I found this an excellent verballising of the many problems Labor face & the worry of the majority of Australians as to the direction our country took under Labor. A thought piece that all should read if they are confused as to what happened to Labor in power & where to next for the incoming govt. be it Labor or Liberal.
This is a long piece but deserves a read by any who find the political landscape of Australia worthy of being kept informed & where to go next in the coming election.
Labor's tragedy: a lack of strategy to govern for all
ELIMINATION of the long-running Gillard-Rudd leadership melodrama has left the Labor Party's real dilemma more exposed - the party faces a crisis of belief and an intellectual failure to fathom how Labor governs in the 21st century.
Labor has been in denial of these realities for most of the past five years in office. Such denial is no longer credible. Resolution of the leadership crisis has brought into daylight what was lost in the shadows, a crisis over Labor's policy and strategic direction.
The idea that Labor's primary vote is stuck in the 30-34 per cent zone because of bad PR, a few mishaps and Kevin Rudd's celebrity status is ludicrous.
Yet this argument or excuse has enjoyed currency within the party and, incredibly, within wide sections of a gullible media for a couple of years.
Julia Gillard is in a terrible bind. Party unity is an imperative in the election prelude yet Labor's effort to bury debate on the core issues now looks untenable.
The Prime Minister says she has the chance to govern effectively for the first time with her liberation from Rudd's perpetual leadership threat. Yet she faces a torrent of critics within the Labor family.
Much of the critique is tied to the Hawke-Keating era. It comes from those closely associated with that generation, notably Martin Ferguson, Simon Crean and now Bill Kelty. It captures sentiments previously expressed by former Rudd "gang of four" minister Lindsay Tanner and the sustained criticism offered by party veteran and former Keating minister John Faulkner.
This reflects a belief that the Gillard government is derailed and has failed to build on the Hawke-Keating legacy.
It also reflects a private position Rudd had recently begun to develop - that Gillard's party is too enthralled to the trade unions, old-fashioned labourism, class warfare, hostility to business, internal patronage and excessive regulation. Rudd didn't make such arguments openly because that hardly would have helped his return to the leadership.
But Rudd and his close supporter, Chris Bowen, who would have been his treasurer, believe that sweeping internal reforms are essential for Labor's revival and must be tackled as soon as practicable. This will happen only with a resolute commitment from the next leader. It is wrong, however, to think Labor is riven into two camps warring over future directions since the divisions are confused, chaotic and shift from one issue to another.
Labor's tragedy is that a party created in the 1890s to represent the industrial wing has achieved its historical purpose with rising community prosperity, affluence once unimagined, and the shrinking of trade coverage in the private sector to about 14 per cent of employees.
Given this reality, Labor must change. It cannot continue to see itself as a party defined by its institutional ties with the trade unions and a 50 per cent union representation rule. Such a narrow definition dooms Labor's future. Gillard's recent embrace of this identity was an extraordinary blunder that mirrors the structural conflict implicit in Gillard-Rudd tensions. It is now improbable that Rudd does not want radical reform of Labor's ties with the union movement.
The sharpest point in Ferguson's resignation speech was his lament that Gillard is not governing for all Australians. Can there be a more lethal assessment? When the union leaders from the Hawke-Keating generation shout this criticism from the rooftops about the Gillard government - witness Ferguson, Crean and Kelty - then crisis is not an exaggerated notion.
This is not the Business Council of Australia talking. It is not the alleged greedy mining billionaires. It is not the Murdoch media. No, it comes from the elder statesmen of the Labor family. Their motive is not their own glory - that lies in their past - but their deep alarm.
Gillard's misjudgments are embedded in her revival tactic of appealing to Labor's base, rekindling the faith of blue-collar workers, invoking trade union loyalty and embarking on new spending initiatives on disabilities and schools to be financed by redistribution from business and better-off households.
It sounds plausible in theory. But its implementation from a weak position risks exacerbating Labor's poor standing. Gillard's "divide and rule" tactic is casting Labor into an entrenched minority position.
The cause of the problem is easy to identity but complex to resolve. The current Labor generation failed to think through a governing strategy.
It came to power in 2007 in an era of immense prosperity pledged to address climate change, abolish Work Choices, invest in education, convinced of the utility of greater government intervention across the board and ready to apply ruthlessly the short-term media tactics that served state ALP governments so brilliantly.
In retrospect, its superficiality is striking. In opposition Labor did next to nothing on party reform and gave little consideration to how it would govern. It has paid a ferocious price. Individual ministers, mostly, are smart and diligent, but the total is much less than the sums of the parts.
The most vacuous internal remarks this week were complaints that the Hawke-Keating era was being romanticised. Sure, they just won five elections, managed internal dissent, kept the leadership on ice until the third term, revitalised the private sector via deregulation, boosted the profits share, got the budget to a pre-recession surplus, boosted international competitiveness and ran on growth with equity. Some romance.
They were pro-business, pro-profits and pro-jobs. Their declared aim was to steal the middle ground from the Liberals and force the conservatives out to the right. They made targeted concessions to the Left and the Greens but not at the cost of the middle-ground strategy.
Labor's current tragedy is writ large. As Wayne Swan said yesterday, Australia is one of a small group of nations with an AAA credit rating, solid growth, unemployment at 5.4 per cent and low inflation. So what gives with a projected election wipe-out on the scale of Greece or Spain? How did Labor achieve this bizarre double? We missed the recession but our government has the poll rating of a deep-recession nation. Something has gone badly wrong.
The answer is that Labor has lacked a firm governing strategy to unify its decisions, its rhetoric and its electoral tactics. It has been all over the place with confused priorities, poor decision-making and sudden improvisations. The proof is everywhere.
Taking recent weeks, if Labor had a coherent governing strategy it would never have adopted its media package based on the flawed idea of greater state powers over newspapers.
It would never have run the foreign worker 457 visa scare based on short-term electoral gains by sacrificing its economic credentials.
It would never have offered a litany of concessions to the unions, week after week, that merely reinforce a one-dimensional pro-union, anti-business image that is electorally disastrous.
And it would not have sanctioned a three-month feeding frenzy over its plans to impose new superannuation taxes that has unnerved superannuation holders and the industry.
This testifies to a government, under pressure and on the run. It suggests Gillard is looking backwards to Labor's past for ideas where the Hawke-Keating hallmark was to assess and seize the best contemporary ideas.
In a deeper sense Labor, ironically, has never recovered from the death of socialism. With its philosophical framework collapsed, Labor did something very clever: it decided its only real purpose was to govern, to satisfy its supporting interests, constituencies and voters.
As Tanner said in his recent book: "In the old days, winning elections didn't matter. Now, nothing else matters. Noble idealists tilting at windmills have been replaced by cynical manipulators massaging polls and focus grounds."
It is an exaggeration but the argument is valid. The real question being posed by Ferguson, Tanner, Kelty and Faulkner, who come from different quarters of the ALP, is what does Labor now represent?
Gillard's tragedy is that she understands this debate, knows the problems and has never had sufficient command of the political process to devise a solution.
The origin of Labor's initial malaise in office was trying to keep nearly everybody happy. In the end, that means most people become unhappy with their government. Labor changed its message according to the audience because that seemed smart.
It was pro-market and pro-government intervention. It believed in business but was pro-union. It was pledged to action on climate change but horrified when it realised such action might be unpopular.
It abolished with moral flair John Howard's punitive boat policy without realising the boats might return. It replaced a mining tax that was too onerous with a mining tax that was too soft.
When it suited her, Gillard broke an election promise not to legislate a carbon tax. She entered an alliance with the Greens while warning they had the wrong values. Desperate to become fiscal conservatives after their big spending splurge, the Prime Minister and the Treasurer pledged a budget surplus only to fail their own test.
With the great 20th-century ideological divide fading, there is more agreement than before inside the Labor Party yet more confusion about how to manage a new age and new problems with a party still anchored in an earlier century.
Labor, as ever, awaits a political messiah with the answers. Look hard in the gloom. That bumpy road to the light on the hill is empty of messiahs.
by Paul Kelly
