Any prospect the Labor Party will seriously review the source of its election defeat is remote. The reason is simple — there is no will or incentive for a ruthlessly honest review and, given Scott Morrison’s narrow win, Labor assumes, no doubt correctly, it will be competitive at the next election.
Labor is the party with a history of competitive losses. Being competitive is the substitute for winning. Each defeat holds out the enticing hope of victory next time — and the next time and the next time.
It keeps extolling the Whitlam and Hawke legacies in hollow gestures designed to conceal that it is the anti-Hawke party in terms of governance and the anti-Whitlam party in terms of internal reform.
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Meanwhile, Labor has lost seven of the last nine federal elections — and of the two it won, one was a doomed minority government. Labor has passed a new threshold — the party is beyond reform. And nobody gets angry. Nobody stands up and says “enough is enough”.
The party is trapped — tied to a rank-and-file hopelessly to the Left of the Australian public, hostage to a trade union movement locked into counter-productive political activism and entangled in a fatal embrace with the Greens, who steal its votes whenever Labor tries to be responsibly centrist.
So the party and its legion of progressive media supporters get ready to champion the next ALP leader and the next ALP era with the same determination to be blind to the arc of history.
Too much is at stake for real change — too many interests, too many ideological faiths, too much risk to Labor’s competitive position in 2022. Labor is suffocated by its constant self-congratulation. Aware it has good prospects of winning next time, Labor will opt for a fresh leader, new cosmetics and dressed-up adjustments at the margins. It is a familiar story.
Consider the ALP primary vote from the last four elections — Labor polled 33.69 per cent this year, 34.73 per cent in 2016, 33.38 per cent in 2013 and 37.99 per cent in 2010 when it last won — that being the Julia Gillard minority government.
The last respectable primary vote was 43.38 per cent when Kevin Rudd won in 2007. No other institution with four such dismal results would be allowed to get away with the useless sophistry peddled this week by senior ALP figures, much of which is calculated to ensure nothing of genuine substance happens. The Labor comments after defeat were beyond belief: the policies, the nation was told, were courageous; the party has been upfront and honest; performances of senior figures, of course, had been impressive; Bill Shorten deserved everybody’s thanks.
A sporting team with these results since 2010 would be purged and reformed from top to bottom, but not Labor. Can you imagine what Gough Whitlam, in his booming voice, would say about such chronic failure and craven apologists? Labor is victim to its self-image. It sees itself as the authentic carrier of the Australian heart. Meanwhile, the gulf between the true believers and the quiet Australians just widens.
Only about one in three Australians cast a primary vote for Labor. This dismal model is entrenched. There is, however, no way Labor can break this mould without smashing up its party for fundamental redesign. And that won’t happen.
The partial exception is Anthony Albanese, the incoming leader, who talks about real change, the need for “respect” and who said “unions and employers have a common interest” — pure heresy in the Shorten schema. As a Left loyalist Albanese will have some immunity to move towards the centre, at risk of course to his own authenticity.
Shorten, a right-winger, united the Labor Party by taking it decisively to the Left — to a position rejected by the people. That reveals all you need to know about where Labor’s internal power lies. Shorten survived as leader but lost the election. That was a strategic failure that exposes Labor’s problem. The once great ALP Right is discredited and broken.
How brilliant was Shorten’s result — unity in defeat? The problem is not just about strategy; it is about identity. Albanese said all Labor policies must be examined — and that’s right. Then he said, but not Labor’s values — and that’s wrong. Labor’s values are the real problem for too many Australians. What else does one vote in three mean? The party cannot see its own denial. The public is distrustful of Labor values. When it gets upset with the Liberals it sees them as out of touch or inept. But being out of touch or inept is more easily fixed. Labor’s problem is much deeper — people distrust what it believes, they worry about its values.
Labor has become a progressive party and this captures its crisis. It cannot speak to conservatives. It cannot speak to people of faith. It cannot speak to tradies or to miners. It cannot speak to ordinary non-political Australians. It can barely speak to people in the regions. It cannot speak to the millions of people who are satisfied with their country and who don’t want fundamental change. And it cannot relate to people who are suspicious of the progressive change agenda for society, culture and the economy that virtually all Labor figures now champion to some degree as core business.
This election showed that while Australia is becoming more progressive, the nation still remains far more conservative and less progressive than Labor realised. Labor doesn’t get the defect with progressive politics. The essential progressive agenda is fundamental change in society.
Scott Morrison says Australia is the greatest country on earth. But the heart of the progressive project is to purge Australia of the injustice, exploitation and historical grievances progressives see at its beating heart.
Consider Shorten Labor — its view of intergenerational justice was to reward the young and penalise the old; its view of climate change was to hurt coal regions and reward renewables; its view of fairness was to enhance workers’ income by punishing business via redistribution; it was willing to advance LGBTI rights by being prepared to wind back religious rights and alienate Christians; it offered multiple concessions to identity politics, thereby compromising the sense of common community that Australians cherish; it drew a dividing line around $90,000 as the level at which households were to be rewarded or punished; it propagated a “big end of town” class warfare agenda when facing a down-to-earth everyman as PM who had no trappings from that part of town; and on the exaggerated symbolism of the Adani project it was calculatingly duplicitous.
Some of these policies were tactical blunders. But tactical blunders cannot explain this litany. This is a defect in Labor’s evolving culture. These policies didn’t arise in a fit of absence of mind. The essence of progressive politics is a change in the established order — new ideas and interests will prevail and old ideas and interests will be subjugated and punished.
Every aspect of this agenda was divisive. On the economy Labor was ideologically riven. It engaged in a huge old-fashioned spending project as Shorten, day after day, rolled out futile pledges as the public tuned out and swinging voters were left unswayed. The spending, of course, was financed by an overall increase in the tax burden combined with a major redistribution when the economy was slowing.
Labor was beaten on fairness. Labor’s idea of fairness was zero-sum politics that punished one group and rewarded another. Morrison’s idea of fairness was trying to lift everyone. Throughout the campaign Labor talked of fairness and redistribution and barely mentioned growth or expanding the national income pie.
It is hard to imagine a greater repudiation of the Australian character. The people were fully aware of five years of Coalition chaos. They had no love for the government — but a majority felt, in the end, Labor gave them little choice.
Across the past generation there has been a transition in the nature of Labor that the party itself seems unable to understand. Since Whitlam’s demise only two ALP figures have carried the party from opposition to office — Bob Hawke and Rudd, and their shared essence was reassuring the public.
But modern Labor cannot reassure. The rank and file, the unions and the Greens won’t let it. This is Labor’s dilemma. Its problem transcends negative gearing or franking credits, though this is not to diminish their role in the defeat. After the worst recession in 50 years, what did Bob Hawke make as the centrepiece of his 1983 election manifesto? It was Reconciliation, Recovery and Reconstruction, with Hawke’s campaign slogan being “Bringing Australia Together” — a pitch where, you might think, Shorten Labor set out to offer the exact opposite.
Does Labor begin to grasp how utterly it is divorced from the ethos and ideas that drove Hawke?
In his own analysis before the 1983 campaign, Hawke wrote: “The essential malaise to be identified with the period of the Fraser government is the increasing erosion of any sense of common national purpose. Individuals and groups have been encouraged, explicitly and implicitly, to perceive and pursue their own self-interest … the desire for this sense of national purpose or unity is undoubtedly present and strongly felt — it reflects, as well as economic concerns, an apprehension of increasing social disintegration.”
Labor’s 2019 agenda more resembles what Hawke was criticising, not what he was advocating. Policies don’t fall out of a clear blue sky — they come from values and outlook. In this election Labor was punishing prudence, savings and aspiration. It saw the answer as government, not people. Many ALP figures will say, in their defence, Labor just lost. They will say Labor is in striking distance of victory next time. And they are right.
They will say this is no time to panic, no time for radical change, no time to ruin a competitive party. And have no doubt, Labor can win in 2022. But also, have no doubt, Labor suffers from an entrenched structural and cultural malaise — that will be its burden whether in opposition or government.
Editor-At-Large
Sydney
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