Month: December 2022

For 20 years, Luke Donnellan was the Victorian Labor MP for the outer suburban electorate of Narre Warren. He served as the Minister for Roads and Road Safety and Minister for Ports (2014-2018) and then as the Minister for Child Protection and the Minister for Disability, Ageing and Carers (2018-2021).

Before the Nov 2022 state election, the Labor Party denied Luke preselection for his seat, and was thus pushed out of parliament altogether.

Luke joined Discernable for an open conversation about the lives of everyday Victorians. What do they care about? Why do they keep electing Labor governments?

We also delved into the ethics of protests, social justice, and the corruption tendencies of long term governments. As the Minister for the most vulnerable cohort of Victorians during Covid-19 (the elderly), we also explored his thinking on vaccine mandates, segregation and community safety.

Watch the full interview at:

• We discussed:
• The grass roots instincts of Daniel Andrews
• Door knocking your electorate
• Pandering to minorities in the electorate
• Labor/Liberal comes in cycles
• Where the Liberal Party went wrong
• Door knocking is the key to success
• The future for both political parties: the outer suburbs
• Why the north and west of Melbourne have underdeveloped infrastructure
• Who Victorians voted for – the rise of minor parties
• The baseball bats for Daniel Andrews never came
• Everyday Australians don’t care about corruption
• The dismissal of Casey Council which is still in caretaker mode
• Regulatory capture and systemic ‘grey corruption’ in Victoria
• Stale governments become corrupt governments
• Renewal inside the Labor Party of Victoria
• Factional wars: Labor Socialist Left vs Labor Right
• Liberals are stuck in the Baby Boomer generation
• Australians have moved left
• The Victorian Socialists’ weird success in the election
• Greens taking over country electorate of Polwarth
• Labor Party surprised at the election result
• The internal mood toward Daniel Andrews
• How Luke was pushed out of parliament
• Driven by Social Justice
• Rugby as early intervention against crime
• Pacific Islanders: God and Rugby
• Child Protection: Foster Care, Kinship Care and interventions
• A billion dollars for wire rope barriers on highways
• Irrational objections from the Country Fire Authority
• In politics you write your own rules
• The Victoria crackdown on protests
• Chinese protests vs Melbourne protests
• Relative ethics: what the people want they get
• Are lockdowns morally good or bad?
• Are mandates morally good or bad?
• Daniel Andrews’ victory speech double speak
• The impending economic recession
• Why the left wing won’t do longform media
• Labor Party communications discipline

How do left-wing/progressive/woke people think? Is there a way for the right wing to speak to the left? Why do they misunderstand one another?

Rob McMullan joins us to discuss the psychological differences of those loosely defined as politically left and right wing. Ultimately, Rob’s hope is that the moderates on either side will find a way to communicate and cooperate.

Watch the full interview at:

We discussed:

• What is ‘the collective good’?
• The left have no interest in cooperation
• Claims of ‘hate speech’
• Each side is blind to the other
• Left Wing Caretaking vs Right Wing Capitalising
• Case study: what is marriage?
• Fairy tale thinking on world politics
• How conservatives should talk to the left wing
• Interpersonal empathy does not scale
• A dysfunctional marriage between the left and the right
• Case study: would Dan Bilzerian care about a speech on moralism?
• Gina Rinehart calls out Netball Australia
• Conservatives in power are too comfortable
• How to speak to the left: emotional validation
• The lack of social consensus = pain for the left
• Differentiating the ‘woke left’ from the sensible left wing
• Freedom from the law of scarcity
• ‘Boomerservatives’
• The left has a greater verbal ability than conservatives
• Wokeism is the evolution of religion
• The Star Trek reality
• The life of a Twitter worker: caretaking beyond reason
• How conservatives should speak to the left
• Powerful conservatives have checked out
• The left will double down even when it ‘hits their hip pockets’
• Empathetic Thinking vs Systematic Thinking
• Daniel Andrews’ hypocrisy of excluding some Victorians
• The long arc of social technology created by the empathy brains
• The empathetic herd
• How women speak to one another
• ‘Herds vs packs’ and the differing strategies and moralities
• ‘Individuals vs the collective’ is incorrect
• Purity spirals
• We need a new aristocracy to balance the left
• The left should pay with ‘gratitude’
• Solutions for the future of Australia
• A new strategy: Separate and Co-operate
• Vaccine mandates driven by social and herd consensus

ROB MCMULLAN
https://twitter.com/TheMcMullan