I getting a little fed up with this group think, from Aaron Patrick at the AFR:
Labor leader Bill Shorten channels leftist lions Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders in front of the cameras. In his heart he is more of a Bill Clinton or Bob Hawke, leaders who knew the only way for “left-progressives” to attain and retain power was to generate wealth, not just redistribute it.
Ask anyone on the Fake Right today and you’ll get the same monotonous answer. Bill Shorten is “radical left” and what we need is return to the Halcyon Days of Hawke and Keating.
Is Bill Shorten radical left? Give me a break:
- lifting the minimum age;
- reform to prevent health insurance gouging;
- anti-Adani corporate welfare;
- pro-mass immigration;
- negative gearing reform;
- pro-decarbonisation and gas domestic reservation.
The only policy here that is identifiable as left at all is lifting minimum wages and, as we know, that makes good sense in an environment of demand deficit, especially if it is coupled with broader policies aimed at lifting capital efficiency.
Everything else is either not political, is pro-market (or anti-monopoly) and, more to the point, pro-business as well.
Constantly invoking the Hawke/Keating reform talisman against some fictitious radical left vampire is rubbish. Hawke and Keating addressed a different and far more rigid economy, chock-o-block with regulation, vested interests and stalled productivity. Those things also need addressing today but so does the power of corporations over labour. As Keating himself said recently:
Rather than harping on about eras past, he said the country needed “a new golden age” of reform driven by these present realities and pushed by political leaders who possessed the vision to conceptualise beyond the constraints of the public service.
“Changes on a canvas of this kind are not going to drop from any department. You will not find them falling from a Treasury printer. Because of their essence, they require imagination, the principal tool that was employed in underwriting the ’80s and ’90s changes,” he said.
According to Mr Keating, governments are in danger of missing the turns and were already trailing consumers who have taken advantage of the greater choice and lower prices from the digital marketplace and “the smorgasbord of things on offer – and at their fingertips”.
“The wider phase, the grander phase, where even larger gains are to be had, is in the heavily government-influenced areas of health, aged care, education and human services,” he said.
“These are the reform horizons we should be concentrating on, and not the dross handed down from the Business Council … the whinging from the ACCIs of this world about penalty rates, when the reality of static wages growth stares us in the face.”
Does the Fake Right really believe that Hawke and Keating would not have addressed falling wages were they in power today? They governed through a period of booming wage inflation.
Don’t get me wrong. Shorten should be doing much more on productivity. But most of what he is not doing is bringing liberal market reform to the same oligarchic Fake Right that is complaining he is “radical Left”.
If anything, Shorten is camped far too close to the Fake Right and they should be bloody grateful.
