Not Dead Yet: Labor's Post Left Future
by Shaun Crowe
 

In Not Dead Yet: Labor’s Post-Left Future, Mark Latham declares himself to be a new, glass-half-full kind of guy. Where he concedes that, once upon a time, he was guilty of focussing obsessively on the Labor Party’s problems, he’s now committed his public commentary to finding solutions.

“There should be a new rigour applied to the writing of books and essays on the ALP”, Latham argues. “They shouldn’t qualify for publications unless they focus on answers”.

Whilst this means that the current Quarterly Essay lacks some of the colour that filled in his Diaries and more polemical AFR columns, that’s probably for the best. Latham’s awkward insertion into the 2010 federal election wasn’t his finest moment, and a reckless public image has often served to obscure his significant political and sociological insights.

In Not Dead Yet, Latham groups some of these insights around the question that has dominated his career: how can the traditional structures of the ALP renew themselves to appeal to a 21st century Australia?

What emerges throughout the book is not so much an overarching project, but a series of projects; a set of ideas that are as aggressively anti-utopian as they are hard-nosed. Unlike more radical strains of progressive thought, Latham sets forth no teleology, no desirable end point of society. Rather, he advocates a style of politics: a democratisation of organisation and thought, with the goal of aligning the desires and needs of voters more closely with political decisions.

The first of these projects involves internal reform of the Labor Party. Latham’s core contention here is that the ALP suffered an Edenesque fall when it lost its place within the society it sought to represent. Citing figures from Rodney Cavalier’s book, Power Crisis, the essay lays bare the obvious truth: that the former lifeblood of the party, its membership and affiliated trade union movement, have bled to the point of anemia. In practice, this has meant that the structures that once united its supporters and parliamentary party (such as community preselection and party conferences) have become tokenistic and, at their worst, a mask for centralised union control.

As Latham sums it up: “This is the core delusion of 21st century, that political parties can fragment and hollow out, yet still win the confidence of the people”.

To reverse this slide, he advocates the introduction of community ‘primaries’ to select parliamentary candidates. Echoing Sam Dastayari’s experiment in Sydney’s mayoral contest, he argues that a ‘50/50’ model (an evenly weighted split between party members and registered ‘supporters’) could inject some needed transparency into what Lindsay Tanner described as its “Masonic-Leninist” culture.

Whilst certain self-interested parties have ridiculed these experiments (Stephen Conroy, the Victorian right-wing powerbroker, asserted that they would only aid the wealthy, while union chief Joe de Bruyn called them “plain dumb”), Latham favours some basic regulations to meet his ideal of community representation: candidates should be confined to strict spending limits, show a track record of community engagement, and be required to organise public meetings with their constituents.

While these specific requirements can be debated, the broad imperatives for cultural transformation cannot. When the Labor brand has been tarnished, it has invariably been because of a perceived opacity. The internal overthrow of a first-term Prime Minister, the seemingly insane level of power wielded by Eddie Obeid, Ian MacDonald’s corrupt licensing, the siphoning of funds within the HSU; each dagger to Labor’s heart was premised on a deluded sense of internal invulnerability, built on a lack of external accountability.

In this, the dispute about internal transparency seems to have paralleled the dispute on gay marriage: there’s been a lag between the intellectual debate in the community and the decisions of those with institutional power. As Latham argues, and Dastayari concedes, the party has reached the stage of ‘reform or die’. We can only hope that the survival instinct is stronger at the organisational, rather than individual, level.

The essay’s second contention concerns economic policy and the party’s relationship with the so-called ‘Hawke-Keating legacy’. Latham believes that economic liberalisation has initiated one of Labor’s greatest social achievements: the growth in real incomes and job opportunity, spread throughout each income level of the Australian economy, witnessed in the past two decades. Citing NATSEM data, he points out that the average family is now $224 a week better off. In anyone’s book, but especially a party built on improving the living standards of working Australians, this is a remarkable feat.

But instead of embracing such an achievement, the party has, in Latham’s eyes, rejected Keating and re-advocated a form of industrial protectionism. Kevin Rudd criticised the “personal greed dressed as economic philosophy” of neoliberalism, whilst Wayne Swan has similarly used his pulpit to bash Australia’s mining barons.

But here Latham seems to only tell half the story. In practice, it’s hard to see where the Labor Party has peeled back the policies that comprised the ‘Keating settlement’. Whilst you could point to discrete examples like the prolonged death of the car industry, the vast bulk of economic policy under Labor remains liberal, when not explicitly stimulatory and counter-cyclical. According to the conservative American Heritage Institute, Australia remains the world’s third most ‘free’ economy.

The problem lies less in the realm of policy and more in the realm of rhetoric and identity. In essence, the party is unsure how to discuss these changes. As the progressive project involves a complex web of ends (on one hand, the material state of its constituents and, on the other, the promotion of social ‘solidarity’ and greater economic equality) and means (the use of government oversight and the harnessing of markets),  Labor has found itself in a philosophical no-man’s land.

Or to put it another way: is the Labor Party willing to accept a decline in social solidarity and its associated community ties, for a rise in wealth and working class autonomy? Obviously the debate is more complex than this, but the party’s rhetorical confusion remains this at core. They’re tied between two horses walking in different directions, unsure of which rope to cut.

This becomes clear when the essay articulates Latham’s favoured form of ‘liberal solidarity’. Latham himself, in numerous books, articles and speeches, has bemoaned the decline of Australia’s ‘social capital’. To counter this, he argues that institutions should balance a rights agenda with social responsibility; that, rather than pure liberalism, they should accept a form of mutualism.

But this is hard to square with one of the Latham’s central themes: that when formulating rhetoric and policy, the Labor Party should understand and focus on the social and material “aspirations” of its constituents. Desiring a better job, education or income is profoundly human (criticising these aspirations would echo the logic of Kim Jong il’s mid-famine crack-down on private industry; he wanted to stop a rise in ‘egoism’) but it does, if it’s to become the party’s guiding philosophical construct, sit uneasily with Latham and Labor’s foundational belief in community solidarity.

Whilst Latham attempts to walk this tight-rope, the tensions remain. It might just be that, by emphasising the market’s wealth generating capacity alongside the obligations of citizenship, Labor can foster a rich and cohesive society. But it also makes it sound awfully like the Liberal Party. Ultimately, without a new vocabulary of progressive politics, a way of talking about how policies relate to the Good Life and Good Society, this is a bridge that seems difficult to pass.

Not Dead Yet concludes by discussing the other debate that has defined Labor’s current stretch in government, climate change. Here Latham makes a very simple, but incredibly important point. He argues that climate change’s scientific reality will eventually dictate a social reality: that the politics of global warming, reflecting disastrous climatic shifts, will mean that parties simply have to deal with it politically.

Because of this, Latham argues that the Labor Party should position itself as its natural stewards. Like education, health and industrial relations, he believes it could create another weapon in its future political armory.

Of course, in 2013, when this physical reality remains abstract, the politics are difficult; the left are asking citizens to make material sacrifices for speculative ends. But, like the Democrats passing the Civil Rights Act in 1965, the tide of history will, unless Andrew Bolt’s conspiracies are true, almost certainly be on their side. For Labor politicians pondering the long-term trajectory of their party, this certainly seems worth considering.

Not Dead Yet ultimately proves that, when he puts his serious hat on, Mark Latham can be a substantial, insightful voice in Labor politics. As a glass-half-full guy, he might direct his provocation towards less entertaining ends than The Latham Diaries did, but, for any citizen, activist or politician concerned with Australia’s oldest party’s future, this is good place to start.

 

Shaun Crowe is a doctoral candidate at the Australian National University.

Mark Latham, Not Dead Yet: Labor's Post Left Future, Black Inc Books, 2013.