James Campbell: Claire O’Neil identifies the real problem with Labor
Labor MP Claire O’Neil has pinpointed many of the party’s problems but should go further on the enjoyment it takes in talking down to the public, writes James Campbell.
James Campbell
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While this might be a bad time for the Australian Labor Party in Canberra, it’s a great time for connoisseurs of Labor navel gazing.
Self-reflection and self-criticism in the wake of defeat has always been a Labor speciality, for the simple reason that its members have had so many defeats and being out of power gives them time to reflect on what went wrong.
It’s early days — less than six months since the most recent sad event — but 2019 has already produced a vintage crop of bitter wisdom gleaned in hindsight. In addition to Anthony Albanese, Bill Shorten, Jim Chalmers and Richard Marles, there have been cries from the heart from Joel Fitzgibbon, Mark Buttler and many others.
This week it was turn of Clare O’Neil, shadow minister for innovation, technology and the future of work, to give us her thoughts on whither Labor. And to give her due, she hasn’t mucked about.
Where others had talked about the problems with the campaign team, the leader, the policies, the polling and advertising, O’Neil correctly identified the real problem, which is that fewer and fewer people seem to like the Labor Party.
Take voters in the Queensland seat of Capricornia which, as O’Neil points out, in 2007 gave 56 per cent of their first preferences to Labor. This year Labor got less than a quarter of that number. That, as she says, is the pointy end of a bigger problem which is that since the 1970s, while “Labor’s primary vote has bounced around a bit” the trend has been “a slow persistent decline of almost 1 per cent per election”.
In other words, while all the things that went wrong with this election can explain a lot, they can’t explain what has gone wrong over the past 40 years. Putting on her management consultant hat — before parliament she was employed by the corporate witchdoctors McKinsey — O’Neil suggested that perhaps it was time for Labor to move beyond debates about whether it should move Left or Right, or to put it in the strange and beautiful language of her former profession, “if that framework is relevant or useful”.
The emerging fault lines in 2019, she argues, are not between Right and Left but between “winners and losers in a digital economy” which favours the city over the country, as well as “Australians who want the community to look more like it did in the past and those who love and value change”.
There’s also an emerging division between “people who are worried about global interdependence and those who see opportunity for global influence” as well as “those who relish economic change and those who resist it” and “young people who feel locked out of a life enjoyed by older generations and those who think that kids have never had it better”.
If that wasn’t enough, there’s apparently also a cleavage between open and closed, authoritarian and decentralised, the elites and the masses, and Collingwood and Richmond. Actually I made the last one up, but you get the drift: the divisions these days are not primarily about economics as they once were but a whole new set of concerns.
In plain English, O’Neil is arguing that in more and more matters, we agree on less and less. And what has made the problem worse and worse is the internet.
“Algorithms on YouTube and Facebook can turn someone with questions about vaccinating their child into an ardent conspiracy theorist in a matter of hours,” O’Neil argues, while “some of the most violent terrorists started out not particularly committed to any ideology and became radicalised online relatively quickly”.
That is true alas, but not something for which there is a solution on the horizon. Indeed, it’s going to get worse as Generation X, the last to be raised in a world in which the mass media created an agreed-upon-set-of-facts, passes away.
As a journalist I have thought for a long time that it is no co-incidence that mass political parties rose in parallel with the mass media and that we appear to be going down the plughole of history together.
O’NEIL, of course, is approaching this fracturing consensus from Labor’s point of view; that is to say, what can be done to get as many Australians as possible back in the cart. Which is why the immediate focus of the speech was on her admission that many people feel that progressives talk down to them. Which is undoubtedly true.
That it is being pointed out by a Harvard-educated McKinsey management consultant makes it no less so, although it is exquisitely funny.
Moreover, while O’Neil thinks there is “a culture developing in the progressive movement where membership is granted with a box of ideas and if you don’t accept one of the ideas in the box, you do not merely have a different opinion, you are obviously wrong, probably stupid and possibly subhuman”, I would go further.
It strikes me as an outsider that denouncing people who disagree who with you is not a bug of the progressive movement but a central feature — and it’s going to take more than a few speeches to stop them looking down their noses at the rest of us.
James Campbell is a Herald Sun columnist