Labor faces crucial test on Greens values

FROM carbon pricing to social values, Gillard must stay true to her party.

THE Labor Party is facing a crisis of values. This is highlighted by the struggle on the Left of politics between Labor and the Greens, where Labor needs to prevail this term in the coming battle of ideas.

Forget any notion that the Victorian election terminates the Greens' push. That's nonsense.

The setback the Greens experienced last weekend in Victoria has nothing to do with Labor's strength and everything to do with the Liberal Party's preference decision against them.

While the Greens failed to win lower house seats, they polled 10.9 per cent of the vote compared with Labor's 36.3 per cent.

The threat posed by the Greens to the Labor Party remains as potent as ever while senator Bob Brown stays federal leader.

The Greens are more formidable than the Australian Democrats were and represent deep cultural and ideological currents in Australian and Western society.

The Coalition, in broad terms, knows where it stands.

It rejects Greens values centred on prioritising environmental action over the economy, higher taxes, more government controls, permissive borders, severing the US alliance, curtailing overseas military deployments, social progressivism in sexual and lifestyle choices, and an assertive secularism that breaks from the religious tradition still underpinning Western institutions.

The Labor Party, by contrast, looks confused and divided in its response to the values represented by the Greens.

Early impressions are that Labor sentiment is moving to the Left to protect its progressive wing, but this is not necessarily Julia Gillard's own judgment.

Former NSW Labor treasurer Michael Costa offered the critical insight in The Australian Literary Review, saying that "Labor will never be able to match the Greens in a rhetorical battle on so-called social justice".

He's right. The Greens will outbid Labor on climate change action and any item in the progressive social agenda.

The coming Labor-Green contest will be dominated by two dimensions: climate change focused on pricing carbon and social libertarianism focused on the Greens-driven agenda of euthanasia and gay marriage.

In 2009 the Greens won the climate-change debate against Labor. Gillard's success as prime minister will hinge upon her ability to reverse this result. The Greens carried the view that Kevin Rudd's scheme, with its aid for electricity generators and trade, exposed industry, while Labor's 5 per cent emission reduction target was a sellout. Rudd's scheme was trashed in the media and dismissed by much of the climate-change lobby as the prelude to being sunk by Tony Abbott.

The second round is now occurring and this week Climate Change Minister Greg Combet spelt out Labor's approach. He sees pricing carbon as a reform that will strengthen, not weaken, our economy. He doubts a binding global agreement will be achieved any time soon.

He argues the 5 per cent reduction target (by 2020 off 2000 levels) is more ambitious in per capita terms than Europe's and the conditions are not met for Australia to lift this target.

Combet's argument is that Australia should move to price carbon next year and the Greens must be held to account for their decision.

The test he poses for the Greens is whether they "prove themselves capable of playing a constructive hand to achieve fundamental environmental and economic reform". And Combet keeps reminding the media that the Greens' torpedoing of Rudd's scheme last year "received surprisingly little analysis".

Gillard closed the circle this week. She announced, bluntly, ruthlessly, that 2011 "is the year Australia decides on carbon pricing". Blind Freddie can decode this. Gillard is naming 2011 as the year the Greens become either constructive collaborators or wreckers.

If they fail to negotiate Combet's bill then war between Labor and the Greens is inevitable.

In any such conflict Gillard must win the values debate. She needs to hold the voting majority behind her policy because Gillard cannot repeat Rudd's blunder last April of walking away from his commitment.

Gillard, in effect, is doing what Paul Keating advised on the ABC's Lateline on Thursday, when he said "the big parties do the big changes".

That is, Labor must operate from strength and live with the consequences. It is big picture politics. Having taken her stand, Gillard cannot retreat because of the skeleton in her cupboard.

That skeleton is the advice she gave Rudd earlier this year to abandon his climate change policy. Gillard told senior cabinet colleagues she would not and could not support Rudd's scheme, that is, the emissions trading scheme, going into the 2010 election. She was unequivocal.

She insisted upon this with the force of her office as Deputy Prime Minister, leaving Rudd little option. So her current position is a "road to Damascus" conversion meaning yet another reversal would be fatal for her.

If the bill fails next year Gillard and Combet must protect their left flank by arguing that the Greens have been utterly irresponsible, and protect their right flank against Abbott by arguing that pricing carbon is a national necessity.

In short, Labor needs to brand itself as the party of responsible climate change action. If it cannot win this battle of ideas then Labor will sink between the opposing assaults of the Greens and Coalition.

The parallel contest next year will be the Green-driven social engineering agenda. It starts with euthanasia, where Brown vows to resume debate to restore the powers of territory parliaments to legislate for euthanasia. In effect, this reverses the 1996 bill moved by Liberal MP Kevin Andrews and carried in the lower house on a 88-35 conscience vote (most dissenters being Labor MPs).

Despite its mechanics, the ultimate intent is to secure the introduction of euthanasia into Australia. This would constitute one of the most important social reforms in our history and crosses the threshold to a legal regime that sanctions killing, with little confidence that safeguards exist to reassure the sick, vulnerable, indigenous and invalid.

While a test for the entire parliament, it becomes a special test of Labor values, given Labor is in office. The question is whether Labor, as a party, has a pro-euthanasia majority in support of the Greens' campaign for a core change in Australia's values.

After euthanasia, comes the gay marriage debate. The Greens, again, have put this on the agenda and Labor has fallen into a protracted and divisive internal debate with emotions high on both sides. It is the last thing Gillard would have wanted.

For Labor's pro-gay marriage camp there is only one issue: removing another discrimination against gays. NSW senator Doug Cameron said this week the current marriage law was "wrong" and "crazy". He said Australia was a "socially progressive" nation and there would be no downside for Labor in legislating gay marriage.

However, gay marriage is not recognised as a universal human right. It involves not merely removal of a legal discrimination but changes the foundations of the most vital social institution.

This truth cannot be evaded and Labor should confront it. The point is recognised by Gillard in her election-eve interview with this newspaper.

Explaining her rejection of gay marriage, Gillard said: "For this nation, with our heritage as a Christian country, with what's defined us and continues to define us, the Marriage Act has a special status in our culture and for our community. My position appreciates that."

Her remarks, as an atheist Labor PM, are unremarkable. It is, however, a measure of how far Labor's values have changed that much of the party is now hostile to Gillard's position. This originates in two factors, tactics and values.

There is support within caucus to embrace gay marriage as a tactic to pre-empt the Greens. And the public isn't mug enough to miss this. The idea that Labor is ready to change the meaning of marriage to save its vote in inner-city seats will only invite public cynicism.

What other principle is Labor prepared to trade like a sack of potatoes?

The more substantial point relates to values. Here is the authentic commitment to gay rights that says marriage must be re-defined. Again, this would constitute one of the most pivotal changes in Labor belief since the party's inception.

And it assumes as Cameron says, that Australia is now a socially progressive country.

Indeed, it seems almost politically incorrect to even question this mantra. However, it is questioned at length in the just released John Howard memoirs. Howard explains that social conservatism was at the heart of his success as PM. Proud of what he stood for, Howard believes the social conservatism he radiated on a wide front almost daily helped him to penetrate and hold the Labor base vote and win four elections.

Now, perhaps Howard is utterly deluded. Or perhaps Labor is fooling itself, as it has done so often over the past 20 years. Labor has a history of embracing progressive causes beloved by educated activists but at odds with its working-class base, which either opposes such causes or dislikes the priority they are accorded.

Next year will see Australian households hurting and under pressure. Labor needs to consider whether this is the moment to embark upon a radical shift in its social beliefs to fit into the so-called new paradigm and astute Greens agenda-setting.