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November 30, 2010
One of the current themes in the mainstream media is the ALP's soul search for its lost identity. This mostly comes from the Murdoch press. They says that since becoming a minority government the ALP has lost its way, and it doesn't know what it stands for. Of course, they have plenty of advice: federal Labor needs to shift to the right.
Many in the ALP concur: Labor has lost its basic Labor values. So they have gone off looking for them. Michael Costa, who has been silent of late, amplifies this theme in his Reform the cure for Labor's ills in The Australian Literary Review. He replays the Labor Right's main meme to cure the ALP's supposed identity crisis: federal Labor must confront the Greens to save the Labor Party and stop practising the politics of appeasement with the far-Left.
For Costa The Greens have a pathological antipathy to capitalism and inherent contempt for the principles of sound public finance. Their mantra is that things would be much better if Labor just stopped selling out to the capitalist system and its vested interests. The Greens, along with the rest of the Left, are addicted to describing any policy that doesn't strictly conform to their world view of greater government intervention as being neo-liberal.
The Greens' strategy is to always try to wedge Labor. Costa says:
The Greens need to be confronted rather than appeased. This is precisely why federal Labor's political deal with the Greens is so damaging.Gillard and her advisers have, by formalising a political agreement with the Greens, unnecessarily and irresponsibly legitimised them in the eyes of many ill-informed voters as a credible political force. In short, Gillard has made a damaging political blunder that will haunt the party for many years to come.
He says that most traditional Labor voters are not supporters of the Greens' policies. The Greens' policies on a range of issue, from taxation to law and order, would horrify that base---because the Greens are deemed to be far-Left, extremist, anti-capitalist and anathema to middle Australia. In short, Gillard has made a damaging political blunder that will haunt the party for many years to come.
The ALP, in standing up to The Greens, needs to return to the core economic and social principles that allowed Hawke and Keating to propel the Australian economy along a path of economic and social prosperity and embrace the successful Hawke-Keating model of economic liberalisation and continuous micro-economic reform. What Costa means by reform is economic reform interpreted as smaller government, welfare cuts, deregulated industrial relations and lower taxes. He probably would include a larger population. So speaks the NSW Right.
The core problem with Costa's account is that he ignores--makes no mention of -- the reform attempt by Rudd Labor to shift Australia to a low carbon economy by using market mechanisms to drive change through an emissions trading scheme. The ALP was supported in that by the Greens, until the ALP was captured by the power and coal industry, lowered the targets and price on carbon, and subsidised the polluters.
Costa opposed the shift to a low carbon economy, was a climate change denialist, and was only interested in privatising the NSW power stations. He had no interest in reform in the Murray-Darling Basin, was opposed to investing in urban public transport and could only see the negatives in increasing the energy efficiency of the built environment.
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It's ironical that one of the machine men most responsible for the unprincipled opportunism that characterises 21st century Labor should try to diagnose its electoral problems. The absence of self-awareness is breathtaking, but then Costa would have been quite at home as a member of the Howard Government.