Labor came near to winning government on October 3, it did not even come close to winning the argument. Labor's 1998 campaign was all strategy. The government was pitching on the big picture, Labor clearly was not. The same criticism could have been made of John Howard in 1996. Howard's win in 1998 however makes it impossible to ignore policy any more. This is essentially Mark Latham's criticism of Kim Beazley. Is Latham correct? The answer may lie in an appreciation of what parties are and what they have to do, not on any particular policy prescription.
Imagine if Labor had won, the Coalition would have been destroyed for a generation and Labor would have exhausted its policy bag of tricks in its first Budget. Again the same criticism applies to John Howard. In response, a disillusioned electorate would have turned even more heavily towards One Nation or other odds and sods.
The parties were once thought to be passe, only leaders and interest groups mattered. But challengers like One Nation and the Greens have been seen off, and the parties survived, but they are not what they were. They are now less distinct; Labor less industrial, Liberal less blue-rinse, National less hayseed. The parties are not about to vacate the field, they are as much a permanent feature as ever, and what is more they do a good job at sifting the competing demands of the electorate. The parties provide the voter with a history of ideas and performance far deeper and more reliable than the leader's persona.
The parties won the election. Let us be grateful for small mercies.
The problem for the parties is that they are "less able but more visible" than they used to be. They are finding it hard to convince voters that they have national answers to international problems, but that has not stopped them for seeking a policy prescription for everything.
They are also "less relevant but more privileged" than they used to be. They have strengthened their hold on office, but weakened their hold on the electorate. One Nation set out to break the cartel of parties that control the game. Just watch the parties change the rules on electoral funding so that outsiders cannot horde the money for a second attempt. The trouble is, part of the argument used against storing funds is that One Nation is a company, not a democratic organisation. Such an argument however opens the parties to the question, how democratic are they? The majors have been in the public eye for long enough to give them some legitimacy. However, a fresh scrutiny of their rules and behaviour in the light of the supposed shortcomings of One Nation would see them fail a test of internal democracy.
How is Labor affected by these changes and how well placed to meet the challenges? Labor has a legacy of working class origins, a moral agenda, and an organising principle of collective action.
The places where Labor branch numbers are generally highest is in the inner city safe seats, and they are overwhelmingly middle class. If not middle class then they are stacked with people who cannot speak English and whose support is traded among factional leaders for preselection. Is Labor's special responsibility for the working class, or its new support from the middle class proving too great a divide? The wonder is it has kept the show together so successfully for so long.
The moral superiority of disengagement from the Vietnam war, of aboriginal land rights and reconciliation, of the battle to empower the poor and the outsider, women, ethnics, gays, greens has squeezed out the simpler moral agenda of equality, ie. better pay and conditions. The middle-class post-materialist battlefields are miles, figuratively and geographically, from industrial and working class labor.
Labor once held that government ownership was the model means of collective action, it realised however, aided considerably by the lesson of the damage of deficit budgets, that the instruments it held were not right for the job. The Commonwealth Bank did not make for cheaper money, Qantas did not make for better air services, Telstra does not make for more efficient telecommunications. None of them alone could save a dying town or region if its economic base collapsed.
There is no solution to unemployment in the Labor kit, because every solution relies on lowering the cost of employing, or in a more competitive market place with its threat to job security. Labor has come up against some very hard choices. It has to straddle some very difficult fences in the next three years. John Howard (and Tim Fischer) risked their vitals on the barbed wire fence, Labor will have to do the same.
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