Despite never supporting his team, I always respected the former federal Labor leader. Vale.
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The drums of war which failed to lure Crean are the same drums which are ensnaring the Labor of today.
Say what you like about Simon Crean, but at least he didn’t fall for the Neocon invasion of Iraq.
Came across him when he ran the Storemen & Packers union .. very mediocre man .. used Daddy’s influence to climb the union staircase .. at least we won’t be paying for anymore French lessons tho, I’m guessin’, we’ll be coughing’ up to dig the hole ….
I had him as a minister following the first, failed Keating uprising when he took John Kerin’s well established place. He took on the role quickly, worked hard at getting across his brief as soon as possible, was extremely hard working and his team was expected to be on call 24/7. A very difficult feat in the early days of mobile phones. But not a valid excuse, as a friend discovered. Ah, well, that didn’t happen again while she was in the office. I would also say he was very focussed on policy too, a feature of Hawke Government politicians (even though he was the son of an Whitlam era politician) unlike it seems the modern variety.
Simon was the first to affect a fake ocker accent for public consumption.
I always thought that marked him as a fake in other areas too.
Yes, Crean did change a bit with the wind, yet he was honest or ingenuous enough to say so, as when reported in an article saying that his attending a football match, looking the part in his footy scarf and all, was about meeting with perceptions when he in fact would have preferred to be on a tennis court. The working class are not stupid. Or they weren’t.
Dick Ed
Obviously you were not around when Arthur Calwell was Labor leader.
His accent or voice are obviously not fake, but Albo’s voice is so atrocious and grating, that I cannot stand to listen to him for longer than the very briefest of moments.
“Industry policy? You don’t have an industry policy!” Simon Crean, way back then.
Requiem aeternam, Simon, but the notion that a government should have an industry policy, short of laissez-faire, should be buried with you.
His accent or voice are obviously not fake,…
Uh huh.
Can you explain how Simon had a well modulated private schoolboy voice when he was ACTU secretary, then started speaking Strine after he was elected to Parliament?
I was writing about Albo’s accent and voice not being fake, not Crean’s.
I don’t know recall Crean’s accent was like.
There was a decency about Simon Crean (as too about his father) that won respect and affection from people of all shades of opinion.
I take it that Albo wasn’t a chorister when he was at St Mary’s Cathedral College. A stint in the choir would have done wonders for his diction.
Safe to say that very few people spent any time actually listening to Crean … at any stage in his career. It’s weird the way Ed Case knows astounding details about ALP insider baseball … but yet he struggles with basic day to day stuff like electricity, or fire engines.
Point well made. Generally the less any politician achieves, the better their long term track record. Crean was one of those guys who was always around the place, but if you grabbed some hapless random shopper at Woolworths and asked them to name the three biggest achievements of Simon Crean they would look at you blankly and sadly for about 10 seconds, then make a timid request you let go of their shirt.
In an ideal world, the same lack of reccognition would apply for every politician.
Ask a random person what John Howard achieved and you will get clenched fists, “That little war mongering twerp!” or lines to that effect.
Yeah, it’ a good point. The trouble is politicians in this country like Rudd, Gillard and Albanese who want to leave a “legacy.”
Crean’s legacy is better.
Okay.
What did Tony Abbott achieve?
Nothing.
What did Mal Turnbull achieve?
He sent Abbott to the backbench and kept him there, won the 2016 Election from a long way back, thanks to Abbott spending 2 years poisoning the Liberal well,
and got rid of Barnaby Joyce from the Nationals leadership, which helped Morrison win the 2019 Election.
Turd Case
Turd balls was so bad he converted a massive majority into a potential failure, saved only by the Nationals winning an unexpected death.
Lay off the shilling for Labor, it has become boring.
Turnbull was arguably the biggest backstabber of his own PM in Australian political history and most disloyal MP.
He was working at undermining Abbott for years.
I remember him even being openly critical of Coalition government policy in some areas, an absolute no-no for a front bencher.
At least Abbott stopped the boats.
Turnbull accomplished nothing except wreck the Liberal Party.
He proved that by a huge majority, everyday Australian voters believe that Global Warming is a crock of shit. Having demonstrated this fact he went on to take no tangible action.
He also demonstrated that his party are utterly and completely useless … but that was kind of understood already.
Oh that one’s easy … gay marriage, lightbulbs full of mercury that will kill you if they ever break in the home, and half a billion in inexplicable last-minute kickbacks that looked deadset suspect to everyone in the nation.
I already explained … by that stage Tony Abbott had proven the Liberal Party to be utterly useless, so Turnbull was only locking it in, rather than establishing any new territory. Fortunately Turnbull’s “achievements” were all small token effort kind of things. Seems unlikely that either Abbott or Turnbull could have understood quite how badly Australia’s budget would be devestated by recent events … maybe if they knew, they would have blown it more?!?
One small thing that Tony Abbott did achieve was that Labor had (yet) another one of their referendums planned for 2013 all set and ready to go when he took office.
He axed it.
He didn’t do enough and he did very little but I’m grateful to him for that.
He also sacked Tim Flannery and abolished his Climate quango upon taking office; another very small but good move. Pity there were so few.
Frank and Simon Crean are from different eras, the likes of which we will never see again.
The Father and Son encapsulate the drift of the former Australian Labor Party.
Frank, born in Hamilton Victoria, was the Member for Melbourne Ports, Williamstown and Port Melbourne, prior to full on gentrification of those areas while Simon became the Member for Hotham, some Melbourne South Eastern Suburbs.
Vale, as C.L. says.