No room for blue collars in ‘modern’ Labor

Using the spurious excuse of non-disclosure of spent convictions from 30 years ago, the ALP national executive has sacked the Labor candidate for Fremantle, Chris Brown.

It is all right to have spiv lawyers like Julie Bishop in parliament, who defend asbestos companies that murder workers, plus an assortment of multi-millionaires who don’t pay their taxes and shonky bosses who rip off their workers.

However, we can’t have someone in parliament who as a teenager had a bit of go in him and assaulted a cop.

In any case it was a put-up job. The ALP leadership never wanted Brown.

Brown’s disendorsement is just one further confirmation that the idea of taking Labor back to its supposed working class roots is pie in the sky.

The real reason for his sacking? Brown has worked on the Fremantle wharves for 29 years and is a member of the militant Maritime Union of Australia (MUA).

The MUA in Western Australia has been making a concerted effort to transform the ALP – to get it to stand up for the rights of workers rather than the big end of town. Such an approach is an anathema to the ALP establishment. They were determined to put the MUA in its place.

Bill Shorten immediately rushed to endorse the party machine’s sacking of Brown, which just goes to show how hollow all his talk is of standing for “fairness” and defending the interests of ordinary people rather than the bankers and billionaires.

MUA president Christy Cain rightly condemned Brown’s disendorsement as “an absolute miscarriage of justice”. Nonetheless, he still committed the MUA to campaign for Labor.

Brown’s disendorsement is just one further confirmation that the idea of taking Labor back to its supposed working class roots is pie in the sky. Time and time again it kicks its working class supporters in the teeth because the party establishment is irrevocably committed to managing Australian capitalism for the powers that be.

The other reason that the ALP establishment wanted to get rid of Brown is that a militant blue collar worker is not their desired image for a candidate in the increasingly marginal seat of Fremantle, where the party is being challenged by the Greens. Whole parts of the old port city have been trendified and gone up market.

Rather than having a wharf labourer as its candidate, Labor has installed the deputy mayor of Fremantle, Josh Wilson. Wilson, a university-educated staffer for retiring MP Melissa Parke, much more fits the image of an “upstanding” Labor candidate.

The former state member for Fremantle, Jim McGinty, spelled it out: “Clearly the party made a mistake which has now been rectified”. He said Wilson would make an “excellent candidate”.

Wilson, who nominally comes from the left of the party, has already confirmed what an “excellent” candidate he is. On Fremantle council, he was associated with supporting refugee rights. But once endorsed, he rapidly demonstrated the “flexibility” of his principles by announcing his support for Labor’s disgraceful policy of locking up refugees in offshore concentration camps.