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March 25, 2011
A core question that will arise from the certain defeat---nay massacre---of the corrupt, incompetent NSW Labor government is what next for Labor. The ALP faces a rout, their Sussex St style of bullying politics is utterly discredited, their progressive base has deserted them for the Greens, and their traditional blue collar base has decamped to the Liberals en mass. Labor is going to be left with minimal political representation.
The answer to what next for Labor is that the ALP will have to renew and reinvent itself. At the moment NSW Labor merely stands for a political machine winning elections for its own sake and staying in power---the NSW right's cult of 'whatever it takes'. They will have plenty of time to renew and reinvent in opposition. Reinvent themselves into what though?
If the political landscape is changing with the slow but steady decay of the two party system, then what is the identity of the ALP in a multiparty system? How does the ALP differentiate itself from the Liberals and the Greens now that Australia is committed to becoming an open market economy? If the old identity of the working class party is decaying, what is Labor's emergent political identity?
I don't know the answer to these questions. I do know that though they will be pressing questions to NSW Labor after it has become a shadow of its former self, it is also applies to Gillard Labor. The latter's style of politics looks to be increasing managerialist in orientation with a set of platitudes and talking points designed for marketing the Labor brand to the ever shrinking political base.
People suspect that like NSW Labor the political core of Gillard Labor is hollow. At the ABC's Unleashed Malcolm Farnsworth gives expression to this judgement:
This, then, is the concern about Gillard: she revels in the political game but seems to lack any deeply-held or coherent philosophy, beyond a handful of platitudes and snippets of management-speak. Give her a brief, a new set of lines to deliver, and she learns them off by heart and trots them out when the political situation requires. And then there’s her tin ear. For someone so intensely political, she seems oddly out of sync with political sentiment....[Gillard] she battles a perception that her government lacks something at its core.
Does this matter? Surely politics is now inhabited by the hollow men and women engaged in professional politics.
Update
It was a massacre for a scandal-ridden NSW Labor, as was expected.The swing was around 17 per cent and Labor will hold around 20 seats. It appears that The Greens failed to win the inner city seats of Marrickville and Balmain; the Independents have been reduced by the resurgence of the Nationals; the Legislative Council has swung to the right.
The ALP heartland in western Sydney has gone. NSW Labor now resides in a political graveyard---its primary vote is at 25 per cent. The Liberals have taken a giant step into areas where their political brand had barely ever registered respectable support.
Alex Mitchell in the SMH states that the rebuilding starts to reconnect it with its traditional base among blue- and white-collar voters. It will need to do more than that.
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Malcolm Farnsworth gets to the disquieting core of Gillard's education revolution in his How do you solve a problem like Julia?
Gillard has embraced educational conservatism. She speaks like a conservative.