Labor's team more focused on spin than substance

Leak opinion

Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. - Matthew 5:5

THE underlying problem with modern Labor is its personnel, not necessarily its culture or its organisation. And the world, as well as Australia, has more than enough room for a centre-left party to thrive within the ideological spectrum, but only if those spruiking the message are believable in what they try to convince the public to support.

Predictions of the death of the Australian Labor Party - which finds itself wedged between left-wing activism and mainstream middle Australia - are greatly exaggerated, even if the present mob running the show looks weak. The decline of liberalism within the Liberal Party leaves Labor as a political movement capable of appealing to large swaths of progressive voters who would rather not vote conservative. But only if Labor finds serious ideological ballast.

The present line-up of ministers and senior party figures in the federal Labor Party cut their teeth as the underlings during (or immediately after) the great Labor eras of Bob Hawke and Paul Keating. In doing so they showed an important political professionalism (as distinct from policy professionalism, which has hardly been a defining feature of this government's ad hoc approach).

But what today's Labor leaders offered as underlings of leaders from a bygone era doesn't extend to a passion for the ideas their masters spruiked. In short, they were fixers.

Furthermore, the senior operatives in the government today were, by and large, senior figures during Labor's wilderness years, when the party knew what it opposed but became increasingly uncertain of what it stood for. This loss of identity made the transition to government in 2007 harder than it at first appeared. And a long stint in the political wilderness equals a long stint away from the management jobs (in business or government) that equip people for roles as ministers. That's why they've failed the competency test.

In the short term after Labor was re-elected following nearly 12 years out of power, ideas flowed thick and fast. However, in time the loss of ideas and direction during the wilderness years translated into a weak and convictionless commitment to ideas in government, especially when they were tested by an opposition leader prepared to be highly opportunistic and aggressively negative.

To succeed, Labor must find a way to convince voters it is passionate about reforms already on the table: a carbon tax, a mining tax and a national broadband network. It can't redefine the agenda without completely counting itself out at the next election.

But convincing voters to get behind reforms on the table will be difficult when the Prime Minister (and Treasurer) selling the policies were the key figures behind deferring the ETS under Kevin Rudd's leadership; and the Treasurer in particular was passionately behind the original mining tax before Labor junked it to strike a deal ahead of the last election. Throw in what both these figures said about not pursuing a carbon tax before the last election and brand Labor is in deep trouble right now.

Hawke, Keating and members of their cabinets, such as John Button, John Dawkins and Peter Walsh, were men with ideas and convictions. They were prepared to stake their political careers (and success) on achieving policy objectives. It was a heady commitment to micro-economic reform, for example, that saw Labor achieve more by way of adjusting how the Australian economy operated in five years than had happened in the previous 50. And they were believable (as well as not compromised) when arguing the case.

Without reforms from the Hawke and Keating eras, and their commitment to political ideas, Australia's prosperity today wouldn't be as assured as it is.

In 1986 Stephen Mills wrote a seminal book, The New Machine Men, about the rise of the political class, hell-bent on professionalising politics in this country. Use of party databases to track voters, focus-group research to better understand the thinking of the electorate and track polling to raise issues with swinging voters, so the parties understand the political challenges that lie ahead: these were just some of the methods the second-tier political class now running the country used to keep Labor in power during the Hawke and Keating years.

The techniques were vital to Labor's success in the 1980s and 90s, and they also helped a generation of state Labor governments stay in power during the subsequent Howard years federally. Labor's machine men were better at their jobs than the Coalition's during the Hawke and Keating years, helped along by the power of incumbency as new techniques emerged. The personnel from those times - operating underneath ideas-rich ministers - are the Labor frontbenchers of today.

Treasurer Wayne Swan was Queensland state secretary for the Labor Party before entering parliament in 1993. He also advised Kim Beazley for a period.

Defence Minister Stephen Smith was a senior adviser to Keating when he was prime minister, and West Australian state Labor secretary before that. Don Watson, in his biography of Keating, made the point that Smith was always highly driven by what the polling and the focus groups were telling him.

Trade Minister Craig Emerson was a senior adviser to Hawke, although to be fair his focus was more on policy than politics. (Emerson holds a PhD in economics.)

Communications Minister Stephen Conroy worked for former Labor ministers Ros Kelly and Barry Jones; Environment Minister Tony Burke for Graham Richardson; Rudd was a functionary to Queensland Premier Wayne Goss, first as his chief of staff then as the head of his department of premier and cabinet; and Family and Community Services Minister Jenny Macklin was an adviser to the Victorian health minister in the Cain government in the 80s.

The above names are just a snapshot of the functionary roles of the senior Labor politicians of today during previous Labor governments. Even Gillard was John Brumby's chief of staff as opposition leader in Victoria shortly after Labor's federal domination in the 80s and 90s.

If I am right and the present crop of Labor ministers don't have the same commitment to policy goals ministers from the Hawke and Keating periods did, the important question for Labor moving forward (there is that awful phrase again) is whether the generation coming through does. Do they represent a return to the meaty policy focus of Labor dynasties of the past? Or by learning their trade underneath a team more focused on spin than substance, have they missed out on the mentoring needed to rebuild Labor's brand as the party of ideas? And of course, who will they be?

These are much more important questions than any notion of structural reform within the Labor Party: tinkering and navel-gazing is only likely to cause further outward appearances of chaos.

Peter van Onselen is a Winthrop professor at the University of Western Australia. His PhD examined the impact of the professionalisation of politics in this country.