EDITORIAL : THE AUSTRALIAN, AUSTRALIA

Labor has a light on the hill and it is not green

PRIME Minister puts Labor on the road back to the middle

Mainstream Australians have not been hiding; they still live in the suburbs, aspire to home ownership, a good education for their children and a country where a fair go permeates all aspects of life. Which makes us wonder why Julia Gillard had to use Thursday's inaugural Whitlam Institute oration as a belated attempt to reattach her party to its middle-Australia base. By identifying the Greens as a party of "protest" and the Liberals as a party of "extremism", the Prime Minister was on a mission to show Labor occupies the centre. The Weekend Australian believes the ALP should be a party for the mainstream, so we welcome Ms Gillard's awakening. But it will take more than platitudes and denunciation of her opponents to cement the claim. As the saying goes, don't tell us you're funny, make us laugh.

Much of what Labor has done in recent years, federal and state, has pointed to a disconnect between the party and its base. The direction of its policy and its rhetoric has been shaped by the progressive, moral middle-class agenda from which Ms Gillard now seeks to distance herself. To listen to the Prime Minister and her colleagues address issues such as the carbon tax and border security has been to hear disdain for the legitimate concerns of working Australians. Rather than listening to Australians who object to the party's progessive policies or explaining the party's approach, Labor's elites have thrown around words such as nutters, deniers, racists and extremists. This will never pass muster for a people's party.

Labor's drift to the progressive Left has created policy contradictions, with a tough/welcoming border regime and a low-emission/growth-driven economic policy. The confusion has it losing ground to the Greens in inner-city electorates with their prosperous young professionals. In the suburbs, socially conservative working families have switched to the Liberals. Maps in our pages show how this plays out across Sydney after the NSW poll, with Labor battling Greens in the inner city, clinging to seats in the most working-class of areas and losing to the Liberals across a range of suburbs. Many of these are the aspirational suburbs where Ms Gillard realises Labor must rediscover its base. She must also hope that disgust at NSW machine politics doesn't tarnish federal Labor.

She was right to point out the Greens don't understand the fundamental importance of a strong economy. The question then is why she entered into a formal agreement with them before forming government, an unnecessary move that has created a problem in perceptions and probably in policy development. Ms Gillard has cited the new parliament as reason for breaking her promise on carbon tax. We can only hope her robust critique of the Greens' economic ineptitude will steel her will against their calls to limit industry compensation in the tax package.

Even if they sneak into the lower house seat of Balmain, the NSW election, just like last year's Victorian poll, was a disappointment to the Greens. With a statewide swing of more than 13 per cent against Labor, the Greens picked up just over 1 per cent. Even in Balmain, the Liberals won more first preferences than either Labor or the Greens and in Marrickville, where the Greens expected to win, their candidate's extremist anti-Israel policy, and her evasiveness about it, cost them dearly. Yet we learn this week that incoming NSW Greens senator Lee Rhiannon is planning to take this vile agenda to Canberra. While Greens leader Bob Brown has rejected the policy, we are left to wonder about a national organisation, accredited as mainstream by the ABC, that lets a state branch run a separate, damaging foreign policy.

Senator Brown once joked that the Greens have as many factions as MPs. For anyone seriously contemplating their role in national policy formulation, that observation is beyond a joke. The Greens are a fringe political group and although they rail against it, The Weekend Australian will continue to scrutinise them. It is heartening that after starting to venture down their garden path, Ms Gillard has recognised another road towards the middle ground. It is Tony Abbott, not Senator Brown, who can beat her at the next election; the battle needs to be contested by both major parties in the mainstream.

Encourage scientific solutions

INNOVATIVE research is important to overcoming drought

After one of the wettest summers in decades on the eastern side of the continent, it is counter-intuitive to be talking about managing drought. But in the driest continent on earth, history shows that the big dry follows the big wet as sure as night follows day.
Human ingenuity, which made settlement possible and has driven prosperity, is the key to better management that will underpin future growth and security. Better storage, fairer water allocation and more efficient irrigation techniques will go a long way. But it is encouraging that the federal standing committee on regional Australia is looking beyond the immediate issues of controversial water buy backs in the Murray-Darling Basin to consider the promising results of recent trials of rain-enhancement technology.
Trials in Queensland and the Mount Lofty Ranges have shown positive increases in rainfall in target areas using ionisation to increase the proportion of cloud moisture that falls as rain. Programs using "cloud seeding" technology are already under way in the US, Israel and China. Given Australia's climate and our reliance on agriculture for domestic consumption and export earnings, potential returns are substantial. The technology on the horizon will not put an end to drought, but it could ease it.

Syrian leader must adapt or go

BASHAR al-Assad only has himself to blame for the crisis

Syria's President, Bashar al-Assad, has learned nothing from the Arab Spring. He is a former ophthalmologist trained in London and married to a Harley Street cardiologist's daughter who had a highly successful merchant banking career with Deutsche Bank and JPMorgan. But his defiant, unsophisticated response to democracy demonstrations shows he is his father's son, an apparatchik of the corrupt Baathist dictatorship that has ruthlessly suppressed and looted Syrians for 48 years.
Before he addressed parliament this week, aides tipped an announcement of reforms that would herald a historic break with the regime of his late father, Hafeez al-Assad, including an end to draconian emergency rule imposed in 1963 and a curbing of the all-pervasive powers of the notorious Mukhabarat secret police. But the speech was disingenuous claptrap, with Assad blaming the demonstrations on a conspiracy by so-called saboteurs intent on enforcing an Israeli agenda. Without the histrionics and headgear it could have been Muammar Gaddafi speaking. Assad has not got the message of the uprisings that have swept away long-entrenched leaders in Tunisia and Egypt, and is likely to pay a heavy price for his obduracy.

It is not the first time Assad has disappointed since succeeding his father in 2000 in a shameful act of dynastic corruption. While touted as a new breed of Arab leader and a potential partner in a peace process with Israel, Assad has instead continued to meddle in the affairs of Lebanon and beyond, supporting such evil surrogates as Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad and Hamas. He has forged a close alliance with Iran in support of global terrorism, a relationship that has seen the first Iranian warships to pass through the Suez Canal since 1979 dock at the Syrian port of Latakia to establish a base. His sinister nuclear program was snuffed out only when Israel bombed the facility in 2007.
For the West, the crisis in Damascus presents profound challenges. Syria has a potent arsenal of missiles, rockets and chemical warheads capable of hitting targets in Israel. Now that Assad has his back to the wall, that potential is even greater. Were he to be deposed, it's likely that Sunnis, possibly Muslim Brotherhood extremists, would take over. Assad has himself to blame for the crisis. He failed to bring about reforms that could have been a template for the region. He must adapt or go.