Will Mark Latham be able to make 'Society' matter to voters?

Latham has been accused of brandishing social issues as a distraction from the absence of his party's detailed economic policies. He responds to such criticisms by saying that Australians actually care more about issues like boys' masculine identity in a fatherless postmodern world, childhood obesity in the era of working parents and play stations, and community breakdown in a time of gated suburbs and locked doors.

The question which may make or break Latham at the polls later this year is - is he right?

According to Sue and many other middle Australians living in the suburbs with the voting masses that will shape the outcome of the next federal election, Latham may just be on to something good.

"Well. I'm excited. We're all excited." Sue, 41, mother of three and part-time nurse, is smiling over the plate of cold sausage and salad she has just placed in front of her youngest child, four-year-old Cameron. It's Monday, one of the two days Cameron has at home with mum. "Cautiously excited," she adds, laughing as Cameron wriggles out of his chair and on to more interesting things.

Sue is talking about her and her husband's growing enthusiasm for the change they see coming in Australian politics, under Latham's banner of social capital and relationships. "We'll wait and see, but at least Latham is talking about things that matter."

The "things that matter", according to Sue, are family relationships, job and housing security, and general community wellbeing. These middle Australians, living between the rich and poor in the Australian suburban sprawl, are growing disillusioned with the economic-rationalist philosophy of progress and growth at the expense of personal wellbeing.

Recently, Australians have begun to go directly against the grain of economic rationalism, opting for life substance over lifestyle. Sue and Pete are a case in point. They both work part-time so as to spend more time with their children, having decided to sacrifice a portion of their income and, for Sue, job security (she is on a contract), in preference for more fulfilling relationships with their children and each other.

Others are moving their families out of the "rat race" and into small-town communities. In its 2004 Yearbook, the Australian Bureau of Statistics reported a trend developing among middle Australians of acting on their dreams of a more relaxed, community and family-centred lifestyle, by moving out of the city and down the coast or into the country.

Still others are turning towards Buddhism and smaller Christian sects to gain a deeper sense of life purpose and belonging. The reasons for following the Buddhist faith are numerous but Australians who have recently become adherents give reasons such as the search for deeper personal meaning, a wish to develop peacefulness and compassion, and to decrease attachment to the material goods and goals so prevalent in modern, individualistic society. Those turning away from mainstream churches and towards smaller Christian sects also report the wish for a more living, active faith, and community, in their lives.

Australian researchers and public commentators are working hard to debunk the "economically correct" point of view that material gain should be the main priority of government and individuals. Australian psychologists Shaun Saunders and Don Munro have found a positive correlation between consumerist, materialistic values and depression, anxiety and anger. Richard Eckersley, one of the creators of the Australian Unity Wellbeing Index, recently released Well and Good, which presents international evidence demonstrating that reducing socio-economic inequality would "do more to improve population happiness than maximising economic growth to raise average income." And in a recent Australia Institute report, researchers reported that young people demonstrated a "well-developed critique of materialism”, and a clear preference for more time with their parents rather than more money through parental work.

"This finding is extraordinary!" exclaims Lindsay Tanner, Labor MP for Melbourne and Shadow Minister for the newly created portfolio "Community Relationships." "When I was young, we wanted our parents out of the picture - they were embarrassing, boring, daggy. If teenagers are saying that they want to spend more time with their parents - well, it is a perfect illustration of my point."

Tanner's point, which is the central tenet of his book Crowded Lives and the main reason for creating Labor's world-first "Community Relationships" portfolio, is that relationships are absolutely central to wellbeing.

"In part, my ideas have been influenced by my experience of being a non-custodial parent, going through marriage breakdown and experiencing the high-stress, time-poor life that many Australians now lead," says Tanner, who is certainly no stranger to the unhappiness that can arise from relationship breakdown. He has two broken marriages behind him and is the non-custodial father of two young children. "I have no doubt that work intensity was one of the contributing factors to the breakdown of my marriage. To spend time with family, you need some petrol in the tank."

In the months since establishing the world-first portfolio, Tanner and Latham have already nailed the rhetoric of relationships. They have translated social capital discourse into words that mean something to mainstream Australians. "Loneliness", "isolation", and "stress" are "things that matter", in a way that "social capital" and "community building" do not.

There is a philosophical shift underlying the words, one that is resonating with dissatisfied middle Australians searching for more meaning than can be measured by their pay packets, and who are far from inspired by Costello's call to work past retirement age. Latham articulated the mood of the times when he told the National Press Club, "Increased wealth in a society does not necessarily make us happier. People have understood this for a long time. The politicians are merely catching up".

Latham and Tanner's philosophical framework reflects the growing sense that, in order to be happy, Australians want and need more than the individualistic struggle for material wealth. Labor is moving away from the economic-rationalist approach and, in so doing, is tapping into middle Australians' deep vein of dissatisfaction with the current imbalance between material growth and personal and social wellbeing.

What differentiates the new Labor approach from past governments' dutiful nods in the direction of communities, is their intriguing emphasis on relationships. Labor is crafting a framework for a legitimate government role in enabling and facilitating wellbeing at a much more intimate level than has previously been considered possible.

According to Tanner, "Governments actually set the framework in which we live our lives - whether it's through family law, child support laws, education system, shopping hours, industrial relations, or the work-family balance. Much of my portfolio will be about government doing things that affect people's relationships better than government has done them in the past."

This shift in philosophy is in broad keeping with the work of current happiness and wellbeing researchers, and has its roots in social capital theory whilst echoing the social philosophy of writers like Erich Fromm and Ernest Bloch, who posit that human beings find meaning in the social arena and in relation to each other. Latham and Tanner are perhaps unaware, however, that they also have the legacy of feminist thought for laying deep foundations for their relationships framework.

Feminist thinkers from Mary Wollstonecraft through to Charlotte Gilman have made it possible that politicians can even contemplate the legitimate role of government in facilitating happiness and healthy relationships - matters traditionally considered, like domestic violence, to belong to the private sphere and as such beyond government influence. Challenges to economic rationalism are built on the foundations laid by feminist and social theorists like Victor Seidler, who mounted feminist challenges to the philosophical dominance of rationalism in Western society. And it is thanks to the work of feminist thinkers who have challenged the traditional roles of men, that a man like Lindsay Tanner can now openly discuss - even write about - even, if he chooses, run an election campaign - on a platform of the personal.

But are there any teeth to the new Labor-speak of relationships? Are they actually doing something about the "things that matter?"

The first issue Tanner has attempted to tackle, in Labor's "bite-sized chunks" approach to making Australians happier, is the so-called "crisis in masculinity". Tanner and Latham have released a national mentoring strategy for boys as their first priority in the portfolio. It may be that, as Charlotte Gilman wrote, the personal really is political, and Tanner and Latham are both speaking from the heart when they talk about the problems young boys and fatherless children are facing.

However, the Labor duo have not yet applied the same refreshing philosophical openness to women's roles in a (post-)post-modern society. The ALP's newly released women's policy (19 July) may go further than Latham has in the past, but it has stayed firmly within the battle lines drawn by the government.  The very idea that baby payments and work-family balance policies should be included in women's policy, represents an ongoing gendered approach to family responsibility.  These policies, whilst worthwhile, are family, not women's, policy.  This concept is yet to be grasped by either of the two major, male-dominated political parties.

So while the rhetoric of relationships is watertight, the way in which the two men are applying it in practice reflects an entrenched, gendered view of the world and men and women's roles within it. This is a shame, because Latham and Tanner's relationships approach could be a powerful tool in tackling the less sexy but undoubtedly far more entrenched issues of women's lower social and economic status and ongoing systemic barriers to real, culturally imbued equality.

In the areas of education and health, the relationships framework has made no discernible impact on Labor policy. True, the Federal ALP is talking about using its relationships with the State ALP governments to secure levels of cooperation designed to make Howard's fraught Commonwealth-State relations look as bad as they are. Parents reading to children is also a nice idea. However, Latham's chequered history of statements on education, including punishing parents for children's misdeeds, is at odds with his open-minded, care-and-share community talk.

Tanner and Latham have had the philosophical wherewithal to mount a challenge to the dominant economic paradigm of the past 20 years. They have thrown down the gauntlet to the Liberal government and the economic rationalists. But do they have what it takes to turn their rhetoric into reality, and not just for fatherless boys but for all of middle Australia?

If they do not, then both they and the Liberal government will continue to play the game of catch up when it comes to understanding the priorities and life choices of the growing middle of middle Australia. These Australians are zipping up their laptop bags and heading down the coast for more than just the weekend, and they are not looking back.