Don’t you do it, good old Anthony Albanese has it all in hand

Illustration: Eric Lobbecke

Who knows what the Great Comrade himself would have made of last week’s Whitlam Oration delivered by Anthony Albanese at the Shellharbour Club.

Whitlam, a creature of the NSW right faction, spent much of his time as leader trying to douse the hotheads from the Victorian left. On Friday we had the party’s deputy leader from the NSW left, calming the anti-capitalist rhetoric of his leader, Bill Shorten, from the Victorian right.

One suspects the GC’s response might have been similar to his apocryphal answer to a nervous tailor who inquired: “May I ask, sir, on which side you dress?”

Whitlam looked down imperiously at the man with the outstretched tape measure and replied: “Both sides, comrade, both sides.”

Gough Whitlam, nonetheless, would have felt more at home with Albanese’s Whitlam Oration than he would have with Julia Gillard’s in 2011. “We will keep a tight rein on spending to return the budget to surplus,” Gillard said. “That’s what we said we will do and we will do it.”

Delivering a lecture on fiscal rectitude in a Whitlam Oration is like giving a sermon on temperance in the Horsham Demons clubhouse after the Wimmera Football League grand final.

Balanced budgets weren’t really Gough’s thing. They turned out not be Gillard’s thing either, but that’s another story.

Albanese returned to more familiar Labor themes on Friday in a speech described, somewhat ambitiously, as a “manifesto” by some commentators.

Perhaps you had to be there on the night at the Shellharbour Club (formerly the Shellharbour Workers Club) holding a schooner of Tooheys New as a gesture of solidarity with the labouring classes to get the full effect.

In its written form, however, it is a dismal treatise, peppered with platitudes and slander in equal measure, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

In other words, it is a typical modern Labor speech, the rhetoric of a party living off imagined glories without an original idea in its head except that, somehow, by some means, it wants to make the world a little less nasty.

Labor hardly needs speechwriters these days. All it needs is a good algorithm.

“Our shared vision of opportunity for all”; “government as the great enabler”; “intervention when markets fail”; “a vision for progress”; “listening to the drumbeat of human empowerment” — it’s all there in Albanese’s speech.

The underlining principle is Labor is the party that will do things for you, so you don’t have to do things for yourself. The government’s job is to “imagine a better future” and to “anticipate and create that future”. When change occurs, the government’s task is to “manage this transformation in the public interest”.

The Liberal and National parties, on the other hand, “rarely think beyond tax cuts”. They believe “if government just gets out of the way, the market will sort things out”; they “can’t conceive of the idea people might work ­together towards a shared vision”.

“Their creed is self-interest and the law of the jungle — the political philosophy of selfishness propagated by the likes of Friedrich Hayek.”

The message crawling out from this sludge of bromide is that an Albanese Labor government will pick up where Gillard and Kevin Rudd left off. His differ­ences with Shorten are merely questions of emphasis inspired not by different principles but by their different power bases.

When Albanese curtsies to the unions, he will demean himself a little less than Shorten. Shorten will be a more truculent guest at boardroom lunches than ­Albanese.

In the end it will make little practical difference. The biggest winners under either in government will be those who administer the government programs rather than those they seek to serve.

The losers will be those in the private sector, taxpayers and those who have taken the trouble to put aside money to support themselves in retirement or ill health.

The modern Labor movement is indeed then forged in Whitlam’s image, a leader so convinced that the universe would be better run from Canberra that he bent the Constitution to steal power from the states.

What’s puzzling about the cult of adoration around the GC is its failure to consider the practical outcome of his 1071 crazy days as helmsman.

It might have given the party faithful the chance to work off the accumulated frustration of 23 years in opposition, but it was sending the country broke.

Many of Whitlam’s claimed reforms in the environment, education, the arts and immigration had been set in place by the Liberal prime ministers before he came to power.

Others were later abandoned as impractical. Free access to higher education, for example, was scrapped by Bob Hawke’s Labor government because of the intolerable burden it placed on the budget and the institutes of higher education.

More puzzling still is Labor’s reluctance in opposition to examine more recent failings. Successful institutions are those that embrace failure as a chance to learn. Henry Ford built his Model T only after his first two businesses had gone bankrupt.

Yet Labor has avoided confronting the multi-billion-dollar omnishambles of the Rudd and Gillard governments, prompted by a knee-jerk response to the 2008-09 financial crisis and Rudd’s presumptuous belief that he must save capitalism from ­itself.

Renewable energy targets, the housing insulation program, Building the Education Revolution, the National Broadband Network and the National Disability Insurance Scheme were centrally planned bungles on a ­Soviet scale.

Each was the result of poor public service practice encouraged by a demanding government that points to structural weaknesses in our governing system, as Peter Shergold outlined in his perceptive 2015 report, Learning from Failure.

Each, however, was underpinned by the delusions central in Albanese’s speech: that markets are too fickle to be allowed to operate freely; that the economy must be managed; that people are too feckless or stupid to manage their own resources; and that Canberra knows best.

Until a Labor leader emerges possessed of the intellect and courage needed to address the contradictions of socialism, the party will continue to disappoint.

Nick Cater is executive director of the Menzies Research Centre.