Self-interest proves strongest motivator

POLITICIANS use vacuous rhetoric to tell it the way we want it to be.

LABOR has closed out the year spruiking its credentials for economic management aimed at ensuring the twin goals of prosperity and opportunity (when it isn't too busy dealing with the fallout from the WikiLeaks saga).

Can someone please point me to a political party that doesn't claim to believe in prosperity and opportunity (other than the Greens, perhaps, who regularly save Labor at the ballot box with their preferences)?

For a party trying to find a way to highlight such obvious goals and describe them as "in a nutshell, its core purpose", in the words of Wayne Swan, is the political equivalent of saying absolutely nothing.

But let's get into details of what could be done. Does Labor support prosperity through a flexible industrial relations system? No, it abolished Work Choices and replaced it with the far more constraining Fair Work Act.

Granted, that was what the public overwhelmingly wanted, but let's not fool ourselves that it is an example of living up to the creed of a core purpose of ensuring prosperity.

Even the Liberal Party is unprepared to put meat on the bones of its more flexible alternative for industrial relations, out of fear that doing so would be political poison. Opposition finance spokesman Andrew Robb tried to suggest Liberals again stand up for a more flexible IR system, but his colleagues were quick to distance themselves from the remarks. In truth, neither party has the wherewithal to stand by what is needed on the IR front to lock in the sort of national prosperity voters expect.

Debates over how best to improve prosperity and opportunity are complex and there is no one simple answer as to how to make it happen. Which is why political leaders identifying such goals as what they are about is vacuous in the extreme.

The reason they do so is for pure political positioning. Stating that you are the party of opportunity and prosperity implies that the other mob are not.

But the spin isn't really working for the Labor Party.

Partly this is because modern society has become a closer fit to the ideals of liberalism than it has to the ideals of socialism: the rudimentary divide that once differentiated the main parties. Also, such spin is easier from opposition when a party doesn't have to take decisions.

Once a party does have to, it quickly realises there are always winners and losers attached to policy adjustments, and the losers invariably feel as if they lost out in terms of prosperity or opportunity, or both.

Losers have longer memories than winners. The great difficulty for incumbent governments is that the longer they last, the larger the number of people who at some time have felt dudded by a decision they have made. That was partly John Howard's problem federally in 2007, it was one of John Brumby's difficulties in (unsuccessfully) seeking a fourth term for Labor at the recent Victorian election. The electorate's self-interest more often than not guides the way the public votes. That's why support for climate change action was stronger when we were in drought than it is now.

In my previous life as an academic, I would start the first week of my first-year "foundations in politics" classes by asking students what they individually stood for. What were the approaches and philosophies that guided their political thoughts?

High on the list for the self-assured political thinkers present each year, most of whom were all of 18, was equal opportunity. When I asked as a follow-up question if they therefore would agree with new policies being introduced that abolished inheritance, for example, in order to help achieve the equal opportunity they craved (assuming such policies could be practically implemented, which of course they cannot), then suddenly equal opportunity as an ideal took a back seat to self-interest.

An auditorium of young adults suddenly saw the inheritances that would one day give them a leg up in a high-priced world vanish before their very eyes.

My idea was an absurd one. It was incomprehensible, and various excuses for why it couldn't be done were given. Most responses centred on the impracticality of the idea, never mind that I had already absolved the theoretical discussion from implementation issues in my introduction. We had the luxury of being in a classroom, not a cabinet (perhaps where the architects of the pink batts scheme would have been better placed).

Students used the practical problems with my idea to dismiss it because that was easier than confronting the reality that they may not be as pure of thought about egalitarianism as they might have wanted to be. Of course that made opposition to death duties as used in other parts of the world, such as Britain and the home of capitalism, the US, difficult to sustain when we moved the discussion on.

Some students reassessed their world views and embraced the inheritance-restricting death duties idea so they could remain ideologically pure. (I would suggest that will change if they ever have to vote on it.) Others stayed inconsistent as advocates of equal opportunity but hoarders of prospective wealth. Very few openly conceded equal opportunity was in fact of low importance to them, thereby dropping the pretence of virtue in the room.

The aim of the discussion was to remind people that for all the ideals in the world, politically speaking self-interest is a powerful motivating factor, often powerful enough to force people to act in a way contrary to what they say matters most to them.

What we say matters is quite often far removed from what really matters (that is, what shapes how we vote), which are factors that affect our daily lives.

A party saying it supports opportunity plays to our emotions. Saying it supports prosperity plays to our selfishness.

But most of all it is just vacuous rhetoric from politicians who most probably don't know what they stand for, or even if they do are too afraid to let the public know lest it costs them votes.

SOME conservative commentators were quick this week to blame Julia Gillard directly for the disaster on Christmas Island where asylum-seekers have lost their lives. Thankfully the opposition hasn't taken the bait and played politics with the issue - not yet anyway. It is drawing a long bow to blame government policy for tragedy at sea caused by the weather.

If, however, some people must blame others and can't bring themselves to hold nature alone responsible, they should focus their energies on the brutal dictators of overseas regimes asylum-seekers flee from, or indeed the people-smugglers who trade on human misery, not a democratically elected prime minister who has a different public policy outlook than they do.

The same thing goes for the refugee advocates who also blame our politicians for the tragedy, only with diametrically opposed logic.