The prime minister has laid down several markers on Labor Party reform today at a party function in Canberra.
Addressing a Chifley Research Centre function this morning, Julia Gillard returned to an issue that has plagued her government, outlining her vision of modern Labor’s core values and how they have changed in recent years, in particular emphasising the importance of choice as well as opportunity. She also flagged support for several reform proposals from the Bracks/Carr/Faulkner post-election review to be considered later this year.
These included an aggressive 8000 recruitment target for 2012, a trial of preselection primaries in some seats, accepting the proposals from the Labor elders to empower party members — which included voting directly for National Conference delegates and the national president — and “embracing online membership”.
While the prime minister’s reform list embraces many of the recommendations from the review, it also reflects the reform agenda being pushed by the NSW Labor Right and particularly the NSW branch’s general secretary, Sam Dastyari, who has aggressively pushed for reform since the party’s smashing defeat in March.
As is now usual in Labor’s media management process, the reform proposals were leaked to the print media overnight, rendering that section of the speech redundant before it was given. In any event, the speech was more interesting for Gillard’s effort to locate her government in the longer reform history of her party and clearly articulate her own vision of Labor values and how they’re being implemented. While much of the emphasis on opportunity and education has been heard from the PM before, she made a point of addressing, albeit subtly, the apparent high level of hostility and anxiety in the community toward her government:
“We live in an age which at its best is one of individual empowerment and at its worst is one of stress, anxiety and confusion … for too many people, the lived reality of a world of so much promise is actually one of feeling adrift in a sea of information and overwhelmed by too much change. The lived reality is one of feeling that they have lost control of their own lives. Indeed, I believe this clash of the choices of modernity with our need for security in life is one of the reasons that there is a sense of anxiety in the community.”
Her response appeared to be to emphasise the party’s collective tradition, but now harnessed to deliver choice, empowerment and opportunity to people, rather than older Labor aims of a welfare state and protecting industrial rights. She summed the theme up succinctly at one point:
“Cradle to grave opportunity. Cradle to grave care for each in the face of life’s risks. Cradle to grave shared expectations of personal responsibility met with a shared resolve to leave no one behind. Collective action used to create great jobs, to build great infrastructure, to deliver great public services — and then collective action used to empower individuals to choose between these good things.”
It was a long rhetorical bow to link Labor’s tradition of collective action to the provision of individual choice and empowerment, particularly given her earlier comments about the anxiety induced by information overload and too much change. But it serves as an apt reflection of the contradictory and occasionally confused ideological moment Labor finds itself in, particular under Gillard, who has adopted an almost Thatcherite focus on the redeeming quality of education and hard work. A party traditionally of the Left, the advocate of collective action and government intervention, one that still retains a “socialist objective”, that now finds itself arguing for market solutions and liberal economics against conservatives arguing for the sorts of populist interventionist policies Labor would have been proud to own four decades ago.
The structural reforms may get up at the party conference in December, and they may even work to breathe some life into the base of the party. But the party’s ideological problem is one that will remain far less amenable to repair.
“Collective action used to create great jobs, to build great infrastructure, to deliver great public services – and then collective action used to empower individuals to choose between these good things.”
Cradle to early grave communism! Or is it cradle to early grave fascism!
As far as I can see everything is being sold off to the highest bidder without so much as a whimper from the crowd that masquerades as the present government. Heh! I am not in any way confident the other flavour of political vanilla would serve out interests any better but we need to call it for what it is.
At a time when 45% of the Australian population believe they are worse off this year than last; when the Americans are planning on solving our troop numbers problems by coming here next (See SMH article of this morning “US, Australia inch towards troops, military deal”), while 62% of the population want the Australian Govt to treat China and America equally in our relations and only 2% want to go all the way with the USA; at a time when 85% of the population want mining companies off our land if they don’t have our permission; at a time when rural communities are banding together – Labor and Liberal alike to stop the fracking coal seamers, at a time when 82% want to preserve our agriculture and manufacturing over mining; then the only way you will get the policies currently being promoted by an un-mandated government through is via a totalitarian regime so I guess out comes the collectivist rhetoric just in time to assume all the land for the public good only to sell it to an international corporate elite for their good.(Source:Australin Opinion Research September 2011). We have X-Ray machines at airports, dumbed-down education, multi-national corporations running amok, a newly inculcated surveillance mentality, police in black Kevlar. Heck we are close to having the police state being built in the UK and the United States. So when they take us over they’ll feel it is just like home.
When will they get it – the labor party can never out-Thatcher the Thatcherites; and they just look silly trying!
That tired old rhetoric about “choice” and “empowerment” decodes to the same user-pays, privatisation, two-tier society agenda run by every $#@!$%%$## cowardly politician since the accursed Milton Friedman created the monster (he is now burning in his own special circle of hell).
The “sense of anxiety” I feel comes from lving in a society where the social contract has been abandoned, and the old labor ideas about equality of access to quality education, health services, public transport etc have been junked. The “sense of anxiety” I feel comes from living under cowardly politicians who wont call racism and homophobia when they see it for fear of offending Alan Jones and his ilk. The “sense of anxiety” I feel comes from living with selfish bastards who dont want everyone to have equal access to social goods if it means they can make a buck or get something others can’t have.
Gee Julia – why does the Greens vote keep going up amongst the voters of the future? It aint rocket surgery – like the add said – I havent changed MY values, just my vote.
When Labor start ditching dead wood like Williamson and Thomson. Then and only then they will be on the way back toward representative government. We the people do have the power to shake the base of politics We can do that by simply voting out lazy time serving politicians who incidentally populate both sides of government. Foy decades we have been putting up with politicians who piss on our backs and tell us it is raining. I wont accept there are no Labor Party Members who have any idea about the cancer which is being exposed from a box of discovery documents left over from Craig Thomson’s failed defamation action. We the voting public do have the power to shake the base of politics. All we need to do is keep voting sitting members right out of our Parliament! Edward James. independent activist 0243419140
Brand Labor has jumped the Shark -see ya!
Does anyone believe Gillard wrote this piece of boilerplate? It is almost, kinda-sorta, english which she read with all the feeling of the talking clock. Her tin ear for language – “new, innovative procedures..” FFS! – is not congenital, as demonstrated when DPM during Krudd’s many absences, but an implant from the apparatchiks of Sussex St.
How does anyone imagine Oz can introduce something like a US primary? They are partisan ballots, in most states, because voters are required to nominate their allegiance when registering. Fewer than half the states allow “independents” to participate in Repug(nant) or Dem(ented) primaries and, in case the voters don’t get it right, the popular nominee can still be defeated at the nomination conventions.
Not to mention the Electoral College if the silly national vote doesn’t do what is intended by the wholly owned corporate subsidiaries masquerading as political parties.
Whereas here in Oz, we… oh fuggit, this is a waste of oxygen. Nothing will change.