Pearls and Irritations

Not since Alaska has the US won a nation so cheaply.

A friend joked to me recently that the best news Labor has had this week was being told that I was thinking that Anthony Albanese could very well lose next year’s election outright. The jibe at my forecasting record was fair comment, one I must endure – sometimes boast of – with all the fortitude I can muster.

But more important than profitless speculations about the election date and the likely outcome is whether people with a usual mind to vote Labor should do so next year – as a sort of encouragement award? Or because the alternative seems so dismal?

Does Albanese deserve re-election? Would more of the same be preferable to life under Peter Dutton? Or should Labor’s seeming incapacity to break through on the cost of living, its policy timidity, and its effective abandonment of what were once seen as fundamental Labor ideas and ideals suggest that its separation from the community can only grow?

Labor struggles with some of the legacies of pragmatic decisions made even before the election. Going along with AUKUS, for example, was decided by an inner coterie of party heavies in less than 48 hours after the American, British and Australian agreement was announced. It was decided without consultation with the rest of the front bench, parliamentary caucus or the wider party. It was obviously against the party’s grain, but the leaders feared, correctly, that Scott Morrison would use his coup to wedge Labor to the coalition’s advantage.

As some of his vehement Labor critics, such as Paul Keating and former foreign ministers, Gareth Evans and Bob Carr have said, going along with the proposal might have been reasonable political counter tactics at the time. It would do on the understanding that it would operate until after the election when an incoming Labor government could get a full range of independent advice. Morrison had felt no obligation to brief or consult Labor. He never did on big issues.

But once Labor was elected, it doubled down on AUKUS, without ever explaining its thinking processes. It hasn’t yet. It has appeared in the outcome more servile, more anxious to please and be flattered and more careless of Australian sovereignty than ever it had suggested in its pre-election indications. Perhaps that was because the background and instincts of Albanese and Richard Marles were never steeped in the area. Albanese and Marles may be good factional players, but neither is much respected as a policy wonk, let alone an intellectual or strategist. All it seems to have cost the Yanks was a little tummy tickling and some golf games. Not since Alaska has the US won a nation so cheaply.

British and American defence industry can rival Australia in delays, cost overruns and incompetent management. They, unlike Australia, can in any event abrogate the deal at will. No one knows how Albanese can insist the arrangements do not compromise Australian sovereignty. It’s not clear to Keating, Carr, and Evans and independent commentators. Adding to those doubts is the government’s failure to engage in any public consultation, or debate about what is really involved.

Labor mostly sings the Israel song, if with token gestures of concern for Palestinian victims, including 18,000 dead children

All of these considerations, and more, apply to the way that Australia has been a largely uncritical supporter of the US and Israel over the reduction of Gaza and the invasion of Lebanon. In more recent times, the Australian foreign minister, Penny Wong, has made verbal gestures and tepid criticisms suggesting a more even-handed approach, but has satisfied no one. Albanese and Wong were once fiercely in support of Palestinian rights. Albanese, in particular seems to have swallowed whole the idea that any criticism of Israel, or Zionism represents full-blown antisemitism. Labor’s significant shift towards Israel has not been a “pragmatic” response to political defence or intelligence judgments about Australia’s needs and national interests, or international human rights considerations. In line with what seems a general strategy of secrecy, and resistance to public discussion and debate, Labor has failed to confide in the public, to consult, to listen or to explain.

Labor has long had a bad conscience on respecting the human rights of asylum seekers. It became a “pragmatic” supporter of (convert to) Liberal Party policy after it was thought to be successful. It came to think, even (through Kevin Rudd) pioneer the belief that boat people had to be treated by Home Affairs officials with conscious and implacable cruelty and given no hope of achieving asylum in Australia. This was on the practical ground that this, and boat turn-backs, cut the traffic (if not the problems of people escaping war and civil disaster.) No one in Labor could think of an alternative policy that would not be monstered by the coalition happy to demonise refugees. This week Labor took legislative and PR initiative in “toughening” up its powers to deal with unauthorised non-citizens. It is trying again to get around successive High Court judgments which have frustrated the capacity to detain indefinitely without trial, or without manacles.

Labor lets coalition call the tune on immigration, refugees

Again, in terror of being wedged, Labor has sought to implement significant cuts in the immigration intake, particularly by restricting numbers of international students. This has been in response to a Dutton suggestion that housing problems have been aggravated by student demand. In fact, the international education industry earns Australia $30 billion a year, and student accommodation, even in the cities, is not a significant part of the housing problem. Albanese, in short, is shooting the nation in the foot by pandering to whipped-up anti-immigration sentiment, without making any contribution to resolution of the problem. He won’t defend the policy because he knows it’s an uphill fight. So, he surrenders in advance.

Actually, a resolution of housing shortfalls by 2030 would involve allowing migration by at least 50,000 more building tradespeople beyond those Australia could train from within its own population over that period. The houses will not build themselves, and while there are workforce and supply problems, subsidising rents, giving grants to first home buyers, announcing new subdivisions and “announceables” will only drive up house prices. Which may well suit some Labor constituencies, already housed, who do not want to see the value of their houses decline.

It is, of course, deplorable and despicable that Dutton and many coalition figures are helping to create and pander to anti-immigration feeling. It is worse that many will feel themselves encouraged in this by the success of such political strategies in the US and in Europe in recent times. But this does not excuse the Albanese government’s pre-emptive buckle to such sentiment, its general terror of political criticism from anyone apart from the Greens. Or its failure to enter into the public square to promote and defend sound policies. This is a government, in short, that lacks guts.

It also lacks imagination. And it won’t take political risks. It has a habit of leaving others out to dry the moment any brave or pioneering new “initiative” causes a negative reaction. Once within sight of the enemy, or a headline in The Australian one sees general panic and retreat.

Labor seems a pawn of gambling interests, TV moguls and miners. And Qantas

Even on social policy, including gambling law restrictions, Albanese has been a catastrophe and has seemed a pawn of the lobbies that have traditionally “owned” Labor. Like most of the media-policies of its communications minister, tough-sounding social media laws are a PR construct, rushed into parliament but not intended to do anything for at least a year.

It has reached the point where skilled opponents can play Albanese himself, and various other Labor bedwetters off a break. Almost anything the highly professional Labor machine does to try to counter this – especially pandering to mining companies and giving favoured treatment to their sternest critics The Australian and other organs of News Ltd – aggravate the perception problems. Its loyalty to its traditional enemies is never reciprocated.

Equally despicable is the way that Labor makes no-go zones of policy areas where it has suffered humiliating defeat, usually by own goals. There could be no better example than Indigenous affairs, once the highest priority of Albanese, now an area of policy and program paralysis after the decisive defeat of the Voice referendum last year. It is no coincidence that the principle to which Albanese was committed – the idea that those made subject to indigenous policy ought to have a right to be consulted and heard – has been, all along, the most serious deficiency of his style of government. Most significant policy and program failures have been inevitable consequences of his compulsive secrecy, suspicion of players not inside the big lobbies, and his exclusion of the public, and even the party, from consultative processes. (Oddly, however, members of the big lobbies, including many who pretend that Albanese is a “good mate” regard him as a pushover – even as groups which have been pro-Labor, or of the party itself, find themselves treated with hostility, indifference, wariness, scepticism and distrust.)

The Albanese style depends on the fact that the party has long ceased to have any form of grass-roots structure or governance. Or any pretence of participation in its counsels by anyone other than full-time party professionals, the greater majority of whom, including Albanese, have never worked outside organisations affiliated with the party, nor got their fingernails dirty.

A traditional follower of Labor will acknowledge that Labor’s focus on the cost of living has been correct but will not necessarily see the policies being implemented as intrinsically “Labor” (or as very successful in achieving its aim.) One doesn’t have to be a lefty to see the party as now very right wing. It is not only so on foreign and defence policy, but on broad economic policy.

Labor is ideologically closer to the Liberal Party than it is to the Greens, even if most of the Greens, on whom Labor relies, mostly originated from Labor. Originally a ginger group on the environment against a Labor Party in thrall to industry and unions over environmental destruction, the Greens got their biggest fillip when Kim Beazley, to Albanese and Wong’s disgust succumbed to national security hysteria and public hostility to refugees in 2001. [It is said that fully half of Labor’s paid-up membership did not vote Labor in 2001, and that none of the deserters have voted for it since.] It is very unlikely that the Greens will ever supplant Labor as a major party in government, but the trend is for increased Green representation, and that Labor almost always loses when the battleground of ideas and ideals is between Greens and Labor. In such debates, after all, the Greens can seem pure even when they lose the argument; Labor, by contrast, often seems corrupted by its pragmatism, want of principle, and untidy accommodations with all of the lobbies.

Albanese is calculating that voters have had a chance to look Dutton over and to not like him. He is also hoping that he can win the debates by logic and rules of debate. He ought to have a close look at the US presidential election. I don’t think it is either a beauty contest, nor about the mathematics and “facts” (if any) in the platforms. Dutton is doing more to persuade why Albanese is failing to deal with the mood and the need. Albanese, amazingly, thinks his performances shows him to be the more effective leader.

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