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| Forget Hawke, Keating and Kelty: look to Britain for the light on the hill, The Australian, 23 May 2012 |
| By Dennis Glover, Per Capita Research Fellow | |
Labor's grey nomads have been at it again, stealing the limelight at the ACTU Congress. Bob Hawke, Paul Keating and Bill Kelty have been doing their all-singing and all-dancing routine, reminding us that they are the greatest generation ever to streak across the Australian political firmament. Once again, little of their story was left out as they handed out some very public advice. Is there really much that Labor can gain from this endless story retelling? Yes, but not the lesson Hawke, Keating and Kelty want us to learn.
As the threesome keep telling us, together they (along with the seemingly forgotten Simon Crean) created a new economy and society, including a new middle class to which Labor is finding it difficult to appeal. But here's the interesting point: when they were in charge they couldn't control their new economy or appeal to their new middle class either.
From 1990 onwards, when the impact of the trio's big economic reforms was first being felt, Labor was living on borrowed time, which ran out in the electoral Armageddon of 1996. If they want to advise Labor to keep fighting that last war, they have to acknowledge it's a war they lost.
The Hawke-Keating-Kelty legacy is substantial, and to give Kelty his credit, he had lots of positive things to say in his speech about the Gillard government as well the Hawke and Keating governments; but the humiliating demise of their rule rather blunts their implied criticisms of the present generation of Labor leaders.
The fact is, none of the world's social-democratic parties has yet figured out how to deal with the demands of the economies and the electorates they helped create over the past few decades.
Thanks partly to the powers unleashed by the likes of Hawke, Keating and Kelty, working-class communities, their party infrastructures, their unions and their ideologies are everywhere lying in ruins. Yes, Labor's 1980s and 90s generation and its equivalents overseas created a new world, but they did so by unintentionally kicking out the props from beneath their own political movement. Rebuilding that movement will be the most important task confronting the next generation.
There was one particularly insightful observation Kelty made that the next generation should heed. He described the party's industrial and political wings at their best as "romantic warriors" fighting for the national interest. As Labor begins to reconstruct its movement, either from government or opposition, it could do well to remember that its ability to romance its base and inject it with a sense of mission and fight must be the starting point for all else.
Young people will not join the ALP or unions if the movement's future is presented as a re-run of their parents' old war stories.
Recently, in his new role as chief Labor critic in The Australian Financial Review, Mark Latham argued that Labor's mission was essentially to follow through on the reforms of the Hawke-Keating era. He wrote that the day job of the modern ALP, especially the job of the newly aggressive Wayne Swan, "is to assist people like (Gina) Rinehart, (Clive) Palmer and (Andrew) Forrest make mega-profits", in the hope, presumably, that some will trickle down to Labor's base. If that is how Labor markets itself it has no future.
The British Labour Party is now awake to this important base-building task. Recently leader Ed Miliband appointed left-wing intellectual Jon Cruddas to head a policy review that will form the basis of the party's manifesto at the next general election. This is a move full of significance for Australian Labor too, as political ideas from Britain make their way here rapidly. Cruddas, a likely future force in British Labour, is the sort of politician who is all too rare in Australia. He's not just a tough campaigner, having taken on the British National Front and won in his working-class constituency of Dagenham. He's also a forceful intellectual, convinced that the collapse of the Blair-Brown project was the result of the party losing its sense of itself as a broad movement with a moral mission that extends further than economic policy. As one of the founders of the Blue Labour movement, Cruddas is a big drawcard on the lecture circuit, speaking about Labour's origins as a product of English working-class life, and the profound damage done to the movement by its conversion to statism and market-liberalism.
His message is that rebuilding the party from its present ground zero requires it to recapture the idealism that led ordinary people and thinkers to found it and fight for it for more than 100 years. That is the starting point for rebuilding the ALP too. It would be too disrespectful for Labor's leaders to say so, but the agenda of the Hawke-Keating-Kelty era has been rendered politically counter-productive by the consequences of its devastating success.
What Labor must now take from its old warriors is not their program but the passion and romance they brought to Labor's cause -- not what they say but how they say it. If Labor can do that, it has a big future after all.
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