Labor's tragedy: a lack of strategy to govern for all. (a think piece)

[idlewhile]

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

[izabsmiling]

Who is the author ? 

Some of these Journo's would have suited Hitler .

Make it all seem worse than it is, lay blame,create fear and hate,use propaganda and people will not only believe...they will do the unimaginable 

[not_an_eloi]

paul kelly is editor-at-large for the australian

or as described by somebody else:     "Oh God, we can't fire them, but we don't want them in the office. I know! Editor-at-large. Go forth, and write us drivel, old man! And here's a sack of doubloons"

as described by me:   sell the nlp brand to the people, cash-for-comment

[donnashuggy]

I will take a guess, lighteningdance/sukuri

[spotweldersfriend]

Goebbels

[freakiness]

well if you can get through that load of tosh up there maybe this will bring some balance.

Patsys, players and the future of Australia’s political mediaMarch 30, 2013 · by Drag0nista · in Media

Not this Patsy

The most significant thing that emerged from the mea culpas and post mortems that littered the coup-that-wasn’t battlefield was the notion that journalists are willing to be made patsys.

What other explanation can there be for the role the media played in the Rudd camp’s most recent premature leadership tourney?

Seasoned journalists proved yet again their willingness to publicly be made to look fools in return for being able to participate in private leadership maneuverings.  For participate they did, dutifully executing the Ruddites’ not-so-well-laid plans to whip up a media storm in the hope of securing the requisite number of Gillard turncoats.

When the tactic failed, the same journalists had the temerity to sound chagrined.

Peter Hartcher wrote:

It was a moment of gut-wrenching disappointment for his supporters and gleefully comical anti-climax for his detractors … Few will consider repeating that exercise. One of his most important and effective lieutenants declared: ”I’m over Rudd.”

Laurie Oakes opined:

Rudd’s failure to contest the leadership ballot, after all the efforts of his henchmen to bring it about and their big talk about the numbers in caucus, made him look ridiculous.

Indeed.

Meanwhile, a nascent debate has emerged amongst thinking journalists on the ethics of reporting leadership tensions.

The discussion actually started back in September last year when former editor Michael Gawenda penned one of the first pieces by a journalism practitioner to openly question this aspect of reporting politics in general and leadership speculation in particular:

There are clearly rules of engagement in journalism and that’s particularly true when it comes to politicians and the journalists who cover politics. These rules are rarely discussed and rarely open to public scrutiny. These rules are contentious because the interests of politicians and the interests of journalists are – or should be – entirely different.

In my view, the rules of engagement, for some time now, have not worked. They have allowed politicians to get away with telling untruths and have led to a situation where journalists can’t tell us what’s really going on.

It often feels as if the rules of engagement are such that most of what journalists in Canberra know can’t be revealed to us outsiders. Indeed, there are times when journalists report statements that politicians make publicly when the journalists know that these statements are untrue. How do they know? Because these same politicians, in off the record conversations – which means they can’t be reported – have given journalists the ‘real’ story.

Gawenda rightly raised the vexed question of anonymous sources and off the record conversations, considered a staple for truth-seeking journalists but equally a convenient cover for cowardly troublemakers. As a counterpoint, Tony Wright wrote more recently about the lies that are regularly fed to journalists by politicians both on and off the record when it’s considered the wrong time tactically to tell the truth.

Gawenda wrote again in February this year about the symbiotic relationship between journalist and political source, following another eddy of leadership speculation:

This is speculation that is journalist driven basically, because journalists are prepared to report – anonymously of course – every wild and often hysterical outburst by Labor people, without ever asking these people to put their names to this stuff so that we poor punters can judge where they are coming from and why they might be saying these things.

It seems to me that journalists have become sort of counsellors for psychologically stressed MPs who need a sympathetic ear and who feel better when they have unburdened themselves of their nightmares. Whether journalists should play this game is questionable.

And now, following the recent leadership farce, game-playing journalists are the topic du jour.

Interestingly The Australian moved early to secure the high moral ground after the non-coup, even going so far as to name Peter Hartcher as a leadership agitator. To reinforce its point, The Australian cited its nemesis news organisation, the ABC:

As ABC Insiders host Barrie Cassidy put it yesterday, “There are lessons too for political journalists who enthusiastically embrace the destabilisation that Rudd supporters generate. At what point will they say to Rudd supporters, stop pulling our chains. You took us once again to the brink and did nothing. Even at the last minute, journalists were running the argument as to why Rudd should return to the leadership, only to be left red-faced.

“That won’t stop many of them because they too have invested so much in a return to Rudd. But they must now know that their candidate is unreliable.”

As an aside, this was also the first time, to my knowledge, journalists who’d been briefed by the plotters named names after the event (or came as close as they dared to doing so). Hartcher wrote that Bob Carr’s attempts to deny the story that he’d bailed from the Gillard camp “failed the laugh test, and the laugh is on Carr. His caucus colleagues know the report was correct and that he has complained long and loud to them about Gillard’s misjudgments.” Others used the cover of Crean’s post-coup spray to finger the main protagonists.

Thankfully there is a growing cohort of journalists interested more in saving their profession’s diminishing reputation than simply defending their own credibility.

Katharine Murphy and Lenore Taylor used their final columns before departing Fairfax mastheads for The Guardian Australia to entreat their colleagues to do what is needed to regain readers’ trust. Murphy wrote (a week before the non-coup reached its crescendo):

We can pretend the only player here with an existential trust problem is the Gillard government, and wilfully ignore our own parallel universe: the evidence that audiences don’t trust us either.

We can comfort ourselves in self-delusion, and strut and fret. Or we can spend less time swaggering and railing against our enemies and more time renewing the mission of contemporary journalism. We are tellers of truths, news breakers, curators and contextualisers; and at our best and bravest, we are people who write things that someone, somewhere, does not want written.

The only people who can save or destroy journalism are journalists. And we will save it only if we exhibit courage and humility, not manufactured conflict.

Taylor built on this theme from a post-non-spill perspective:

… If journalists are truthful, we have to admit that reporting nascent leadership challenges is deeply treacherous territory. It is impossible to do it without resorting to anonymous sources and such sources – used very judiciously – can help to expose the truth in a situation where the rules of the game dictate that most of the politicians involved will lie.

… But anonymous sources have to be carefully cross-checked and treated with extreme caution, because of the obvious dangers of being drawn into the process in order to build momentum towards a result, and of being perceived to be playing that role.

Taylor then goes on to argue that Essential’s recent poll showing only 30% of respondents trusted newspapers and television news, with an even lower 27% trusting online news media “should give long pause for thought about how that trust can be regained.

“For the media it now has to come down to meeting, and explaining how we are meeting, our responsibilities to be reliable and informative and interesting and fair.”

But as former editor Gay Alcorn notes:

How can the public believe the media to be ”reliable and fair”, in Lenore Taylor’s words, if large swaths of it are palpably hostile to the Prime Minister, then purport to report the ”news” that her leadership is under threat?

If Gillard has a credibility problem, so, too, does the media. If Gillard can’t ”move forward” without recognising what’s gone wrong with her own performance, neither can those charged with critiquing her government. If politicians and the media let down the public they purport to serve, then the public will reject them. Simple as that.

Then again, perhaps it’s not that simple. Perhaps it’s only those journalists and writers who’ve had the opportunity to step off the careening news treadmill, either to transition to a new employer or a different career, who can see the threat and identify what needs to be done.

Perhaps those who are left to write and file endlessly updated political news stories have lost sight of the need to engender trust by being reliable and fair. These days, it seems, they are only interested in being first.

And so, no more than a week after Gillard and Rudd’s not-very-High-Noon, the anonymous sources and their media enablers are at it again.

The Financial Review’s Geoff Kitney reports [$]:

Resentment is building in Labor Party ranks towards the key figures who shielded Julia Gillard from a leadership challenge and who are being accused of preferring Tony Abbott over Kevin Rudd as prime minister.

Despite heavy pressure for the Labor Party to unify behind Gillard to keep alive any chance of Labor winning the September election, there is undisguised anger in the ranks that antipathy towards Rudd was a bigger factor in the defence of Gillard than fear of an Abbott government.

http://ausvotes2013.com/2013/03/30/patsys-players-and-the-future-of-australias-political-media/

[i-need-a-martini]

Ok. So I read the article.

But it says absolutely nothing of substance. ?:|

What is it supposed to be about exactly? Other than a journalist for the pro-Liberal Australian having a whinge about his perceptions on Gillard in a pretend sympathetic  tone.

[idlewhile]

Obviously any introspection on just what caused Labor to fail so dramatically & lose their voters base is anathema to the one's who have replied to this piece.

Attacking the writer, who by the way has over 40 years in his position, a vast knowledge of the inner workings of politics) is the last defence of the rusted on, attacking the OP is another & invoking Godwin is another.

If you all want to follow Labor over the cliff that's your prerogative, it's a sad reflection on just how toxic any kind of political debate has become.

[freakiness]

Do you read news from other sources too?

[catsnknots]

Obviously any introspection on just what caused Labor to fail so dramatically & lose their voters base is anathema to the one's who have replied to this piece.

Attacking the writer, who by the way has over 40 years in his position, a vast knowledge of the inner workings of politics) is the last defence of the rusted on, attacking the OP is another & invoking Godwin is another.

If you all want to follow Labor over the cliff that's your prerogative, it's a sad reflection on just how toxic any kind of political debate has become.

Godwin's Law is exactly what I thought when I read Iza's post too... lol