ve already noted their intent to restore abusive “conversion therapy” practices, thus contributing to massive suffering and an eightfold increase in suicide risk. The DLP’s not content with just that. Their policies speak to a desire to erase LGBTQIA+ people altogether. They want to “End the cultural Marxists (sic) personal pronoun war, with biological sex determining titles.”

Ooh, sounds scary, doesn’t it? Conjures up images of Reds Under the Bed, whispering “transness is A-kay, comrade” into the ears of our Precious and Vulnerable Children. Unfortunately for the DLP, it’s utter rubbish. “Cultural Marxism” is a conspiracy theory that popped up in the USA in the 1990s, claiming that ideas about identity, inclusivity, and progressive politics were, in fact, a plot by Marxists to destroy “Western” culture. There’s no evidence for this ridiculous claim, but boy is it a great way to spook your “No Commies” target audience.

Inevitably – and I am getting so tired of having to address this nonsense again and again – the DLP are on the “trans athletes are Bad and Wrong” bandwagon. Just look at the language of the policy: “End unfair sporting competition by transgender athletes by mandating that athletes may only compete as the biological sex based gender they were born with.” (My bold).

I guess “fairness” only applies if you’re a cis person, in the DLP’s “Labour utopia.”

And let’s just stop and examine the idiocy of hanging these policies on “biology,” shall we? For a start, gender is a social construct. What the DLP is really talking about here is sex, but even given that, there are huge problems with the idea that biology trumps all.

How do we even determine the “correct” sex of a person? An obstetrician’s best guess when a baby is born with “ambiguous” genitalia? Or how about the good old XX/XY chromosomes, that’s pretty definitive. Except it isn’t, with at least five types of “sex” chromosome combinations identified by geneticists. Are the DLP really suggesting that our pronouns must be established on the basis of an expensive and unnecessary genetic test, or worse, the opinion of a third party? Are we supposed to carry little cards that “prove” we are a particular sex, so that when we’re bailed up in a public toilet, we can whip them out to defend ourselves from the terrible accusation that we might be trans? Is the DLP suggesting we should be subject to criminal penalties if we use a pronoun that they don’t deem to be “right?”

Oh but wait. There could be trans people on the street right now “pretending” to be “normal,” but how can we know? How can we protect the kiddies?

Perhaps the DLP would like it if we wore badges on our clothes, just so that everyone will know who is not part of “proper” society.

Why yes, I am bitter and heartsick about this crap turning up again and again this election, what gave it away?

The DLP’s anti-Aboriginal bigotry apparently knows no bounds. In their “all people are equal” fantasy, there will be no more Acknowledgment of Country from public employees. There’ll also be no “racist” Voice to Parliament. Both of these phrases are, offensively, put in scare quotes on the party’s website. I couldn’t say definitively whether this is meant to imply that the Voice and Acknowledgement aren’t real things, but it suuuure looks like it. Just to drive the point home, the DLP promise to pass legislation that would prevent any flags being displayed on government or public property except for the Australian and/or Victorian flags. This is clearly aimed at removing the Aboriginal and the Torres Strait Island flags. That’s appalling.

What’s funny, though²and by “funny,” I mean, “absurdly short-sighted”, is that, in their racist drive to erase Indigenous presence from “Australian” culture, the DLP would enshrine an international insult. It’s common practice, when dignitaries from other countries visit us, to fly their flags alongside our own. Taken as written, the DLP’s anti-Indigenous policy would prevent us from acknowledging anyone else, too.

Just in case the DLP haven’t thought of everything, they have an umbrella policy to cover themselves: “Outlaw the teaching of race and gender issues in schools.”

Outlaw.

On the face of it, this is a monumentally stupid statement. A literal reading would be that the DLP doesn’t want anything about race and gender taught to students. That means, nothing about white people, nothing about a gender binary, etc. Of course, we know that the DLP isn’t talking about that. For them “race and gender issues” are those inconvenient facts about the existence of Indigenous and of LGBTQIA+ people which might undermine the party’s attempt to do away with us.

Rounding out the DLP’s (anti-)social policies are a ragtag bunch of grievances grouped together under the heading, “Freedom.” You can see where this is going, can’t you?

A COVID-19 inquiry! What a surprise. But – like virtually all the others – this isn’t a call for an independent, balanced inquiry. No, the DLP demands an inquiry into, among other things, the “silencing of critics of government, [and] brutal political enforcement actions of police.” They’re singing from the cooker hymn book, in defiance of all evidence that nothing of the sort happened. Opposing voices were not silenced – they screamed loudly at every level, from anti-lockdown protesters in the streets to News Ltd journalists harassing Victorian government officials at daily press conferences, to the Prime Minister himself. As for police brutality – well, I’m a veteran of more than a few protests going back to the Kennett era, and the treatment handed out to us was actually brutal. Anti-lockdown protesters, by contrast, were and are treated with kid gloves, only being subjected to non-lethal dispersal methods on a scant handful of occasions.

Moving on to more “freedoms.” These are what the DLP call “unpopular victimless crime nanny state laws.” No more lockdowns ever! No vaccine mandates! Free speech, aka “let us be hateful”! No mandatory bicycle helmets for adults! No vaping bans! Backyard fireworks for everyone!

Am I the only one hearing echoes of 1970? You know, the cries of the anti-seatbelt crowd back when vehicle restraints were first written into law? Bicycle helmets help prevent serious head injury. It’s not even an opinion – this comprehensive study undertaken by Australian statisticians demonstrated clearly that helmets reduce the risk of serious head injury by 70%, and death from serious head injury by 65%.

The usual counterargument to these statistics is that even so, it should be someone’s choice. If they want to risk scrambling their brains and possibly winning a Darwin award, we shouldn’t stop them. People must be free!

News flash. We don’t live in little pods isolated from everyone else. What we do affects others. Laws such as mandatory bicycle helmets aren’t just about protecting individual cyclists from injury or death (although that alone should be a reason to keep them). They’re about protecting their families from grief. They’re initiatives that reduce the strain on our hospital system.

The same goes for the idea that fireworks should be available to everyone. Sure, you might be prepared to risk blowing your hand off or suffering permanent eye damage, but what about the kids out in the backyard with you? What about the grass fire you could inadvertently start that destroys your neighbour’s property?

And then there’s vaping. The DLP suggest it’s a good way to quit smoking, but as numerous studies have agreed, the evidence is inconclusive at best. More importantly, vaping harms those around you from toxic aerosols passively inhaled or absorbed through the skin. These aerosols can cause asthma, lung damage, heart disease, and cancer. Just this week, Australian media reported on an alarming increase in the number of young children being poisoned after drinking vaping liquid, often because it smells like lollies.³Sadly, many of these articles are now behind paywalls, but if you’re a subscriber, you can easily find them.

Our laws are not just there to protect people from the damaging consequences of their actions. They are designed for the communal good, for the protection of those who would be adversely affected by what others do. The DLP seems not to care about that, as long as individual “freedoms” are enshrined.

Curious, then, that they also want to abrogate the freedoms of those they don’t approve of. One might be forgiven for thinking that “hypocrisy” is a word that the DLP never learned. Because that’s what this is, make no mistake. Utter hypocrisy. For every “we must be free to do X” policy, there’s one that states “except you – you don’t get to be free because we don’t like you.”

Hateful speech, according to the DLP, is a right. Choosing your pronouns is not.

Erasing Indigenous culture is the DLP’s idea of good policy. The simple acknowledgement that we, as modern Australians, live on land whose history stretches much, much further back than Captain Cook is unacceptable.

In the DLP utopia, we must be so “free” that we actively suppress truth. That we ban science from our classrooms. That we allow our kids to be subject to alienation, bullying and abuse, and that we force someone to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term no matter what their circumstances are.

Oh, and just in case you were still clinging to the idea that maybe the DLP really were some kind of “workers party” standing up for traditional Labor principles, you should know this. Their small business policies demand that we remove penalties from workers and limit unfair dismissal laws. Sure sounds like the party of the worker to me.

This isn’t an exhaustive list of DLP policies. They also take aim at large retailers, support mandatory “third strike” life sentences, harsher criminal penalties across the board, and minimum height requirements for police. They want to see a system of “majority parental sanction” that would allow parents of kids in government schools the ability to approve or veto everything from curriculum to “administration issues,” and call for the abolition of “extreme left wing dominated teacher training colleges.” And they’d put a brake on local councils implementing “radical political agendas,” and compensate people for “unreliable” renewables as part of their general climate change denialism.

To say the DLP are a contradiction in terms is an understatement. They may claim to hold some sort of “real” Labo(u)r principles, but the reality is that they are some awkward mash-up of libertarian ideals, right-wing talking points, and the kind of discriminatory politics that is unfortunately becoming all too common in Australian society. If you think it’s more important for you to be allowed to risk other’s health than give up your vaping, and are okay with anti-Indigenous racism, then you might want to vote for them. If you have even a shred of concern for how what you do affects others, however, I suggest you steer clear.