Pity the poor Laborista assigned to do the Light on the Hill address in 2019.
Jim Chalmers wanted to use it to tell Labor to abandon its nostalgia regarding old-left socialism. But of course he also had to recite Ben Chifley’s accomplishments. Here’s how he handled the engine driver’s greatest passion: “His membership of the banking royal commission from 1935 to 1937 showed him what did and didn’t work about banking and finance”.
When you’re telling the party to move to the centre, and the lecture is named after someone who wanted to nationalise the whole banking system, probably best to simply leave out the greatest fight of his life altogether.
Look, Chalmers seems to be a decent guy, but his Chifley oration is heartbreakingly self-parodic — an effective demonstration of the terrible situation Labor is in.
Bill Shorten’s Labor came to the 2019 election with a grab-bag of policies, some of which — renewables, childcare, tax — were mildly leftish but had no overarching narrative, common grounding, or much passion from the right-faction figures selling them. The campaign marked the final point of Labor’s long leaching-away of any form of social-political analysis that had been cross-fusing the party since the 1920s, and which had all but run dry after 1996.
Having become immersed in neoliberal economics, choice theory and focus groups, the sort of atomised individualistic thinking that underpins such processes deluded the party into thinking that that’s how society actually is. So they offered nothing but isolated bids; a policy auction.
Because some of these offers were leftish, Chalmers asserts that Labor was perceived to be against mobility. “Mobility” is Chalmers’ mantra, the idea that Labor should be realised by assisting people and families to go about their individual and differing self-advancement.
That’s tricky if you’re delivering the Chifley, because the obvious content of the “light on the hill” — from the Sermon on the Mount by way of John Winthrop — is that we are going towards it collectively, that it’s the only direction to go in. Winthrop, a Puritan settler of Massachusetts spoke of the “city on the hill” that would serve as a beacon to the dissident — and fiercely ethical — puritans of Europe. That worked for Chifley, for Whitlam and even for Hawke, because they presided over societies in which the mode of life of Labor’s base retained a residual collectivism, a fact which relied on an absence of mobility. Similar schools, jobs, neighbourhoods — we were moving towards the light together.
Chalmers thus has to combine these contradictory notions and the result is rich in absurdity. Here’s my favourite: “A forward-looking society, an outward-facing country, powered by an upward-climbing economy”.
Also known as: nose-down, arse-up, going round in circles.
Chalmers’ hope as expressed in the oration is that 2019 is like 1980; the disappointment before the triumph. That is presumably a gin-up for the troops because, without some real rethinking, 2019 will be more like 2001 for Labor — or 1951 — the first of a string of losses.
The simple point to make is that Chalmers (and much of Labor) has entirely misunderstood how Morrison eked out his 2019 win. They appear to have latched on to the idea that Morrison sold aspirational individualism better than they did, while Labor’s various statist offers smacked of collectivism. That is exactly the opposite of what occurred. Morrison didn’t advocate an individualistic and competitive society — he assumed that it existed, and offered, via political sloganeering, some partial compensations for it. Morrison supplied a collective of atomised individuals — “the quiet Australians” — who lived up to the “promise of Australia”.
This latter phrase was mocked by Labor insiders, as was “if you have a go, you’ll get a go”. Some suggested this was an invitation to selfishness; actually it was an invitation to reciprocity, to feel part of a larger national enterprise — even if, day by day, your family’s life is actually isolated, struggling and precarious. There was no policy offered to “achieve” this; that occurred simply by saying it, politics as a granting of recognition.
How did Morrison and his team hit on this in a way that Labor couldn’t? The obvious answer is that Morrison’s genuine religious faith gives him an insight into a population’s hunger for something beyond individual (including family) existence, in a way that Labor’s technocratic and unimpassioned elite have lost. Having kept a lid on explicit religiosity (after a few early missteps) Morrison had, in Christianity, a way of “theorising” social life. Pretty crude, but since Labor had none, Morrison won.
Morrison’s vague memes supplied the heart to the heartless world of neoliberalism. By so doing, the Liberal Party became the custodian of Chifley’s vision, regressing to its literal religious roots. After all, what is the Hillsong megachurch when lit up for service? Literally a shining city on a hill.
Labor, which once offered a society that would be better than the one we had, now proposes to replace the idea of leading us somewhere with mobility — which is going nowhere, but at greater acceleration. If Labor runs that line — and quite aside from the possible global recession coming down the tracks — then Morrison will go twice as pseudo-collective in 2022, and win 2022 and 2025 at the same time.
Before going to the hill, maybe Labor should lie down in the valley for a while and think hard about what it is, what society is, and why it actually wants to rule the shining city.
Bloody well indeed!
Hear, hear. And I can feel the wrath of the die hard ALP apologists without even bothering to look, you know the kind ” how dare you criticise Labor it’s the Govt blah blah”. Calling the ALP left wing is farcical, the only thing they are vaguely left of is the neofascists currently taking up residence on the treasury benches.
Brilliantly biting, but oh so true.
It’s rubbish like this that has persuaded me to cancel my auto renewal of my Crikey subscription and to allow it to run down. Sniping from the left while the mass media including a compromised ABC pushes from the right puts Labor in a no win situation. It might have escaped Rundle’s attention but the LNP bought the last election on credit aided and abetted by Palmer, the media and vested interests including a well known shock jock. He pushed hard in support of the franking credits rort for the entire election campaign without ever publicly disclosing his chairmanship of a financial planning outfit.
There’s more than one way to be “left”. Labor have chosen the worst, and put themselves in the no-win situation.
Absolutely agree. All kinds of theories with no influence of $60 million spent on advertising by Clive Palmer alone. Any data to back up these theories? None! The superior analytical framework offered by dialectical materialism conquers all! I too have enough of this data-free, fact free, bullshit.
On the other hand we have the purely neoliberal macroeconomic analysis of Bernard Keane telling us that the federal government is like a household and needs to balance its “budget”, or some equivalent rubbish.
Time to cancel the subscription. Why pay for bollocks.
Johnny, you can’t be in Queensland where the ALP abandoned any pretence it had to a climate change policy in the last couple of weeks of the election campaign. That’s right, they had the bones of a policy including a vague but plausible attitude to Adani and then they hoiked the whole thing out the window and went chasing after the blue collar vote – which had already gone over to Hanson, Katter etc long, long ago. Don’t believe it? Just look up Galilee Basin Pledge – where the embattled ALP member for Herbert ditched the greenie vote and died in a ditch for ‘workers’ who weren’t there to vote for her. The Greens vote went up 1%, ALP back 5% because so many disgusted greenies put Labor last – just to give them a taste of the price of treachery. If the ALP want to try that again they’ll get a proper sock down their throats – not because the Morrison government has anything going for it but because the ALP turned out to be lying turncoats who don’t care if they can’t be trusted. Light on the hill? What a fucking joke.
Totally agree Charlie. My earlier post, sitting in the unmonitored moderator’s inbox, points out how Labor has abandoned the bush, the LNP is on the nose big time and the winners will be Hanson and the rest of the populists.
Abandoning entire communities to appease the Greens is how the original Labor proposal was widely misrepresented and the intervention of blundering Bob Brown just added to that impression. Policies are being revamped at the moment and there is scope to provide a sensible middle course.
Yes, JR, but there are always going to be dirty tricks by your enemies – that’s what enemies do. The point for Labor supporters – of which I’m one – is to work out a program and message that is not only good but dirty tricks proof…
Yep. Dirty tricks need a legislated restraint. Fat chance of that. The way I suggest Labor ‘dirty trick proof’ its agenda is appeal more to the young on environment and social equity and a funded plan to fund the transition of coal, gas and oil workers to new energy industries. A significant weakness in Labor’s climate policy was that it was on the funding never never.
Very hard when even the ABC uses selective 10 second grabs from your news conference to illustrate the angle that they are pursuing.
If Morrison has “genuine faith”, then his god is an arsehole and his religion is fraudulent.
Both true.
Well the difference between genuine faith and genuine delusion is rather slender…
GR’s analysis seems to credit our voting population with warm hearts and analytical minds…maybe they do at other times, but during elections their bullshit detectors are dulled by their selfishness and ignorance.
I personally think that commercial television and advertising has damaged the thinking faculties of many, and especially the so-called “swinging voter” segment – Gruen shows quite clearly how gullible marketing people think we are, and sales prove their point.
The more important fact is whether Morrison’s religious practice allows him to project an idea of community that Labor wasn’t able to
I think you’ve got it wrong. Shorten projected the same whiny sense of insecurity that he had always done; Morrison projected a simpleton’s aura of catch-phrase confidence, no doubt sensing like everyone else the insecurity of his opponent. That is all.
Forget the light on the bloody hill, if Shorten had lashed the Libs on the NBN (instead of not mentioning it), promising to at least begin the inevitable repair job, had some kind of sensible and feasible policy to cut back total immigration (especially long term ‘temporary’) instead of inviting grand-parents or whatever for godsake, and gone full throttle on environment and climate change instead of his half-baked two-faced Adani bullshit, I reckon he’d have won in spite of his own deficiencies and those supposedly loser policies on negative gearing and Frank Dividend ‘refund’.