Labor called and it wants its base back

Kudelka cartoon

NSW ALP state secretary Sam Dastyari appears to have declared war on the Greens, describing them as "extremists not unlike One Nation". It's a pertinent parallel, but perhaps not in the way he may have meant.

One Nation blossomed because the two major parties of the then political Centre cut off their own noses to spite each others' faces.

The preparedness of both to deal with Pauline Hanson rather than aid a strong opponent sprang from a reluctance to admit - let alone praise - the extent to which the preceding two decades had delivered a healthy liberal democratic consensus at the centre of Australian government.

Both major parties refused to acknowledge the honourable truth that the country was better off because they agreed on core policy items including freer markets and foreign investment, the permanence of Medicare and the safety net, progressive taxation and equal opportunity.

In the vernacular it was said "they're both the same". And hardly anyone went to the trouble of explaining why that might be a good thing.

In the absence of a clear explanation why a global and competitive world might be the guarantee of our future rather than the death of it, the people of Ipswich sent a messenger to Canberra at the 1996 election. In the absence of anyone to praise the new consensus, Hanson came to bury it.

In the furore that followed, John Howard suggested that while Hanson was wrong about indigenous disadvantage and a few other things (the 2+2+2 cascading tax springs to mind) she was entitled to her view. P. P. McGuinness and Margo Kingston were the only people I recall, though there must have been a few more, defending Hanson's right to speak in her guileless, passionate way on behalf of the people who voted for her.

In 1998, a staggering 22 per cent of Queenslanders voted for the fledgling party. The following year in NSW David Ernest Oldfield entered the upper house. The prime minister resisted invitations to label a million Australians drunk, dumb and racist.

"Progressives" held rallies. Howard's office was briefly occupied. Resistance and other left-wing groups gloried in their outrage as a handful of arrests were made. High school students who attended in newsworthy numbers were declared - even by columnists in The Daily Telegraph - to be the good hands into which our future could be trusted.

That same year, at the election, Hanson was entitled to think she had a good shot at re-election. She led early with 36 per cent of the first preference vote - ordinarily a commanding position. But by then Labor and Liberal had done a deal to put her last. Tony Abbott, MP, initiated Australians For Honest Politics with former Labor minister John Wheeldon.

The group was dedicated to putting One Nation last. Maths would tell you it made sense for the Coalition to address the One Nation threat. While my husband Paul McLeay's former NSW state ALP seat of Heathcote was littered with "Free Pauline, Free David" stickers, One Nation was principally a threat to the Nationals and, by virtue of their long association and dependency, the Liberals. Peter Costello put One Nation last on his how to vote. It appeared a highly principled stand from younger members of the Howard caucus, and perhaps it was. But after Queensland it was, in equal measure, pure calculation. One Nation was not brought down by students or Marxists or principled liberals. It was brought down by a pact between the major parties to get their bogans back.

Which turns out to be exactly the reason Labor is trying the same trick again.

Dastyari and his ally Paul Howes have suggested that as Labor once stood against the racism of One Nation, so it must stand now against the "extremism" of the Greens. But reasons have been thin on the ground. Greens don't like contact sport, they're not really family, they want to decriminalise drugs. Not enough to change my usual habit of putting Fred Nile last, or for variety Australians Against Further Immigration.

It is little wonder Howes and Dastyari don't dally too long on the policy failings of the Greens as they align with the policies of many ALP MPs. I compared the text of Kevin Rudd's Monthly essay with the Greens manifesto. The then prime minister wrote: "The great neo-liberal experiment of the past 30 years has failed . . . Climate change is a potent example . . . the greatest market failure in human history." The Greens manifesto says: "The free market economy, by externalising the environmental and social costs of greenhouse gas emissions, is creating the greatest market failure of all time."

Rudd expressed concern about foreign ownership, which is another area of overlap, as are higher taxes for the wealthy, public ownership, industry subsidies, price controls and softening National Competition Policy. The carbon tax was the bastard child of this marriage of convenience, so that's no grounds for differentiation.

Which leaves one with some unkind conclusions. First, the declaration of war is ersatz aggression in the hope it will play well in the bogan heartland of western and southwestern Sydney. This is hinted in the wording, "where it is in the Labor Party's interest to do so, we should consider placing (the Greens) last".

Does Dastyari mean put them last where it is in Labor's immediate electoral interests to get some distance; say, in Greenway or Lindsay? Or does he mean where it is in Labor's long-term interest, which must include those inner-city seats where the fight for high-income, progressive voters has distorted Labor's thinking, its perceived support base and its approach to government? Most marginal seats where Labor fights Liberal have monuments testifying to the efforts each side has made to win them. A NSW sample includes the Bangor Bypass, the Seacliff Bridge, the inner west busway, the M7 cycleway, non-contiguous sections of the Pacific Highway, and dozens of national parks where there used to be working forests.

The strange thing about the seats where Labor fights the Greens is that there are absences rather than presences attesting to the battle. In state seats Balmain and Marrickville and federal electorates Sydney and Grayndler, what you can see are the places where infrastructure should exist but doesn't. The expansion of Sydney airport, new freeways, private ferries, the bans on development at key sites including Callan Park, Glebe Island and the White Bay power station - to win a few votes in the city, Labor failed to build infrastructure that would have benefited outer seats.

If the best of Howes and Dastyari's multiple ambitions are to be served, the real challenge is to address the drift of ALP policy towards a middle-class urban constituency that has little empathy with the struggles of mainstream Australia. They put cattlemen's jobs at risk for the approval of the animal rights lobby. They pursued low-density, low-growth, small "footprint" policies that have driven up the price of everything from a block of land and the gas bill to a pre-mixed cocktail.

While there may be good arguments for distancing the ALP from the Greens, it is the green cancer at the heart of Labor that urgently needs to be cut out.

Cassandra Wilkinson was an adviser to former NSW premier Kristina Keneally.