Labor is the original party of nationalism in Australia. So what went wrong?

The ALP has a long history of putting Australia first but changing demographics and anti-Australian leftist sentiments have silenced the party’s love of country.

Why isn’t the ALP the party of patriotism?

The question was put to me by a party insider a couple of weeks ago, just before the Coalition opened both barrels on Anthony Albanese over federal Labor’s perceived squeamishness on China.

The attack is ill-founded — Albo has admirably held the line on national security, and rightly offered bipartisan support for the Australian, UK, US security pact — and yet is proving effective. So why?

Certainly the history should suggest otherwise. Labor is the original party of nationalism in Australia — indeed in its early days it was so nationalist that it was openly racist.

Leader of the Opposition Anthony Albanese speaking after the Bombing of Darwin 80 years ceremony on Sunday. Picture: Floss Adams.

Former Prime Minister John Curtain was lauded for saving the nation from a foreign invasion.

More proudly, it is also the party of our greatest wartime leader John Curtin, who famously broke ties with Britain in the middle of the greatest global conflict in history and declared he would put Australia’s interests above all else.

With this single courageous act Curtin became the only prime minister in history to save Australia from foreign invasion.

No other party can lay claim to this — a Labor PM literally saved the country — and yet somehow it is the ALP, not the Coalition, which is painted as weak on national security.

So again, why?

Part of the reason may go back to Curtin’s great act. The wartime PM had no choice but to publicly, unequivocally and unapologetically turn to America.

His famous declaration of 1942 was as follows:

“Without any inhibitions of any kind, I make it quite clear that Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom.”

Former Prime Minister Paul Keating went all in on China. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Gary Ramage

Former Prime Minister Gough Whitlam was in office from 1972 until 1975. Picture: Peter Cade/Central Press/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

But of course today America is anathema to the fashionable left, sneered at by cultural elites and bizarrely despised by former titans such as Paul Keating who have gone all in on China and are now too proud, or perhaps too entangled, to concede they were wrong.

And it is a matter of pretty basic arithmetic that a nation the size of Australia cannot stand up to a nation the size of China unless it has some pretty strong and powerful allies on its side.

Thus to project any national moral strength or aggressively assert our national self-interest we must have an affinity with and affection for America as plain as Curtin declared it.

Yet clearly there are too many loud voices on the left who are anti-US and/or anti-capitalist — be they young student socialists or unreconstructed baby boomers who fondly recall the Vietnam moratoriums — for Labor’s leadership to feel it can go all the way with the USA.

Let us not forget that the person who most infamously outed Albo as being better for China wasn’t the Coalition or the CCP but a Morrison-hating former public servant.

The subtler and perhaps larger problem for Labor isn’t one of hard ideology but soft culture.

Since the Whitlam era the party has derived more and more of its support from affluent, tertiary educated professionals who see themselves as cosmopolitan globalists.

Bob Brown, God help us all, even coined the term “Earthians”.

Bob Brown Foundation at a rally in Hobart for Tarkine rainforests. Picture: Chris Kidd

For such urban elites associate patriotism is a quality associated with knuckle-dragging rednecks who hang out at Cronulla. Love of country is the new love that dare not speak its name.

This also explains the Gordian knot the party ties itself into every Australia Day.

The party leadership is always politically obliged to declare support for January 26 — not only do most Australians still want that date but support is especially high in migrant communities whose vote is vital for Labor — yet the left effectively casts celebrating Australia Day as the dying throes of irredeemable racists.

And so Labor is hogtied in how much it can declare its love for Australia even on Australia’s national day. God help it for the other 364.

But the greater question is why Labor feels it needs to pander to the loony left at all. They are hardly going to vote for the Coalition, and so once they have parked their first vote with the Greens or the CPA it will almost certainly come back to Labor anyway.

Moreover, in Queensland Labor has shown you can even give away whole electorates to the Greens in the inner city and still win in a landslide in the suburbs and regions simply by openly pivoting to the right.

Indeed, not only is the abandonment of the lunar left the only morally and intellectually sound decision, it is the only politically sound one too. Eventually more and more of Labor’s inner city seats will fall to Greens or green-tinged independents.

In order for the party to survive it must be in lock-step with the values of suburban and regional Australia.

Places where they love their family, they love their footy, and they’re not ashamed to love their country.

Watch Joe on The Blame Game — 8.30pm every Friday on Sky News