The AFR today offers an explanation of Labor’s woes that has very little to do with reality:
Julia Gillard’s purge of Kevin Rudd supporters has exposed Labor’s existential crisis as more than mirroring the fiscal crisis of the social democratic welfare state in most other developed countries. Instead, it reflects a modern perversion of Australia’s traditional labour-market culture, traditions and institutions.
Prime ministers normally would claim to be governing for all the people. But Ms Gillard’s declaration to last month’s Australian Workers Union conference that she heads a “Labor” government rather than a social democrat or progressive party, and her rhetorical assault on foreign workers, narrowed the interests she represents to a trade union movement in structural decline. Over the past two decades, trade-union membership has slumped from more than 40 per cent of the workforce to 18 per cent, and only 13 per cent in the private sector.
…Even former ACTU president Bob Hawke complains that the unions are almost “suffocating” Labor. As trade-union influence has become less ideological after the end of the Cold War, it has become more concerned with patronage and power. The draining of meaning has left the party more exposed to external infection, such as Eddie Obeid in NSW, and the internal Health Services Union scandal.
…As former ACTU vice-president Anna Booth has written, Australia’s industrial relations system remains an exercise in institutionalised conflict. Rooted in the class divisions of the 1890s depression, the unions assert that a fundamental power imbalance between labour and capital demands redistribution of a “fair share” to workers. They persist even though technological change, mass affluence, a shareholder democracy and fundamental social change have made them redundant and even counterproductive.
Let’s take a moment to recall how this government blew itself up.
- Kevin Rudd is elected and flies high on a platform of fiscal conservatism and reform aimed at climate change, the NBN and winding back Work Choices.
- Rudd manages the GFC well in the moment but overdoes the bailouts for banks and households (and property developers had he been allowed). He remains popular.
- Rudd allows business to water down CPRS then he back flips completely on climate change reform and his polls fall heavily.
- Rudd proves a poor communicator as his “moral challenge of a generation” fades into politicking.
- Rudd introduces RSPT overly quickly, his polls fall further and before he finds a solution is dumped by a party spooked by a mining PR campaign.
- Gillard dumps RSPT in favour of the mining-authored MRRT.
- Gillard is re-elected in a minority government with a much reduced majority (obviously).
- Gillard introduces carbon pricing reform process and polls fall further again. She also introduces reregulation of the labour market (which I disagree with on many points).
- Carbon pricing is hysterically attacked by Opposition (labour market is barely mentioned and reform hardly resisted).
- Carbon pricing proves benign. Gillard’s polls improve as rate cuts flow.
- Gillard proves a poorer communicator even than Rudd and she struggles to regain momentum as her leadership is undermined by the former leader.
- Gillard offers licorice all sorts policies in early election (including sops for unions).
There is a lack of ideological conviction in this, yes. But the consistent theme is not slavish adherence to labour union interests. Quite the opposite. Most of Labor’s woes stem from a slavish adherence to appeasing individual businesses. The banks were bailed out. Carbon polluters were appeased. The miners were appeased. Telstra was appeased. Car manufacturers were appeased. Carbon polluters were compensated again. Each appeasement of the Nanny State undermined the leader anew, and yes, the national interest has come a distant second.
The government has killed itself by giving in to individual capitalists, not unions. Why is hard to know. My own theory is that because most of Labor’s recent leaders have risen from state politics, they learned the wrong trade. Running states is all about managing stakeholder interests. Running the country is about stomping on stakeholders in the national interest. An associated explanation is that Kevin Rudd’s Nanny State became the unshakable ideology of the government.
The Eddie Obeid example used by the AFR proves the point again. The motive here is capital, simply on that occasion, to have more of it for oneself. The AFR’s bias on this issue is another example. It’s job should be to protect the structures that preserve private enterprise, not to protect individual private enterprises or sectional interests.
Modern Labor occupies the centre of political discourse easily enough. Meanwhile, to appear different, those on the Right have been driven to extremes that see them extol cheap libertarianism that is nothing more than a fig leaf for business interests propaganda and has nothing whatsoever to do with the national interest. Labor gave into this loon pond and drowned.
