Why a Rudd-led Labor has surrendered to big business

Manne equates Ruddian rhetoric with reality.

In office Rudd continues his servile relationship with big business. The Australian Financial Review reported that the Labor leader recently attended an Australia Labor Advisory Council meeting with union leaders, but that the meeting was "low key". It was explained that Rudd did not want to upset corporate Australia by giving off the appearance of being too close to his own people.

At the congress of the Maritime Union of Australia (ALP affiliated) both Julia Gillard and Anthony Albanese, of the Labor Left, refused to attend the congress dinner for the same reasons according to the preferred newspaper of the bosses, which comes replete with liftouts called Luxury and Boss in a sort of in your face reverse class war.

Indeed, Gillard's favourite phrase is "yesterday's battles" or some variant thereof. To support, for instance, conciliation and arbitration in industrial relations against enterprise bargaining or to support pattern bargaining would be manifestations of "yesterday's battles" according to Gillard. It appears as if anything that smacks of enhancing the structural power of labour with respect to capital, the purpose of a labour based party, is an example of "yesterday's battles".

The whole ideology of "yesterday's battles" was actually developed by the multi-millionaire "wunderkind" of the Victorian ALP, Evan Thornley, who stated to the Fabian Society that Labor must not be oriented toward labour versus capital, yesterday's battle, but must now choose sides in the conflict between owners of capital and management. He even stated that for organised labour "today's battle" is to support capitalists against managers.

Despite the emphasis placed on avoiding "yesterday's battles" this, alas, does not prevent Julia Gillard from holding the safe ALP seat of Lalor in the working class western suburbs of Melbourne. She holds her comfy seat in parliament by virtue of continued working class consciousness, but this does not stop her from doing the right thing by the establishment under the rubric of "yesterday's battles".

In fact, a extensive pre-Christmas profile in the Australian Financial Review demonstrates just how grotesque Gillard's betrayal of the proletariat has become. The profile, these things are always developed with the close support of the subject, wrote of her that "in government, Gillard has put distance between herself and organised labour". Moreover, "from several accounts, Gillard has grown more comfortable in the company of business people and the private school crowd". Notice the asymmetry.

Julia, next time you are out campaigning in Werribee Plaza or Altona Gate why not be honest and tell the public school slobs just how much you prefer the company of the "private school crowd"? In fact, Julia, why not go one better and resign your seat in parliament and go stand for election in Kooyong and Higgins given that you prefer the people over there so much more than those over here?

Gillard is able to hold her working class seat because she is not accountable to the people who elected her or to the genuine membership of the ALP. The former arises because she knows that the proletariat cannot vote Liberal and the latter because she knows that the ALP is an authoritarian organisation which is about as democratic as the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party was.

The two most significant Labor victories at the Federal level in recent times, in 1993 and 2007, occurred because the broader working class turned to the party for support in the face of a corporate led neoliberal jihad. They both support, rather than undermine, the thesis of the most astute academic observer of the ALP, Andrew Scott, who argues that if Labor continues to betray the Australian working class it risks its long-term future.

The best way to understand the Rudd and Gillard led "Labor" is by realising that Kevin and Julia have learnt the lesson, taught to them by "the Latham debacle", that they must earn and keep the "trust" of corporate Australia.

This has occurred in much the same way that Labor was disciplined by the socialist scare campaign of the 1949 election and beyond, a key dynamic behind the Whitlam leadership, and how the ALP was disciplined following the "Whitlam debacle", as pointed out by Graham Maddox from the University of New England, during the Hawke era.

Many observers have wondered what the "narrative" of Rudd and Gillard's ALP is. The "meta-narrative" is one of surrender. They have been disciplined by "the Latham debacle" towards unconditional surrender to corporate Australia. The ideology of "yesterday's battles" is a proclamation of capitulation.

It's little wonder then that Mark Latham has become the most incisive left wing critic of Rudd Labor for surrender was not the Latham style.