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Labor’s death wish

By Peter McMahon - posted Friday, 1 December 2006


The Howard Government should be on the ropes and heading for the canvas right now. It has failed dismally in two of the three critical areas of government, and is quickly sliding on the third. But these days Labor is so inept it simply cannot make real headway, and so the electorate is stuck wondering what to do.

Reading the memoirs of old Labor types like Fred Daly brings out the pathos of a whole generation of Labor MPs who became inured to failure and took it for granted. To win government, Gough Whitlam and his allies had to revamp the entire party to overcome the culture of defeat. Labor under Beazley (again), is beginning to look very similar to the Labor of the 1950s and 1960s.

Labor then was up against the unprecedentedly benevolent post-war years when reconstruction and technological change generated two decades of strong economic growth, low inflation and high employment. The Coalition under Menzies milked their good luck for all it was worth, in large part continuing policies introduced by the Curtin and Chifley governments.

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More recently, Labor has suffered as the Coalition under Howard reaped the benefits of a generally benign world economy and in particular the commodities boom. Again, the Coalition benefited from the economic reforms begun by Hawke and Keating which were intended to integrate Australia more fully into the fast globalising world economy.

The manifest failures of the Coalition, such as its disinterest in environmental or Indigenous affairs, were passed over by the voters who only took account of its apparent economic management credentials.

Now inflation is stirring and interest rates are up at a time when Australians have never been more debt-leveraged, and so Howard’s primary claim to credibility is under question.

Furthermore, Howard has been completely wrong in his policies regarding the two great questions of the time, global warming and international relations. His unquestioning obedience to the radical Bush administration - whose policies on global warming, terrorism, Iraq, Iran and North Korea have been abject failures - has been a disaster for Australia.

So why isn’t Labor licking its chops at the prospect of victory in the next election?

Well, because as a serious party of reform, it is defunct. Run by soft-headed opportunists with minimal understanding of the contemporary world, it is corrupt to the core and utterly incompetent. It is led federally by a tried and true loser who belongs to another era and in the states by political hacks whose only real concern is in pleasing the usual vested interests and the media. As shown by Howard again in relation to IR, it is federal politics that matters, and here Labor is moribund.

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It is painful to watch the few good Labor people left - like Lindsay Tanner and Julia Gillard - defending a party that needs immediate transformation. Beazley’s intention to keep people of meagre talent on his front bench while Peter Garrett languishes in the background says it all. Kevin Rudd would at least not make so many mistakes, but he promises nothing genuinely new.

But Labor, we understand, will not dump Big Kim because they fear another Latham episode. The lesson the ALP should have taken from that mess was not to go back to dull conservatives like Beazley, but to get some real talent into the party - in a hurry. Latham might have screwed up, but he and Tanner were just about the only options the ALP had at that point.

Recent polling tells us that the ALP has not made ground in regard to what is, rightly, emerging as the issue of the century, global warming. This is entirely apt. Labor has been nothing more than opportunistic on the environment, only showing interest when it suited electorally.

The fact that the Coalition - led by a prime minister who still acts like he doesn’t really believe in global warming and a treasurer who says we have decades to deal with it - is ahead of the ALP on this issue shows Labor’s complete failure as a progressive political force.

So the ALP needs to dump Beazley, put Gillard in as leader and make Garrett shadow minister for the environment ASAP. It would then be led by people who look like they might actually know what the twenty-first century is all about.

None of this will stop the Greens from cleaning up in the Senate, and we will see how their next generation of senators stack up. The Greens have to consolidate with some real performers to push for the third force role and show that their days of naïve bumbling are behind them.

How Labor handles the Greens will be another major test. It is highly likely that the old guard will see them as upstarts and worse than the Liberals, and launch all out war. But Garret and a few others will know that the future of progressive politics in Australia is going green and the Greens need to be dealt with as legitimate players.

Labor has a proud record as the most important progressive force in Australian history. It has ably represented the working classes and those wanting to see a fairer society, in relation to gender, welfare, or Indigenous matters, as well as a secure society based in processes of international negotiation. Most of the outstanding reformers since federation have been Labor politicians, including our only great prime minister, John Curtin, who made the right decisions when it really mattered.

But Labor has completely lost its way. It casually shifts its increasingly cynical and arrogant staffers between state and federal jobs, preparing the worst of them for their own parliamentary careers, like some dodgy employment bureau.

Those who had any real knowledge of the real world have been marginalised, or pushed out entirely. Labor has no idea what it stands for and no idea how to sell itself to the electorate. It is driven by a death wish which will see it become increasingly irrelevant, even if it jags office federally every now and then as politics becomes more volatile due to the growing global crisis.

Can Labor pull itself together and regain relevance, as it did in the early 1970s? Not with its current leadership, membership and party processes it can’t. The rot is now so deep the necessary reforms might tear it apart, but perhaps this would be better than having to watch what was once such a noble project wither and die.

Of course, if Howard continues to botch his government’s response to global warming, especially his lunatic preference for nuclear power, he might just force Labor to take a stand and start acting like an effective opposition for once.

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About the Author

Dr Peter McMahon has worked in a number of jobs including in politics at local, state and federal level. He has also taught Australian studies, politics and political economy at university level, and until recently he taught sustainable development at Murdoch University. He has been published in various newspapers, journals and magazines in Australia and has written a short history of economic development and sustainability in Western Australia. His book Global Control: Information Technology and Globalisation was published in the UK in 2002. He is now an independent researcher and writer on issues related to global change.

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