Quarterly Essay 49 Not Dead Yet: Labors Post-Left Future

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It would also be to admit that in fact, from MySchool to the QR privatisation, Labor state and federal governments have mostly persisted with the orthodoxy that arises from neoclassical economics and related bodies of thought like public choice theory. It's not just members who are appalled by this. Fresh Essential survey data reveals voters - Labor loyalists and otherwise - also feel that Labor has lost its essence. The lost tribe of progressive Laborites who now vote Green are part of a vanished coalition that Keating, in effect, helped to destroy. Another group have gone over to the Tories because, seeing few remaining ideological differences, they have followed the ineradicable electoral intuition that says that conservative governments are more competent.

Following the assassination of Rudd, when Labor can again put together a majority coalition is an open question. Latham never admits that the Keating program - along with Keating himself - had and continue to have very little electoral appeal. His deregulations, privatisations, public sector interventions and all their consequences were unpopular, and fed directly into Pauline Hanson's reactionary-populist revolt. The incorporation of her ideas into Howardism reframed Australian political debate in a way that permanently advantages the right.

Meanwhile, survey data perennially shows that voters think that they've lost out from privatisation, would like the government to have more of a role in the economy, and that it would be preferable if government ran most public services. Last year's election in Queensland and the subsequent fate of Campbell Newman show that privatisation is still unpopular enough in itself to destroy governments and leaders. Rather than confront any of this, Latham would prefer to keep company with those who would like to continue to try to excise as much as possible from the scope of public debate.

He is frustrated that attempts to depolicitise economic matters by, for example, corporatising utilities, have not worked. Among other things, Nolan complained, as a Labor minister, about having to adjudicate on workplace issues - that is, she objected to having to make political decisions.

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She was responding to Tingle's apologia for the political class in the face of recurring public demands that governments do more, where she urged an acceptance of the status quo of diminished public control and restricted political debate. The problem with such attempts to exclude the political, as political theorist Chantal Mouffe reminds us, is that it tends to return in ways that are difficult to predict or control, or are directed at the system as a whole. That's obvious from the fact that people still blame governments for their inability to make ends meet, even as governments try to divest themselves of the relevant responsibilities.

The supposed appeal of all of the Keating agenda to the suburban "aspirational class", though, grounds what must be Latham's oddest and most enduring political daydream. The aspirationals are those who, according to Latham, had their material and lifestyle ambitions permanently awakened by Keatingism.

In Latham's suburban pastoral, they care a noble, postmodern yeomanry - entrepreneurial, ambitious for their children, upwardly mobile, "empirical". They are the platform for Labor's future electoral success, but for now Labor's abandonment of Keating's legacy has meant abandoning them as a constituency. In the imagination, they live in Sydney's west, but with faces are turned East towards their future, closer to the harbour. Latham's big idea is that the increasingly obvious effects of climate change will deliver them to Labor, as the right retreats further into denialism, and the cognitive bubble of right wing media seals them off from the electorate and reality.

But the "empirical" sensibility of aspirationals is currently most offended, we are told, by the "antisocial behaviour" of an "underclass" whom they must encounter in their suburbs, in public schools, and occasionally on television, in news items about remote aboriginal communities. Latham always espoused a moral order that favoured them over those who did not quite aspire hard enough to escape the orbit of public housing, "welfare dependency" and intergenerational disadvantage.

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By now, his attitude to the underprivileged has hardened into a species of contempt. He ignores the realities of structural unemployment, gaping inequality, and the inadequacy of welfare payments to openly blame the poor for their own difficulties: Ultimately, however, the problem of the underclass is an inability to make good choices in life — a blindness to the possibilities of personal change.

The social norms of the neighbourhood are so badly corroded that rational behaviour becomes a minority influence, the sort of thing which strange people do. What the rest of society regards as normal is seen as socially aberrant. In effect, a subculture has formed, in which residents only mix with people from the same underclass background, sharing the same ethos of irresponsibility and hopelessness.

North Melbourne Books: Quarterly Essay Not Dead Yet: Labor’s Post-Left Future, by Mark Latham

My concern is more with values. To speak of the poor in this way is practically to divide a society into separate species. It is the opposite of egalitarianism - it sees people of different income levels who live in different neighbourhoods as essentially different in their ethos and their capabilities. And it does so in preparation for bringing the full force of the state to bear on them: In public housing, where governments have the power to move tenants around, this is a straightforward task. They too need to be broken up: The reason for this is straightforward. As long as disadvantaged Aboriginal people continue to live in isolated, disadvantaged communities, they can never break the cycle of underclass culture.

Or perhaps it's closer to the truth to say that "community" is not something he considers his underclass to fully partake in. He actively dismisses any role for indigenous leaders in remote communities, or any persistent connection between aborigines and the land they live on. No consultation is necessary, no autonomy is permissible.

This is a frankly authoritarian proposal to forcibly rip communities apart because their inhabitants have not acquired the jobs that don't exist in our economy, or have been trapped in circumstances that previous government policy has engineered. It's a crazy-mirror class war, where the support of the petit-bourgeoisie is secured in order to turn the full coercive and disruptive power of the state on the obstinately poor.

In this sense, and in its abjection of the "underclass", it is closely akin to Blairism - Matt Cowgill forcefully draws the connections between this and the Clause IV generation in the United Kingdom. The Blairist connection is also visible in Latham's recommendations on education - he wants to discipline school teachers by means of constant testing, muscling up to education unions, and imposing a market on public schools.

At the same time as proposing to erode the autonomy and conditions of teachers, he expresses the hope of bringing high achievers into the profession. Needless to say, the most dramatic recent improvements in school systems have arisen from doing the opposite of what Latham suggests.

Finland's government has made a long term investment in education, has worked with unions, and emphasises equal treatment of schools, students and teachers. Schools have not only been kept as a public resource, but they have moved closer to the centre of the meaning of the public. Teachers are paid well, and esteemed, not micromanaged. They do not carry out endless testing.

Latham's proposals, on the other hand, are not evidenced by way of successful implementations of like schemes. That is because they're not empirical, but ideological, and can't think of the public sector except as inherently wasteful. Latham's program is meant to appeal to a cohort whose values he assures us he understands, but whose continued existence provides very little evidence of.

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He can't, because they're illusory - they're probably best thought of as the narcissistic projection, or better still as an inadvertent piece of snobbery. Latham imagines that suburban voters have no broader ambition or vision than their own immediate material advancement, when there is ample evidence available that they are most worried about the decline or disappearance of what we hold in common. Latham's fantasy can also perhaps remind us of of some broader problems in the labour movement.

The ALP that talks about "the Lindsay test", second-guesses itself according to the whims of the Daily Telegraph, plonks Gillard in western Sydney and hews to roughly the same orthodoxies as the Liberals may not survive. There's no reason to vote for it. To the extent that it embraces a "post-Left" future that further alienates progressive voters, it will lose a rich source of potential candidates, activists and evangelists.

As long as it withdraws from the provision of services and uses the state principally as an instrument to scapegoat and punish the poor, it will be practically indistinguishable from the conservative parties, and it will be implementing policies that voters have been opposed to for as long as they've been asked about it.

If Labor is looking to represent broadly shared values, it should oppose itself to the evisceration of the commons. There is already one Liberal Party; Labor will get nowhere by aping it. View all 3 comments. Mar 29, Gabrielle Trenbath rated it really liked it.

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Australia is very different to the Australia that gave birth to the Australian Labor Party in the s. Latham correctly identifies that civil society has changed and developed to a post political party environment; meaning t Not Dead Yet: Latham correctly identifies that civil society has changed and developed to a post political party environment; meaning that individuals opt to participate in civil society groups, even though they might be political in nature, remain outside the mainstream political process.

Also his focus on poverty in Australia was a good reminder Australia is not a lucky country for everyone. Mar 07, foundfoundfound rated it it was ok. Mar 24, Peter Franklin rated it liked it Shelves: Some valid points about the influence and the out of whack proportion of union representation in the political party. Tilda rated it it was ok May 06, Simon Evans rated it liked it Aug 17, Robbie rated it really liked it Jun 25, Yuri Sharon rated it liked it Dec 16, Jim rated it really liked it Mar 12, Leir rated it did not like it Jun 03, Stephen Sargent rated it really liked it Jun 08, Min Guo rated it liked it Nov 27, Lisa Mclean rated it really liked it Feb 04, Cephalopod rated it it was ok Jun 22, Rich rated it it was ok Mar 19, Cam Ward rated it it was amazing May 06, Maiy Azize rated it did not like it Mar 04, Carlene rated it really liked it Jan 29, Mark rated it liked it Mar 15, Mark rated it liked it Jun 08, Daniel Carr rated it really liked it Apr 10, Matt Kelly rated it really liked it Apr 05, Ioanis Hristodoulou rated it it was ok Sep 23, James Brann rated it liked it Jun 09,