Abstract

Old Australia and New Australia, Old Labor and New Labor
Shaun Crowe
 

When Lindsay Tanner quit politics in 2010, he, like many gone before him, cited ‘family’ as the primary reason for his leaving Parliament. “There are”, he confessed, “two little girls and two older children who need me more than the country needs me”.

Perhaps understandably, this was met with a healthy dose of cynicism. The only thing more predictable than a politician giving the ‘family’ excuse is their relapse into public life.

But, more than this, the timing of Tanner’s decision hinted at deeper reasons for his retirement. Firstly, there was his well-documented and long-running dispute with Julia Gillard. Given that she had, only a day earlier, ascended to the Office of the Prime Minister, it didn’t take a lot to link Tanner’s decision with their personal acrimony.

Secondly, there was the state of his parliamentary seat, Melbourne. Having been held by Labor for over a century, and housing Labor figures like Arthur Caldwell, the inner-city electorate had become increasingly endangered by a rising Greens vote. In fact, earlier in 2010, Tanner himself argued that the left-wing party was ignored at “[Labor’s] own peril”. And as Adam Bandt’s eventual election showed, this warning proved to be well-founded.

But reading Politics with Purpose, you get the sense that Tanner’s farewell was more sincere than it was credited; that his decision wasn’t solely the product of political considerations. Indeed, if you were to identify one foundation on which the book, and Tanner’s political philosophy, is built, it would be the primacy of relationships in underpinning healthy social and private lives. Across the volume’s essays and speeches, Tanner suggests that an emphasis on the defense and reestablishment of community trust is the best way to recalibrate Labor and answer the political question that most troubles him: that is, how the ALP can arrest its slide in popularity, social relevance and internal democracy, whilst simultaneously confronting its persistent existential dilemma.

In this sense, Tanner analysis is close to Mark Latham’s in the growing genre of literature that seeks to explore What’s Wrong With Labor. Both see the corrupting of the party’s internal democracy (a democracy that once linked members of the community with actual decision-making) and the dissolving of the social structures that actually facilitated that democracy (structures built on interpersonal trust and a sense of investment in a community’s future) as the core reasons for Labor’s decline.

On the question of internal democracy, Tanner writes convincingly and consistently. Modern readers could, perhaps, accuse him of restating familiar arguments, arguments that have found formal articulation in a number of party reviews. However, this critique is quickly silenced by a look at precisely when these points were being made. 

Even before he entered parliament in 1993, Tanner argued that the party’s future depended on a reinvigorated membership; a membership that was freed from the existing shackles of internal hierarchy. By 2002, he was more forceful in his language. The ALP’s internal culture, he argued, could best be described as ‘Masonic-Leninist’: “Byzantine structures, unfamiliar jargon, exclusionary attitudes and an atmosphere of secrecy characterise Labor’s organizational culture”.

That these debates continue after twenty years, a time in which transparency has remained a goal rather than a reality, speaks to both the prescience and essential truth of Tanner’s analysis. Whilst internal party rhetoric suggests that open primaries are a future possibility, a snapshot of modern Labor has a far greater resemblance to Tanner’s portrait than the democratic ideal.

On the subsequent question of social change, Tanner is again consistent, if this time more provocative. Tanner is instinctively cautious about the left’s alignment with ‘liberation’ movements. Whilst recognising the need to explode the repressive, stilted and prejudicial nature of pre-sixties society, he asks whether this ideology hasn’t created its own problems.

By conflating liberation movements with individualist liberalism, Tanner argues that the underlying assumption of these ideologies (that whatever makes an individual, rather than a community, happy should govern personal decision-making) has fostered an atomised, often lonely society. “Our most pressing problems are a reflection of insufficient order and security”, he argues, “not an absence of personal rights and freedoms”.

Whilst this might represent a more conservative, or at least explicitly communitarian, brand of social democracy than many within the left desire, he does support it with some clear, often socially vital, examples. The loss of ‘time’ and shared experience following labour market deregulation, the difficulty many over-committed parents find in spending time with their children, the confusion of status young men have experienced as their jobs and social utility have transformed, all these are given by Tanner as instances where relationship, rather than purely rationalist, decision making could lead to the greater happiness of a greater number of Australians.

 And, in this, we see what is possibly most useful in Tanner’s analytical style. Rather than providing clear answers to the questions of politics, he provides a clear approach. Across the book, Tanner suggests policies that deal directly with plainly identified social problems and impediments to Australians’ happiness. Rather than advocating a preconceived ideological position to fit whatever the current context may need (“more freedom” or “less freedom”), his arguments are always striving to meet a vital human, rather than abstract, end.

So whilst, in Politics with Purpose, various members of the left might find specific grounds for criticism, they should still take away one distinct lesson. At their best, politics and social organisations can respond to our desires, align with our aspirations and sympathise with our pains.

What Lindsay Tanner tells us, and has been doing so for twenty years, is that we should never lose sight of these guiding lights. 
 

Shaun Crowe is a doctoral candidate at the Australian National University and the Research Manager at the Centre for the Study of Australian Politics.

Lindsay Tanner, Politics with Purpose: Ocassional Observations on Public and Private Life, Scribe 2012.