Jock or Janus? The time has come for Labor to turn back and face the future

Jocks always view the past through rose coloured glasses when it suits them, but view the present and future through glasses of an altogether different hue.

The future

Whoever next leads Labor in government is going to have to contend with the current crop of Jocks to get there. I have no doubt that we will all bear witness to the irony of the Hawke and Keating governments being cited as exemplars for the next Labor administration. Jocks of the post-materialist left have already beatified Keating for his efforts on the Republic and Reconciliation after years of excoriating him for espousing the centrality of wealth created in free markets to the Labor project. I suspect that when there is a new Labor government to demonise they will surrender even these residual criticisms and perhaps even forgive Hawke for winning too many times.

Change as tradition

Jocks are not wrong to cite tradition as a central consideration when weighing up proposals for reform. They are wrong to require slavish adherence to specific aspects of the status quo based on a tradition manufactured from rusty and ahistorical anecdotes. Tradition should facilitate and guide change, not retard it. Indeed, one of the great traditions of the ALP is its commitment to change to meet contemporary aspirations and problems with modern social and economic ideas.

Keating called this true tradition of change "the crossing of the Rubicon". Another Jock, Peter Beilhartz, sees it simply as a betrayal of tradition and matches Keating's classical allusion by referring disparagingly to Labor’s "Janus face". Though meant as an insult I think I prefer Beilhartz's allusion. Janus is the Roman God of new beginnings. He sits atop doors, archways and entrances with one face pointing to the future and the other to the past. Janus represents past and future wisdom and his temple doors were opened when Rome was at war.

Federal Labor has lost three wars on the trot. Unlike Janus it has refused to open its doors to new ideas. There are sensible arguments for and against certain suggested reforms. But opposing an idea simply because it runs counter to tradition is not only weak but also, and paradoxically, counter to Labor's tradition of change. If the Party wishes to avoid a decade of irrelevance it will have to do a little better than that. It must ask itself – do we want to reform as we have before, Janus-like, with one eye on the wisdom of the past and another on our aspirations for the future or do we just want to bury our head in our Jocks?