That Julia Gillard is to speak to the Conservative Party conference this week should surely be enough to remove doubt, if any remained, that she and her government were the continuation of John Howard’s neoliberal project — after a brief outbreak of actual social democracy under Kevin Rudd and Wayne Swan.
Gillard would presumably claim that she is doing this in her role with Global Partnerships for Education. But she could have ducked it. At a time when Labour and other parties are fighting a gruelling battle to delegitimise Boris Johnson, Gillard’s willingness to lend her considerable UK prestige to him is an undesirable outcome.
Undesirable, but unremarkable. Julia Gillard’s government was a left neoliberal project that saw the final separation of industrial relations from actual workers in the creation of the Fair Work Commission, and the mass privatisation of social care under the NDIS. It did several good and social democratic/social market things as well, but they were all contained within a neoliberal, technocratic architecture.
This was a journey Gillard had been on since she left the mainstream Socialist Left for Socialist Forum in the early 1980s. The latter’s ostensible radicalism — actual communists! — disguised their technocratic, managerialist politics. From there it was simply a case of drifting with the spirit of the age, to the private market as the vehicle of “efficient choice”.
So of course Gillard would appear for the Tories, just as UK Labour has become a mass membership party with a dynamic relationship between leadership and rank and file. Like Berlusconi’s centre-right Forza Italia, behind the cover of Boris’ bluster, the Tories are full of right technocrats itching to take apart the remains of British social democracy piece by piece.
Gillard’s appearance among them, as a genuine left social democracy tries to take power, is a logical consequence of the path she took, and down which she took the ALP. Those inclined to yell at me for another anti-Labor piece might want to ask themselves where the real danger is.
The bad calls are coming from inside the house.
Rest easy, GR, you’ll receive no yelling at from me.
A perfectly natural progression.
Me too David. Well argued Guy. Thanks.
Better off waiting to hear her pitch. She’s pitching into a pretty dysfunctional Tory turnout that hanging on to the flotsam and jetsam of Brexit with no life jackets.
Well after all the hand wringing on Gillard’s Motives and political failures , she ended up spoking on advocacy for a bipartisan maintenance of a foreign aid target and in doing so identified the failures in her period to raise the target and achieve bipartisanship across the political board , particularly in Australia where the commitment continues to slide to one of the lowest contributors in the developed economies. It’s the end of social democracy in our time!
Unfortunately, what you say is only too true.we here in Queensland had our own experience with Anna Bligh when she went on a privatisation binge, got kicked out and straight away signed up as a mouthpiece for the Australian Bankers Association with nary a blush.in many ways Labor in Australia has been hijacked by people who wouldn’t have a single Labor bone in their bodies, when they go to university they look around and then decide which party to join.i really believe that to be a true Labor person your beliefs are as much in your heart as in your brain.when Beazley began his privatisation agenda the alarm bells started to ring for me.After all the family silver is sold or pawned, what if left? Where else can a True Believer turn to though, I can’t possibly vote for the other gang, and at eighty I am too old to attempt to change it.
I once met Claire Moore during my time in QLD Labor and told her about my swinging voter Dad. I go through a bunch of federal and state issues he felt betrayed on, and asked how do I get him back to being a Labor man, why should he vote for them?
The answer? An uncomfortable look and not much else.
Eventually I came to the same conclusion and stopped campaigning for them.
Yes, Malcolm, and we now have Albo (from ‘the Left’) saying Labor needs to govern for those on $200,000 a year, because they’re not rich.
Agree with this commentary but in retrospect( always good for 20/20 vision) it would seem the gentle beginnings of Neo-Liberalism for Australia lay in the Hawke -Keating years with Hawkies quite open friendship with business moguls and the social accord which cut the balls off the unions. Keating himself says that Neo-Liberalism has had its day and has gone too far but the problem now is we have generations of workers with no concept of anything else but this awful semi-fascism we are stuck in. Socialism has become a swear word with only the Scandinavians able to exist as a successful example of modern-day Social Democracy. Only the young whose light on the hill is the survival of the planet which the greedy elderly rich care nothing about have any chance of changing things.
At the local level Labor is doomed as long as it has as its movers and shakers student politicians who value the great god of pragmatism over ideals.
Geez Guy, you may be seeing a few too many ideological spooks here. Let’s not forget PJK with Bob Hawkes’ support, unleashed neo-liberalism here, but with an effective safety net. Every Labor leader has trodden that path. Now, PJK, never one to readily admit error, has come to see the the evils of neo-liberalism for what it is. As you say, that is the destruction of social democracy. And I think you are being a bit hard on Julia. She did craft a lot of enduring good policy in a minority government.
Having said that, I agree that Labor now has to be straight about the failure of the neo-liberal project and plant its philosophy in social equity. However, one despicable success of neo-liberalism is that it has deluded many individuals into thinking they are capitalist and that their personal interests are aligned with corporate greed. That is going to take some winding back, if it is possible at all.
Which is exactly what Margaret Thatcher set out to do – ‘There is no such thing as society’, just a collection of ‘aspirational’ (=greedy little capitalists) fighting each other for the biggest piece of the pie.
Spot on.