ALP must ditch the elite identity politics

IN this misguided culture war, the Labor Party needs to abandon the futility of identity politics and reconnect with middle Australia, says Mark Latham.

Former Labor leader Mark Latham.

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IN the shallow, short-term ­nature of political commentary in Australia, the only constant is leadership speculation. Once the popularly-elected Tony Abbott was forced from office last year, most media outlets turned their guns onto Bill Shorten.

The Labor Party should treat the undermining of its leader with ­contempt. If leadership changes were a solution to the party’s woes then by now, the ALP should have been ­enjoying a Menzies-style electoral ­hegemony. Already this century, Labor has had eight different leaders — an average turnover every two years.

The only one to win a majority of seats in the House of Representatives was Kevin Rudd in 2007 but then he suffered the same fate as Abbott — a prime minister elected by the people only to be deposed by a panicking party room. In our Australian democracy, the sovereignty of the electorate has been replaced by a revolving door of leadership — spun ever faster by weekly opinion polls, media king-making and factional bastardry.

The party’s core problems are structural, rather than personality-based. For the eight federal elections in the 1980s and ’90s, Labor’s primary vote averaged 43.9 per cent.

At the 2013 election, only 33.4 per cent of voters gave their first preference to the ALP — a historic low, ­replicated in recent party research.

The issue for Labor is not about leadership, it’s to answer a bigger question: what’s happened to its missing 10 per cent primary vote?

In little more than a decade, one in 10 voters have deserted the party, seemingly on a permanent basis.

My judgment is that half this amount (five per cent) has been lost on economic policy.

After the defeat of the Keating government in 1996, Kim Beazley and Simon Crean decided to abandon the Hawke/Keating legacy of open, competitive market-economics.

Just at the point when Australia was launching into its longest-ever period of growth and prosperity, the ALP frontbench gifted responsibility for this achievement to the Liberals.

The key vote on this strategy was taken at a shadow ministry meeting in Rockhampton in August 1997.

I moved an amendment opposing a Creanite protectionist push and was defeated 18 votes to one — a glorious moment of political isolation.

This was typical of my time in parliament: correct on the big policy questions (economic, Iraq, asylum seekers and Labor reform) but hopeless at managing the consequences of my correctness. For the ALP, the Beazley/Crean pivot remains a ­lingering folly.

Labor Leader Bill Shorten / Picture: Peter Wallis

As working Australians have ­become more economically aspirational, gaining access to capital and small business start-ups, they have linked this reality to Coalition policies — in many cases, abandoning the lifelong habit of voting Labor.

The economic record of the Rudd and Gillard ­governments, dominated by over-spending and deficit budgeting, did nothing to correct this ­impression. The main challenge for Labor heading into this year’s election is to convince the electorate it can manage money and enliven ­aspiration.

Shorten should announce an ALP moratorium on new expenditure measures until such time as the ­federal budget is back in surplus.

He should also purge his party of corrupt trade union officials and ­require 50 per cent of new election candidates to come from a business background.

The other half of Labor’s lost 10 per cent primary vote has been on the cultural side of politics. Over the past decade, the party has become obsessed with identity politics: judging issues via the prism of race, gender and sexuality.

Through public controversies such as the domestic violence debate, same-sex marriage and the booing of Adam Goodes, it has joined the chorus of inner-city elites depicting ­suburban Australia as inherently­ ­racist, sexist and homophobic.

Politically this has been a monumental mistake, no less damaging than the embrace of Creanite ­economics in the late 1990s.

Only a small fraction of voters live their lives through identity politics. The rest of us, the 95 per cent majority, lead an existence grounded in the practicalities of family incomes, healthcare challenges and navigating our children through the growing ­crisis in Australian public education.

Identity politics is an indulgence of the privileged few: wealthy, media-savvy propagandists inventing claims about discrimination that nobody else can see. I’ve sat in the outer at hundreds of footy games in Western Sydney and never heard a word of ­racism directed at indigenous or ­Islander players. I’ve knocked around at pubs, sporting clubs and racetracks for 40 years and I can count the number of misogynistic and homophobic comments on one hand.

The suburbs the elites talk about are ones that I don’t recognise.

We are a remarkably tolerant and inclusive multicultural society. When it comes to discrimination, the worst form of intolerance in ­Australian public life is geographic. It’s the sneering of the elites at people from the suburbs and regions; Australians who live “outside the bikeway” (the elaborate, publicly-funded cyclepaths that ring the gentrified centre of our major cities).

In this misguided culture war, Labor needs to be on the side of the 95 per cent. It needs to abandon the futility of identity politics and reconnect with middle Australia.

Its ideological reference point should be an updated class analysis: the interaction between ruling class, aspirational middle class and underclass communities. Its frontline issues should be public education, welfare reform and reduced immigration numbers, rather than gay marriage, Left-feminism and the Republic.

While it’s true, if I put this strategy to today’s shadow cabinet, I would most likely be voted down 18-1, I know, in the substance of the issue, I’m no less correct than I was in Rockhampton on the party’s ­economic direction.