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July 03, 2005
I normally skip Paul Kelly's commentary on Australian politics. I'm irked by the pontification, resent the way Kelly treats the rest of us as ignorant fools who have little to offer, and recoil from the narrrowness, and lack of, policy ideas.
This time round Kelly is saying something about the crisis facing the ALP. If he can help us put our finger on this crisis, then he has provided a way to kick the public conversation along. This conversation sure needs to be kicked along as this particular debate has been stuck on endless repeat for some time.
Kelly starts his op. ed. by saying that:
The crash and meltdown of Mark Latham is an agonising episode for Labor, but the party's real test is whether it sinks deeper into the mire or devises a recovery strategy from its catharsis.
True. We do know that. It repeats the speech of John Faulkner when he launched Bernard Langer's The Loner: Inside a Labor tragedy. Still it is a good opening. Maybe the industrial relations protest rallies of last week in Melbourne have opened a new political space for a recovery strategy?
Or is this workplace relations protest a looking backwards that appeals to shoring up the ALP's populist(conservative blue collar unionist) heartland?
Kelly then asks a good rhetorical question:
The media focus all week fell on Latham's anger, his denial and his refusal to accept his responsibility for the loss. It is easy to attack Latham and, of course, his crass indulgence invites this response. But Latham has left politics. And if Latham were the prime problem, then Labor's woes would be over, right?
That puts a lot of the anti-Latham commentary into perspective does it not? Kelly goes to define the nature of the crisis in a negative and positive way.
The negative approach clears away the rubbish: The tribulations facing Kim Beazley during the past six months suggest a more searching and complex response is needed to Labor's problems than the suggestion that the removal of mad Mark means a Labor revival...Labor is in crisis, yet this crisis is remarkably undefined or rarely discussed. Indeed, any student of politics might think that Labor's crisis was that Beazley was a windbag, or that Crean couldn't communicate or that Latham had too big a chip on his shoulder. These defects are only too true, yet they are discrete personality problems that don't touch the bigger problem.
Is this crisis is remarkably undefined or rarely discussed? See South Seas Republic for a defence of the Third Way.
The positive approach is Kelly's judgement that the crisis is one of ideas and identity. He says that:
It is about how Australian social democracy defines itself in the globalised age of a market economy amid a community demand for restoration of social order and greater personal responsibility. This has been Labor's problem since Paul Keating's 1996 defeat.
This is promising. Note that Kelly says nothing about the environment.
Kelly then introduces Keating's view that Labor's problem arises because Australia has moved beyond the ALP policy framework, and that the Labor Party doesn't understand how much Australia has changed and what the Hawke/Keating economic reforms have delivered. Keating says that the "Labor Party, unfortunately, has returned to its old anvil; its focus now is on low-income earners and minority groups, but that doesn't work any more."
I've noticed this tendency too. The exclusive concentration on the conservative blue collar vote by the ALP right has always suprised me. As has its tendency to define middle class, the upwardly mobile, the self-employed and small business as an enemy. As Kelly observes this strategy only delivers 37 per cent of the primary vote and, short of a recession, it will stay a minority. The ALP has to do more than appeal to the working class heartland.
Keating's Third Way centres around two alternative ideas that he reckons should guide Labor's tax policy. The first is making Australia a genuinely creative nation and the second is being globally competitive. It is a question of values and votes and unless Labor re-thinks, it won't win the votes of the middle class, the upwardly mobile, the self-employed and small business. This takes us to a contradictory political space we know the ALP is enmeshed in.
Note that there is nothing about the economy and environment in Keating's ideas, and that Kelly merely recycles cliches about the Tasmanian forest issue. The ALP sure has a problem developing its old ideas of ecologically sustainable development.
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Gary, I didnt write the article, "The Sad Tale of Latham and the problem of selling the 'Third Way'", siento did.
To be truthful I am probably not capable of writing an article as insightful on party politics as that.