In Tanner’s life after Labor, important concepts take shape in fiction

Lindsay Tanner has a successful business career and his second novel was published this week.

Lindsay Tanner gave up politics for family and a fresh start in the real world.

When then finance minister Lindsay Tanner rose in the House of Representatives on June 24, 2010 to say he would not contest the election, there was ­astonishment on both sides of the chamber.

The decision was motivated entirely by personal circumstances, after 17 years in parliament. “There are, frankly, two little girls and two older kids who need me more than the country needs me,” he said.

It had been a tumultuous day in politics. Julia Gillard had been elected Labor leader and sworn in as prime minister hours earlier. Kevin Rudd, his tears still fresh, was sitting on the backbench.

Tanner, who has since carved out a successful career in business and as a writer of fiction and nonfiction, continues to be involved in the community sector and is chairman of the ­Essendon Football Club, has no regrets.

“Although it is often a joke that people who get themselves into trouble say they are resigning to spend more time with their family, I was one of those people who ­actually did,” Tanner, 62, tells ­Inquirer in a rare interview.

“There are only so many ‘Daddy, when are you coming home’ phone calls you can handle. The girls are now aged 12 and 14, and I have a lot more involvement in their lives. I made the right call. I have two older children who were then in their mid-teens, and that was part of the equation too.”

Tanner’s second novel, Comeback (Scribe), was published this week. It is set in inner Melbourne. The central character is a grumpy, middle-aged, down-on-his-luck taxi driver, Jack van Duyn, and we are reintroduced to him as he wakes up and staggers into the bathroom:

“The mirror told a sorry tale: a crooked nose poking out from a blotchy, battered face above uneven yellow teeth. And was his left eyelid drooping a bit? ‘Erghh. F..k!’ he spluttered at the empties on the coffee table. ‘Why do I keep doing this to myself?’ ”

The story focuses on the redevelopment of a public housing ­estate that brings Jack into contact with a dodgy property developer, government officials, old-school unionists, the local refugee welfare centre and the tenants association. It is about a clash of communities, values and prospects.

“It is really about people who are struggling, which is what an inner-city politician’s office tends to see,” he explains.

“The under­lying theme is homelessness and housing. A lot people take for granted our housing ­arrangements being stable. I’m using my main character to confront the realities in their world.”

Tanner was the Victorian state secretary of the Federated Clerks Union (1988 to 93) before winning the federal seat of Melbourne for Labor in 1993.

He was in parliament for the final term of the Hawke-Keating government. He retired at the 2010 election, and the seat was lost to the Greens.

Labor’s failure to win back Melbourne is symptomatic of the structural change creeping through global democratic politics. But Tanner ­ says the archetypal post-materialist Greens voter is often blind to ­inequality in their own neighbourhood.

“The Greens-voting, upper mid­dle class who live side by side with these people rarely interact with them,” he says. “The loudest voices in support of human rights and ­social justice are typically high-­income earners living a comfortable life, yet they live next door to the most disadvantaged people and have nothing to do with them.”

Tanner’s second novel echoes what he says is the new fault line in global democratic politics: education rather than income.

“The political class is overwhelmingly dominated by people with a university education, but a majority of the voting population do not have a university education, and do not see themselves reflected in the political system.

“Parties of the far Right now identify with low-educated, working-class, older demographics. This has been a massive disrupter of the traditional political system and has contributed to the anti-­establishment populist upsurge.”

This new political fault line poses a particular challenge for Labor. The party has often struggled to unite a shrinking blue-­collar, working-class base with affluent progressives driven by post-materialist values, and has lost voters to the Greens.

“A large cohort of professional, upper-class, university-educated Labor voters has been lost to the Greens. The progressive side of politics does not have a cohesive alliance of forces. When one part of the spectrum focuses on taking votes from each other — and the Greens are focused on taking votes from Labor — they are cannibalising themselves.

“This is a bad thing because it creates an internal structural division. The underlying success of the Hawke-Keating era was that you had various elements of the urban middle class and the working class working together and compromising on ­issues.”

Tanner advises Labor not to cede ground or consider any form of partnership with the Greens if it wins the next federal election.

“I do not advocate Labor going into any sort of ­alliance or ­coalition with the Greens,” he says. “They are trying to take votes away from Labor. We saw how cynical the Greens can be with the carbon pollution reduction scheme. We would have had a reasonably coherent vehicle for tackling carbon emissions with 75 per cent support across the political spectrum — but the Greens torpedoed it.”

The bifurcation of modern politics is also enveloping the Liberal Party, which is divided between its conservative reactionary and liberal progressive wings, and has lost voters to far Right parties.

“Our parties are projections of the world 50 years ago but that world does not exist any more,” Tanner says. “So you have these traditional political spectrums bitterly divided against themselves.”

His landmark book Open Australia (Pluto Press), published in 1999, was one of the first that ­seriously grappled with Labor’s values and purpose as it ­approach­ed the 21st century.

As finance minister and a member of the “gang of four” with Rudd, Gillard and Wayne Swan, he played a key role in steering Australia through the GFC without sinking into ­recession. Tanner concedes it was “a shock to the system” when Rudd did not make him opposition treasury spokesman, and treasurer in government, preferring to stick with Swan.

“That’s life,” he says. “I could have spat the dummy and walked off the stage but I chose to just get on with it. Luck and serendipity plays a huge part in how individual careers evolve in politics. Most people succeed in life but not usually how they expected.”

In his 2011 book Sideshow (Scribe), Tanner argued that two rules govern contemporary politics. First, look like you’re doing something. Second, don’t offend anyone who matters. Nothing has changed, he says.

“We now live in the world of the permanent election campaign,” Tanner says. “It is understandable given leaders know they can be knocked off because of a few bad opinion polls. But the focus on serious policymaking is draining out of the political system.”

It is not surprising Tanner does not miss politics: “We all have a use-by date and I’m glad I didn’t hang around. I’m a bit of a dinosaur. I am a creature of the 1980s and 90s, when big ­issues were thrashed out by serious people.”

Does Tanner have any ­advice for any soon-to-be ex-politicians who might be eyeing a new career as a novelists?

“If you have harboured mad ideas to do something different, give it a go, don’t be frightened.”

Lindsay Tanner’s Comeback is published by Scribe.