It is always amusing to hear what wisdom a party in power offers its opponents because the ultimate goal of such advice is invariably to harm the vanquished. By that standard, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s Monday morning ‘analysis’ of the Victorian Liberals’ defeat at the hands of Chairman Dan speaks volumes.

Mr Albanese said:

‘The Liberal Party have failed to come to terms with modern Australia and they continue to cuddle up to some far-right elements… You can’t run a major political party by listening to what fringe elements are saying. You need to be in the mainstream. That’s where the Labor Party is positioned.’

Methinks the lady doth protest too much.

If Liberal strategists have even the faintest skerrick of a clue – admittedly, a highly debatable proposition – they will realise that Mr Albanese has just told them exactly how to kick Labor where it hurts.

Remember, Labor’s recent federal election results were hardly a glowing endorsement. The swings outside of inner-city enclaves have Labor utterly terrified about whether it can hold its traditional working-class voters. And those voters are the face of ‘modern Australia’ just as much as the heavily medicated, overly-earnest youngsters who latch on to whatever cause is most fashionable – and forget it just as quickly.

Crucial outer suburban and regional voters are taking a serious look at any alternative they can find, and have switched from Labor to Liberal or to some other party. Labor knows this full well, and is trying as hard as it can to convince those once-safe voters: trust us, we’re on your side. Witness Mr Albanese’s panicky assertion that Labor is mainstream. This is merely part of a slick campaign to appeal to every man and his dog, especially those who have had it up to their back teeth with cashed-up elites telling them how to live.

Does anybody seriously think, for example, that inner-Sydney-based Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek hangs out with rough-as-guts Tasmanian miners because she wants to? Unless we have slipped into some bizarre parallel universe, the answer is resoundingly ‘no’. Politicians do this sort of thing because they are told, in no uncertain terms, that they have to make friends with people outside the exclusive cafes of Darlinghurst. You know, the people who have figured out that ‘modern’ Labor’s policies are great for the privileged but make everybody else’s lives poorer, unhappier, and harder.

If the Liberals ever find a spine to stand up and develop credible alternatives, then they are also going to force Labor to nail its ‘progressive’ colours to the mast. For a party that is currently surviving by trying to have a bob each way, having to make such a choice is unthinkable and Labor know that doing so will turn wavering voters outside of major cities away from them in droves. It is far more palatable for Labor to try shaming dissidents into conformity by slapping the pejorative label ‘far right’ – once reserved for the most truly unappealing of views – onto anything that even vaguely disagrees with Woke orthodoxy.

Parties that advocate freedom, personal responsibility, government accountability, and reward for hard work, are not some ‘fringe’. The fact that both Labor and Liberal are losing a serious chunk of votes to those parties – so much so that Labor clearly sees a need to go on the attack – says that those parties reflect the concerns and realities of people’s everyday lives. Those parties appeal to ordinary, hard working Australians who have had a gutful of weak-kneed politicians taking orders from keyboard activists and a slew of entitled upper middle-class infants who think that policies should be based on appeasing their petulant tantrums.

Labor is struggling desperately to hold on to the voters it could once take for granted and the last thing it wants at any level of government is a reinvigorated Liberal party that actually puts forward serious challenges to its elite agenda. This is why Labor is throwing everything it has at convincing the cowardly Liberal ranks that moving further and further left is the answer to the problems that moving further and further left has already caused them.

Labor’s fanatical insistence that the Liberals must become even more Labor-lite is exactly why the Liberals should do the opposite of what shivery little men in funky glasses and neurotic women with badly dyed hair and look-at-me tattoos tell them to do. Does anyone genuinely believe that Labor is offering advice because it wants to help the Liberals? To those with two brain cells to rub together, the answer should be obvious. Yet in today’s dismal excuse for democracy it is easier to imagine party pundits in Liberal HQ on their knees thanking Labor for knowing what is best for them, than it is to see them finally landing blows.

Lillian Andrews writes about politics, society, feminism and anything else that interests her. You can find her on Twitter @SaysAwfulThings.