Why Labor lost

For most of Australian political history it was the Liberal Party that was seen as the party of pragmatic self interest, and the Labor Party as the party of conviction.

Now, most intriguingly, the roles have been reversed. The Liberal Party, no matter what one may feel about it, is widely seen as the party that contains a coherent ideological narrative, and which is not afraid to defend and promote that narrative in both opposition and government.

Tony Benn has often said of a certain personable and red headed Welsh that on the road to power he abandoned all of the beliefs that compelled him to take up the call of politics, only to shockingly discover that nobody in the electorate at large believed a word he said. Benn, of course, was speaking of the former British Labour leader Neil Kinnock, who started his political life as a working class oriented left wing activist.

So it is was with another personable red headed Welsh in the Antipodes; she was the secretary of the left wing Socialist Forum that went on to inform us that class struggles are "yesterday's battles," that Hawke and Keating's neoliberal reforms were marvellous, who got the Wikileaks revealed tick of approval from the US Embassy, the feminist that gave single mothers the slap, the atheist that wouldn't budge on gay marriage, and the leader that lurched Labor even further to the Right on refugees.

Julia Gillard, just like Neil Kinnock, threw everything away in order to attain and hold power only to find that she was believed by nobody and listened to by none.

So it was surely with tongue planted in cheek, if not in open contempt, that she wrote in her much commented post election essay in The Guardian that; "Labor comes to opposition having sent the Australian community a very cynical and shallow message about its sense of purpose."

Indeed, Comrade Gillard, quite indeed.

What precisely does the Australian Labor Party stand for? Not many people would be able to answer this question beyond the usual Blairite platitudes. Quite a few would see Labor as an electoral machine whose raison d'etre is to elect a technocratic class of "hollow men" who will jettison any principle and will cut any deal in order to achieve electoral success.

Of course, this picture is an exaggerated one, it ignores the rank and file who though voiceless do exist and do believe, but it does contain more than just a kernel of truth.

These observations are important for we might divide the causes of Labor's electoral loss under two broad categories, namely long term structural and proximate contingent ones. Take, say, the Australian cricket team. Clearly there are deep underlying structural issues within Australian cricket that has seen the national side sink to relative mediocrity.

These structural weaknesses are important to dwell on in any analysis of the recent Ashes campaign; they are important because they are not so easily fixed and will always be a millstone around the head of Australian cricket if not remedied.

However, they will not tell us about the ebbs and flows, the high drama, missed catches, poor captaincy decisions, the rash expeditions outside of off stump, that go to explaining why it is that a specific match was lost.

What might we say, firstly, about the proximate contingent causes for Labor's election loss?

Putting aside the flood of qualitative, interpretative, analyses for the moment a good empirical place to start would be with exit polls, which in part tell us not only how but why people voted the way they did. According to the Climate Institute both climate change and the carbon tax were not very significant electoral drivers (5% and 3% respectively singled these out). The main issues were the economy and jobs (31%), cost of living (15%) and healthcare (13%). Asylum seekers was but the fifth most important issue (7%).

Among Coalition voters specifically 40% nominated the "stronger five pillar economy" policy of the Coalition, 24% the "end of waste and debt", and 18% "stopping the boats."

Very little can be found here regarding the leadership ructions within Labor; it is not even a category. It is important, nonetheless, because Labor, to a significant though not total degree, was seen as a having a highly dysfunctional party. The instability at the top fed the notion that Labor were incompetent economic stewards in globally fragile economic times.

Objectively, there are no reasons why Labor should be seen as woeful economic managers compared to the Coalition. Labor was more prepared to stimulate a fragile economy, was more prepared to move beyond the resource based two speed economy, and was more prepared to create an economic framework anticipating the future transformation of energy generation. To all this we might add that the Liberal Party hardly had any policies for voters to warm to; the five pillar policy was nothing but a melange of empty slogans that would have done Tony Blair and George W Bush proud.

On economic management perception, not reality, was critical.

The great tragedy of this, naturally, is that there was no crisis in the Labor Party following June 2010 over the leadership. Julia Gillard overwhelmingly enjoyed the confidence of her comrades in caucus. A massive campaign waged by the corporate press, especially the Murdoch press, in association with Kevin Rudd continually destabilised her leadership.

The corporate media, with the conniving participation of Rudd, successfully created the perception that Labor was a dysfunctional party facing perennial crisis over its leadership, and it was this corporate agitprop, again with Rudd in tow, that had most voters perceiving that Labor were poor economic managers.

Though debt and deficit were important for Coalition voters in reality the differences between the two sides was slight; both were committed to returning the budget to surplus as soon as possible in accordance with the dominant neoliberal consensus. Labor was so committed to this that only until the very end of its term in office did it put, temporarily, the objective aside, but only after agreeing with the neoliberals for years that this was a crucially important policy objective, certainly more important than redistributing wealth in an increasingly unequal Australia.

The policy back flip, at best, was too little, too late and, at worst, fed the perception of poor economic management.

Structurally, one of the most significant issues is that labour movements pretty much everywhere are weaker and corporations, and the parties that represent their interests, are stronger. This is a structural condition throughout most, if not all, of the Western world.

Nicholas Reece, a Public Policy Fellow at the University of Melbourne, correctly observed that "in most advanced democracies, left of centre parties have lost their electoral mojo."

The reasons that he outlines for this, however, are fallacious; he states, "there have been underlying changes in the values and policy outlook of the electorate that many left-of-centre parties have failed to respond to."

In actual fact the values and policy outlook of the electorate has remained broadly social democratic. Even in the United States, as pointed out by the political scientist, Thomas Ferguson, the public rejected the values and policies promoted by the Reagan Revolution. In Australia, research by the sociologist Michael Pusey makes similar findings.

It is for this reason that neoliberalism in the West, but not just here, has been accompanied by attacks on functioning parliamentary democracy. These attacks come in the form of investor rights agreements, misleadingly called trade agreements, that curtail parliamentary sovereignty; through moment-by-moment referenda by financial markets on government policies that are designed to compel governments to put in place policies favourable to "market confidence," a euphemism for whatever makes the rich happy; and through "elections" that are spectacles managed by the public relations industry where parties veil their neoliberal policy commitments behind a facade of imagery and symbols.

It is often said, especially by right wing revisionists within, or speaking for, the Labor Party that the Labour movement is structurally weaker because of the inevitable changes in technology, fragmentation of class structure, and outlook that have accompanied globalisation. Such views, as in Reece's case, are always followed by a call for further movement toward the Right.

The labour movement is structurally weaker because that is a core objective, not just a mere consequence, of neoliberalism.

The movement to restore corporate profitability from the mid-to-late 1970s was based on an attack on the organised working class through strike breaking, anti-union though not anti-corporate laws, labour market deregulation, massive anti-union propaganda campaigns, and the employment of third world workers as a reserve army of labour.

A weaker labour movement represents a critically important structural problem of labour and social democratic parties that have denied them their natural social base; far easier was it to resist corporate campaigns, red scares, and the like when the union movement was strong, mobilised, and based on robust class consciousness; a consciousness that was reflective of strong and active unions.

This all has been compounded by labour and social democratic parties shifting to the Right by actively supporting neoliberal restructuring. This could only be achieved by hollowing these parties out and by centralising control at the top; so it was that they become electoral machines with an eroding social base beholden to the corporate media to get the message out.

Labour and social democratic parties are now made or broken by the corporate media and the public relations industry. Throughout most of their history they could always retreat behind a sturdy union movement and mass party when facing a corporate offensive; when the ramparts are broken, Labor's erstwhile electoral Field Marshal Haigs have discovered that the enemy can easily strike and manoeuvre to effect.

The slow death of labour and social democratic parties is the most protracted act of suicide in history.

A good manifestation of these structural weaknesses is the erosion of Labor's primary vote during the neoliberal era. This first lit up the political radar in the 1987 election, when Labor led by Bob Hawke experienced noticeable swings in working class electorates and where the Coalition (46%) secured more primary votes than Labor (45.8%). Since then erosion of the primary vote has been a structural issue faced by Labor, with swings back at the 1993 Fightback!, 1998 GST and 2007 Work Choices elections. The large boost to the primary vote has occurred when the voters came back to Labor after overreaching neoliberal attacks.

The primary vote of the ALP is now at a post-war low. It won't sustainably get any higher by Labor getting ever more closer to the Liberals on policy and ideology.

Whether it be cricket, footy, lawn bowls, politics, whatever; when you are structurally weak, and getting weaker, and your opponent is structurally strong, and getting stronger, it is always very hard to win.

Labor can get stronger by becoming more open and democratic; by encouraging the development of democratic grass roots trade unionism especially among the unorganised; by repudiating Hawke and Keating through the adoption of policies contrary to neoliberal ideology; by linking up this reinvigorated form of working class political action with other social movements dedicated to social and environmental justice.

It is the Australian Labor Party, rather than the Australian Greens, with its organic links to the Australian working class, that can build an encompassing electoral structure firmly based on a strong social foundation.

It is bringing this broader goal to fruition, rather than a collection of discrete campaigns, that should be the overriding concern of Left politics in Australia today.