Boy, they like to keep it in the family in the Labor party. I’m not talking about Mahuta Inc., but the other side of the Tasman.
The Labor party is notorious for its incestuous relationship with the supposedly impartial ABC — a host of Labor pollies and senior ABC journos have literally ended up in bed together. Then there are the staffers who tie the knot with their bosses.
And that’s just the start of climbing the Labor party ladder.
Labor policy adviser Skye Laris used to work for Albanese minister Tony Burke, when he was Agriculture Minister in the Rudd-Gillard government. Then she married the boss. Now, she’s working for her husband’s boss as a senior policy adviser.
In an area in which she has no bias whatsoever.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese‘s chief adviser on agriculture policy previously condemned mainstream animal farming as “inherently cruel” and campaigned to end live exports.
Skye Laris, a senior policy adviser to the prime minister, is a former GetUp campaigner who worked with Animals Australia and the RSPCA calling for a ban to live exports.
GetUp, it should be remembered, is the far-left activist group founded with seed money pilfered from union funds by former Labor leader Bill Shorten, who served on its first board. GetUp claims to be “non party-political”, but notably only ever targets conservative MPs in its often vicious campaigns. Campaigns so nasty and threatening that South Australian Liberal MP Nicolle Flint was forced to take out an AVO.
But, there’s no way a GetUp activist would be in any way biased as a policy adviser. Not even on agricultural issues.
“Animal cruelty is a day-to-day part of farming practices,” she wrote for website Mamma Mia in 2016.
“The uncomfortable truth is that whether it’s live exports or long-haul domestic transportation on trucks without food and water, or the killing of calves in the dairy industry, or factory farming pigs, or chooks living in space the size of an A4 piece of paper … it’s improved over the years, but mainstream animal farming is inherently cruel […]
It’s as simple as banning live exports [sic],” Ms Laris wrote.
You’ll never guess what happened next!
In May, Labor made a pre-election commitment to ban live sheep exports.
Laris is far from the only anti-farming activist to slither their way into positions of policy influence.
In 2020, a senior Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade bureaucrat, Julie Delforce, who is also the mother of a well-known animal rights activist, resigned following an investigation into her links to the animal activist website Aussie Farms.
Then there’s this common, but silly argument from anti-farm groups:
“From paddock to plate, there is almost always a part of an animal’s journey that wouldn’t stack up if we as consumers were prepared to know what had really happened.”
ABC Australia
That’s absolute bollocks, of course. Unlike the activists, I’ve actually worked on farms. Growing up, my brothers had holiday jobs at the local meatworks.
And I’m absolutely OK with a good steak.
I’m not OK with unhinged activists influencing government policy.
