A tale of two Labors

The ALP has a problem with its supporters’ divided interests, a chasm nobody knows how to bridge.

Anthonty Albanese said on Friday he aimed to change “the culture of our party” by restoring trust, respect and aspiration as Labor virtue.

The Labor Party now resembles two rival constituencies fighting each other — their origins embedded in the party’s past and its ­future — a conflict that extinguished Labor’s hopes at the May election and a chasm that nobody knows how to bridge.

This week the 91-page review of Labor’s 2019 election loss chaired by former minister Craig Emerson and former South Australian premier Jay Weatherill ­offered a devastating assessment of Labor’s campaign blunders under Bill Shorten, but the report was almost devoid of any solution to Labor’s crisis of competing identities.

In the end the report backed the Labor status quo. It confirmed Labor as a permanent party of dual identities. It believes Labor has 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 while it argues that Labor’s great challenge is to rediscover and win back its traditional, lower-­income workers in the suburbs and the regions.

Anthony Albanese and his frontbench share the same conclusion. They embrace the review’s bedrock assumptions. The task Albanese and the Emerson-Weatherill review have set Labor is heroic: it must reconcile the cultural tension — certain to intensify — between urban, well-off, self-righteous progressives and the alienated, more socially conservative workers facing poorer incomes and weaker services.

Albanese said on Friday he aimed to change “the culture of our party” by restoring trust, respect and aspiration as Labor virtues. He wants core changes to the policy agenda and platform. He has defined a timetable for renewal and outlined the policy principles that will define Labor under his leadership: jobs and the economy, a fair Australia, infrastructure, climate change action and national security. The pivotal questions for Albanese are: what are the cultural changes he envis­ages and is he capable of integrating the rival constituencies that now ­define the ALP?

This is a test most social democratic parties around the world have failed. The key to grasping Labor’s dilemma lies in the difference between tactics and identity. The Emerson-Weatherill review is about as frank as any published critique can be of a party’s election loss. It is lethal on the 2019 campaign blunders and the failure of Shorten as leader, with strong messages on how Labor must ­rethink its tactics, policies and ­organisation.

The narrative is as follows: Labor must reposition to prioritise jobs, wages and economic growth; it must win back those lost working class “quiet Laborite” voters; it must be more sceptical of complex and cluttered big-spending agendas playing to “grievance” stakeholders; it must end the “class warfare” mantra and co-operate with business; it needs to focus on the real concerns of working Australians afflicted by technological and economic disruption; it cannot abandon its commitments to climate change and social justice because this is Labor’s core business; it needs to have a simpler, persuasive message at the next election; and it must have a better campaign, research and polling structure next time.

In an analysis that is competent but flawed, the review finds Labor lost the election for three main reasons. First, it had no ­coherent strategy, partly a function of arrogance at expected victory. The report, incredibly, says: “We could not find any docu­mented strategy that had been discussed, contested and agreed upon across the campaign organisation, the leadership and the wider Labor Party” — a lethal condemnation of the leader and ­national secretary.

Second, Labor failed completely to adapt to the reality that it faced in Scott Morrison a new opponent, another sign of arrogance. The report says there was no “serious evaluation of the threat the shift to Morrison posed” — another incredible finding. Third, it focuses on Shorten’s unpopularity. While he led a united and disciplined team, his personal standing was weak. It soft-pedals the core problem here: lack of trust in Shorten.

The report, however, misses one of the most critical factors in Labor’s election loss that has got almost no mention from the political media in the six months since the poll. It is a revealing political blind spot that goes to Labor’s central dilemma: Morrison won on values. The election was an intense ideological and values conflict. Shorten and Morrison offered not just competing policies. Each day they sold their policies on the basis of competing values.

Yet Labor seems incapable of identifying this critical underlying reality — a majority of the voters rejected Labor’s values and preferred the Coalition’s values. If you fail to grasp this you cannot understand Morrison’s victory or what is now happening in politics.

This penetrates to Labor’s identity dilemma. The values of cosmopolitan, better-off progressives are different from and, in many cases, in conflict with once traditional ALP working voters in the outer suburbs and regions. It is easy to argue Labor must reconnect with the working voters who were once its core constituency but this means reconciling almost irreconcilable value systems.

The Emerson-Weatherill report touches on the problem but is feeble in its analysis and ­absence of any solution (not its brief anyway). Alluding to the progressive sectional interests that are colonising Labor, the report says: “The Labor Party has become a natural home for these diverse interests and concerns, including gender equality, the LGBTQI+ community, racial equality and environmentalism.

“Working people experiencing the dislocation caused by new technologies and globalisation could lose faith in Labor if they do not believe Labor is responding to their issues but is focusing on ­issues not of concern to them, or in some cases are actively against their interests. Care needs to be taken to avoid Labor becoming a grievance-focused organisation. This approach leads to a culture of moving from one issue to the next, leading to the formulation of myriad policies that respond to a broad range of grievances.”

This fate befell Labor at the election. The threat has ­arrived. In truth, Labor’s identity as a political party has been transformed during the past decade. The report says the average swing to Labor in the 20 seats with the ­highest portion of university graduates enjoying high incomes was 3.78 per cent, This contrasts with the 4.22 per cent swing against Labor in the 20 seats with the lowest representation of university graduates and poor incomes.

The 2019 story is that Labor failed to win enough votes in the former category to offset the votes it lost in the latter category. The ­dilemma facing Labor is explicit in the review. It says Labor’s ­“future success as a progressive party” is vital and that it cannot abandon “principled positions” on climate change and concerns on race, religion and sexuality.

That sounds fine but it ignores political reality: progressivism is becoming a much more aggressive and intolerant movement. It seeks a new moral order by changing the idea of what is virtuous. ­Because it aspires to change norms, by definition it breeds ­social division. And it is becoming a more assertive movement ­embracing more extreme stances on climate change, identity politics, inclusion and hostility ­towards Christianity. This has grave implications for Labor.

At the same time the review identifies the lost voters Labor must regain to win: lower-income working people; vulnerable ­workers in outer metropolitan, ­regional and rural communities where trust in politicians is low; coalmining communities; Christians; Chinese-Australians; and Queenslanders from the most ­decentralised, culturally conservative state with a mining ethos.

The report says “identifying as Christian was associated with a swing against Labor”. It says: “Coalmine workers and those working in allied industries such as wholesale trade, electricity, gas, water and waste, manufacturing and agriculture, forestry and ­fishing swung strongly against Labor.” Labor’s position on Adani “sent a message to workers and their families in central and north Queensland that Labor did not value them or the work they do, a problem magnified by the Stop Adani Convoy.” In Tasmania, Labor was damaged by its state links to the Greens, the Labor-Greens agreement that underpinned the previous state ALP government, with many voters in northern Tasmania viewing the Greens “as ­implacably hostile to their interests, values and ­livelihoods”.

In short, a careful reading of the report only exposes the ­immense challenge in reconciling its vision: staying true to the progressive cultural dynamic yet ­regaining the lost voters in suburbs and regions alienated from Labor’s contemporary language, values and outlook.

The tactical and communications revamp the report wants makes sense but it has little to say about how to manage the crisis of competing Labor identities. The meaning of the 2019 election ­remains ambiguous — it is the springboard for a successful Labor rethink or signals the ­demise of Labor, a party unable to resolve its competing identities as it succumbs to the decline besetting other centre-left parties around the world.

Australia does not suffer to the same extent the backlash from disadvantaged and anti-immigrant workers that is manifested in the US and Britain in the Trump and Brexit phenomena. Yet similar forces are at work in this country and likely to become more potent.

Referring to the Socialist Party of France and the SPD in Germany, the review says: “These two progressive European parties have suffered an unprecedented loss of support, having been identified with cosmopolitan internationalism and positioned as opposed to nationalism. Cosmopolitanism is characterised by inner-urban demography, articulate discourse, social and cultural mobility, celebration of diversity, tolerance of ambiguity, internationalism and, usually, privileged-class position.

“Its spokespersons and supporters enjoy high levels of education and are more likely to be secular humanists or agnostic rather than people of faith.

“Labor has been grappling with these contending forces in Australian politics.”

The problem that the report does not really confront is that much of the ALP rank and file are true progressives — they oppose tough border protection and ­national border sovereignty; they want the closure of coalmines and oppose Adani; they want an ­expanded program of government spending addressing grievance and inequality; they are post-­materialistic in outlook and wary of the side effects of economic growth; and they back action in terms of sex, gender and race that extends well into the realm of divisive identity politics.

The review correctly argues that in the current global and domestic context of uncertainty many people want reassurance. Indeed, they are hungry for reassurance. But Labor is not offering reassurance the way Bob Hawke did when he won in 1983 or the way Kevin Rudd did when he won in 2007.

This is because Labor no longer stands for reassurance courtesy of its dual identities. Progressives ­demand change and more change, not reassurance. The central theme of Shorten’s campaign was huge across-the-board change when the Australian people wanted better government, less insecurity and more reassurance, not massive change.

The review is guilty of a serious oversight in not highlighting Labor’s major and specific failure: its false diagnosis that it was time for a hefty change and lurch to the left in Australia in economic, social and cultural dimensions. This was a classic case of Labor listening to its own people, not the voters it needed to sway in marginal seats.

There is evidence the collapse in voter trust of politicians hurts Labor more than the Coalition. Because Labor is the party of change, it attracts more suspicion, particularly when it is advancing complex tax and social engineering changes in programs and policies.

Morrison is deeply seized by this idea and raised it in his interview with The Australian a week from election day.

In confronting the conundrum of competing constituencies, the review says: “The dilemma is not easy to resolve. It cannot be ­resolved simply by choosing one constituency over another. Labor cannot abandon its commitment to social justice but it must reconnect with low-income voters in the outer suburbs and regions.

“This challenge must be ­approached on an issue by issue, region by region basis with the confidence that Labor, by drawing on its values, can find a way of building common ground with what, on occasion, appear to be competing constituencies. Success in resolving this dilemma will first require Labor to acknowledge it exists. It will require Labor to ­devote the necessary time and ­energy as a party to address it.”

Revealing the tactical false trail on which Labor has embarked, the review says the party appears to be driven “by a desire to draw civil society organisations and progressive constituencies closer to Labor”. In short, the party is deluded enough to think that such incorporation of progressive interest groups into the party, along with acceptance of much of their special interest agendas, is the way to voter maximisation when it has been the road to defeat.

This technique has made Labor far more into the party of the urban progressives at the ­expense of the outer suburbs, the regions, Queensland and much of the west.

“Success is likely to require a campaign culture that is less centralised and encourages a greater diversity of views and more robust internal debates,” the report says in an extremely challenging conclusion. Labor needs to integrate far better its local approaches with a national interest framework.

Ultimately, the report is optimistic, perhaps too optimistic. It asserts “there is no compelling ­evidence the election loss was an adverse reflection on Labor’s core values”.

Really? With Labor having won majority government at only one of the past nine elections we are constantly told its values are not the problem. Well, the results don’t suggest this. Labor is trying to convince itself. It cannot face the prospect its values are basic to poor election performances.