All That's Left: What Labor Should Stand For

(1999).

INTRODUCTION

Whatever their political leaning or partisan inclination, public commentators and intellectuals share a fondness for debunking conventional wisdoms. It can only be thus.

In recent times it has been fashionable to declare the death of ideology in politics. Our political seers insist that the division between Left and Right has become obsolete. This is a diagnosis shared by those with sympathies for old-style socialism as well as those who yearn for a more conservative mode of politics. For political scientist David McKnight, a stalwart of the Left, Australian political culture has simply moved ‘beyond right and left’. Such a shift is to be celebrated and not mourned, as it ‘offers new opportunities for … creating new ways of seeing the world’. The former Australia Institute chief and failed Greens candidate, Clive Hamilton, has suggested traditional social democracy – understood as a class-based movement dedicated to overcoming material deprivation and inequality – is an outdated model for centre-left politics. On the other side of the equation, Waleed Aly, an unlikely advocate for a renewed conservatism, suggests in his recent Quarterly Essay that ‘Our political discourse is drenched in Left and Right because it is so deeply impoverished’. According to Aly, ‘Left and Right are the hallmark of a political conversation that is obsessed with teams and uninterested in ideas’.

The seers doth protest too much.

To be sure, there is a frustrating imprecision with labelling one side Left and one Right in our political debates. It is telling that those on the Left are variously called social democratic, left-liberal and progressive, while those opposite are variously referred to as neoliberal, liberal-conservative or conservative. What do such terms really mean? In an Australian political culture that is notoriously pragmatic and averse to doctrinal purity – many would say a product of a Benthamite or utilitarian political culture that prioritises material outcomes over ideology – bipartisanship on many important questions of policy is common. Dividing lines aren’t as clearly drawn as they are, say, in the USA or even Britain. Yet we shouldn’t be so hasty to conclude Left and Right are simply meaningless labels, even if the distinction between socialism and liberalism has lost much of its salience in the post–Cold War world. Political categories are rarely neat. Fashion should never hold us hostage. Ideology, far from dead, continues to breathe life into our political debates. Left and Right, far from being just about ‘teams’, are also labels about ideas, the lifeblood of any democratic polity.

It now seems a long time ago, what with all the political surrealism of 2010, but he events of late 2008 should make this self-evident. Historians will likely look back at the collapse of the Lehman Brothers bank, which precipitated the global financial crisis, as a defining political moment of the early twenty-first century. Granted, the crisis didn’t usher in the complete demise of liberal capitalism, even if there was a brief appearance of ‘financial socialism’ in the form of massive government nationalisation of banks in Britain and the USA. Few comrades were to be found bursting into verses of the Internationale. But it takes an obtuse mind not to recognise that the global financial crisis is of deep ideological import and that Left and Right remain useful shorthands for the competing political philosophies in today’s world.

This was brought into bold relief by former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s response to the global financial crisis. With his denunciation of neoliberalism in the pages of The Monthly – as he put it, ‘that particular brand of free-market fundamentalism, extreme capitalism and excessive greed which became the economic orthodoxy of our time’ – Rudd provoked in Australia a fiercely contested battle of ideas. Political actors from across the ideological spectrum suddenly cast off their bipartisan economic policy robes of some two and a half decades. They sallied forth with bold claims and counter-claims, as to the virtues of free markets and government intervention. Rudd, so the story goes, had exposed the naked emperor of neoliberalism.

For Rudd, this wasn’t the result of a sudden ideological awakening. Though the political Right frothed at the mouth at his apparent transformation from a cautious ‘economic conservative’ to what then Opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull dubbed the ‘great socialist hero’, Rudd’s Keynesian effusions reflected less a metamorphosis and more an ideological consistency. In his maiden speech to the federal parliament, Rudd dismissed ‘the death of ideology’ and ‘the politics of convergence’; as he put it, ‘I believe that there remains a fundamental divide between our two parties on the proper role of the state in a modern economy and society’. Almost a decade later, in his 2006 Monthly essay, ‘Howard’s Brutopia’, the then Shadow Minister for Foreign Affairs railed against the ‘market fundamentalism’ of John Howard’s Coalition Government, notably its deregulatory WorkChoices industrial relations policy, and its prosecution of the mythical ‘culture wars’. According to Rudd, the culture wars were an American-inspired diversion from the ‘real battle of ideas in Australian politics’; the totemic contest ‘between [neoliberal] free-market fundamentalism and the social-democratic belief … that the market is designed for human beings, not vice versa’. Twelve months later, Rudd dislodged John Howard’s four-term Coalition Government from office.

Rudd’s flexing of ideological muscle was a remarkable show of strength in his first eighteen months as Prime Minister. Progressive confidence indeed grew apace following Labor’s stunning triumph in the November 2007 federal election. The Rudd Government made a long-overdue ratification of the Kyoto Protocol. The new prime minister’s first speech in parliament was a moving apology to the Stolen Generations. Confused and divided, the Coalition limped from crisis to crisis, replacing the Opposition Leader Brendan Nelson, a long-time former ALP member, with a one-time ALP senatorial aspirant, Malcolm Turnbull. The Rudd Government’s $42 billion ‘nation-building’ stimulus package, which most observers credit for steering the Australian economy from the danger of recession, seemed like a political coup de grace.

But it was Rudd’s social democratic manifesto and embrace of nation building that galvanised both sides of politics. On the defensive for so long, the Left was suddenly fuelled by a post-millennial zeal to recreate Australia into what commentators from a previous age dubbed the ‘antipodean social laboratory’. Such confidence could be detected in Rudd’s charge that his predecessor John Howard had been ‘indolent’ and culpable for ‘a fundamental failure of long-term economic reform’. There was a certain audacity in Rudd’s claim that the Liberal Party couldn’t be regarded as partners with the Hawke and Keating Labor governments of the 1980s and 90s ‘in the great project of economic modernisation for Australia’. Indeed, this was a full-blown declaration of war.

Yet, following the Tony Abbott’s ascension to the Liberal leadership in late 2009, Rudd Labor lost its way. Spooked by attacks claiming an emissions trading scheme was little more than ‘a great big new tax’, the government chose to abandon the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme legislation after it was blocked twice in the Senate; no matter that Rudd had famously declared climate change to be the greatest moral and economic challenge of our time. The flawed rollout of the home insulation scheme as part of the government’s stimulus package, along with inconsistencies in its Building the Education Revolution program, raised questions about Rudd Labor’s ability to administer policies. Ongoing public concern about ‘illegal immigration’ saw the government suspend applications by Afghan and Sri Lankan refugees for two years – despite its earlier assurances that it would adopt a more humane approach to asylum-seekers. The proposed Resource Super Profits Tax embroiled the government in a bitter public dispute with big mining companies.

All this, of course, contributed to Rudd’s replacement as prime minister by Julia Gillard in June 2010. The parliamentary federal Labor party, unwilling to countenance the prospect of a one-term government, terminated Rudd’s leadership with extreme prejudice.

While Gillard briefly restored Labor’s superiority in the polls before calling an August election, the party once again reverted to its troubled ways. The 2010 election campaign became a study in political self-destruction and paralysis; for many, it served as devastating evidence of Labor’s deterioration into a narrow political party driven by polls and focus groups rather than by conviction or ideology.

Given all this, any sense that there can be an authentic renewal of Australian social democracy might seem bizarre. For what it was, even Rudd’s apparent ideological resurgence was an aberration. Among the world’s centre-left leaders, Rudd was perhaps the only one who enjoyed an opportunity to reshape the ideological landscape in his country. While in the US, the Obama administration has secured passage of its historic health care reforms in Congress, it labours under what is in many respects a hostile political environment, that is dominated by a conservative Right. Governments hailing from the centre-right are in power in just about every crucial centre in Europe, though the eclipse of the centre-left might well be the product of social democracy’s own success in becoming, as historian Tony Judt describes, ‘the prose of contemporary European politics’. In Britain, New Labour’s general election defeat, and the formation of a Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition government, signals an apparent exhaustion of a modernising form of social democracy.

Placed in such a context, it would be naivety, if not hubris, to believe the Australian experience might provide a compelling model for a revived social democratic project. Contrary to what some observers believed, Rudd’s rhetorical flourishes didn’t reflect the ordained designs of Keynesian gods. As is so common in Australian politics, it is practice rather than vision that prevails. If contemporary Labor has been a government of social democracy, it has so far been largely sans doctrine. This raises the following questions. Might the short-lived ideological coherence of Rudd Labor reveal the limits of social democracy and indeed of liberal democratic politics in our time? Are programs of ambitious reform too much to expect of progressive governments? More fundamentally, what does it mean to belong to the Left in the early twenty-first century, when the old dominance of two-party representative politics appears to be breaking down?

This book features contributions from some of Australia’s leading social democrats. We hope the opinions in this collection, some of which dissent from conventional wisdom, will provoke a debate about the direction of progressive politics. Given Labor’s insipid offerings during the 2010 election campaign, the time is ripe for such a conversation. Among the questions that may be asked: What should Labor stand for today? What is the meaning of social justice? Is the size of government a meaningful test of social democracy’s success? What is the meaning of social justice? Can we have a progressive economics? Is the environment transforming Left politics beyond recognition? What must a progressive commitment to education involve? And what can be done to address Indigenous disadvantage? By providing some answers, this volume seeks to enlarge the agenda for Labor beyond 2010, at a time when many are seeking a renewed expression of social democracy.

Conversely, the post-Howard Right in Australia are also searching for a new political vision. Tony Abbott’s leadership of the Liberal–National Coalition has been characterised by unremitting negativity. For a long time, the Right have only been able to define themselves negatively, as in the pages of the increasingly paranoid Quadrant under Keith Windschuttle’s editorship. One may usefully consult the magazine’s vituperative response to the ‘What’s Left?’ series of commentaries about centre-left politics published by The Australian last year, which involved turning over an entire edition to debunking what one contributor termed the alleged postmodernist evils of the Left’s ‘creationism’.

This is projection on an epic scale. For, while Quadrant devoted page after page to dissecting the Left, no accompanying explication of a positive conservative philosophy – or even disposition – was forthcoming on what it meant to be on the ‘Right’. So it is with the other standard bearers of the conservative commentariat. Whether it is Gerard Henderson, Janet Albrechtsen, Andrew Bolt or Christopher Pearson, there is only carping and invective. To be on the Right is to believe that Labor has returned to its socialist ways; that everything is symbolic and hollow; that political correctness has run riot; and, of course, that Judeo-Christian values are under threat. Such poor emulation of American neoconservative strategies – the crass pseudo-populism of the tea-party patriots, the vapidity of Sarah Palin and the blathering of the Fox News demagogues – diminishes not only conservatives but also the wider public debate.

Even when more thoughtful conservatives have tried to offer an alternative, there is something sadly missing. In his recent tract, Battlelines, Tony Abbott spoke of the need for ‘conservatives to write more books’. Judged by the content of Battlelines and his oppositional strategy as leader more generally, one might ask: Why? Shadow Federal Treasurer Joe Hockey talks about civil liberties – yet when his colleagues speak, it is the voice of de Maistrean reaction, not the liberalism of John Stuart Mill that we hear. Other conservatives, meanwhile, now openly celebrate the tenets of Manning Clark’s thesis about Australian politics being a contest between progressive ‘enlargers of life’ and conservative ‘straighteners’. After announcing his retirement from parliamentary politics, Senator Nick Minchin declared that he went into politics with the express purpose of preventing the ALP from taking office.

Amid such intellectual confusion and deficiency, this volume offers a new path. We believe that the challenges faced by Australia today are too important to be left to a coterie of ideological misfits who exist solely to prevent some mythical and malignant ‘Left’ taking power. As this volume attests, the best response to the challenges of our time is most likely to come from social democrats.

At that, this book is also about reclaiming the very meaning of ‘the Left’ for the social democratic project. Though the Left is a broad church,