Former senator Kim Carr blasts Anthony Albanese’s Labor for losing touch with voters

Former Labor minister Kim Carr has blasted the Albanese government for losing touch with traditional blue-collar voters, turning to identity politics with a ‘censorious tone’ towards those who don’t agree and favouring the elites.

Former Labor senator Kim Carr. Picture: Kym Smith

You can now listen to The Australian's articles. Give us your feedback.

You can now listen to The Australian's articles.

Former Labor minister Kim Carr has blasted the Albanese government for losing touch with traditional blue-collar voters, turning to identity politics with a “censorious tone” towards those who don’t agree, favouring the elites and inner city over the suburbs, and lacking a policy ambition to transform Australia.

In the most damning indictment from within since the party was elected to power in May 2022, Mr Carr writes that Labor’s primary vote is in “rapid decline” as its traditional voters have “lost faith” and the prospect of minority government beckons amid a wider loss of trust in the political establishment.

Mr Carr, who served as a minister in the Rudd-Gillard government, also writes in his memoir, A Long March, provided to The Australian ahead of its release next week, that the voice referendum “failed so badly” because the government failed to “connect with voters” and adding that the party’s leaders and MPs are to blame for its defeat.

The former Victorian senator (1993-2022) and Left faction powerbroker is highly critical of the AUKUS nuclear submarine pact, writing that it binds Australia to its “great protectors” and reduces “agency” in the region, and is a “provocation” towards China. He adds that Labor “rolled over” within 24 hours to support the Morrison government announcement.

He says AUKUS was never voted on by the Labor caucus. “Shadow cabinet,” he writes, “was to play into the hands of the government: not in a political sense but in a policy one. We were making it possible for a defeated Morrison government to run Australia’s national security settings from the grave.”

In his memoir, Mr Carr writes that Labor has not paid “sufficient attention” to its blue-collar low-income voting base, which has “lost touch” with the party, while resorting to identity politics to appeal to “a new constituency” composed of inner-city affluent and highly educated voters.

“The Labor ship has struck the rock of identity politics, with too many of its spokespeople adopting a censorious tone to those who fail to embrace their particular social policy agendas,” Mr Carr writes. “As the party of political grievance, it has been selective in the narrow range of marginalised groups it supports.

“Handing over greater influence to those who are doing well and appear oblivious to, or even possibly dismissive of, the struggles of those who are, in the overused contemporary parlance, ‘doing it tough’ a long way from the well-serviced environment of the inner city, is political poison.”

Labor’s coalition of voters is breaking down because it is looking for different things from government and often has competing interests, and is not a sustainable constituency for majority government, Mr Carr writes.

“Before and after the election of the Albanese government that coalition was fraying, if not crumbling, at the edges,” he explains. “As the party’s falling primary vote has shown, Labor could not stem the loss of low-income voters, mostly to minor parties such as One Nation and Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party. To a lesser extent, some … also drifted to Liberal and National parties.”

“At the same time, higher-educated voters were also drifting away, switching to the Greens and independents. This was mostly … voters aged under 35, who, having known nothing but a world almost overwhelmed with choice, were much more fluid in their political loyalties and thus more inclined to vote tactically than their parents and grandparents.”

Mr Carr slams the government over the failure to carry the voice referendum, and suggests “there were many moments when the government could have deferred it” because it had clearly failed to “connect with voters” over the need for constitutional change.

“The leadership responded to people’s concerns about the proposal before them with a mixture of condescending dismissal, lectures and accusations of racism, or simply hoping the problem would somehow resolve itself,” he writes. “None of these responses did the Labor Party, Indigenous communities or the reconciliation cause any good at all.”

Ahead of the May 2022 election, Mr Carr writes, Labor’s agenda for change was minuscule, betraying the tradition of being a bold reformist party, and instead favouring a risk-averse “small target” approach with no ambition for national transformation. This, he argues, has led to doubts over its “ongoing viability” as a party worthy of power in its own right.

“Without an active agenda and an ongoing policy formulation process, a government can find itself waiting for discontent to sweep it away, just as its predecessor did,” Mr Carr argues. “For the Labor Party, however, the small-target play is an especially dangerous course, because when voters start to cast around for an alternative some will consider switching to a third party.”

Revisiting the leadership clash between Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard, Mr Carr writes that he brokered “a deal” between the two in 2006 for Mr Rudd to serve only two terms as prime minister and then Ms Gillard “would take over”. Two days before the 2010 leadership challenge, Mr Carr says Ms Gillard showed him polling purporting to show Labor’s dire position and told him: “We’re sleepwalking to a defeat.” He later writes that Ms Gillard could not be trusted and he “could not understand her purpose” for being in politics.

Anthony Albanese advised Mr Rudd to hold a ballot for leader the morning after Ms Gillard said she would challenge, Mr Carr writes. This was “unfortunate advice” as it “played into the hands of Gillard” and denied his backers time to rally support. Mr Rudd resigned rather than face a ballot.

More broadly, he argues Labor is bleeding members because it has become less democratic, with leaders exerting too much power, MPs and branch members are excluded from policymaking, and the party is no longer broadly representative of the community.

Kim Carr’s A Long March is published by Monash University Publishing on November 1