Some truth and some fantasy in Latham's Labor account

Choices are available. Ultimately, however, the problem of the underclass is an inability to make good choices in life – a blindness to the possibilities of personal change. The social norms of the neighbourhood are so badly corroded that rational behaviour becomes a minority influence, the sort of thing which strange people do. What the rest of society regards as normal is seen as socially aberrant. In effect, a subculture has formed, in which residents only mix with people from the same underclass background, sharing the same ethos of irresponsibility and hopelessness.

Don Arthur has written about how empirically weak this picture of poverty is. My concern is more with values. To speak of the poor in this way is practically to divide a society into separate species. It is the opposite of egalitarianism - it sees people of different income levels who live in different neighbourhoods as essentially different in their ethos and their capabilities. And it does so in preparation for bringing the full force of the state to bear on them:

The starting point for reform must be a policy of dispersal, of moving disadvantaged people out of underclass suburbs. In public housing, where governments have the power to move tenants around, this is a straightforward task.

Remote aboriginal communities are simply assimilated to this "underclass". They too need to be broken up:

High expectations have not been matched by tangible improvements in lifestyle normality, schooling and the development of new business ventures. The reason for this is straightforward. As long as disadvantaged Aboriginal people continue to live in isolated, disadvantaged communities, they can never break the cycle of underclass culture.

The difficulties faced by the most economically disadvantaged mean, for Latham, that their communities have surrendered the right to exist. Or perhaps it's closer to the truth to say that "community" is not something he considers his underclass to fully partake in. He actively dismisses any role for indigenous leaders in remote communities, or any persistent connection between aborigines and the land they live on. No consultation is necessary, no autonomy is permissible. This is a frankly authoritarian proposal to forcibly rip communities apart because their inhabitants have not acquired the jobs that don't exist in our economy, or have been trapped in circumstances that previous government policy has engineered.

It's a crazy-mirror class war, where the support of the petit-bourgeoisie is secured in order to turn the full coercive and disruptive power of the state on the obstinately poor. In this sense, and in its abjection of the "underclass", it is closely akin to Blairism - Matt Cowgill forcefully draws the connections between this and the Clause IV generation in the United Kingdom. The Blairist connection is also visible in Latham's recommendations on education - he wants to discipline school teachers by means of constant testing, muscling up to education unions, and imposing a market on public schools. At the same time as proposing to erode the autonomy and conditions of teachers, he expresses the hope of bringing high achievers into the profession.

Needless to say, the most dramatic recent improvements in school systems have arisen from doing the opposite of what Latham suggests. Finland's government has made a long term investment in education, has worked with unions, and emphasises equal treatment of schools, students and teachers. Schools have not only been kept as a public resource, but they have moved closer to the centre of the meaning of the public. Teachers are paid well, and esteemed, not micromanaged. They do not carry out endless testing. Latham's proposals, on the other hand, are not evidenced by way of successful implementations of like schemes. That is because they're not empirical, but ideological, and can't think of the public sector except as inherently wasteful.

Latham's program is meant to appeal to a cohort whose values he assures us he understands, but whose continued existence provides very little evidence of. He can't, because they're illusory - they're probably best thought of as the narcissistic projection, or better still as an inadvertent piece of snobbery. Latham imagines that suburban voters have no broader ambition or vision than their own immediate material advancement, when there is ample evidence available that they are most worried about the decline or disappearance of what we hold in common.

Latham's fantasy can also perhaps remind us of of some broader problems in the labour movement. The ALP that talks about "the Lindsay test", second-guesses itself according to the whims of the Daily Telegraph, plonks Gillard in western Sydney and hews to roughly the same orthodoxies as the Liberals may not survive. There's no reason to vote for it. To the extent that it embraces a "post-Left" future that further alienates progressive voters, it will lose a rich source of potential candidates, activists and evangelists. As long as it withdraws from the provision of services and uses the state principally as an instrument to scapegoat and punish the poor, it will be practically indistinguishable from the conservative parties, and it will be implementing policies that voters have been opposed to for as long as they've been asked about it. If Labor is looking to represent broadly shared values, it should oppose itself to the evisceration of the commons. There is already one Liberal Party; Labor will get nowhere by aping it.