Left’s view shows it’s time for another Labor split

The ALP’s light on the hill has become a disco ball in a gay nightclub, with race-based entry caps.

Labor leader Anthony Albanese. The light on the hill has become a disco ball in a gay nightclub, with race-based entry caps. Photographer: Liam Kidston

Labor Left factional heavy Mark Butler used me to try to score a politic­al point against Scott Morrison in parliament this week.

Apparently Energy Minister Angus Taylor shouldn’t be at an event with me because of my scepticism of the net benefits of long, blanket lockdowns to counter corona­virus.

In an earlier era, the left would have been far more attuned to the impact of lockdowns on the young and poor at home, and their far worse impact on developing ­nations that depend on a strong global economy to lift their own citizens of poverty.

Indeed, in an earlier era I would have been the sort of person Labor might have wanted on board: son of a union representative (for the old Printing and Kindred Industri­es Union), the first to finish­ high school on both sides of my family.

The coronavirus pandemic and Black Lives Matter movement have highlighted how shallow and inconsistent so-called left-wing advocacy has become. It’s not a place for people like me any more.

The common theme is now sanctimony, vast reservoirs of it, divorced from the complexity of life and the trade-offs policy entails­. That was once a hallmark of aristocrats and clergy.

Giving black students at elite universities extra marks if they are “traumatised” about the death of George Floyd would have been a lower priority than arresting declinin­g life expectancy of poor white Americans for a previous generation of leftists. Don’t expect to hear about a protest for them.

In that generation, one’s econo­mic­ circumstances mattered more than one’s sexuality, gender or race, which reveal little about one’s character, history or power. The old left would have preferred to save the lives of the poor and young in the Third World than the old and rich in advanced countries. Workers of the world, unite, has become retirees, unite!

David Beasley, executive director of the UN’s World Food Program­, warned in April that millions could starve as a result of the economic slump induced by the hysterical response to the coronavirus by advanc­ed countries.

Famine could kill more than the 454,000 who have died so far from COVID-19, which remains a tiny share of the 60 million in annual deaths from all causes.

Sunetra Gupta, an Oxford epidemiologist who has been an opponen­t of lockdowns, told The Wall Street Journal recently that the costs of lockdowns were “not in proportion”.

“I’m reading about migrant workers walking home over hundreds of miles, dying on the way,” she says, referring to her native India, where hundreds of migrant workers, now jobless, have died.

More than 100 million Ethiop­ians, with a life expectancy of 66, probably have more important things to worry about than a virus that increases your chance of dy­ing in your 80s by a small amount.

That’s why the President of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, who has replaced US President Donald Trump as the left’s bogeyman, has been reluctant to smash his economy with lockdowns. In any case, try shutting down a favela.

Even ignoring the devastating impact of the lockdowns on the developi­ng world, the left’s “whatever it takes” attitude to protecting the elderly at any cost sits bizarrely with other policy stances.

For Labor, the physical wellbeing of the elderly is suddenly paramount, but not their financial wellbeing, having fought for years to make their franking credits non-refundable.

After a slice: Anthony Albanese at a Vietnamese seniors event in Inala, Brisbane. Picture: Lyndon Mechielsen

If extending life trumps all other considerations, then why are abortion and euthanasia often so high on the progressive wish list? If you believe the world is over­popul­ated, as the Greens do, then causing a massive recession to stop a disease that shortens lives a little doesn’t stack up.

The left professes concern about inequality but lockdowns will exacerbate it. It’s the white-collar workers who keep their jobs and incomes. The poor and itinerant workers will become un­employed more easily, and suffer the accompanying indignity. Youth unemployment has surged, and job opportunities have been crushed for a generation of young people in their 20s.

Meanwhile, the price of assets, owned almost exclusively by the well-off, are surging as central banks “print money” to prop up their economies, egged on by a left besotted with modern monetary theory.

In any case, poorer households have less to fear from the coronavirus itself. In the US at least, men at the 80th percentile of income distribution live nine years longer than those at the 20th percentile, who tend to die at 75.

Ben Chifley would be shocked at how little concern for the working poor remains. Labor MP Kristina Keneally was recently castigated by her own side for suggesti­ng a reduction in immig­ration as a way to shore up wages.

The light on the hill has become a disco ball in a gay nightclub, with race-based entry caps.

To the extent the left represents a coherent class, it’s the growing part of the middle class that lives off the state: what sociologist Joel Kotkin calls “the clerisy” and what economist Thomas Piketty calls the “Brahmin left”.

These are the university-educated bureaucrats, teachers, public health advocates, consultants and executives dependent on government contracts, et cetera, whose incomes­ are far more stable. Lockdowns have enriched this class financia­lly and socially.

For the other part of the middle class — small-business owners and independent professionals — they have been a disaster. As it becomes clearer that COVID-19 is not as lethal as feared, calls for tough public health measures look as if they are more about hurting the private economy to pave the way for a fattened-up clerisy than saving lives.

In Australia, the Labor Party has split three times in its history: over conscription in 1915, money printing in the early 1930s and communism after World War II.

It’s time for a fourth split: Labor needs a faction that champions the welfare of ordinary wage-earners in the private sector, who outnumber the clerisy by a large margin.

It would advocate huge cuts in income tax for ordinary workers, shifting more of the burden on the wealthy. And voluntary superannuation would give workers the freedom to avoid being gouged by the financial sector and have a better life while young, in case coronavirus claims them at 80. People like me would join that faction.