July 03, 2005
Paul Kelly on the ALP's crisis
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.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 09:33 AM | Comments (7) | TrackBack
June 30, 2005
political truth telling
In launching Bernie Lagan's Loner: Inside A Labor Tragedy yesterday John Faulkner made some truthful comments about the culture of the ALP, its demons and the party's ability to face them.
On what he calls the gladiatorial NSW culture Faulkner says:
In NSW, a combative organisational culture has at times turned toxic. When maintaining factional power is put ahead of civility, decency, honesty, humanity or even legality, then bullying and thuggery become lazy substitutes for debate. Behaviour unacceptable outside NSW Labor is all too often rewarded within it....As an active member of the NSW Labor tribe, I know how hard it can be to draw a clear distinction between the ritualised conflict of Party forums and the real world.
And, by putting Mark Latham's leadership into the right political context, Faulkner critcizes those in the ALP and the press who lay the blame for the ALP's 2004 defeat at the door of a flawed Mark Latham alone:
Both Mark Latham and the Party he led were hurt by our own culture. And both the Party and the Leader were hurt by Labor's desire for a messiah to save us - to save us from ourselves as much as from outside forces. This is a burden that proved too great for Mark, as it would perhaps have proved too great for anyone...Mark was a bold politician, passionate about the future Australia he imagined. Part of his tragedy is that he became leader of the Labor Party at a time when his boldness and his passion were not enough.
It requires political courage to say this when many in the ALP (such as Bill Shorten, the Australian Workers Union chief,) are determined to make Latham equivalent to a poison, in order to avoid confronting the demons of their political culture.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 08:15 AM | Comments (10) | TrackBack
June 29, 2005
there's bile and there's bile
Like many in the ALP the Canberra Press Gallery has really turned against Latham. The Australian's front-page frenzy on Monday comes to mind. Why this kind of attack when there is a lot of truth in what Latham is saying about the current state of play for the ALP?
Is not the current ALP a very conservative institution, run by conservative machine men from all factions? Is not the inner workings of the ALP ruled by machine politics? Has not the ALP become a machine political party, with each little union and each state and territory having its own little powerbrokers and machine representatives in federal caucus? This gives the appearance that far from the ALP being a viable, electable political outfit, it is a mess.
Latham's plain speaking is what is needed. The forthcoming Latham diaries are going to be a great read.
Presumably, the Press Gallery do not like the way the truth is said--its the bile. They reduce it all to character and say the man is sick: roughly he's a depressed, tortured soul overcome with bitterness and anger.
What is wrong with a bit of biff and blowtorch to the belly. That's standard ALP politics isn't it? You know, if the heat in the kitchen is too much for the right to bear, then.....?
There are different kinds of bile. One kind is the response from the conservative right factions of the ALP (eg.,NSW & Queensland) over the last couple of days, which blames the leader, not the party, for their election loss. Whose living with the delusions here? Shouldn't they be reflecting on their own hysteria and angst---recall the use of "a Labor rat" and being lower than a dog?
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 05:04 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 23, 2005
a question mark over the ALP
This is my last day in the Senate working as a political advisor to Senator Meg Lees. The Canberra office is nearly cleaned out and I return to Adelaide tonight to help clean out the electoral office during next week. Then I take a break for several weeks before I move to my new job.
For those who care about things I did not attend the Press Galley Winter Ball.
Whilst finishing up my work in Canberra I've been watching the ALP's performance in Parliament and in the new media. They are just going through the motions of being an opposition. There is little enthusiasm on the front bench, no fire in their belly, their eyes look glazed, their bodies sag. There is little by way of policy being put forward, and very little on new thinking on mandatory detention or on disability and work-to-welfare. The ALP's aura is one of despair.
Costello is right. There is a hollowness in the current performance of the ALP front bench. Hence this kind of reporting. (Was this a leak from the ALP Right?) And we have the ongoing battle over parliamentary tactics in the Labor caucus and the continual surfacing in the media of the internal bitterness.
The ALP response to the Costello hollowness charge has been given by Wayne Swan. He says:
Who has any idea what Peter Costello stands for, apart from a record tax take heavily redistributed towards very high-income earners? While he surfs the gains of Labor's economic reforms of the 1980s and 1990s what big new ideas has he contributed to the economic or political debate in this country?"
Swan presumes that Costello is hollow as he has contributed nothing by way of policy ideas.
Swan seems to be unaware of the demographics of health opened up by the Treasury's Intergenerational Report 2003-4 and the way that this kind of work (as it is being developed by the Productivity Commission) underpins the Government's fourth term agenda.
Swan simply ignores this and he seems top be unaware that the ALP is losing the battle of policy ideas. That is a little example of what is going wrong with the strategy of the senior leadership of ALP.
The significance of this is that the government is given a free run, as the ALP just fluffs its feathers and huffs and puffs about being tough. Yesterday it was tax. Today it is foreign debt. Minchin was ready--private companies are borrowing the overseas money and investment is booming. The attack was deflected.
Tomorrow the issue the ALP will decide to be tough on will be?
Whilst packing the crates I listened to the Senate at Question Time. I did not hear all that much from the ALP on the connection between to foreign debt and the trade deficit, weak exports, big imports, a bubble in housing prices and households going into debt to finance their consumption. Or that Australia's economic growth has been mainly driven by the housing industry.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 01:56 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
June 14, 2005
one step forward and...
I'm in Canberra listening to fragments of the political debates swirling around me about the Budget tax cuts. Inbetween I heard a new Senator from NSW gave her first speech praising individual liberty, family values, patriotism, assimilation and social cohesion, mixed up with a populist attack on the elites and advocating volunteerism as the backbone of civil society. The speech touched all the right conservative buttons and signifies the new conservative face of the Howard Senate.
There is nothing wrong with the tax cuts per se. Most of us need them, but they should be equitable, and those who are most vulnerable need to be given a fair go.
Louise Dodson in the Sydney Morning Herald observes that:
Beazley tries to demonstrate that he has "muscled up" to fight John Howard and Peter Costello, eschewing his "small target" strategy for which he was criticised when he was Opposition leader fighting the 2001 election. He does look tougher, the differences between the Coalition and Labor have been sharpened, but has he picked the right policy to demonstrate his new pugnacious political persona?
The answer is no. The judgement is that the message was confused, the ALP found itself in heavy weather, and the shadow Treasurer did a poor job in selling it. Using the tax cuts as a fightback platform misfired:
So a new issue has to be found to establish economic creditbility. Is it the economy? The economic news is not good. The current account deficit is in excess of 7.2% of GDP; the net international investment position is at -64% of GDP; economic growth is slowing to an annual growth rate of 1.9 per cent; the housing bubble is deflating and the credit cards are maxed.
Beazley's 'Securing the Economy' speech to the the NSW ALP State Conference suggests that it is.
He says:
I believe John Howard and Peter Costello are taking us to the edge of the debt cliff. I fear Australia's credit card is nearly maxed out. John Howard and Peter Costello have made Australia vulnerable to economic damage with potentially dire long term consequences. Over the long term no economy can sustain a mix of spiralling debt and slowing growth. And our country cannot sustain this whilst Government drives us down the low skills road.
This is Knowedge Nation revised. The argument is that the Howard Costello Government is driving us down the low skills road, whilst the ALP would take the high skills road.
Will it provide fightback platform required?
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 04:23 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
June 10, 2005
Canberra observed#2
Laura Tingle's weekly 'Canberra Observed' column in the Australian Financial Review addresses the situation after July 1. The features of the landscape include the Coalition's control of the Senate, the industrial relations reforms becoming law, Telstra being sold, changes in media ownership, and the ALP under siege, and subject to the daily humiliation and whipping in the House of Representatives.
In the light of this Tingle usefully asks:
What will Labor stand for, as far as voters are concerned, in this new world?
It is a good question and needs to be asked because we are entering into a new political landscape. Tingle says that as far as votes are concerned the question can be answered in the negative:--the ALP is not the government and Beazley is not Howard. She states that the negative is not enough.
Tis a fair point. These are dark days for the ALP. It has been in opposition for nigh on a decade, it probably faces another six years in opposition, its party membership is ageing and diminishing, its branches are collapsing, the undemocratic factions rule, and most of its experienced staffers left last year. Canberra this winter is going to be very depressing indeed.
Moreover, the ALP's glimmer twins (Swan and Smith) have not been very effective in taking on Costello on the economy, even though growth is slowing, property prices are falling, consumer debt is high, consumer confidence is low, and the trade deficit is very bad.
Despite the bad press of late, it is the dissident liberals led by Victorian Liberal MP Petro Georgiou, not the ALP, who are the effective opposition around immigrationadn n mandatory detention. It is the Australian Greens leader Bob Brown, not Beazley, who presents as the conviction politician on asylum issues (eg., the attempted defection of diplomat Chen Yonglin) and who highlights the confusion within John Howard's team and their shabby treatment of Chen.
So far the ALP has not been very good at making the Coalition accountible in the House of Representatives. That was the key strategy for the next three years was it not? So the ALP does need to stand for something positive and alternative to Howard's political agenda, otherwise it is going to become irrelevant in the new landscape.
Tingle's inference from this is:
The change in Senate numbers means Labor must embark on the most profound remaking of itself possibly in its history.
So what does Labor have to build on? Tingle does acknowedge that Beazley's defining line in the sand stands for greater public investment in infrastructure renewal and skills training. That is not enough. It is just plugging the gaps left by the Coalition.
Where is all the action on the impact of climate change on water and energy? You cannot continue to pretedt that it is just the drought and the rains will come and the problems will go away.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 06:15 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
June 04, 2005
is the game being played?
The ALP continually suprises me in terms of its oh so clever parliamentary tactics and its bad long term strategy. The classic example is the way it handed control of the Senate to the Coalition by directing its preferences to Family First. One presumes that as the ALP did not want to lose control of the Senate to its enemies, so the clever tactic backfired.
Tactics have priority over strategy. Presumably it did not occur to the smart political operators to consider what the political landscape would be like for the ALP with John Howard controlling the Senate for a decade. That should have been the possibility to prevent at all costs. Alas, as the political operators in the party machine did not see beyond the horizons of their short term tactics, they handed their enemy dominating power on a platter.
This oh so clever way of political operating continues, as we rapidly move towards a new political order where John Howard will control both houses of parliament:
Now it's not just Beazley. It's the inner circle that runs the ALP these days. I presume the clever 'block the tax cuts in the Senate' tactic was devised by that smart political operator Wayne Swan, the shadow Treasurer, with help from Stephen Smith. Smith went public with the rationale for the tactic.
A similar situation has happened with mandatory detention. Remember it is the Liberal dissidents who are trying to soften the hard edges of mandatory detention, and to limit the time people spend in carceration, not the ALP. The ALP says that the policies advocated by Liberal dissdents, such as Petro Georgiou and Judy Moylan, are in line with its own policies. So openly supporting the Liberal dissidents would increase the pressure on Howard, and it help to keep the momentum up for the much needed changes to mandatory detention.
That is good long term strategy as the mandatory detention camp has become the heart of our political life.
Did the ALP provide support for the Liberal dissident's private members bills?
No. The ALP is being low key: it is asking few questions in parliament on the issue and, as the Opposition, it has not bothered to put up its own legislation to force the pace of change.
The ALP's parliamentary tactics last week were designed to attempt to embarrass the Coalition by highlighting the divisions within its ranks. Changing the mandatory detention system was the instrument used to play the short-term parliamentary tactics game.
That means the short term tactics have priority over strategy.it is normal operating procedure of the ALP's political culture. That means the ALP doesn't really care about changing the mandatory detention system.
Good policy is sacrificed for parliamentary stunts. That is the judgement we citizens make. We also judge that the ALP's political culture needs changing.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 02:54 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
May 13, 2005
questionable tactics
Not many in Canberra were impressed by the clever parliamentary political tactics to oppose and seek to defeat in the Senate the Costello budget's $21.7billion tax cut for all income earners. These tactics, devised by the glimmer twins (the duo of Wayne Swan and Stephen Smith), were premised on negative rhetoric.
If the glimmer twins political tactics were meant to provide a platform in the media from which to launch a critique of the Costello's budget policy, then they sure backfired. The ALP ended up on the ropes from the Howard/Costello body blows landed throughout Wednesday.
I reckon it was a case of bad political lines that lacked punch and bad political judgement to go along with the oh so clever tactics. The ALP ended up looking vulnerable, bloodied and inept. It failed to use question time on Thursday to attack the Howard government's soft underbelly in its welfare-to work reforms---eg., the inadequate training places for the unemployed and those on welfare, and the shortages of childcare places. Instead of a public debate about the punitive politics of the welfare reforms the debate was about the ALP's blocking of tax cuts.
That meant Kim Beazley's budget speech-in-reply, had to make up the lost ground, with its alternative tax cuts plan and new policy initiatives on infrastructure and skills training.
New policy initiatives? Did not Kim Beazley say in April (The National Press Club speech in April) say that the ALP was going to focus on attacking the Howard Government in the House of Representatives so as to make them accountable, rather than putting forward alternative policies?
I thought that the newly-elected Beazley was on a promise to deliver a more policy orientated approach? Does that mean we should put the Press Club speech to one side? Do we then concentrate on ideas and policies?
So what happened to the ALP's care and compassion for those who were negatively affected by the work-to-welfare reforms at a time of a tax revenue surge from supercharged company profits? There was no mention of this in the budget reply speech.
I thought the ALP was drawing a line in the sand that demarcated a fairer and more equitable Australia. The line was to be used to enable Labor to define itself against Howard as the party of fairness and equity. So what happened to the tough critique of the punitive work-to-welfare reforms, that are the first step in dismantling the welfare system.
What is going on with the ALP? Does anybody have any ideas why it is all over the place?
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 01:55 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 27, 2005
Is the ALP Right going feral?
The ALP Right has big plans to revitalize the federal party. It does need rejuvenation as the power has shifted to the states.
Now the bruvvers on the Right constitute a strange political animal with stange ways. We saw the strangeness here. That little policy proposal was about increasing the rate of the GST and broadening the GST by including food to help the states get rid of their own tax base. Now they have got more strangeness.
This time it is Bill Shorten, national secretary of the Australian Workers Union and aspiring MP. Bill is all about ditching the inner-city, chardonnay lefty set and getting back to basics.
Back to basics? What would that mean today? It means downplaying caffe latte issues such as the environment, refugees and multiculturalism? It means turning away from pseudo-Green left policies that play in only five or six inner-city federal electorates. It also means moving away from the (big) Left, returning to the blue collar base, and appealing to the centre or middle Australia? That is how I understand it. Confirmation
What are the policies then?
Shorten gives it straight in a recent speech. He said that the top personal tax rate should be brought into line with the 30 per cent rate paid by companies. Presumably this is how Shorten understands the ALP being the party of the big economic ideas that give confidence to all Australians. Presumably tax cuts come before increases in publicly funded health care and education.is that what Shorten means when he says that its time for the ALP to move to the Centre of Australian politics by focusing on the broad economy.
Apparently he also said the rich should pay less tax, taxpayers should fund wealthy private schools and the Medicare rebate should be scrapped.
Back to basics as an agenda for renewal? It's a sharp contradiction to ALP policy and values don't you think? What is the ALP Right up to, embracing the basics of the Liberal Party, in the name of Labor Unity. That embrace implies that the goals of public policy are to promote prosperity and ensure that Australia becomes the wealthiest nation in the world.
Shorten was giving his ideas on on how Labor could win the next election in marginal Labor seat of Isaacs, in Melbourne. Honestly, I cannot see how becoming a neo-liberal clone of the Liberal party will get the ALP re-elected. Shouldn't the ALP be different from the Government? Isn't that the tried and tested strategy?
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:09 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
February 05, 2005
The ALP's glimmer twins
In an earlier post I began an argument that the ALP is missing good opportunities to establish its very tarnished economic credibility. In an update I mentioned that I had came across an op.ed by Ross Gitten.This had been written after Kim Beazley's media conference/interview just after he had re-gained the ALP leadership. I said that this op-ed confirmed my judgement that the ALP was not doing a good job in restoring its lost economic re credibility.
Gittens puts it far more forcefully with his image of the dead (economic) hand. He said that Beazley's statement in that first news conference about making sharp differences between the ALP and the Coalition explicit was okay, but it lacked any policy grunt. He then asked the right question:
All fair enough, but where are the actions to back up the words? Not there. A bit early for that, you say? No, not at all.
I thought that Gittens was a bit quick to judge, after only one press conference. However, Wayne Swan's small target response to the OECD Report on the Australian economy effectively undercuts Beazley's commitment to making the sharp differences have some policy substance.
What has gone wrong? Why have the glimmer twins(Wayne Swan and Stephen Smith) gone off the rails so early. They were meant to be the lead act in re-establishing the economic credibility the ALP says it has to re-acquire, if it is to have any hope of winning the next election.
Gitten's suggestion is a persuasive one:
Neither of these two [ie., Beazley bovver boys-Wayne Swan and Stephen Smith] has any significant record of interest in or commitment to micro-economic reform. Rather, they're highly experienced political operators. So Labor's continuing its post-1996 folly of having shadow treasurers who are professional pollies-- Gareth Evans and Simon Crean-- trying to fake it as economic rationalists.
He's right. Gitten's judgement is quite damming:
Surely it's clear by now that they can't pull off the act. They can't inspire or even convince the coterie of economic opinion leaders whose granting or withholding of their imprimatur has a subtle but significant influence over the public's general impression about which party's economically competent and which isn't.
I reckon we should let that judgement lie on the table. It judges the ALP according to its own criteria.
Gittens reminds us that the policy debate around the reform of the economy will not be won by clever tactical moves on the floor of the House of Representatives during Question Time.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:06 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 29, 2005
Language and death
Well, it's all signed, sealed and delivered then on the ALP leadership question. Kim Beazley recycled with fire in his belly.
The functioning of the political machine has been restored, even if it is currently running on empty. Running on empty because the ALP is floundering on finding an issue to run on against the Howard Government.What are the issues it will a Beazley ALP fight on at the political barricades.
We should not forget the past. Remember Mark Latham? Alan Ramsay gives an accurate description of what happened:
It was a public execution, not a resignation...A year later, after he'd failed to deliver in 12 months the electoral gratification that the fumblings of Kim Beazley and Simon Crean had been allowed to bury, ever deeper, across almost eight years, Labor did to Latham what in a more primitive age was done to heretics. It burnt him at the stake, in front of us all, to the applause of a mostly accommodating media and those interests, internal and institutional, that Latham's confronting leadership style had so offended.
I agree. What comes to mind is Fascination, ecstasy, explosion, abandonment, dying, madness. The vortex of the void sucked them in to such an extent that we witnessed a spectacle of the ALP eating its own.
Now Latham made mistakes. And he was a lone wolf. But why the need to behead him? What happened to his friends? Should not the senior ALP leadership and campaign team take responsibility for losing the election? Why the evasion?
So why this bloodletting form of political madness?
There is an eerie silence about this public execution. We know that few are going to speak about it. Most are going to pretend that it never happened. A veil will be drawn over it. So Alan Ramsay should be applauded for saying that it was a public execution.
The unity of the normal political discourse was fragmented by the lethal violence.It has been restored. Things have now settled down. They can now pretend that it never happened.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:45 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 28, 2005
ALP: advice galore
The awful bashing of a sick Mark Latham appears to have died down. In the end he had few friends. Presumably, everybody in the media and the ALP is feeling a whole lot better after the catharsis of their beheading a wounded Leader. Well, not all.
Things are rapidly shifting to new concerns, namely the credibility of the ALP as an alternative government concerned with Australia's future. Kevin Rudd, the former leadership contender and foreign affairs spokesman, has spoken some more home truths.
What I'd like to say to all of my colleagues in the parliamentary Labor Party is it's time we stopped talking about ourselves and it's time we started talking about Australia's future.I think it's time everyone took a very long cold shower and shut up.
The advice on how to do this is beginning to circulate. Tony Parkinson at The Age trots out his standard 'you gotta put a lid on the "blame America first" lefty faction' who are so in love with the cheap thrills of domestic point scoring. Peter Hartcher in the Sydney Morning Herald reminds them of the light on the hill.
What is more interesting is the Australian Financial Review advice to Beazley Labor, as it indicates that the pressure to box the ALP into a corner is now on in earnest. Thurday's AFR editorial states:
Mr Beazley needs to do things differently this time if he is to drag Labor into the 21st century in time to make a contest of the 2007 election. And the first thing he must do is put the faction chiefs on notice that he will put the best people in the most important portfolios and shed cabinet deadwood regardless of factional nicieties.
That means dumping Macklin and Crean and putting Rudd in as Treasurer. He deserves a key domestic portfolio and needs one to establish his leadership creditionals in parallel with Julia Gillard.
What then?
The AFR is forthcoming on the advice:
With the best shadow cabinet it can muster, Labor should turn its attention to developing a policy platform that will appeal to voters as they are, not as party apparatchiks might wish them to be.
What does that mean? The AFR is quite forthright:
As Mr Rudd said last week, what Labor needs is a program of fundamental reform in areas such as education and health within a reformist policy framework that cares for the weak but also unapologetically rewards hard work. That means big changes to the tax, welfare and workplace relations systems and to the way in which the commonwealth and states fund and operate schools, hospitals and other vital infrastructure.
The AFR reckons that the ALP should support the right wing pro-business reform agenda. There is no need to devote any time to the environment.
There ends the advice. Why should the ALP become a clone of the Coalition? How is that going to ensure its re-election in 2007? Not even the ALP right would fall for that line of seduction.
The AFR is diplomatic. It does not say. What it does say is that Howard's electoral positioning may involve using the control of the Senate to aggressively advance new reforms. It acknowledges that is tricky terrain for Beazley, and it says that navigating it without dropping into cracks will take all the skill they can muster.
It is a good account of how the conservstyives will try to beat up the ALP. The pressure that is on will try to box the ALP into the corner, poke sticks at it, and then weaken it's body by making it slowly bleed. You can be sure that Howard will position things over the next 3 years so that the skin on the ALP's body cracks open, it loses its foothold, the old wounds open up and then start to fester.
So what is the alternative pathwayto the pro business conservative domestic agenda?
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:58 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
January 25, 2005
ALP: 'a God-awful shambles'
I personally find all the spin about the ins and outs of the ALP leadership rather boring and tedious. This game is about numbers: Kim Beazley has the numbers, the Right rules the machine and it is behind Beazley. That's it.
The rest is blah blah blah put out by the competing camps whilst they keep calling for unity, make a public show of harmony, and say they desperately need a healer to fix the gaping wounds. Presumably, they've given up looking for a prophet to lead them out of the wilderness to the light on the hill.
Honestly, who cares about every nuance in the eternal, internal jostling inside a crisis ridden ALP? Only the political junkies. Yet the media flows are filled with every nuance of the leaking and ongoing destablization of a splintered culture riven with vile. What we are witnessing is a political spectacle stirred along by the media. It is their kind of show.
Kevin Rudd, an aspirant for the ALP leadership, speaks the truth:
We are the ALP, we are the alternative government of Australia, and frankly, right now, we are in a God-awful shambles.We need to patch this up straight away in order to lift ourselves out of the muck and become a viable alternative government for this country. This country deserves better than we are currently delivering.
That needs repeating and repeating and repeating. Gillard has been saying something very similar as she positions herself as a key politiclal player in the public's mind.
Is anybody in the ALP actually listening? Knock knock. Hello in there.
The way the factional warriors have been conducting themselves of late indicates that the ALP is in no position to become a credible alternative government for Australia. It will have great difficulty become a unified political party.
Update: 26 Jan
Julia Gillard withdraws. She will not contest the Labor leadership. She marketed herself as a lefty with a bold policy vision. That needs to be questioned. I do remember her "close the borders lets have detention camps" refugee policy. There was little political courage or bold vision there. That was about political expediency.
So that leaves the field open for the triumphant return of Tampa "flip-flop" Beazley. He faces a daunting task of unifying a fragmented Labor caucaus. The simmerings and tensions in the caucus indicate that a simmering underground civil war is going on. The ALP has kissed its renewal goodbye.
I suspect the calls for unity will be meet with loyalty not unity. The ALP is not unified in purpose, policy or vision. Did not the Beazley camp say that Gillard could not be a leader becase she was single and childless? That opens a window on the boysie culture of the ALP right and the deep antagonisms between the Right and Left.
I just cannot see the ALP culture being transforming into a culture of mutual respect and shared conviction. I see bushfires flairing up all over the place with little empathy or sympathy for the victims.
They seem to have forgotten that the electoral clawback for the ALP is big. A tough ask to get the 18 seats required. You can already see Howard beginning the positioning that will take place over the next three years. It is taking place aroung the economy. Howard will use the economic reform legislation and control of the Senate to paint the Coalition as the party of opportunity, ownership, dynamism, and forward thinking; and to make the ALP appear to be against economic reform, and the defenders of old, boring, inadequate safety net programs.
The ALP may will be caught, as it is too busy fighting itself to contest the rightwing reform agenda of big business. Honestly, I cannot a disunited ALP defending the public interest in the face of the Howard Government's executive dominance over the legislature.
Can you?
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 09:38 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
November 22, 2004
ALP: turn right
As readers of public opinion are well aware, I am a fellow traveller of the inner city, apartment dwelling, caffe-latte Left, who are deeply concerned about post-Whitlam progressive policies relating to the environment, refugees and multiculturalism. You know the political grouping that is much despised by the right wing grouping of mates within the ALP.
I say fellow traveller because I do not live the Christian life and I am not a member of the ALP. Never have been.
Now that party politics does not matter to people, such as Bill Shorten, national secretary of the Australian Workers Union. He says that party affiliation is not really relevant here. What is relevant is the world view of the innercity intelligentsia which Shorten attributes to "us". He describes this cultural mentality in terms of:
"....a 'top-down' divide, between highly educated, urban intelligentsia [who despite party differences share similar liberal social values and an economically rationalist acceptance of globalisation] and so-called 'ordinary Australians' in the suburbs and regions [who are risk averse to economic restructuring and suspicious of liberal social values]."
Anti-populism+liberal social values+economic rationalist acceptance of globalization sounds like a description of the views of Paul Keating to me. I'm not that kind of guy. I detest Keating, am opposed to economic rationalism (neo-liberalism) and I critique the corporate form of globalization. That only leaves liberal social values. As I said I'm a fellow traveller.
Shorten has lots of strategic advice for the ALP in his leaked speech that he will deliver to the Fabian Society next month. Basically, the advice is that the ALP must distance itself from the Left intelligentsia if it is to win back the suburban Australian heartland now owned by John Howard.
It should move to the centre, establish its superiority in economic management credentials, reconnect with its blue collar base and "middle Australia", and accept that people want more public services and more tax cuts.
Shorten is a little coy here as he interprets moving to the centre in terms of "the everyday experience of working for the economic interests of people in the real economy is a valuable policy anchor." Now moving to the centre---ie., back into Howard's suburbs and towns---- also means accepting a conservative populism structured around an old-fashioned or nationalistic conservatism and cultivating support among socially conservative or religious Australians. This is required to counter wedge politics, where people vote to support certain values even against their own economic interests.
That is the voice of conservative populism in the ALP.
Where is its difference from the conservative populism of John Howard? The only difference I see is looking out for the economic interests of trade unions rather than the bosses. That union boss talk would not resonate all that well with the do-it-yourself enterprise culture of the new middle class of contractors, franchisees, people working from home and fledgling suburban entrepreneurs. Does not the union movement have a problematic relationship with this new middle class?
If I may say so, me tooism does not sound like a sure fire way back to the Treasury benches. I presume that Shorten's understanding of democracy is that if you haven't got the numbers, mate, you're stuffed.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:41 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack