How Laborism can lead Australia forward
How did Labor come within a hair of an historic election win? Chifley Research Center’s Michael Cooney explains how Labor’s pursuit of core Labor values has, and will, set them up for success.
On election night, Bill Shorten said “the Labor Party is back”. Many people are surprised.
But something even more unexpected has happened: Laborism is back, and in a big way.
Think about the wider ideas contest that began on Budget night May 2014 and continues today. The reason Malcolm Turnbull has been reduced to the barest of parliamentary majorities this week is that Laborism has won that contest over the past years in three critical ways.
Laborism is back, and in a big way.
First, Bill Shorten rejected the 2014 Budget as unfair, unwise and un-Australian — because it was anti-egalitarian. This is a decision endorsed by every serious political analyst inside and outside the Labor Party. In hindsight.
Had Bill Shorten and his leadership group followed the smart money and the respectable opinion of May 2014, rather than following Labor, our country and party would be very different today. When Labor’s leader fought on ground of his own choosing — egalitarianism — he transformed Australian politics, just like he did on the NDIS.
Second, Shorten and his economic team created a contemporary account of the problems in the economy which need a Laborist solution.
The tedious, bloodless language of productivity-oriented reform has been updated in a rich egalitarian tenor. Reform now means what Labor wants it to mean: fixing problems that threaten equality and threaten growth. That updating has allowed Labor to explain, rather than just assert, why fixing negative gearing is good and putting up GST is bad.
Reform now means what Labor wants it to mean: fixing problems that threaten equality and threaten growth.
This new tenor has also put a serious political edge and intellectual lift on an argument which has obvious public appeal but meets resistance from opinion-leaders. A case in point; at the National Press Club late in the campaign Shorten offered two rather marvellous grace notes.
On trickle-down economics: “Reagan tried it. Thatcher tried it. A generation later we got Trump and we got Brexit.”
On inclusion: that Australia must not be “a place where the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must”.
A leader simply trying to agenda-manage on issues where Labor leads and slide through on a bumper sticker of “Jobs, Health, Education” can’t get to those highs. Nor can a leader trying to sneak home by appeasing special interests and conservative prejudices.
(And the current Liberal leader can never cite Thucydides without the compulsion to explain to everyone in the room who Thucydides was.)
Third, Bill Shorten has put all this in the longer context of a revised story of the 1980s and 1990s — offering a broader account of a period of egalitarian progress in cooperation with unions and in the face of Liberal resistance. This worked so well that Hawke and Keating became champions for Labor in this campaign, not parables to be told against it.
Laborism is arguably the oldest Australian progressive political tradition.
All this revision and updating hasn’t meant mere novelty.
Indeed these ideas are not new; Laborism is arguably the oldest Australian progressive political tradition.
Laborism is neither the anti-capitalism of classical socialism nor the anti-materialism of a postmodern utopian left — rather, in the historian Bede Nairn’s phrase, it is a political project of ‘civilising capitalism’.
Yet if Laborism is an old wine, it is being poured into new wineskins of ‘inclusive prosperity’ and ‘inclusive growth’ — because the problems of the economy today are the problems Laborism understands.
Uncivilised capitalism doesn’t work economically and can’t last politically.
This is the moderate but political-economic outlook which sees the connections between the fragmentation of the post-great recession global economy and the fragmentation of the political order of Europe and the United States: ordinary people will only put up with so much for so long. Uncivilised capitalism doesn’t work economically and can’t last politically.
On the other hand, the solutions for the contemporary economy are also the solutions Laborism recognises. Laborism works as micro-economics, because investment works.
The future of production relies on skilled and healthy workers, the future of demand relies on rising living standards, and the future of the Budget relies on adequate retirement savings for middle Australia. Laborism delivers those things: schools, Medicare, wages, superannuation.
Laborism works as macro-economics, because incentives work.
If only 10 per cent of people win when the economy does well, 10 per cent of people will care if the economy does well; it’s that simple. If we can share the benefits of growth with the great mass of productive people, we can restart growth in the post-crisis era. Laborists understand this — modern conservative elites do not.
This economic case for inclusive policies could have been argued last week and of course it was.
What’s remarkable after the 2016 election is the inescapable conclusion that Laborism works as politics. The count of seats falling and votes swinging speaks for itself.
What’s remarkable after the 2016 election is the inescapable conclusion that Laborism works as politics.
This can be heard through the rages about class war from one establishment media faction and thewhinges about scare campaigns from the other.
In fact, Labor and Laborism have roared back into the political mainstream. In barely two years, two very contrasting conservative prime ministerships have lost their mandates. Lost with them is the credibility of the two styles of right wing politics in Australia: the crude crypto-Republicanism of Tony Abbott and the suave establishmentarianism of Malcolm Turnbull.
This of course tells us much about their divergent personal failings and the weakness of the Liberal Party’s culture and machinery upon which both of them relied — and about the superior campaign from Labor. But it tells us more.
A a back seat buried under footy boots and ballet shoes and a boot stacked full of Labor corflutes.
Today we are seeing the exhaustion of two of the major styles of Australian politics and the resurgence of the third.
In the road race of Australian politics, there have been not two, but three cars in the contest since 2013. Tony Abbott has been driving a black Hummer with a “love it or leave” banner. Malcolm Turnbull’s ridden a fully-imported hybrid Lexus LS with a (discreet) rainbow magnet on the licence plate.
Today, Abbott’s business and media support teams are still putting out the fire, while Turnbull’s team has him stopped in mid-track for new steering.
And there’s Bill Shorten: getting around the suburbs in the car his mum left him, with a ‘Save Medicare’ sticker on the bumper, a back seat buried under footy boots and ballet shoes, and a boot stacked full of Labor corflutes.
Weeks after the 2016 election, his is the only car that’s still got a future.
This article originally appeared in the Labor Herald.
