Future Labor can learn from patriotic working class past

To understand the mess it is in, the ALP must be honest: the late 1960s Whitlamite party revolution went too far.

Bill Shorten, with wife Chloe, was only the most recent Labor leader to fall short.

There are some Laborites who ­believe that their party does not fundamentally need to change. They hail from the party’s Left and Right. In their view, Labor merely needs a more popular leader, its policy settings require the slightest tinkering here and there, its communication of those policies expressed in simpler but not radically different language. Labor must make the Morrison government the issue.

Such a response will not suffice. As a reminder, Labor has won one of the past nine federal elections (with one draw). By the time it gets another chance to break the drought, it will be close to 15 years since it won a majority.

It has won national government from the various incarnations of anti-Labor at an election just four times in the past 100 years and only three times since World War II.

Those three times, the leader (Gough Whitlam, Bob Hawke and Kevin Rudd) has been more popular and more centrist than the party they led. Each leader’s implicit bargain with the electorate was that they would control and moderate the party, they were in charge and would govern for all.

The same is true of John Curtin’s wartime leadership, which resulted in Labor’s greatest victory — in 1943. The brutal truth for true believers is this: as far as the national electorate is concerned, Labor has had one very good government (Hawke) since 1945 and two (Curtin and Hawke) in a century.

The idea that modern Labor is in a prolonged crisis is not a newfangled view. The CFMEU’s 2004 Brompton report, published in the wake of that year’s crushing election defeat, argued: “There is a vast gulf between the beliefs and aspirations of working-class Australians … and the professional political class running the Labor Party. Until such time as the Labor Party machine realises that they have a fundamental disconnection with large sections of mainstream Australia, they will continue to face electoral isolation … equivalent to the lost years of the 1950s and 60s.”

Labor members constitute 0.02 per cent of the population. Taking out a Labor membership means one is not like other Australians. They do not share the true believer view of Labor or its centrality to Australian life, as great as its historical influence has been.

Modern Laborites are the outsiders, the outliers, different to other Australians. Laborites need to understand Australians better, wherever they live — but Australians are under no obligation to understand Labor. If true believers don’t put aside their biases and preferences and reconnect with everyday Australians there is no future for Labor. If it weren’t for compulsory, preferential voting it would be in the position of its ­European comrades, polling under 30 per cent.

Can Labor reform and renew its personnel, structure, policies and relationship with Australians (in Whitlam’s holy trinity, “party, policy, people”)? If it doesn’t, there is no guarantee of federal Labor returning to power, certainly not in the short term.

Coming (back) to the party

The ALP needs to be honest: the late 1960s Whitlamite party revolution went too far. That project was designed to make the working class-dominated party reflective of modern Australia. This was brilliantly achieved. Tertiary-edu­cated, middle-class progressives were encouraged into both party and parliament. It set the stage for Labor to win seven of the next 11 federal elections. Today, however, it is impossible for a blue or even white-collar worker to rise up through the ranks: Labor is increasingly a party for but not actually made up of working people.

It isn’t difficult to predict that the coming 2019 election review will embark upon a new campaign to recruit more rank-and-file members — perhaps by means of cheaper and online categories. Yet, if it is to be worthy of the name Labor, the party must ­actively seek to recruit new members from the suburbs and regions of working Australia. The last thing Labor needs is more inner-city, middle-class professionals dominating its membership and becoming the next generation of members of parliament.

Labor is as shockingly sclerotic as it was in the 1960s. It is hostile to new ideas and new people and stuck in a tired formula of policy announcements, speeches and talking head segments on Sky News or the ABC. This won’t cut it any more. Labor must take steps to reduce overrepresented types in parliament. It must become less middle-class in structure, culture and outlook. If the ALP can ­enshrine an affirmative action quota based upon gender, then it should cap the number of staff, union officials and apparatchiks winning preselections. As a corollary the ALP should formally ­establish a new working-class quota system — a modest beginning might aim for 20 per cent of winnable seats. The aim should be to elect MPs without post-high school or tertiary qualifications, or qualifications not acquired ­before age 25.

Labor can also apply a neglected lesson from the Blue Labour ­experience in Britain. Co-founder Maurice Glasman’s platform (and his peerage) emerged directly from his community organising, and Blue Labour developed its first constituency in the party and among the media as a result of its Citizens UK campaigns, such as pushing for a living wage. Community organising embodies the Blue Labour idea of being “radical and conservative”. An example is faith-based organisations, many clearly not “progressive”, working in alliance with secular groups to achieve reform. No voter IDing or asking strangers if they vote ­Labour, but real conversations.

Real organising would help Labor rebuild concrete links with working-class communities and pay attention to working-class ­issues. It could empower those communities to identify, foster and train leaders from within. Otherwise, Labor is asking working-class people to join a largely middle-class, highly secular entity whose rules and institutions are stacked against them, or worse, where they are made to feel like their views and presence is un­welcome. In this, unions are critically important.

Policy: less is more

Labor presented a vast suite of policies in 2019. Critics argue there were too many complex policies, open to what eventuated as highly successful scare campaigns. Labor does not need more policy but policy that is better conceived and more attuned politically. There is scope for a transformative agenda, moving beyond an obsession with “tax and spend” politics and “nudge” economics, the sort of “we know what is best for you” statism lying behind calls for a sugar tax. Labor exists to gain power in order to redistribute wealth and power, rather than ­expanding the state to redistribute wealth without power and create rights-based legislation. Pulling back from a statist form of progressive politics can help rebuild trust in social democratic institutions and may ease the pressure on Labor governments to live up to the hallowed standards of the Hawke-Keating reform mythology, what I call Labor’s “1983 and all that” complex.

Labor needs to break out of a policy vortex that looks exclusively to the state or leaves it to the market. Here it can take a leaf out of Whitlam’s reimagination of Labor’s reason for being. He re­framed the debate away from the state versus private ownership dichotomy and income redistribution. Whitlam insisted Labor talk about more than industrial ­relations and focus on “quality of life” concerns. Pause over the term quality and there is Labor’s 21st-century inspiration: to focus on improving our institutions — from parliament to our boardrooms and workplaces — while addressing economic insecurity and rebuilding shared cultural norms.

The ALP’s election platform in 2019 spoke to the problem of low wage growth and economic ­insecurity but failed to frame the solutions to these problems in terms of a pro-business, pro-worker agenda, one that brought Australians together. And yet Aust­ralians are keen to see more bipartisanship and co-operation, and not just in politics. To address the big challenges facing our country we need a resilient workplace and corporate culture fit for purpose in the 2020s and 30s, which prizes profit and productivity as well as co-operation and fairness. More balanced institutions are needed to sustain a high-growth, high-skill, high-wage economy for the long run, not one sustained by ephemeral mining booms or that relies on lazy, counter-productive measures such as cutting wages and making work insecure. Germany can be our Light on the Hill. Specifically, the German idea of co-determination — where elected employee representatives sit on company boards — can be the basis of reforming our nation’s industrial and political life. It is the major policy change Labor should adopt to reclaim its role as the party of working people, economic growth, productivity and delivering a fair share of the good life.

The people’s party

Culture and language are important. Labor is a Labor Party. It’s in the name. This does not mean it is an exclusively union-based party or only concerned with work, wages and the regulation of work. And being the party of the labour interest is not incongruent with ­aspiring to be a party of government for all Australians. But if a majority of Labor MPs and members believe that Labor is a “progressive” party, then they need to be honest and brave enough to seek to rename the party. The ALP can become the Australian Progressive Party. Proponents of change might point to the various anti-Labor incarnations that have seen Labor’s opponents change names. But if Labor’s progressives can’t make the case for change there is another alternative: cease referring to Labor as a progressive (or liberal) party and its aims and policies as such. Perhaps 20 per cent of the population explicitly identifies as “progressive”. To cast one’s party in this mould potentially alienates 80 per cent of the electorate. This is not an argument for Labor to focus exclusively on blue-collar workers, or religious and socially conservative voters, though they sorely ­deserve more attention. Rather in the nation-building Laborist tradition of Curtin and Hawke, Labor must once more draw ­together what the scholar Adrian Pabst describes as the “overlapping material interests and immaterial values” of working and middle Australia.

Labor, to that end, needs unashamedly to re-embrace the language of patriotism, understood as a dignified pride in one’s country and a desire to make it better. It means more than being trusted with national security, as important as that subject is. A robust Labor patriotism can mobilise voters emotionally, bind them ­together in a common project, maintain our historically high rates of social cohesion and preserve Australia’s attachment to economic egalitarianism and ­social solidarity. It is no surprise that the best Labor prime ministers, Curtin and Hawke, naturally gravitated towards the language of patriotism, telling an enchanted story of the Australian people, what distinguished us as a people and binds us together.

In 2019, a Labor patriotism means talking about what we need to preserve in our national life as much as change. The public need to hear more from Labor about what makes Australia tick, its achievements as much as its failings. Yes, it includes expressing pride in migration, and ethnic and religious diversity; it means recognising our First Australians constitutionally and, yes, advocating for a republic.

All of this, however, entails a thorough reworking of Labor’s story, one that places family, work and community at the heart of Labor’s idea of this nation of 25 million souls; its story of the good life, of the good society and the common good.

There will always be a minority of Australians who express antipathy towards the ALP. The real risk is the growing number of Australians who are joining their ranks and worse: working men, women and their families who feel indifferent towards Labor. No political party has an innate right to exist. There is no guarantee Labor will be around in a few decades, except as a historical footnote. It is now possible to imagine this scenario. That should leave Laborites feeling blue but drive them — MPs, officials, members and unionists — to renew the party. The needs and aims driving working people to found Labor in 1891 remain relevant; they must be Labor’s future, too.

This is an exclusive edited extract from Nick Dyrenfurth’s new book Getting the Blues: The Future of Australian Labor (Connor Court), published this week.