As the Labor Opposition jettisons policies on negative gearing, capital gains taxes, franking credits and climate change policies that don’t embrace coal you have to ask – what’s the point of Labor?
A simple answer could be that at least it’s not the Morrison Government. Given the Morrison track record it’s a compelling positioning that may appeal to many but probably not quite compelling enough to get over the line in an election.
The question – and some of the answers – comes to mind when reading Barry Jones’ new book What is to be Done.
The book starts with a recap of some of the themes in his 1982 work Sleepers Wake and evaluates what was prescient, relevant or wrong in the book. The key omission he now says was that while he had addressed climate change back in 1967, he didn’t address it in Sleepers Wake.
Succeeding chapters look at democracy’s existential crisis in this post-truth era; the rejection of Enlightenment values across society; the impact of the digital revolution; Trump; the science and politics of climate change; the way retail politics focuses on the toxic, the trivial and promotes disengagement; the loss of language and memory; Covid; the environment; climate change and the political engagement required to tackle it; and, the curse of Australian’s belief in national exceptionalism combined with appalling ignorance of our history.
In the chapter on loss of memory and language he cites our record on Indigenous issues and the PM’s odd belief that Cook circumnavigated Australia and mentions that Morrison has one thing in common with Cook – the regret of visiting Hawaii.
The chapters on climate change science and politics are among the best available short summaries of the issues involved in both.
Jones contrasts the failure of contemporary politicians on climate change with the Hawke approach in the 1980s to the future of tobacco, automotive and clothing workers of confronting the problem, being honest about short-term problems and longer-term gains. A similar approach is needed with the 37,000 Australian coal miners – 0.3% of the labour work force.
In looking at the politics of climate change, he discusses the work of Frank Luntz who, in his 2007 book Words that Work, created the formula ‘the science is not settled’, which was and is still widely peddled. However, Luntz had a road to Damascus moment with the 2017 Californian bushfires and is now passionate about combating climate change.
George Lakoff’s book, Don’t Think of an Elephant, is the best book yet written on framing. If you want to know how we got ‘death taxes’ and other similar phrases, read it. Framing is a much more effective device than dog whistling or the subliminal marketing popular in the 1950s and 60s. If you want to know how it works get some friends in a room, ask them to close their eyes, relax and clear their minds. Then repeat a number of times: “I want you to just relax, but don’t think of an elephant. Whatever you do – don’t think of an elephant.”
But good framing – just like Get Up petitions and feel good symbolism and gestures – is no substitute for the widespread political engagement around progressive policies Jones recommends.
In the case of policies Jones suggests a list which, if it were not for the dire state of the major and minor parties, would seem no-brainers:
- Renovating the Constitution.
- Having an Australian head of state.
- Adopting a Bill of Rights.
- Creating an Independent Commission against Corruption.
- Practising open government and rejecting all the prevailing secrecy.
- Appropriate funding for the ABC, CSIRO, Bureau of Meteorology and ABS.
- Investing in soft diplomacy in our region.
- Recognising the value of the humanities and the arts and providing adequate funding for them.
- Giving high priority to science.
- Re-establishing the moral basis of progressive taxation and recognising the increase in social inequality and the role of taxation and school funding as contributing factors.
- Being open-minded and sceptical about involvement in foreign policy and wars and supercharged spending on submarines and defence big boy toys.
- Taking creative approaches to multiculturalism and rejecting the notion of education, health and the arts as ‘industries’.
- Adopting compassionate, rational and statistically based policies on refugees and asylum seekers arriving by sea.
The policy priorities reflect some of the thinking behind the discussions Jones and Malcolm Fraser had about how a new political party might be formed and what it could stand for. The last, about refugees and asylum seekers, is also a reminder of why a number of Vietnamese stood silently outside Scots Church during Fraser’s funeral.
Jones says, however: “I would like the ALP to be this new party.” But he warns: “Parties sometimes go through the motions of attempting to reform internal processes – but a paint job will not suffice.”
There have been a couple of quite churlish reviews of the Jones’ book. One scoffed a lot, complained that Jones’ Sleepers Wake had not woken people up, and accused him of repeating things he has said before. Another worried that he cites too many white males, overlooks reforms like citizen’s assemblies and ignores emotional appeals on climate change – despite the section on Luntz.
They prompt one to think of Jones’ beloved Montaigne who wrote: “Since we cannot attain it, let us take our revenge by speaking ill of it. (The Collected Works, On the disadvantages of greatness, Book III Chapter 7).
But Jones could, but wouldn’t, quote the rest of Montaigne’s thoughts on the reviews: “Yet it is not absolutely speaking ill of something to find some defects in it; there are some in all things, however beautiful and desirable that may be.”
Noel Turnbull has had a 50-year-plus career in public relations, politics, journalism and academia. He blogs at http://noelturnbull.com/blog/
Comments
22 responses to “What’s the point of Labor?”
Barry Jone’s discussions with Malcom Fraser about a new political party suggests he is having a late case of sleeper awake. Somehow his commitment to big ideas and the ALP allowed him to miss what Hawke and Keating did to the ALP. With deft hands they drained the party of its core beliefs and principles with a raft of privatisation and economic deregulation activities – a toothless medicare as final salute to past comrades commitments and perhaps a nod to an almost extinct social conscience. Having provided an exemplary liberal style government, they left a legacy of a party only able to be elected when it purports to be liberal lite .
I agree. And Jones has company. Try Peter Garrett – just for one other. And Gareth.
Hello Noel: have you taken over from Jack? Attacking Labor from the left! Labor is NOT the government . They have lost the four elections. Labor took very good left-of-centre policies – as good as can be in the real world not the pampered sheltered workshop of academia – to the last election, and got wiped. In parts of QLD and NSW their vote didn’t just drop it collapsed. You claim media expertise (like Jack). So, what’s your strategy to deal with the rubbishing of policies and marginalizing of leader by the right wing total media (Murdock, Costello and Stokes), and with the ABC doing celebrity chit-chat in place of current affairs. I think the intellectual left, who rode the private-school-elite-university-student-politics to intellectual left conveyor belt, prefer conservative governments. They can then be the noble champion-of-the-poor voice of opposition while having dinner at throw away worker eateries.
A couple of points:
1. the phrase “Words that work” appears in Luntz’s 1997/1998 memo to the Bush administration. In that same memo, Luntz counsels Bush to favour “climate change” over “global warming”.
http://aireform.com/resources/archive-2002-memorandum-to-bush-white-house-by-gop-consultant-frank-luntz-17p/
2. “Don’t Think of an Elephant” is a work of George Lakoff, first published in 2004.
https://www.google.com.au/books/edition/Don_t_Think_of_an_Elephant/IcaafxA93U8C?hl=en&gbpv=1&printsec=frontcover
Quite right David. I have used the book in teaching and my mind must have been in neutral when I ascribed it to Luntz. Apologies and glad you picked a stupid mistake up. Thanks.
The media line up to bash Labor.
Fascism waxes.
0% interest rates? Clearly a criminal conspiracy so vast that it is beyond that description. Who is stealing what with these rates and the collapse of many sectors of the ‘economy’?
Labor? Intellectually bereft.
Barry’s policy innovations are good. But his only path is to get more people into the ALP. Seriously underwhelming.
I think we will find that local issues will be the key to electoral success. The prize in marginal seats will go to candidates who wear out the most shoe leather. The big issues are too big. The virus is not a party political issue and it is outsmarting the scientists who produced it. The speed of America’s breakdown has caught us by surprise and is beyond our control and China is not winning friends. We have an election in WA in a few weeks where the incumbent government is dominant. If there are any changes I think they will swing on local issues.
I’m sure that’s true in rural and regional areas. Maybe in suburbia too (I’m less sure about that).
Barry failed to diagnose the fatal affliction of Labor: a virus that lives on money and power. Boiled down, Labor is but a shopfront for union/faction bosses whose main interest is personl power and the distribution of the spoils of war, internal or national. On top of that its rotten culture is now uanble to produce leaders who has the capacity to lead, innately or unmortgaged to the barely stable power-sharing amongst his/her faction sanctioned cabinet barons.
Policies? Yes, but first they must pass the “winning is everything” test. Negative gearing? No, no, NO! Lost us the unlosable election. Not a word on the poor preparation for the roll out, and a shadow Minister with little capacity to take the hard questions on the run during that campaign. And with its recent losses it is now all about small targets and safe bets like IR for the casuals, and hoping that the other side would disgrace themselves so much that the punters would over-teach them a lesson and inadvertently move the crown to Albo’s head.
If only the Greens were less doctrinal, less narrow, and not so naive or optimistic, the end of Labor could safely be forecast.
I think Albo thinks there is a still a large cohort of lowly paid proletariat class. There may be in terms of educational standards, but it has long been the case that many of these so called ‘workers’ are quite highly remunerated. While the federal government’s efforts are always clearly in favour of business and employers, particularly very wealthy ones, we also have to acknowledge the some unions are pushing for absurd wages and they display levels of excessive greed too. We saw that at the last election with coal miners in QLD. They weren’t just acting to keep their jobs but to keep their extraordinarily high incomes.
That is a big problem. Union membership in the private sector is tending towards a single digit. Yet labor thinks aloud about “returning to their traditional base”!
The pursuit of personal enrichment is corrupting the social justice foundation of the Party. Just look the number of ex-State or Federal Secretaries of ALP who have gone over to the “otherside” – making big money compradoring to the mining or gambling corporations. That is the beacon so many in Labor caucus or Party organisation would be attracted to.
I agree. Why didn’t Labor architect and sell a carefully-crafted ‘transition’? If Dr Forrest can offer one less than 2 years later, why does a 50,000 member political Party – one which (stupidly) keeps priding itself on being ‘Australia’s Alternative Government’ as opposed to our ‘Loyal Opposition’ – reflect such gross ignorance and suicidal lack of care?
I can agree with that Charles, there needs to be much planning way beyond anything we see now. I think people need to have work obviously for income, and the only group that can facilitate and organise transition are the government. We even need a different kind of economy, but they may take time. What we see with Coronavirus as well is that many have had no work in their respective fields while others have made excessive profits. Such is the misfit of capitalism now with the needs of the times.
George – this can be a very rigorous forum. I’m with you bruvva!
Mate – we’ve just got to keep pushing for a sustainable Universal Basic Income. Sustainable by changing the popular assumption that billionaires should exist.
Beginning by asking: how much money over how many years would you wish to have to meet your material desires?
My best mate is 70. His partner is 63. They have no children. They share some $1m including the value of their regional village residence. They are not going to be able to spend their asset base before their deaths.
I suspect that even The Australia Institute has not researched the actualities and the opinions of this question. If they read this blog, they should.
Yes the billionaire nonsense has to change. Is is becoming so easy with internet platforms too, where the market is the entire world. Sell a unit of something on the world market for $1 and you become an instant billionaire through rapidly repeated sales. Then park your money in offshore non-taxable bank accounts.
Capitalism as it stands now is a form of theft where one player, oligarch groups, or a cabal, give themselves the right to sift off increasing levels cash for their own pockets to the detriment of the much larger workforce. They are like a neo-aristocracy that has rebuilt since the 18th Century, constructed out of Adam Smith’s capitalism. Any graph you can find shows the siphoning of of wealth to the top echelons or the 1% (0.6% now in America).
It is a system so reliant on consumerism, and undealt with pollutive waste, that it is now 100% incompatible with the natural laws on this Earth. A dream hardly based on reality.
I am also in favour of a UBI because it gives security to people so they are not the puppets of corporations who control them through fear of losing a job. It is stopping us moving on to a post-consumerist future.
When you have a lower but stable income you make far more effort to live without compensatory consumerist gifts to yourself, and you are a far more likely to use the extraordinary abundance of secondhand goods that otherwise just passes as rubbish. You might just also look at the world of life around you and see its enormous value beyond anything money can buy.
The entire consumerist economy is a trap that many pay a great price for.
I agree and I love living your penultimate paragraph!
The betrayal of core policies appears to be a consistent path of parties aiming at gaining political power. In the case of the ALP the “greatest moral challenge of our generation” has been replaced with barking from the sidelines about relatively minor issues of the day, nor would the ALP take a clear position regarding the UN Treaty on the prohibition of nuclear weapons (https://www.un.org/disarmament/wmd/nuclear/tpnw/) and the rising danger of a US-China war.
Barry should add a radical change in how this country is dealing with, and preparing for, climate change.
It is both gutless and irresponsible not to go beyond basic policy announcements and provide clear cut solutions to the future problems we face, particularly in Australia. The argument should not be about employment verses action on climate change, the fact is that if we don’t prepare ourselves and make the transition to a greener-based economy we will have far more people unemployed in the end. I would say that any government should be hands on and proactive in offering alternative employment opportunities so people don’t feel threatened about losing their jobs during the conversion.
Biden stuck his neck out on this in the US, and it just shows how he actually was able to override about 40 years of fossil fuel company pseudo-science propaganda. With his recent phone call with China climate change action was foremost in the conversation. (Despite what the appalling media said here by imaginatively turning it into a conversation about Biden shirtfronting Xi Jinping ).
Australia will also be economically left in the dark if it doesn’t adjust to where the rest of the world is going.
Perhaps Morrison should ask Jen how the girls will be when global temperatures go past 2 degrees, and 60% of Australia will be ravaged by climate instability and extreme weather events.
I wish Jen had the initiative to tell him without being asked!!
I don’t think either of them have any real contact with nature and natural world. If you do you are going to value it and not want to see it destroyed. For many like them in a kind of sanitised suburbia, it is about avoiding even getting dirt on your shoes, let alone your hands, so it is almost a synthetic life based on consumerist dreams.
Just think, so many politicians live in a world completely separated from even the exterior atmosphere. It’s the aircon home, aircon drive to the airport, aircon airport lounge, aircon car and driver at the other end, aircon office, and aircon parliament house. Is there any wonder they are somewhat estranged from nature itself?
I so agree.