There is no doubt imo that the reason for Labor’s loss is they...

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    There is no doubt imo that the reason for Labor’s loss is they were too relaxed about what was happening in social media which was probably aided and abetted by an army of Morrisons media people fuelling a scare campaign using right wing groups(trolls) to smother the media with anti-labor rhetoric. They used smear to extremes aimed at raising doubts about Shorten and anyone else they could target. No-one was spared and even this forum imo played its part. They were relentless posting the  dirt needed to get ScoMo up! Labor by comparison were asleep at the wheel and did little to counter the onslaught of slime thrown their way. They were sucker punched and from what I can see now they are still shell-shocked. Trolls were defaming Shorten with impunity. Lies were being dished out by the minute.

    Even on this forum the negative stuff and smears being dished out were accompanied regularly by large numbers of likes which imo were orchestrated to give an impression of widespread agreement. I wondered while that was going on, where was the army of Labor members and Labor inclined organisations, including the union movement. Seemed to me not much coming from those quarters.

    The coalition and its acolytes went hard with a basically no prisoners approach, whereas Labor tippy toed through the tulips with a wet lettuce approach.

    They should have got the message now but I doubt it. They were out campaigned in the new media. They supposedly were more cashed up than the coalition but all I saw are ads every five minutes slamming Labor and Bill Shorten in particular. The Labor ads when they came up were just tinkering with images of Abbott & Dutton and Morrison when really what was needed clear understandable explanations of the too many policies they had put up. They announced the policies but not much in follow up.

    Labor were destroyed in the campaign. The coalition had everybody thinking more taxes from Labor, that every retiree would be impacted by the franking credit policy, that house values were going to collapse, and then to add fuel to the fire distributed widely the lie that Labor would introduce an inheritance tax. Labor's response to this onslaught was pretty weak. There was no hard hitting Hawke or Keating figure to expose the lies. So the Libs and their trolls slaughtered Labor with their scare campaign and added a touch of smear to create doubt in the minds of voters.

    How many threads just on this forum mentioning the word rape aimed at smearing the Opposition leader. To those who think that this forum has no impact imo they are wrong. They forget that quite apart from the member reads non members can access and read posts. What they cant do is post or interact in the forums. Furthermore, Google searches by topic will bring up HC threads so the readership can be even wider but not reflected in HC reader numbers which probably only record member reads.

    Labor should be able to sign up thousands of its supporters members here which provides a free platform to express views. They are however not here but rather a small number of long term HC members who may coincidently tend to lean to Labor, whereas I am convinced that the right wing of politics is operating  here big time.

    Even the focus on GetUp is another area where the coalition won the campaign. They managed to impart a view that GetUp was working for Labor pointing fingers away from their own army of organised groups of coalition trolls and media that were predominant in the discourse.

    Labor were well and truly outmanoeuvred!

    Just my opinions!
    Last edited by eagle888: 21/05/19
 
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