Wanted: A Labor leader capable of capturing the imagination of voters

In May 2019, Bob Hawke died. Just two months later, the great Labor speechwriter, Graham Freudenberg, died too. Before he did, he wrote a piece explaining the value of Hawke’s promise that “by 1990, no Australian child will be living in poverty”.

Freudenberg wrote the line, but Hawke “accepted unflinchingly the unspoken contract that the person who delivers the speech owns it”. Accordingly, Hawke later said he regretted it. But there were two reasons Freudenberg stood by it.

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The first was the specific policy – a new payment – that accompanied it. That policy was delivered, wrote Freudenberg, and was “a step towards a goal and an ongoing aspiration”. Not a small step, either: in 2017 the head of the Australian Council of Social Service, Dr Cassandra Goldie, told this masthead that Hawke had “reduced child poverty by a full 30 per cent. We’ve had no PM do the same since”.

The second reason was its role in Labor’s 1987 election victory. “One had to be in the Sydney Opera House to grasp the transformative effect of this promise,” wrote Freudenberg. “There was still life in the old Labor Party and it galvanised the whole campaign for a hard-won victory.”

It’s hard to imagine a Labor leader making a similar campaign promise now. That is partly a result of Hawke’s failure to deliver on his pledge, which left such rhetoric, both specific and grandiose, looking overblown. But there is another reason, which is that the Labor Party has changed. Freudenberg wrote that Hawke’s payments were “the last great Labor reform in the old Labor tradition”. Later, “the centre of Labor gravity set firmly in the broader middle class”.

Which raises an interesting question about political trade-offs. Fighting for the “broader middle class” means you offer something tangible to more voters, which may make you well liked. But that is a different thing from electrifying. Do political parties which choose to appeal to broader groups of people effectively give up their chance of exciting voters? The types of causes we think of as “inspiring” often come from fighting against injustice; fighting for a small, or voiceless, group of people. Pundits say there are “fewer votes” in such policies; they “play to the base”. But that dismisses the power of excitement.

The shift from fighting for those doing it toughest to representing the middle classes is tied to two other shifts. Campaigns have had to shift: instead of inspiring voters, centre-left parties generally try to cajole them instead. The ambition of centre-left parties has also changed. Once, there was value in arguing that society should be reshaped not through revolution, but through dramatic structural changes. But those same parties now speak to people more likely to be happy with the broad shape of things because they judge that they have benefited: they want change, but not too much. So that’s what the politicians offer them.

This goes some way to explaining the parallels between Britain’s new Labour prime minister, Keir Starmer, the new Democratic presidential nominee, Kamala Harris, and Anthony Albanese.

Last week, a profile of Harris in The New York Times described her as believing in “step-by-step change that can add up to durable transformation”. She is “focused on granular impacts over broad society shifts”. This sounds a lot like Albanese, who has repeatedly argued for embedding changes over the long term rather than making sudden moves.

Interestingly, though, Harris’ first campaign ad included the line: “We choose a future where no child lives in poverty.” And there’s policy to match. During the pandemic, America – like Australia – dramatically raised government payments to poorer people. Overnight, the number of children living in poverty halved. Harris is now pledging to restore that payment and more (as is the Republican vice-presidential candidate).

In Australia, meanwhile, longstanding child poverty advocate Toni Wren is damning: “The government is ignoring child poverty.” They don’t even say the words, she tells me. “If we don’t name it, we don’t act on it. Maybe they don’t want to do anything about it so they don’t name it.” I say to Wren that she sounds more frustrated than previously. She agrees: “They’ve had two more years.”

A recent report commissioned by the Valuing Children Initiative found the number of children living in poverty rose by 102,000 between 2021 and 2022. The authors say that number has risen further still due to inflation, with the poorest renters seeing some of the highest rent rises.

The importance of assets to a sense of security is one reason I was surprised by the largely positive spin that attended a recent Productivity Commission report. Most attention went to Australia’s generally impressive income mobility. But the more detailed picture was more grim, with poorer people more likely to stay poor. Especially when wealth was included: “Looking at wealth mobility in isolation, around half of the people in the top or bottom two wealth deciles remained there over two decades later.”

Labor has taken some limited actions: raising JobSeeker, expanding eligibility for payments, providing services to poorer areas. The precise impact is hard to measure.

Last week, Oxford professor Sabina Alkire visited Australia, meeting with MPs and putting forward the case for a multidimensional poverty index that takes into account factors – such as mental health or low work experience – missed by a purely financial measure. But the embarrassing fact is that Australia does not even have an official financial definition of poverty. The importance of measurement, Alkire said in a speech last week, is that it makes “poverty visible”.

This has a similarity with Wren’s formulation. Together, they suggest you have to name the problem, and give it specificity, to get action. This, in turn, is a fair description of what Hawke did. He didn’t fix the problem, but giving voice to it went a long way.

Hawke’s regret about his promise hurt Freudenberg. But the speechwriter could live with that, he wrote, when he thought of the families whose lives improved – and of the line’s “pivotal role in the famous Labor victory of 1987”.

Whether such sentiments can still excite Australians, and whether exciting voters is something politicians are still interested in, is unclear.

Sean Kelly is a regular columnist and a former adviser to Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd.

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