Anthony Albanese just saved the Labor Party from oblivion

By rejecting far-left “woke” politics and shooting once again for the mainstream Australia, Anthony Albanese has saved Labor from oblivion, writes Joe Hildebrand.

Anthony Albanese may not have yet saved the Australian Labor Party from opposition but he has just saved it from oblivion.

The ALP leader has made his strongest case yet for Labor to once more become the party of mainstream working Australia, with an address to National Conference that stresses jobs, jobs, jobs, and – if there’s time – more jobs.

Gone is the silly and undergraduate class-war rhetoric that improbably crept into the party under the Victorian Right hardman Bill Shorten. Gone is the climate target obsession that is the fentanyl of the party’s upper-middle green left. Albo is shooting straight for the centre and it is a bullseye he will have to hit if the party is going to survive.

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The Morrison government has shamelessly – and laudably – implemented Labor-style Keynesian economic policies to guide the nation through the coronavirus crisis with enormous success. In doing so the Coalition has almost inadvertently captured the notions of fairness and common sense that are middle Australia’s ideological heartland.

Labor can no more attack the government for this than it could attack itself. Albanese knows this, and knows Labor’s only hope at winning an election in six to 12 months’ time is to say thank you very much, we’ll take it from here. The party needs to put down the brickbats in the hope of picking up the baton.

Member for Bankstown Tania Mihailuk. Picture: Joel Carrett/AAP

It is a self-effacing but sensible approach that is at sharp odds with social media activists who are more interested in unhinged abuse and pointless hashtags than the pathway back to government. Sadly some of these would have you believe they are the voice of Labor. Were that true the party would be irreversibly doomed.

In fact Albanese has no interest in the Twitterati except for a creeping concern that they are doing his party far more harm than good.

In this he is far from alone, and a growing chorus of Labor figures are now saying publicly what they have been saying privately for a long time – the association of the party with the new “woke” left has been political poison for the ALP both federally and in the largest and once all-powerful NSW branch.

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The state’s opposition leader in waiting Chris Minns rightly said this week that the party needed to reflect the values of “the common man”, while Bankstown MP Tania Mihailuk said that perceptions of “wokeness” were toxic to voters of faith in her deeply multicultural electorate.

And from the other side of the nation West Australian Premier Mark McGowan, currently the most popular Labor leader in Australian history, pleaded with the party to embrace mainstream Australians and their values, not those of noisy sectional interests.

The first thing to go must of course be the idiocy of identity politics, a Trojan horse by which overprivileged political activists can claim oppression – sorry Harry and Meghan – or infiltrate and derail the education of our children with idiotic exercises in internalised white privilege.

A video titled ‘Got White Privilege?’ shown to NSW students.

The notion that the latter could be part of an educational program when there are thousands of children turning up to school without having had breakfast and thousands who are not turning up at all having been lost to the appalling school shutdowns last year is nothing short of a disgrace.

Moreover, just picture the moral horror show of a teacher trying to determine which students were white enough to perform the walk of shame. Would they include Jews? Greeks? Turks? Armenians? Would there be a colour chart? It’s frankly a disgusting and dangerous thought.

Labor – the great party of education – should not just disassociate itself from such madness but condemn it for the unhinged pseudo-academic wankfest that it is.

The second landmine that the party seems magnetically attracted to is the issue of climate change and the measures needed to mitigate it.

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There are few sane people who deny that climate change is real and that adapting to address it is inevitable – indeed both phenomena are already laid bare in front of us.

The real question is what Labor’s priorities should be – or, more importantly, who they should be.

Those on the green-left wing appear most concerned with appealing to international policymakers so that Australia doesn’t “embarrass itself on the world stage”. How often have we heard that phrase?

This is a passing strange obsession for a party whose purpose is to represent the interests of Australian coalminers and steelmakers and factory hands who are most under threat of being left jobless in a carbon-free utopia.

Change is indeed inevitable but the party of the worker should be obsessed with the impact on these workers and ensuring they have better jobs to go when that change comes rather than abstract arguments over what the severity of that change ought to be.

Former Prime Minister Julia Gillard in 2011. Picture: William West/AFP

Labor’s new climate spokesman Chris Bowen is already forging that path, rightly condemning the Greens for their soulless indifference for the plight of working people and their ideological extremism that blocked practical action on climate change a decade ago.

And of course the third big thing that Labor needs to get right to win back the trust of the electorate is the economy. If it cannot win people’s faith on this it will never win power.

The Australian people have always put the economy at the heart of federal elections and no other issue has punished Labor at the ballot box more. And that is because for working and middle-class Australians the economy is not some abstract capitalist monster, as imagined by amateur Marxists, but their jobs, their homes and their families. They understand how it works better than any political theorist.

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And so the great Ben Chifley was cast out when he tried to nationalise the banks in 1949, Labor spent decades in the wilderness when it was infiltrated by communists in the 1950s and ‘60s, Gough Whitlam was twice rejected in the wake of shambolic financial mismanagement in 1975 and 1977, Mark Latham went from unbackably popular to a routing in the 2004 election that ultimately gave birth to WorkChoices, Julia Gillard turned the Ruddslide into minority government in 2010 because of the absurd contortions over carbon pricing, and Bill Shorten lost the unlosable election in 2019 thanks to a tax plan that carried the whiff of class war.

The only Labor government which has had any real success in the 75 years since World War II was the Hawke-Keating era of 1983 to 1996, which thoroughly rejected socialist and protectionist ideology and instead harnessed the freight train of economic forces for the good of everyday people. They were smart, they were right, and, most importantly, they were elected.

After this week a humble true believer might dare to hope that Labor is finally back on the middle track – because all the other tracks are a dead end.