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

"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.