G’Day. Here’s a piece on the Labor leadership I never thought I’d write. I’m off for a couple of weeks to recharge, and have a think about where Webdiary might go to from here. As usual, your ideas would be greatly appreciated.
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Political documents come and go, but there’s one set I’ve kept on my bookshelf at work for more than ten years, called Fightback!
Remember November 1991? The Coalition had dithered it’s way through seven years of opposition until John Hewson took it by the scruff of the neck and set it to work finding out what it believed in and why, and how it proposed to realise the vision.
Vision statements are meant to be passe these days, and Hewson’s tome is conventionally seen as the way NOT to do politics. But step back and take the long view, and that muscular, honest, rigorous document is the blueprint for just about everything the Coalition government has done since.
When the Coalition lost in 1983, it thought it would soon return to government. It sat back and waited for Labor to fail, and found, to its great discomfort, that it agreed with many things Labor did economically. It pulled together a bit of this and a bit of that election after election, a sweetener here, a rhetorical flourish there, and shunted the leadership between Peacock and Howard for years looking for a way back to office without effort. It failed. Fightback! ignited the Party and the 1993 loss – based on the lie by Paul Keating that could have tax cuts without a GST – galvanised many grassroots Liberals into committing energy into turning it round next time. It’s the energy born of a common vision, and it matters.
I thought Kim Beazley did a good job as opposition leader in the first term. He did the healing and kept the party unified. I wrote at the time that the second term was the one for a new vision. Labor needed to work out its mistakes in office, reenvision the Party’s alternative to the Coalition, in particular the role of government, and set the agenda in areas like water, education, health, the environment, Aboriginal affairs and accountability. It needed to find, through research, community consultation and vigorous debate, its core values and principles, its abiding beliefs, and adapt them for a changing world, as John Hewson did after 1990 and as Tony Blair did with his Third Way.
But it did not. It thought it would zoom back into office by opposing the GST Howard took to the 1998 election. It failed. Then it thought it would get back by opposing the GST and making itself a “small target”.
That lazy, arrogant stance saw Labor take decisions which destroyed principles many thought were at its core. It supported the private health insurance rebate despite saying, correctly, that it would destroy Medicare, the most popular policy for a generation.
And Simon Crean did something so dreadful I can hardly credit that Labor ever made him leader. Howard sold the GST as an integrated package, giving with one hand, taking with the other, to promote fairness between sectors. In return for the GST business got tax breaks, in particular the halving of the capital gains tax. But it also had to suffer a clampdown on the most widespread tax avoidance mechanism around, family trusts.
But after the Democrats did a deal to pass the GST shadow treasurer Crean, in a panic of relevance deprivation syndrome, rushed into Peter Costello’s office to do a deal on the business tax package. He agreed to support the business tax sweeteners in return for a mere promise by Costello to bring in legislation at a later date to fix the trust problem. As was obvious then, that legislation was later dumped due to political pressure from the Coalition’s core constituency. Crean and Beazley share the disgrace.
The ever smaller target also saw Labor rail against the redistribution of funds to wealthy private schools, then pass the legislation. By the time Howard had picked the vibe and spent his way back into contention for the 2001 poll, Labor was wide open to a Tampa type sting. When it came, it capitulated, and yet another core Labor principle – an insistence on the universality of human rights – was also gone.
Back in 1998, after Beazley’s first lost election, Mark Latham, incensed that his visionary education policy had been reduced to a couple of lines by Beazley’s office, retired to the backbench. He’s been doing the hard yards on policy and vision ever since. His latest book, ‘From the Suburbs: Building a nation from our neighbourhoods’ (Pluto Press) is a collection of his essays trying to reenvision Labor as the outsiders party, giving power to the powerless, and promoting bottom up democracy.
I’ve been a Latham fan for a while now, believing that his combination of mongrel, thick skin, and intellectual powerhouse was what Labor needed to regenerate, as Hewson regenerated the Liberals.
But now, I find myself believing something I never thought I would – that Kim Beazley should be given another go.
We live in dark, insecure times when international affairs dominate our lives and our fears. I believe the Australian people will not accept an untried player at this time. They like Kim Beazley, and respect his judgement on matters of defence and foreign policy. They would therefore be prepared to consider him next time around, but would not take the risk with Latham. Of the other contenders, Stephen Smith and Wayne Swan are small target machine men, and that’s bad news for Labor. Very bad news.
I hope Kim Beazley has learnt the lesson of his failures. He was badly advised, and he wrongly accepted that advice. He was on the right track with Knowledge Nation, but got freaked out by the supposed necessity of a balanced budget, an ideology being trashed as we speak by George Bush in the nation which founded that orthodoxy. Investment in our future can’t be reduced to short term numbers, as the Coalition proved when its decision to increase HECS for science and maths students saw many fewer students get educated in these vital fields for our future.
If we get Kim Beazley back, and he sets to work forcing his party to really look at itself, and produce a Fightback!, Labor will finally stop reacting to the Coalition agenda and produce an agenda of its own to argue for. Fightback! put Labor on the backfoot for more than a year, and destroyed the Prime Ministership of Bob Hawke. Keating was reduced to deceit and scaremongering to win the 1993 election, and was duly punished at the next one.
Labor’s performance since it lost office has been deeply damaging to Australia. It has failed to hold John Howard accountable for his failures, or his lies. It has left a vacuum where engaged, constructive policy debate should occur, leaving the field to polemicists who have reduced the national debate to vicious pointscoring and the politics of prejudice.
Kim Beazley may get the chance to prove that he really is a conviction politician. Australia needs that, desperately. The dominant neo-liberal ideology is dated, and has created terrible unintended consequences. are looking for a credible alternative that’s not about manipulation of their feelings, but based on Labor’s deeply held conviction that it can truly serve the public interest better than the Coalition.
John Hewson is a martyr to the Liberal Party, doing what had to be done while failing to reap the personal success from it. Kim Beazley too, might not reap the personal success of rolling up his sleeves and getting to work on a fresh new vision for Labor, but the service he would give to his party and the nation would be priceless.