George Orwell, me and the longest suicide note in Labor history

On federal election day 2019, I was in Aragon, touring the battlefields of the Spanish Civil War with Richard Blair, George Orwell’s son. While the vote was being counted back in Australia, we were inspecting the remains of fascist machine gun positions outside Huesca, which Orwell’s left-wing militia had besieged in 1937.

Orwell adopted his son Richard in 1944. He died when the boy was six. Credit: Vernon Richards

The previous day we had been up in the mountains at the spot where Orwell was famously shot in the throat by a sniper. Orwell’s trenches are still there and from them you can see the lie of the battlefield below. When his comrades rose from those trenches to assault the city, few survived. As my distraught 18-year-old son relayed the Australian election count to me by text message, the moral of both results was obvious: don’t charge into a well-prepared trap if ever you can avoid it.

Six months later , the Australian Labor Party – still reeling from defeat in the election it had been widely expected to win – asked me to help redraft its platform. The review of the election loss by Craig Emerson and Jay Weatherill had targeted the document – dubbed by some “the longest suicide note in history” – for serious attention. My job, if I chose to accept it: get it down from 310 pages to 50, without reducing the font size.

Another crazy mission? That platform had a lot of history and stakeholders. After the divisions of the Rudd-Gillard era, the federal caucus had sought unity. Rocking the boat was discouraged. You want a policy change to repay some supporters? Fine. Impressed by the ideas of some tidy-minded economics professor? OK! Few proposals were rejected. Ironically, in its understandable desire to show internal discipline, the party had abandoned all policy discipline. And the election loss was the result.

Shortening the document, though, ended up quite easy. I employed a number of cunning strategies. The first was removing repetition. Why mention a contentious issue once when you can mention it 80 times? (I kid you not.) Those 310 pages were soon 150.

The second was removing unnecessary detail. Surely we could tell voters what we intended to do in government without mentioning the multiple departmental reorganisations needed to make it happen. Labor articles of faith such as workers’ rights, environmental sustainability and gender equality could be taken for granted and stated once, couldn’t they? That took it down to 125 pages.

After that, I turned to grammar and managerial jargon. I love the brothers and sisters of the Labor Party, but why don’t they know what a verb is? Simply by exorcising the word “impact” I saved a whole page. Paragraph after paragraph of indecipherable nonsense evaporated. Just 100 pages left.

Labor’s then leader, Bill Shorten, with wife Chloe, concedes defeat on May 18, 2019. Credit: Bloomberg

Things then got a little harder. Political criteria needed to be applied. My drafting instructions were to remove all spending commitments, tax rates, policy targets and promises to create new government departments, agencies, advisory boards and committees. Foreign policy discussion was also to be given less detail – it’s a famously tricky subject.

After a summer of slashing, I had almost exactly 50 pages.

The committee I reported to blew it back out to 100 pages ­– 50 obviously being a cunning union-style ambit to get to 100 – but Labor now had a social-democratic platform that could just about be read in a sitting, be easily understood, and maybe even win votes instead of losing them.

Why is this important? Because it shows that following the 2019 disaster, the ALP under Anthony Albanese adopted a steely political discipline. If you listen closely, you can hear it in the tone of caucus members’ voices. Time and again during the consultations with frontbenchers, I heard the same pleas: Tell people what we plan to do and can do – not what we don’t plan to do and can’t.

The new national platform is in no danger of winning the Miles Franklin, clearly, but anyone reading it will see its story is a world away from the Coalition’s.

Over the past week, many have vented their anger over changes to Labor’s tax policies. There’s no getting away from it: those decisions will make the tax system less progressive than otherwise might have been. That decision was, however, inevitable. Those tax policies were put to the people twice and rejected twice, including by many of the very people they were designed to benefit.

To put it simply: even though inequality persists in Australia, our increasingly affluent electorate, including the old working class that once joined unions and reflexively voted Labor, won’t accept the old solutions. Sad, but true.

By recognising this hard reality, Labor has decided to try to win. How? By refusing to do what romantic progressives are forever calling upon it to do, and which Orwell’s old comrades did back in 1937: go over the top and charge into the trap carefully prepared by its opponents.

Dennis Glover is a speechwriter and author who has worked for the ALP. His novel, The Last Man in Europe, is about George Orwell. His latest novel is Factory 19.

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