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| ALP thinkers should spell out the party's values with brio, The Australian, 24 August 2012 |
| By Dennis Glover, Per Capita Research Fellow | |
IF you were listening closely last week you may have heard the thud of Australia's intellectual Left hitting the dirt. In the aftermath of the Gillard government's asylum-seeker decision the conservative opinion-forming class is now standing over the Left's quivering body, firing a clip of ammunition into the air before resuming its headlong advance across a wide political front.
For days now, parliament, the newspapers and television political affairs programs have been filled with sloganeering denouncing the "the conceit of the progressive Left" and proclaiming that "the progressive Left moral high ground has collapsed". Now, the conservatives say, is the time to recognise that the Left's philosophy is responsible for a creeping malaise that supposedly afflicts the entire nation, and to ram home the advantage in every area: economics, workplace relations, indigenous policy, education, welfare, the environment and the law.
This is nothing new. Seldom does a day pass without the Australian Left being denounced as a conspiracy of arrogant, sneering class warriors. But the intensity of these denunciations has reached new heights, like the final, morale-sapping hour of a week-long artillery barrage. This victory was not an accident, but the end result of years of hard intellectual combat.
My first thought after reading kilometres of comment in recent days is that in the minds of some, progressive thought on any subject now borders on the illegitimate. Every question, it seems, can be adequately answered by reference to the simple shibboleths of three core philosophies: neo-liberalism, neo-conservatism and neo-libertarianism. On the conservative side of politics, electoral priority, vested interest and philosophy converge as never before. Labor, by contrast, is struggling to pull these strings together because it hasn't done the intellectual hard work of creating a progressive narrative.
Never before has Labor and its purpose been so publicly defined by its enemies. Never before has a Labor government had to swim in such a hostile sea. And if the past few years have shown anything, it's that a Labor Party devoid of a consistent populist narrative that can sustain its base and reach over the heads of the conservative commentariat finds it hard to sustain support for its policies. This cannot be allowed to continue.
Julia Gillard, Wayne Swan and others are articulating the party's values with some brio, but there needs to be a more powerful movement selling an egalitarian national narrative to back them.
The long-term question for Labor therefore becomes: what is it going to do about it? More to the point, what are Labor's younger thinkers and writers and the next generation of leadership aspirants going to do about it, because it is most definitely their responsibility. This is about starting the process of resolving on a narrative capable of setting the agenda five years from now, not five weeks from now. The Gillard government has nothing to fear from it, and it may even give a further boost to the government's improving position in the polls, which has coincided with a return to old-fashioned Labor values. As the party's pollsters will tell you, lots of voters actually like it when the Labor Party sounds like the Labor Party.
The problem starts with overcoming bad habits. During the past two decades Labor became a party of highly successful but highly pragmatic managers whose first instincts were to distrust intellectuals and suppress the tendency to think out aloud.
As anyone who has worked in this environment will tell you, the experience was like having bromide slipped into your tea, taking away the natural urge for philosophical outrage. It was made quite plain that writing books and essays wasn't a good career move; only the most reckless bucked this pressure. Perhaps the greatest indictment of these times was that for a decade after it lost government in 1996 Labor made few serious efforts to establish a proper think tank. Even now, after five years in government, the two or three Labor-friendly think tanks that do exist cling to life by their fingernails. The machine talks endlessly about plans to address these needs, but nothing seems to happen.
There are of course some writers and thinkers in Labor's ranks, but their interests tend to be limited to narrow aspects of public policy, not the broader questions of history, culture and philosophy that determine a party's overall direction. Those who do speak out on intellectual matters are all too often motivated by narrow economic and foreign policy obsessions of dubious appeal to Labor's rank and file. The book readers and potential book writers need to start asserting themselves in the interests of the party's long-term viability.
It's easy, though, for Labor's thinkers to blame others. But the fact is, their silence since the 1980s has been partly voluntary. They were discouraged, yes, threatened too, but essentially they gave up the fight. A generation of pro-Labor thinkers, despairing of ever being taken seriously, slunk off to the academy, or sold off their books and got with the program. The result lies clear for all to see in Labor's lack of a clear, coherent and popular narrative capable of sustaining its policy agenda.
What I'm saying is it's time for the ALP to start taking its thinkers seriously, and for those thinkers to show some old-fashioned moral and intellectual courage and demand to be heard. They must come out of their self-imposed silence and begin to write books and essays and give lectures. More, they must resolve on a narrative that reconciles the party's philosophical traditions with the electorate's new priorities.
People have been warning for years that Labor's inability to resolve its narrative problem will one day cost it dearly. Now, at the absolute nadir of its intellectual fortunes, is the time to come up with a new story capable of winning public support.
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