For more than a year, right up until election night in May, it was widely assumed that Australia was destined for a Labor government. The UK is in much the same unenviable position: the conservatives are wracked by division, cursed with a weak leader and seemingly determined to be at odds with their own voters at every turn. But, if Bill Shorten was an unpalatable prospect as prime minister, the odious Jeremy Corbyn is much, much worse.
Fresh from the victory that (almost) nobody saw coming, Australian treasurer Josh Frydenberg is telling Brits that they don’t have to bow to the seemingly inevitable.
Treasurer Josh Frydenberg has ripped into British Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, telling a British centre-right think tank, the Policy Exchange, that a number of Mr Corbyn’s positions were at odds of what he considers to be good policy.
After hinting that he had no regard for the UK Labour plans, Mr Frydenberg, who is from a Jewish family, then added: “put it this way, I am not lining up with Hezbollah and Hamas.”
For Frydenberg, his distaste for Corbyn’s Labor is not just a matter of policy, but deeply personal for the Jewish-Australian. British lawyer Mark Lewis has bitterly observed that “Jeremy Corbyn moved the rock, and the anti-Semites crawled out from underneath the rock. They’re not going back”.
The shot across the bow at Mr Corbyn — a long time supporter of both radical organisations — stems from not just the very left wing policies of UK Labour Party, such as proposed nationalisation of railways and other infrastructure, and rent controls in the housing sector, but the anti-Semitic views in the party that have fostered under Mr Corbyn.
The UK Labour Party hasn’t been able to adequately stem the anti-Semitic agitation, particularly among its swathes of grassroots followers, who have propped up Mr Corbyn’s leadership.
But Frydenberg’s big message for the British centre-right is: it’s the economy, stupid.
Mr Frydenberg, who is the son of a Holocaust survivor, would not have had any sympathies towards Mr Corbyn, but he highlighted the vast political differences by stressing how the Liberal party in Australia was very much pro-individual enterprise.
“The government doesn’t have its own money, it’s the peoples’ money,” he said, adding “we believe in the power of markets, and the individual hand of capitalism rather than the dead hand of socialism.”
He told the Policy Exchange, chaired by the former foreign minister and UK High Commissioner Alexander Downer, that the key lesson that could be drawn from Scott Morrison’s victory at the recent federal election was to articulate an economic argument…“policies that encourage aspiration and individuals and their enterprise are to be encouraged, you can have as we have, taxes coming down with record spending on health and education and infrastructure’’.
As opposed to Corbyn, banging the same, failed socialist drum that has never achieved anything but poverty and misery.
Mr Corbyn has foreshadowed extra wealth taxes and greater welfare spending if his party wins a general election.
theaustralian
No doubt a familiar tune for Oilers.
