The ALP’s split personality vacates the middle ground

A feminist ideas festival in Melbourne at the weekend promised to inject “nuance” into debate. The Egyptian-American commentator Mona Eltahawy’s contribution was to call Scott Morrison a “white supremacist Christian evangelical” and a “wannabe Trump”. On ABC TV’s Q&A program last week she chanted “f..k the patriarchy!” Her Twitter account shows how to sign this in Auslan. That’s the nuance. Otherwise, it’s the same political pantomime, just a different stage. We’re supposed to cheer wildly or shut up, but no sensible adult believes this glib sloganeering makes the world a better place. Brendan O’Neill had it right in Inquirer when he said: “This is a woke form of blacking-up, where middle-class people self-identify (to use politically correct language) as oppressed to improve their social standing in PC circles and give themselves the right to lecture the rest of us, especially white men, about how dumb and prejudiced we are.” It looked like identity politics was “the revenge of the elites against the masses”.

It’s a problem of the wider political culture, and one that should be front-of-mind for the post-review Labor Party. As Paul Kelly wrote at the weekend, the ALP sees no option but to remain “ a champion of progressivism, the tertiary-educated, high-income cosmopolitans focused on climate change, social justice, inclusion and, increasingly, identity politics”. Yet as the new leader, Anthony Albanese hopes to bring back into the fold those more traditional Labor loyalists who have more in common with Mr Morrison’s “quiet Australians”. It will be difficult to square this circle. If progressive Labor has a slogan, it’s “F..k the mainstream!”

This New Left project does not want to consult, persuade or reassure. It has little interest in broad alliances or trade-offs. From its position of purity, progressivism has found the mainstream guilty of various isms and phobias, and has already begun “reform” by means of institutional capture, especially in education, “diversity” diktats and speech codes. Regular folk know when their views and interests are of no account. For every old Laborite who gave canvassers an earful in the May election campaign, half a dozen would have seen no point in saying anything at all, and quietly channelled their indignation into a protest vote. When progressive elites become so disconnected from the ordinary mass — a gulf widened by social media — the result can be a rude awakening by political eruption. It should be obvious that a fundamental clash of values like this cannot be resolved with tweaks to messaging, although the political vocabulary and tone chosen by leaders can be revealing.

On the ABC TV Insiders program on Sunday Mr Albanese emphasised with justification his record of acknowledging that class war abuse of job creators as “the top end of town” is hardly reassuring for their employees. But the post-election report’s advice for Labor to “adopt the language of inclusion” is tone deaf. Inclusive language, like diversity, is a code word of progressivism which seeks to reinforce likemindedness and exclude dissent. At universities, for example, diversity is confined to identity politics, and rejects any political opinion that is not progressive. So, Mr Albanese will face real resistance as he attempts to drag the party’s political offering back to the middle ground.

That’s where Mr Morrison won the 2019 election and that’s where he is comfortably governing; Eltahawy is clueless in trying to smear the PM as an extremist. Personal faith, allied to pragmatic and competent conservatism in office, is not alien or disconcerting to most Australians. Their key concerns are a robust economy that rewards effort and enables families to get ahead, government that sets fair rules allowing small business to prosper alongside big corporates, prudent national security and border control, affordable healthcare and quality education. They don’t like extreme rhetoric and are open to moderate social change which is well explained and properly debated.

Mr Albanese hit the right note at the National Press Club last week — “Strong economy, jobs at the forefront … and only then will you get a mandate to do the sort of social justice provisions, environmental reform and other reforms that are needed.” Even then he will have to distinguish true social justice from counterfeit progressivism that is a rent-seeking drag on a prosperous economy. Wealth generation must come first.