Shorten delivers last rites to the Hawke-Keating model

What little was left of the traditional Labor model under the Keating and Hawke governments died with Bill Shorten’s speech to the press club yesterday.

The Labor leader delivered a hollow but unquestionably populist manifesto that sought to tap the rich vein of discontent in the community.

In defining Labor’s vision for the year ahead, Shorten borrowed from the playbook of the radical UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who used to great effect the concept of the “left-behind society” by exploiting class envy in an appeal to the disaffected.

It almost won Corbyn an election.

In the end, it may well do the same for Shorten.

In all its concavity, Shorten framed a platform for the political battle ahead that was unapologetic in its populism if rich in contradiction.

The speech was a vision of an empowered union movement and interventionist government based on a bombastic class-driven promise to carve up and redistribute Australia’s wealth by taxing high income workers more and everybody else less.

The rhetoric around the disenfranchised drew an obvious ring around low-income workers, welfare recipients, students and pensioners.

These have become the Labor “dependants”.

Where Julia Gillard and Wayne Swan drew the income line between the haves and have nots at $150k, Shorten has lowered the bar to $87k.

This is the new battleground where he believes the cost of living debate will be won or lost, the new “left-behind society”.

Ironically, this populism appears aimed at a large percentage of people who end up paying little or no tax.

It would have been a folly to expect that an Opposition Leader at this stage of the political cycle would offer anything more than hints as to the enabling policies that would deliver on this quixotic dream.

What hints there were included a legislated cap on private health insurance premiums, reversing company tax cuts and re-regulating the Labor market.

On energy policy, Shorten appeared to suggest the path to lowering energy prices was to build more wind farms.

His speech demonstrated how far the ideological ballast has shifted to the left both in ideology and rhetoric under his leadership, yet he spoke directly to the issues that preoccupy the minds of most Australians.