Labor’s death wish

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.