Dick Nichols
Exit the cardboard messiah, sunk in self-pity. Enter (stage right) the new round of candidate saviours. Good grief, they look a bit shopworn, don’t they? Thrice-recycled “bomber” Beazley with his pompous drone about “stability”, “responsibility” and “long service in the public eye”.
Top-of-the-class smart-arse Kevin Rudd, the human media release. Julia Gillard, full of robotic determination to outperform “the boys” in the bullshit of Question Time.
For ALP supporters and the millions who are longing for some parliamentary opposition to PM John Howard it must be very depressing. Remember those months in early 2004 when Mark Latham was Labor’s great hope, thrashing Howard in the polls? How quickly the little wedgemeister exposed the hollowness of Labor’s “strategic thinker” — and pulped the party in the 2004 federal election.
Now, as if to confirm that it is an organism that has lost all capacity to learn from its mistakes, the ALP begins its ninth year in opposition by agreeing with Howard’s handling of Australian tsunami aid — basically a weapon for getting Australian business a fat slice of Indonesia’s billions in reconstruction spending. Kevin Rudd makes a special trip to bring Jakarta the exciting and shocking news that Labor stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the Coalition once again.
Is there any chance of the ALP reviving under such people? Does it even matter?
The great fact of Australian politics of the last two years (since the criminal Howard involved this country in the slaughter of up to 100,000 Iraqis) is that in 2004, the ALP had the best chance in years to destroy the Coalition and could not have failed more miserably — in votes and in its impact on real-world politics.
Labor bombed not because there wasn’t a clear alternative policy space for it to occupy, to the left of centre but still within capitalist politics. It failed because (unlike its overseas counterparts like the Spanish Socialist Party) it simply doesn’t have the people capable of presenting a “social liberal” alternative to Howard’s outright neoliberalism.
Nothing encapsulated this so well as Latham’s reply to a working-class woman ALP supporter who made the mistake of addressing him with words to the effect of “Good on you, Mark, you’re the battlers’ friend” — only to be hit with a Latham lecture about the virtues of hard work and “getting off our arse”.
To have had any chance of winning the last election the ALP would have had to follow a precept that’s not too difficult for even the dumbest general to understand — to win a war it’s probably a good idea to attack the enemy’s weak points.
In 2004 that meant:
- Hammering Howard on his involvement in the illegal and criminal Iraq war, and making it the central theme of the campaign;
- Promoting a war on poverty and inequality at home, showing just how unequal the “lucky country” has become under the Coalition;
- Having a serious policy of defence of the public sector and of public welfare as an answer to the extremes of income inequality and the rising share of the family budget going to paying off bank mortgages, private health insurance and child and aged care;
- Presenting a clear “values alternative” to Howard. Defence of the right of gays and lesbians to marry; opposition to the Coalition’s draconian anti-terrorism legislation; an Australian republic to replace the ridiculous monarchy and its governor-general; opposition to the free trade agreement with the US; and a bill of rights.
Of course, there was never any way this ALP could have carried out such a campaign — it would have meant a break with its whole evolution since Bob Hawke and Paul Keating. It would have meant ignoring super-nervous state Labor premiers; it would have meant riding over the party’s most pro-Washington wing in the form of Beazley and Carr; it would have required a leader who could at least have managed a decent imitation of being the ordinary Australian’s friend against the corporate silvertails.
Most of all, it would have required a determined push by Labor to build the anti-war movement in the way the late Jim Cairns built the movement against the Vietnam War — instead of limiting its activity in this movement to one appearance by Laurie Brereton at the Sydney February 2003 rally and a stack to split the Sydney anti-war committee. (It would also have required a break from two “theories” of Australian society and politics — that we are all becoming “aspirational” middle-class individualists and that our social attitudes are shifting to the right.)
Of course, even if all these impossible conditions could have been fulfilled by the present ALP, it still may not have won the October 2004 poll. However, an election fought on these grounds would have provided Labor with that which it so dramatically lacks now — a consistent political basis for its opposition to Howard, a sense of some difference from the Coalition that actually matters.
Now what? Even ALPers like former South Australian Senator Chris Schacht are now making the point that a change of leader won’t remotely reverse the pathetic shambles that its endless trudge to the right has made of Labor. Its shifts since the election continue the trudge (symbolised by the axing of the promise to bring Australian troops home from Iraq), and the sort of people who might oppose the retreat simply aren’t in the ALP any more.
Should we be depressed by Labor’s miserable state? Should we join in the pathetic hope prevalent in Labor circles that somehow things will come good?
No, the vital lesson to be drawn from Labor’s dark shambles is that any possibility of its revival as a parliamentary opposition depends most of all on the strength of the extra-parliamentary opposition that all of us who hate Howard can build out in the “real world”. Worrying about the state of the ALP is simply a distraction from this urgent job.
However, consolidating a real alternative to Howard can’t stop there. Building social resistance must go with pushing forward the construction of the political alternative to Labor. This not only means pressing ahead with the building of the Socialist Alliance, it also means seeking out all opportunities for Green-socialist collaboration. And it means asking ever more pointedly within the unions why workers’ money continues to be wasted on a party that has shown itself completely incapable of representing their interests.
[Dick Nichols is the managing editor of Seeing Red. Written in a personal capacity].
From Green Left Weekly, January 26, 2005.
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