As they begin a new parliamentary term it would be churlish not to acknowledge the achievement of Anthony Albanese and the Labor Party. They have a big parliamentary majority. Ours is a parliamentary system, so that’s what’s required.
And yet, it’s the counter-intuitive, perhaps contra mundum, idea of this column that the centre left is in crisis around the democratic world. The reason for this crisis is simple. Everything the centre left offers programmatically is bad for poor people especially, but for the societies more generally that the centre left claims to serve.
The fact of a big election win doesn’t of itself contradict the reality that the policy program of the centre left is disastrous, especially for the poor.
Before analysing why this is so, let me offer three examples of centre left governments elected handsomely which then failed dismally in office.
Joe Biden won 81 million votes, the most any candidate for the presidency of the US has ever won, and yet his presidency was disastrous, on illegal immigration, inflation, energy costs, social cohesion and much else. As a result, Donald Trump won a historic victory straight after Biden. Biden’s program was uncannily similar to Albanese’s.
Example two is Keir Starmer’s Labour government in Britain. Like the Albanese government, it received a low primary vote but in the translation of votes to seats, like the Albanese government, won a huge parliamentary majority. Yet now the Starmer government is shockingly unpopular and is consistently polling behind Nigel Farage’s Reform Party.
It’s a long way to an election, but if one were held now, Farage could very well be PM. Starmer has failed in budget repair, welfare reform and immigration control.
Example number three, less relevant because it’s not contemporary, but well worth considering, is Gough Whitlam’s government. In 1972, Whitlam won a handsome victory and seemed the way of the future.
His government was a rollicking shambles from the start but he won a narrow re-election in 1974, mainly because the opposition leader, Billy Snedden, was so hopeless. In 1975 Whitlam suffered the greatest electoral landslide drubbing in Australian political history. He stayed on as opposition leader and got almost as bad a result in 1977.
All this shows that a government which looks well set can quickly collapse, but there needs to be a credible, or at least slightly likeable or charismatic, opposition leader.
The deeper problem for contemporary centre left parties is this. Their program does gain some initial popularity because it involves massively increased government spending and the recipients of that spending like it for a while. But the underlying truth is that every big idea the left has had in the past 40 years runs in some way against human nature. Because the left, since it parted ways with Western tradition, has been trying to refashion humanity to fit the various ideological constructs which it itself very often doesn’t fully understand.
Because these ideas typically are so radically against the real nature of human life, they hit people with fewer resources harder than they hit people with lots of resources, even when their purpose is ostensibly redistribution.
Consider just a few of the left’s big ideas over the past couple of decades. The nation has just decided to go back to phonics in the teaching of literacy to our kids. I’m old enough that I was actually taught to read using phonics. It’s a great system. You sound the letters out. It gives kids a good idea of letters, combinations of letters which produce sounds, and the structure of words and language.
The education left, a subset of the ideological left, as part of the grand left project of remaking society, rebelled against all traditional forms of learning. With a defective understanding of humanity, they pioneered the idea of whole language approaches. Kids would just see whole words and recognise them semi-spontaneously.
The predictable result was a disastrous collapse in literacy standards, colossal decline on international literary tables for Australia, and a slow coming back to what our grandparents knew perfectly well. The chief victims were poor kids. Rich kids had private educational resources that overcame this ideological deformity in learning.
Consider immigration. Australia, the US and Britain, too, are all immigrant societies. People rightly accept immigration well and all three societies are naturally welcoming to newcomers. But in each society the left thinks there is something illegitimate about the nation state, especially Western nation states. Therefore they believe the state has no right to control its borders. Thus in all three societies you got vast and uncontrolled illegal immigration. Some of the people who came in had great difficulty settling, but more generally the sheer numbers overwhelmed the society.
The people who suffered most were not the new-class, affluent, centre left political leaders, staffers, academics and bureaucrats. They live in insulated affluent suburbs. People in working class suburbs suffer the greatest ill effect of these policies in competition for entry level jobs and sometimes in crime rates.
Consider government spending and inflation. The left thinks governments should always spend more on social programs. Many of these programs are ineffective or actually harmful, again because of the left’s fundamental misunderstandings about human nature.
But in purely economic terms, this spending always leads to big deficits and big inflation. Big deficits lead to huge interest bills, which is tax money that could be spent on something more useful. But the spending also always leads to inflation, which hurts poor people much more than it hurts wealthy people.
Consider the whole net zero green energy fantasy. As my colleague Chris Uhlmann described in The Weekend Australian on Saturday, there is no significant international movement to net zero. Fossil fuels account for about the same proportion of global energy as they have for decades.
But by taking net zero – which is essentially a fantasy concept, a typical ideological construct without application in the real world – seriously, centre left governments guarantee vastly higher energy prices. This hurts the poor in two obvious ways. They can’t afford higher energy prices. And the destruction of industry kills both entry level jobs and long term career jobs for non-university graduates.
Speaking of graduates, forgiving HECS debt is a classic anti-poor policy, because many more middle class kids go to uni than working class kids, and they generally receive higher incomes as a result.
There is really a left-wing war against the poor, evident in a thousand policy areas and big ideas that are bad ideas. Winning one election well does not remotely guarantee policy success. And left-wing policy failure always hurts the poor.
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