Labor's newest star
By Sam King
ADELAIDE — "Come and hear Labor's newest star" said the posters to advertise Cheryl Kernot's March 10 visit to Flinders University, and come they did — around 500 people turned out to hear what Kernot had to say.
But if anyone wanted to hear what different path Labor would take, or its strategy for reversing the Liberal government's attacks, they would have been disappointed. Kernot preferred to talk about "Australians" wanting a "sense of community".
After arriving half an hour late, Kernot contented herself with brief and vague references to "social justice" and criticisms of Liberal policies, particularly on students.
The one area where Kernot was more explicit was education and Austudy. She described the Liberal government's lowering of the HECS threshold, cuts to operating grants and the spread of up-front fees as unacceptable and anti-student.
She explicitly condemned the Liberals as responsible for the shift in students' consciousness away from understanding education as a right to seeing "education as a commodity".
But it was Labor which paved the way for the Liberals' attacks on education. As Resistance activist James Fraser commented, "How can a party which introduced and justified user pays, now turn around and condemn the Liberals for stepping up what they started? Now they're not in government, they use 'opposition' to fees to get support."
Kernot pledged that a Labor government would reverse fees for undergraduates. She also said that a Labor government would lower the age at which students are eligible for independent Austudy.
However, Kernot claimed that this can't happen overnight, without offering any reason why the policy couldn't be implemented promptly.
Almost all those who asked questions sought specific answers to what Labor's policies are on a range of issues. It also became clear that a significant proportion of the people had turned up specifically to oppose Kernot and Labor. But if they expected anything more than vague promises, again they were to be disappointed.
When one Resistance activist from Flinders asked Kernot "Can Labor guarantee it will vote against any moves by the Liberal Party to introduce a GST and that any Labor government will revoke a GST that the Liberals might introduce?", Kernot responded by saying that if people voted for a party with reactionary policies, they can't expect the Labor party to bail them out.
Kernot demonstrated very clearly that the Labor Party is neither willing nor able to show any real opposition or even any real differences with the anti-people policies of the Liberals.