Joe Hildebrand: Anthony Albanese needs to urgently lay out a strong vision or repeat Labor mistakes

Albo needs to urgently lay out a strong vision in lockstep with Australians’ proud sense of national identity and unbridled aspiration, or Labor will again be consigned to the wilderness, writes Joe Hildebrand.

The Australian Labor Party is the oldest and greatest political force in Australia.

It is also the most forgetful.

It forgets its genesis, its evolution and its achievements. And so it repeats its mistakes and erases its triumphs.

The origins of the ALP are so venerated they are shrouded by legend. One is the 1891 Queensland shearers’ strike and the mythical “Tree of Knowledge” around which workers gathered.

Not to be outdone, the NSW Labor version is that they were the original founders of the party in 1890 after the Great Maritime Strike – back when Balmain Boys didn’t cry.

Meanwhile, Victorians would argue that they had been the true originators of the Labor movement, when stonemasons laid down tools in 1856 to demand an eight-hour day while building Melbourne University, my old stomping ground.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese needs to urgently lay out a strong vision that is in lockstep with Australians’ proud sense of national identity and unbridled aspiration. Picture: NewsWire/Brenton Edwards

To which NSW Labor points to its own stonemasons’ strike of 1855.

Who is right and why is it NSW? Nobody can say. But at least this was a movement that knew where it stood and what it stood for.

At the time it was for great things such as workers’ rights and fair pay as well as bad things like banning women from the workforce and the infamous White Australia policy. But Labor evolved.

US General Douglas MacArthur with Prime Minister John Curtin. picture: Australian Archives

After self-combusting in 1931 and becoming the last party to lose first-term government – present strategists take note – Labor literally saved Australia under the world-turning leadership of John Curtin in World War II.

Curtin pulled back troops from overseas to defend our nation from Japan and declared unequivocally that we needed an alliance with the US to avoid becoming a vassal state of Tokyo.

In one of the greatest speeches ever made, he directly addressed the American people in 1942.

“Men and women of the United States, I speak to you from Australia. I speak from a united people to a united people, and my speech is aimed to serve all the people of the nations united in the struggle to save mankind.”

Those words should send shivers down the spine of every anti-American Trot who has infiltrated the party ever since.

Curtin died, and after the great Ben Chifley’s ill-considered plan to nationalise the banks, Robert Menzies swept to power in 1949 and reigned for a generation.

In the lost years that followed, the Labor Party tore itself apart. It was infested by communist rats, and fearful Catholic members fled to form the Democratic Labor Party. This infamous split cost Labor two decades in the wilderness.

Even when it finally came back into power in 1972, Gough Whitlam and his ragtag crew went too hard and too stupid and lost power less than three years later.

It wasn’t until 1983 and the advent of Hawke and Keating that Labor could form a lasting stable government, only the second since Curtin and Chifley, and the first since World War II.

So what defined these two shining aberrations of Labor Party history?

In the case of Curtin and Chifley, it was an unashamed commitment to patriotism and national security. In the case of Hawke and Keating, it was an unashamed commitment to economic reform and growth.

These are, without exception, the only two examples of Labor’s long-term success.

And yet the party forgets. It descends, in opposition especially, into the dumbest and most simplistic ideological retardations of class war, mindless activism or causes du jour.

Prime Minister Bob Hawke (right) and Treasurer Paul Keating in 1983.

The Albanese government has fought hard to shake these scales from its eyes. Anthony Albanese did well in opposition to jettison much of this detritus and rightly ran an effective small target strategy at the last election. But the catch is that, in government, Labor has a greater sense of what it is not than what it actually is.

Across the world decent, honest working people are voting for right-wing populists because they are anxious about their social status and economic survival. They crave strong values and clear solutions, often even above tangible results.

And it is fair to say that the Albanese government has struggled to define its values or its solutions.

Thus even the practical benefits it has delivered – tax cuts, higher wages, lower unemployment, free child care and TAFE, power bill relief and the reversal of an economic crisis – are failing to register because they are not bound up in a greater sense of purpose.

Much of this is because Labor’s mainstream values are constantly undermined by cliched left-wing platitudes that are about as popular as cholera in the age of Trump 2.0.

Curtin, Chifley, Hawke and Keating had visions the Australian people understood and values so clear they could be seen from space.

Albo needs to urgently lay out a strong vision that is in lockstep with Australians’ proud sense of national identity and unbridled aspiration, or Labor will again be consigned to the wilderness it knows all too well.

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