Assets for the next generation

Public culture has become an important public issue. Globalisation is not just an economic event. It also challenges our sense of social stability and cultural identity.

Not surprisingly, people want to take greater control of their lives, reclaiming a sense of identity and community. This means having a bigger say in the decisions of government.

The electorate wants to be heard, not just listened to. This isn’t happening under the current Government.

Even Liberal backbenchers concede that the Prime Minister’s first instincts are authoritarian. Look at his record on democratic reform.

No independent Speaker of the House of Representatives. No reform of the parliament and its committee system. No community cabinets or public consultation. No experiments with Internet democracy. No democratisation of our cultural institutions. And no Australian Republic, let alone a Republic with a directly elected President.

Under Howard, political power is concentrated in the hands of the few, not the many. Labor’s task is to flatten this hierarchical system and to dissolve the power elite. Our role is to re-empower the outsiders, to transfer assets and influence to the vast suburbs and regions of the nation.

Wherever power and privilege are concentrated - whether in the boardrooms of big business, the pretensions of high-society or the arrogance of big bureaucracies - we need to be anti-establishment.

The outsiders want us to shake the tree, to rattle the cage on their behalf. They want us to be less respectable and less orthodox, breaking down the powerful centre of society.

At a time when Labor’s identity and legitimacy are being questioned, the quality of our personnel is not a problem. Our MPs are the products of public housing estates, country towns and working-class families.

We entered politics for the right reasons; growing up on the wrong side of the tracks, determined to fight the system. Our task is to turn these instincts into a new program, one suited to the new politics. T

his is now happening under Simon Crean’s leadership and Jenny Macklin’s policy review. Already we have released ten discussion papers, with more to come.

Economic Ownership

In the paper on economic ownership five policy proposals are being examined: