With the passage of the climate change bill, the Albanese government and the Australian Labor Party come to a position of effective dominance over the country that may be stable for some time. This was not a given from the election result, with its bare majority and a crossbench Senate.
They could have left the climate change targets unregulated to avoid a possible Greens ambush; they could have been facing an opposition which accepted the general principle and then poked holes in the execution, thus making some gains as a party of review and challenge. The party could have been under attack at the state level in Victoria, from a renewed opposition, landing blows on a compromised, tired and disliked Andrews government.
But none of that has happened; indeed, everything is the reverse.
The government’s smooth deal with the Greens and the teal independents deprived the right of what it was desperate for, a carbon pollution reduction scheme rematch, and there was a minimum of paying out on the Greens. The opposition’s mad-dog question time strategy — on the PM meeting a CFMMEU official, for example — sounded obsessive and unfocused.
The kicker was Nats MP Pat Conaghan trying to bring down Greens MP Max Chandler-Mather during his maiden speech, complaining of his “state of undress” for not wearing a tie, which gave Speaker Milton “Herman Munster” Dick the opportunity to slap down Conaghan while Chandler-Mather laughed.
Could it get any more shambolic? Yes, with the appearance of the amazing crushed-velvet “Marquee” Mitch Catlin, PR to the stars and to Matthew Guy, for a hundred grand in direct payment, which occupied everyone until the John Barilaro hearings came round again, and we were all given the spectacle of a true grotesque, wheedling and self-pitying. This marked the total collapse of the Coalition across the nation, and at every level of political action.
There is not only no stable Liberal government in the country — in Tasmania, it’s dependent on an independent, and the premier is changed fortnightly — there is no functioning opposition either. This is a pretty extraordinary one-sided situation for the country to be in. Our federal system has usually ensured that there was always some state leader who could project force and power. But Dominic Perrottet is the nearest thing, and he comes across like a Christian wedding planner.
Labor’s commanding status in relation to this shemozzle becomes almost total. The unity of purpose and clarity of projection is substantial. Rationality and consistency is the dominant feeling around, which gives a sense of legitimacy that spreads well into the people who voted against them. There is a retroactive sense that this had to happen as it has.
This is added to by the effectiveness and command of the state Labor. The two new ones in South Australia and Western Australia are highly popular. It’s a measure of the degree of command that the battered and bruised Andrews government is even more dominant in Victoria than it was. The federal and state governments are now integrated in overarching purpose and action.
But this command and unity makes something else visible. Labor is now the party of capital, its expression and means of coordination and integration. With its final burst of pre-election commitments to not raise taxes, including corporate taxes, its clear communication to the resources industry that it would be hands-off, and its standing back from any notion that it would enforce a specific or programmatic national interest in matters economic, Labor moved into a space that the Coalition had vacated by its adoption of clientelism and cronyism: that of the manager of intersecting parts of capital, and the guarantor of stable circumstances for accumulation and profit. In doing so, it decisively withdrew from any last residual notion that it was in some way a party that represented workers in the political sphere.
That judgment may seem unusual given that Tony Burke has just gone up against the private sector in threatening to close the loophole as regards enterprise agreement cancellations. In fact it fits well, and it fits with everything the government does, separately, with regard to the Fair Work Commission.
By leaving the FWC in place, as designed, and emphasising the mode of use — a government advocating and petitioning to it — the Albanese government is cementing in this type of state-party-class relationship. A Labor government is going to argue for a more generous treatment of workers by capital, and may shift regulations as such, but it is not going to make any changes that would shift structural power relations even slightly.
Having made the commitment to be the alternative party of capital during the election, Labor is now on the way to becoming the organic representative of such. The COVID pandemic fast-tracked a process under way since the 2008 crash: the ever more substantial involvement of the state in keeping capitalism going day to day by propping up demand, and the active involvement in supply chain problems.
With multiple sectors to be integrated in a way that the market now cannot do efficiently, post-social-democratic parties become the preferred agent of capital in state power. The old bourgeois parties of capital, when they fail to understand the need for this switch — the switch to whole system management, rather than simply advancing the interests of one segment within it — become outdated, become agents of system disruption.
Since what capital requires most for profit-making is a reliable framework, consistent over time, the failure of old bourgeois parties to supply that causes capital to desert them. When industry bodies, one by one, peeled off from the Coalition to back a specific and legislated emissions target, the Coalition simply called them traitors. They didn’t get it, and they still don’t.
Labor’s commitment to capital thus dictates, and is expressed by, its actions on social issues. The benefits system is taken over and run on an enduring principle: that it is there to discipline and shape the able-bodied worker, not to ensure their interests and rights as citizens and human beings. Thus the commitment to the new Workforce Australia procedures; thus the refusal to raise basic JobSeeker and other rates. The desperate poverty they create is a social terror strategy to prod people back to work; the collateral damage to those who can’t work or find work is judged acceptable.
The NDIS retains its role as parallel to Julia Gillard’s Fair Work Commission, that of enforcing neoliberal practices in social services, as the FWC neoliberalises employment relations. Bill Shorten’s recent “I didn’t know” hissy fit about the NDIS scandal — hundreds of severely disabled people more or less permanently hospitalised, because there is no capacity within the subcontract-oriented NDIS to care for them — fools no one. Everyone in the care sector knew that the NDIS would come to this situation eventually; it has been talked about for years. What is required, backstopping NDIS, is a state-based care system, steered by the needs of such people to live as full a life as possible. This is exactly the sort of approach which Labor now cannot suggest on any significant scale.
Labor’s role as the party which integrates capital and social life, such that neoliberal capitalism is smoothly, rationally, non-corruptly extended to all areas of existence, is mirrored in federal-state integration by Labor governments. State Labor governments privatise social agencies and regulatory bodies to this end. They turn infrastructure development from the provision of things we need to mass creation of investment and demand, all to fill the ever-present threat of a vacuum.
Victoria’s “suburban rail loop” is an example of this. It is the enactment of Keynes’ observation that it would be best to tender out digging holes in the ground to get demand going if you can think of nothing else to do in a slump. Its purpose is to provide a pretext to create new “activity centres” which now bypass planning regulations entirely; Big Infrastructure will then get vast value capture with its loop tunnel commitments and can turn suburban town and village centres into ghastly high-rise mini-cities, essentially obliterating the notion of neighbourhood. The alternative — planning urban development in a genuinely social fashion — is now out of reach. Some of these “big builds” have a dual character, in that they are genuinely social in intent. But if Labor were still a genuinely “social” party of any sort, there would, for example, be a lot more emphasis on housing rather than transport.
But state Labor’s role goes further — into all social legislation. The Andrews government’s parallel recent initiative has been to create draconian protest laws against actions on logging in central Victoria. The link with capital is not immediately obvious: there’s no real money in this forestry; it’s to keep a few sawmills going and keep the forestry section of the CFMMEU from arcing up. Old growth could be replaced with new renewable timber products to keep these sawmills working; in any gap caused by doing such, it would be cheaper to send every timber worker on a luxury ocean cruise than continue existing arrangements.
But forestry isn’t the main game of these new laws. Their purpose is to permanently change Labor’s relationship to social protest after its century of being first a working-class party, and then a progressive coalition energised by new social movements. That is now absolutely and finally gone, and is being enthusiastically driven out. Labor’s new laws aren’t for the forests; they’re for the cities, in the years and decades to come, a rehearsal for Labor’s role as enforcer of social space being seen as primarily a place for capital, accumulation and profit, and everything else secondarily. Any reform Labor is associated with will tend to be socio-cultural and individual — gender stuff, assisted dying, etc — rather than socio-economic or political. The pathway opens for Labor to be a fully integrated authoritarian neoliberal party, increasingly the discipliner of the people it once sought to represent.
In the early days of this new relationship, the Coalition exists simply as a rump of old capital, desperately hoping that culture wars might keep it together. The Greens and independents will emerge as the true opposition. Will emerge? They can, if they understand what has occurred, and strive to put together a unified core alternative program, which stands up for the idea of a society geared towards human ends, against the endless extension of capital, driven by many decent people who have become the devil’s party without knowing it.
Hasn’t Labor been the party of capital since Keating, and arguably Hawke before him? The old left of the party (Kim Carr, etc.) fought a long and valiant struggle to stay in the conversation, but didn’t the real shift in terms of power and whose interests were being legislated when Labor was in government happen 30-40 years ago? In other words, is it not the case that what we are seeing now is simply a reconsolidation of the real ideological and policy shifts of the 1980s?
My thoughts exactly. If the teals and greens have any clout, it will be to make changes to our electoral system to the kiwi/tassie/mixed member style top get more of them voted in necessitating a coalition of reasonable voices, it was nearly made so this time, only need a couple of teal wins in Labor seats and they won’t give it up
Wish I shared your faith in teals, but reading the economic stance most of the current ones have doesn’t bode that well, unfortunately.
Agreed they are just disillusioned Tories
MME works well enough with small electorates and/or sufficient commonality.
In our atomised, alienated and deracinated society such a major electoral change would require more political courage than we’ve seen since that tall bloke back in 1973 whose like we shall not see again, this side of perdition.
Absolutely! There’s nothing more fundamental than how we put the buggers there in the first place. How election outcomes depend on our address as much as our vote is surprisingly accepted .. through ignorance. When we, the people, are represented, then we can continue this conversation.
Yep. Hawke-Keating was the best Right-wing government that Australia has ever had.
Overtook Fraser on the right hand side!
Without a doubt. The ALP was totally spooked by the Dismissal and realised that their only way back to power was to conform to the financiers who had orchestrated the coup. Hence Hawke’s and Keating’s near total acceptance to the theories at that time of Bert Kelly MP (Liberal), the ‘modest farmer’, who had championed the beginnings of what we now know as ‘liberalisation’ which is ultimately the dictatorship of capital. And liberalisation, being the philosophy of unbridled greed, is overseeing the destruction of the middle and working class in the US and is merrily with the current ALP’s assistance attempting to do the same here.
In fact, one can see how the ALP has swung behind the financiers with the 2 current ‘scares’ that now concern us of the West; Ukraine – armaments and Covid – pharmaceuticals. Both dominate the US political atmosphere with the political class there being totally in thrall to them and us, being loyal puppies to the US, blindly follow our master’s dictates.
As for an amalgamation between the Greens and the Teals… I have my doubts. The Greens to my way of thinking are far too twee to care about the basics of food, shelter and warmth and the old trope, ‘Land Rights for Gay Whales’ still epitomises them to my mind and the Teals are yet to reveal themselves to me. However, given their providence, I don’t expect too much in the way of social equity to concern them. I hope I am wrong on both counts otherwise we really are up shitters ditch.
I really liked and agreed with your comment…until your comment about the Greens not caring about the basics.
I spent a lot of time this last election with the Greens candidate for my electorate, chatting about politics, representation, policies, etc.
I found both the Party’s and the candidate’s care for people impressive. Their policies reflect this too.
Their platform this election was to build 50,000 social housing homes per year(for 20yrs); to bring mental health and dental services under Medicare; to abolish HECS debts and make tertiary tuition free; to double Jobseeker & Pension payments, and more.
They essentially stopped campaigning on environmental issues – as their stance on these topics is well known – and focussed on a socially progressive agenda. Exactly what you fear they don’t care enough about.
Thank you for this – I stand corrected. I will certainly take your comments to heart and take more notice of the Greens from now on. And I have to admit that in the last election the Greens got my second preference as at the time my attitude was ‘anyone but those morally corrupt clowns in power’.
If you think that “Greens got my second preference…” had any effect – except this time in Brisbane – may I suggest that you find out how the preference system works?
It could not be more simple yet otherwise intelligent people do not bother to understand it.
“Greens got my second preference” also had a crucial impact in the seat of Ryan, as well as Brisbane. The Greens final winning margin over the Liberals was greater in Brisbane than in Ryan, which shows the second preferences of Labor voters were even more crucial in that seat.
RW you are a champion! Rarely do I see anyone concede a point as graciously as you did…
I understood his point to be that capital now has no alternative to the ALP for a party to deliver the regular governing capital wants. Previously those interests preferred the Liberals and could hope for better from them when the ALP loses power. But the Libs’ ‘clientelism and cronyism’ in 2013-21 has left Labor as capital’s best ally.
And the Libs’ trajectory from here doesn’t look much more business friendly, in this sense of the term: the most successful international examples of right wing success lately are Trump and Brexit, both of which made a lot of headway with ignoring business interests. (More rhetorically in Trump’s case.) Don’t forget Boris once said, ‘F–k business’, and won the next election. Right now the leading conservative would probably be Ron DeSantis, who must be the first American politician to fight Disney – and in the state of Disneyworld! – and win.
Lenin wrote about the Labour Party in Australia. I’ve left the link in my comment.
Yep- when’s the last time you heard labor say ‘let’s (re)nationalise this’ ? Not aged care, NDIS, welfare, energy, water – just nothing, whilst it’s falling apart before our eyes. It’s also weird they are never asked this question either.
Perhaps Labor is afraid of offering that – aged care, welfare, CES, roads or bank (even ONE!) – for fear of being crushed in the rush to vote for them?
Afraid that they then might have to something instead of collect salaries selling us out.
The chance was there in the last decade or so to set up a Post Office Savings Bank to constrain the greed of the commercial banking cartel instead of just further enabling them. The Post Office offers counter services where there are no longer any branches (which is just about everywhere these days) – given that Keating’s deregulation spree in the mid 80s led to the failure of SSBs of Victoria and SA and his fondness for the dulcet tones on John Stone in his shell-like ear led him to privatise the Commonwealth Bank.
Without a public competitor constraining private corporate greed and service removal we now have the 4 big banks gouging their customers, closing branches and pulling out ATMs. The PO actually props them up but doesn’t offer accounts of its own as post offices have done historically. NZ had their own POSB but disestablished it and sold the remnants of it to ANZ as part of their own neoliberal drive-by in the 1980s.
In Britain the post office was always the first and often only savings account that the majority ever had.
It was also a hub of innovation, in 1971 it introduced GIRO, the first non fee payment transfer system available.
Now, as here, the post offices have been sold off and even the franchises in the grocery store in every village have been trashed – 10yrs ago it was not possible to use a credit card!
Nice how neolibs talk of competition but fear it like the plague!
Turns out they don’t even fear the plague so much… Yet more evidence for the idiocy of such Koolaid drinkers.
It is the near complete take over of most media and both sides of politics by Neoliberals that asks the question,” can there be an active social democracy in Australia ?”
We are dependent on the collective intelligence of the Teals, independents and Greens.
Free education and unlocking Universities from profit motivated survival are an obvious starting point to speed up solving problems that have to be addressed.
A fair study that looks at our past and comparing efficiencies that we once had with our publicly owned assets with what we see today, would almost certainly prove that Neoliberalism is proven to be the weaker system of the two.
It wasn’t that long ago.
Materialism isn’t a sound political movement yet it is god to a Neoliberal.
That we live in a country whose original inhabitants were not materialistic which is immediately so clear to “colonisers”, and fall so easily into the most disadvantaged group of people, this is self explanatory, Materialism is so lacking in personal development, so opposed to pursuits that don’t obviously make money.
We have people who work regardles of pay to help and assist others , and we have others who work to make sure their financial security is assured and a large mix of varying degrees of both on any given day or moment.
Neoliberals can’t really support these people properly because materialism fundamentally has very little meaning except a selfish motive. you can only help yourself or others if you have reached a reasonably high level of financial security.
It’s sick by design, there are whole rafts of features inbuilt into advertising, manipulating people for outcomes that favorur very few and it is so easily done with ownership of the control of media/information. This structure has to be gradually pulled down and a new better one built.
All based on the soul and basic generosity of spirit we believe our fellow humans possess, including our elected representatives. Thanks for another informative article Guy.
I
Your mention of “profit motivated universities” is one the needs to be addressed immediately.
Universities have become some “profit motivated” that they are closing down humanities at such rate that soon they will not be able to be done here in Australia and as it students in the humanities are the “thinkers” how will we be able to move to a more balanced population.
Ya think, Guy?
Love ya, mate. You’re the reason for my subscription.
Can’t say we didn’t see it coming, all of us who begged the electorate to please hang parliament instead of delivering a Labor majority.
You aren’t liking what Albanese and co.have been doing?You’re wishing the LNP had more power?
No. I’m wishing the Greens and independents did. I wanted a hung parliament with neither of the majors holding a majority. I didn’t get it. Instead, I got Labor, who are so busy hanging on to power by trying to be all things to all people and none of it offensive to anybody at all, especially business, they are and will achieve nothing much, exactly as I feared, which is why I wanted a hung parliament in the first place. It would have given them plausible deniability, a built in set of scape goats and the much needed push toward genuine reforms in the interest of all Australians.
So, after 11 weeks of a new government you’re prepared to condemn it with mere assertions and conjecture ? Seems you and your ilk are definitely in need of a sense of perspective.
Spot on Kathy. And we’re not alone .. the people voted overwhelmingly for a hung parliament. The electoral system distorted the vote. All
English derived' electoral systems do this. That's why NZ fixed theirs, cleverly retaininglocal members’.No, we’re wishing more independents were elected, JB. We’ve had wishy washy labor before. They make all the right noises, but what have they actually promised, bugger all, and as usual they’ll barely deliver that. They’ll probably deliver on nuclear subs and tax cuts and a modicum of climate stuff.
You won’t see REAL action on climate change, action on EVs, action on affordable housing, action on dental care for all, action on student debt, on and on. And after two (if they’re lucky) terms, a fed up electorate will probably vote the libs back in. Round and round…
Yes, definitely round and round – just like Chicken Little, your head spins so you think the sky’s falling and we’re all doomed, with no evidence to support your assertions, 11 weeks into a new government that is radically different from what we’ve endured for the last decade ? People need to grow up and wait for the evidence before casting boof- headed assertions.
You want evidence? Just look at their policies, such as they are. Very little change on mining, the bare minimum on climate change, 30,000 affordable homes (including 4000 social houses) over 4 years, support the next round of tax cuts for the wealthy, continue with nuclear subs, Nothing on EVs, on dental health, on student debt, on rental regulation, on super profits tax, etc. Look, I’m not anti Labor, just not willing to put up with mediocre govt any more. That’s what we’ve had for decades. Enough!
When the ALP flags inflation and debt concerns for the economy, and (even) the MSM commentariat says the ALP needs to scrap the stage 3 tax cuts to ease these pressures…and the ALP continues to push them through. That’s enough for me to be highly critical of them
“The benefits system is taken over and run on an enduring principle: that it is there to discipline and shape the able-bodied worker, not to ensure their interests and rights as citizens and human beings. Thus the commitment to the new Workforce Australia procedures; thus the refusal to raise basic JobSeeker and other rates. The desperate poverty they create is a social terror strategy to prod people back to work; the collateral damage to those who can’t work or find work is judged acceptable.”
Dear Mr Rundle – I would be very interested to know any thoughts you might have on where this enduring principle starts and why it has such endurance. My sense is that the imperative to punish is based on the most highly contrived myth of all – a myth I well remember in the 70s even, when it was assumed everyone collecting a benefit was a no-good, surfing dope-smoker all set to rip the system off as much as they could. (I also remember my mother’s take on it: “Well, it they are out there, they sure do treat lightly on the Earth! Why are we so concerned?” A view way ahead of its time then, and it would seem still now.) Never mind that the oil crunch in the early 70s meant that, just like until recently, it was actually very difficult to find work. By then the 60s were well and truly over!
And now, the myth helps to hide the reality of mostly older women being the fastest growing group of people receiving their right as citizens to income support when the economy (and most other social structures in the case of women) have failed them profoundly. Having spent their lives tending to the needs of others, no one wants to employ, support or provide for them. These are our mothers, mostly, for those whose mothers are still alive. What exactly do we think we are doing?
If you’re looking for a beginning you could try the first iteration of liberalism in power: the UK 1834 Poor Law explicitly enshrined the principle of ‘less eligibility’, meaning that it set out to create conditions of receiving ‘poor relief’ that were ‘ less eligible’ (I.e. less desirable) than literally anything else except actually dying of starvation. The purpose was to discipline the labour force. The main weapon was the parish workhouse, known to workers as the ‘Bastille’, and portrayed by Dickens in Oliver Twist. The methods are different under neoliberalism; the principles and purpose are the same.
Look up the poor house TREADMILL – an apparatus designed solely to make people work which was not connected to anything except gearing to make it even harder to turn if the poor were becoming too good at it.
WOW! Leave no time or energy to think or protest. Works every time, I guess.
The equivalent today – pointless work with result – would the requirement that the unemployed attend “job awareness & preparation courses” by the for-profit ’employment’ agencies’.
The only resulting employment being their own and highly lucrative it is.
Before Whitlam came to power the explicit policy of govt was maintaining full employment. Unemployment was very low, generally speaking, in the post war period and all the protection in place for local manufacturing (import duties and sales tax drove the prices of a huge range of imported goods to high levels and local industries were able to compete on this far from level playing field) ensured that there were jobs aplenty. The system of awards and arbitration allowed workers to take industrial action to claim there share of the profits and their share of the economic pie kept up with the share taken by capital.
The Whitlam govt had a raft of spendy policies and had to contend with the oil shocks brought on by OPECs desire to punish the West for their stance on Arab/Israeli politics and to get themselves a bigger share of the oil revenue. The ALP decided to shift the priorities of financial mangement away from maintaining full employment and toward managing inflation and rather than say all these unemployed people are the unfortunate result of our choices they opted for blaming the unemployment on the unemployed. Fraser didn’t start the “dole bludger” thing (although he certainly ran with it) – it was the express intention of the previous govt which felt that the unemployed should take the heat for their efforts to control inflation. They couldn’t very well blame inflation on the unions, who had 60% of the vote at an ALP convention, now could they.
Evidence ?