Right now, every federal Labor MP should ask themselves a question. And it's got nothing to do with what they are all (understandably) obsessed about.
According to the polls, whether caucus keeps Julia Gillard as leader is neither here nor there when it comes to the likely outcome of the next election.
Rather, Labor MPs should ask themselves something different, along the lines of: ''How would I feel if a conservative government did some of the things the Gillard government now wants to do?''
Labor MPs should ponder what their reaction would be if the Labor government established a news media council with the legal authority to enforce ''fairness'', and a future Abbott government appointed a chairman of the council who issued a decree ordering the media to give as much prominence to climate-change sceptics as to those who believe humans are causing potentially catastrophic global warming.
Labor MPs, particularly those who regard themselves as being on ''the Left'', should consider what their response would be had John Howard floated a proposal to have the government force internet service providers to keep for two years a record of all the websites visited by internet users. There would have been outrage. As there should be. Yet such a policy is exactly what's being considered by the Attorney-General's Department.
Amid the desperate desire of some in the Labor caucus to launch revenge attacks against the media generally, and Rupert Murdoch specifically, it's been forgotten that the weapons with which the caucus arms itself will also one day be available to its opponents.
If Tony Abbott and the Coalition are really as dangerous as Labor has convinced itself they are, then it is strange that Labor MPs would hand over to him and his future government the tools by which he could impose their ideological vision on the country.
Even if Labor MPs aren't greatly worried by the principle of freedom of the press, for example, they should at least be aware of the political consequences of what they're doing.
The press censorship the Gillard government is contemplating is bad, but from the perspective of Labor backbenchers, the motives for it might be understandable. They believe it's their chance to get back at a media that they believe has been biased and unfair. But no such excuse is available when it comes to what the government wants to do about internet surveillance.
The Greens' communications spokesman, Scott Ludlam, was spot on when he said the idea of requiring internet service providers to keep internet users' records is like the government telling Australia Post to open every single envelope it receives, making a photocopy of what's inside and putting it in a filing cabinet ''just in case you turned out to be a terrorist down the track''.
Australia is facing a power grab on an epic scale by the bureaucracy and the security services. Many other egregious things are also being considered. For example, the security services want search warrants to be far easier for them to get, although so far the government has not provided any evidence that an inability to obtain warrants has in any way hindered the security services in doing their job.
The privacy consequences of keeping personal data for two years are enormous. The only possible response to the supposed reassurance from the Attorney-General's spokesperson that the data stored ''would be metadata such as the time an email was sent, rather than its content'' is: yeah, right!
Even if it started out as only keeping a record of the time an email was sent, there's not a politician in the country who could say that they genuinely believed this is where the government snooping would end. Surveillance powers are never wound back — they only ever increase.
The Greens are wrong on just about everything. But they're not wrong about how dangerous these surveillance proposals are. It's just a pity that somehow the Greens see no contradiction in the way they oppose more government control of the internet yet support more government control of the press. Speech should be no less free in a newspaper than it should be on the internet or on Twitter.
The Gillard government's diabolical situation is being measured in the column inches devoted to leadership speculation.
The willingness of Labor MPs to agree to any policy no matter how much it offends whatever principles they believe in, just to stay in power, is a better measure of how far this government has fallen.
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