Coming to the Party (2006), edited by Barry Jones

Mike Steketee of News Ltd's The Australian sings a familiar tune in his recent derision of the latest collection of essays from Labor members. "Labor is very good at dissecting its problems in Opposition", he writes. "It needs to try harder to look like an alternative government".[1] Thus at first instance, Steketee (or at least the creator of his headline, "Enough of the autopsy") appears to advocate the abandonment of reflexivity if Labor is to become a serious contender for government.

It is difficult to set such criticism apart from the general anti-intellectualist argument that runs through News Ltd papers. Assuming Steketee is sufficiently independent from his corporate bosses for us to interpret his critique of Coming to the Party as genuine - and his recent analyses of The Latham Diaries[2] and the Howard government's plan to excise the entire Australian continent from the operation of the Migration Act[3] suggest that he is - then his analysis may not be so much anti-intellectual as a plea for Labor to balance is self-criticism with some of the structural change its members have been demanding for the past decade.

Of the twelve contributors to Barry Jones' volume, only four are Parliamentary members of the ALP, and all of them - John Faulkner, Julia Gillard, Carmen Lawrence and Lindsay Tanner - are firmly on the Party's Left.[4] Four of its remaining contributors are also associated with the Left: Jones and John Button, both Ministers in the Hawke governments, were on the so-called "Independents" ticket (though that ticket almost always voted with the Socialist Left faction),[5] and ex-MPs John Langmore and Susan Ryan were members of the now-defunct Centre Left faction. Only Evan Thornley, “Beaconsfield” Bill Shorten, Rodney Cavalier and Joshua Funder have no formal ties to the Left (and only Shorten has any formal ties to the Right). Thornley, an internet entrepreneur who now owns Pluto Press, attempted to establish his own independent “Labor First” faction. As National Secretary of the Australian Workers Union, Shorten owes his allegience to the right-wing Labor Unity faction, though he also has the support of ex-Leftie Dean Mighell’s breakaway Union and Community Alliance. A former Education Minister in the Wran NSW government, Cavalier is a stalwart of the Party’s Southern Highlands branch, voicing his criticism of the Party’s structure in that branch’s newsletter, which he edits. And Funder, who holds a BSc, an LLB, an LLM and a DPhil, and has lived in Blair’s Britain and Clinton’s USA, is currently a Branch Secretary with no apparent factional allegiance.

It’s important that it be recognised that this is not a collection of the Right, which currently dominates inside the ALP across the country. The views expressed inside are all progressive. As Jones points out, social progressives are concerned with the improvement of society, which must occur through government intervention, where appropriate. He argues specifically against the “pragmatism” advocated by the Party’s Right, with its emphasis on small-target “triangulation”, a term borrowed from Clinton campaign organiser Dick Morris, who argued that political candidates must avoid publicly committing themselves to any particular ideology or philosophy. While this is a practice employed by (the electorally successful) John Howard, the Prime Minister holds right-wing, small-government (or rather pro-market) ideas which inherently lend themselves to a small-target tactical approach to politicking. Jones, among others in the volume, argues that progressive politics must flow not from the intended outcome of electoral success, but from the basic and well-articulated philosophies of social democracy, such as those articulated by Bob Hawke and Neville Wran’s 2002 National Committee of Review Report:[6]

• the collective responsibility of society
• unqualified opposition to discrimination
• recognition of prior Indigenous custodianship
• an independent foreign policy
• protection of the natural environment
• the right of workers to organise and bargain collectively
• a “correct and humane” policy for asylum seekers.

Such a statement of principles would, Jones argues, inevitably lead to policies of fundamental difference to those currently promoted by the Liberal government, which believes that the unencumbered market will automatically deliver everything humans truly value, that the historical dispossession of Indigenous peoples must be revised to accommodate present-day national interests, that Australian interests are best served by alligning itself firmly with the world’s only superpower, that the environment must run a distant second to the “realities” of economic growth, and that unions and all forms of collective workplace association necessarily impedes the productivity of business. Currently, with its pragmatic emphasis on winning elections at the expense of a well-articulated statement of philosophical belief, the ALP is little more than an alternative brand of the same government, and the Australian political landscape resembles the battle between McDonald’s and KFC for “market share”. In such circumstances, why wouldn’t “consumers” (which is what citizens have been reduced to) simply go with the brand they trust?

Jones has assembled a lively collection of essays that is capable of true inspiration for those interested in the state of Australian democracy (which, dare one say it now in the era of Big Brother and Desperate Housewives, iPods and plasma TVs, should be all of us). All twelve contributors decry the disproportionate power of the factional “apparatchiks” (an old word of the Left!), who have, unforgiveably, used the time spent in Opposition since 1996 together with the shrinking size of the ALP organisation to feather their own nests. There is plea after plea to the factional bosses to finally democratise the Party, which presently sounds inauthentic and hypocritical when it demands democracy in wider society (much like the US administration). Many of the contributors directly or subtly attack the leadership of Kim Beazley, who personifies the very worst of the present ALP structure: he is reactionary (content to “oppose” instead of provide alternative solutions), right-wing (though he doesn’t like to make a “big target” of himself by admitting it), factionally hamstrung (and after he saw what the power-brokers did to Mark Latham, who could blame him?) and woefully uncharismatic (compared with Latham, Hawke, Whitlam and Paul Keating).

Thornley asks his readers to remember that the neo-liberals ('economic rationalists' in Australia), led by Milton Friedman and Lewis Powell in the United States and the HR Nicholls Society - through which Peter Costello earned his political stripes - here, had to sustain decades of principled work for their ideas of individual economy and market fundamentalism to become 'mainstream'. When Powell sent his famous memo to the American Chamber of Commerce in 1971, 'mainstream' Australians were thinking about the wonderful, leisurely future that would occur with the expectant reduction in working hours. After all, Keynes' economic problem had essentially been solved.[7] Thornley urges social progressives to commit themselves to an equally gruelling project of social reform, instead of simply expecting their adopted party - the ALP - to develop high-impact policy six months out from each election.

There are some great ideas in Coming to the Party, the main focus of which is the structural reform of the “once-great” Australian Labor Party. It is reassuring to know that there are at least some within the Party who are prepared to stick their neck out and criticise the system that privileges a few at the expense of the many. It is a cause for some distress that the contribution of Gillard, a genuine leadership contender, is arguably the weakest, in that she collates a number of policy positions without articulating the crucial philosophical platform from which they should flow. However, as Funder reminds us, social progressives should never expect to leave all the reform to the Parliamentary Labor Party. Each person has the capacity to influence in their respective social and technical spheres.

It used to be that when Barry Jones spoke, the nation listened. After all, this is a man who has been intimately involved in Australia's coming of age over the past four decades. After gaining notoriety as a TV quiz show champion in 1960, he campaigned vigorously against the hanging of Ronald Ryan to the point of having the death penalty outlawed. With Phillip Adams, he engineered the revival of the local film industry through his involvement in the Australian Film Development Corporation. And as Minister for Science from 1983, he oversaw the consolidation of the CSIRO as a truly innovative and widely respected institution for all Australians (contrast that with its present empty commercialisation, thanks to the managerialist culture that is pervading the public service and government authorities). Now, it's probably safe to say that Jones doesn't have the influence he once did. Australia is a sorrier place for it. [Russell]

[1] Steketee, 'Enough of the autopsy, Labor needs a new life', the Australian (Sydney), 1 July 2006 at 23.
[2] Steketee, 'Poison diary holds some bitter truths', the Australian, 22 September 2005 at 10.
[3] Steketee, 'Nauru solution hurls principles overboard', the Australian, 22 June 2006 at 10.
[4] Faulkner, Lawrence and Tanner are prominent members of the national Socialist Left faction, while Gillard is the leading light of the Victorian-based Ferguson Left.
[5] See Andrew Landeryou's blog: andrewlanderyou.blogspot.com/2006/02/poison-gnome-button-attacks-alp.html
[6] Available online: http://www.australianpolitics.com/parties/alp/02-08-09_hawke-wran-review.pdf
[7] For further discussion of how the mainstream milieu has changed since the 1970s, see Clive Hamilton, Growth Fetish (2003).