Not much light on the hill

On Sunday, June 12, 1949, in a famous address to the NSW ALP state conference the Labor prime minister, Ben Chifley, announced his party's objective to be "the light on the hill".

Kim Beazley's speech to this year's conference last Sunday is unlikely to be as well remembered.  The Opposition Leader talked about foreign debt, the Kyoto Protocol, infrastructure development, and apprenticeships, and he promised to oppose the coalition's industrial relations legislation.

Unfortunately for the quality of the policy debate in this country, in 2005 Beazley and the Labor Party risk going the same way Chifley and the ALP did 56 years ago.  At the federal election just six months after his celebrated speech Chifley was comprehensively defeated by Robert Menzies.  After the poll Chifley predicted that his party would soon be back in power.  The rest is history Labor had 23 years of opposition.

The speech by Beazley last Sunday revealed two of the reasons why he lags behind John Howard as preferred prime minister.  Beazley's mistakes are the same as those made by Chifley.

Labor's first problem is that it is staking its economic credibility on the basis of what Bob Hawke and Paul Keating did 20 years ago.  The trouble with this sort of thinking is that voters don't reward politicians for what they did last week, let alone for what they did two decades ago.  Electors want to know what their MP will do in the future, not what they've done in the past.

In 1949 Chifley believed that the electorate would be appreciative of Labor's efforts during the Second World War, which had finished five years earlier.  The nation certainly was thankful to the ALP, but that didn't stop it voting Liberal.

In any case, relying on the precedent of the Hawke and Keating years to prove Labor's credentials in 2005 is dangerous.  Whether the public fully appreciates the scale of the changes wrought to the economy by Labor in the 1980s, and whether it has ever actually accepted those changes, is an open question.  And Keating's "the recession we had to have" hasn't been forgotten.

Labor's second problem is more serious.  Put simply, it has failed to realise the transformation taking place in Australian society.  It is out of touch with the concerns of the majority of Australians.  The processes of globalisation and deregulation have had more than an economic effect.  They have also had social consequences as citizens alter their attitudes on matters such as their employment arrangements and their expectations of what can be achieved by government.

Individuals are increasingly wanting to exercise choice and take on the responsibility of self-reliance.  Simple figures tell the story.  In Australia there are now 1.9 million people who are self-employed, compared with 1.8 million people who are members of a trade union.

The way Beazley spoke on Sunday of big government and big unions working together showed he had little understanding of how the world and the electorate is changing.

Last month in the Fairfax press Keating accurately summed up Labor's present malaise:  "The Labor Party has given up the middle class, middle ground, sole employer, self-employed, small business voter that Bob Hawke and I generated for it."

Interestingly, this group that Keating identified is exactly the category that Menzies targeted as being hostile to Labor's post-war attempts to regulate the economy.  The ALP under Chifley, and then into the 1950s, continued to campaign for more government control when what the electorate wanted was the opposite of what Labor was offering.

Obviously it takes time for political parties to come to terms with the changes that take place in society.

The issue for today's ALP is whether it is willing to face up to these challenges.  There's little doubt that there exists in Labor's ranks those with the intellectual capacity to deal with such questions.  The problem is that many of those who can help the party out of its policy dead end are either on the backbench or not in parliament.  As yet Labor has shown no inclination to remedy this.

In an interview four years ago on the ABC's 7.30 Report Beazley said, "I'm not Ben Chifley, I know, but I'm also not running against Bob Menzies."

At the moment for many in the ALP the fact that their party is facing Australia's second-longest-serving prime minister not its longest is of little consolation.

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