Shane Malone - Eureka Street

ack. Ordinary Australians still expect a fair go: they
felt denied it by Labor.
Labor, traditionally the party of compassion and
justice, turned dry economic changeling. How can
anyone believe in a party that opposed selling Telstra,
but sold Qantas and the Commonwealth Bank
which decries human rights abuses in Nigeria, but
embraces it in East Timor Wept for the dead of
Tiananmen Square, but locked refugee children
behind barbed wire for years because of their parents'
crime of queue-jumping The party that publicly went
to bed with big business, then wore virginal white on
polling day
The scale of the Federal ALP disaster is
undeniable, even to the lieutenants of the
unsinkable Titanic. It slammed into the icy
fact that ordinary people don't understand
and will not judge parties on economic policy,
but from their own experience: don't
say youth unemployment is 8 per cent,
when 30 per cent of our kids can't leave
home because they can't find work.
What, then, must Labor do to reclaim
the high ground Disaster makes for a wonderful
simplicity. It must not promise more
than it can deliver: no-one believes, now, in
a cure for unemployment, for example. It
should not drop apparently unpopular policies,
but it must be informed about what
people are coming round to believing. It can
only do this by rebuilding its membership
base, and enlarging upon our sense
of community.
IT
NEED NOT LOOK TO THE POLLS which, after
all, failed to predict the catastrophe, and at
best give only short-term indications of voting
intentions. Polls don't detect the underlying
currents of political emotion. As
Graham Wallas, a Fabian writer, wrote in 1910, most
political opinions are the result, not of reasoning tested
by experience, but of unconscious or half-conscious
inference fixed by habit.
The ALP's strength as a party came from its
ability to inspire support across regional and cultural
boundaries by its vision of justice and compassion,
but the Liberals have claimed that vision now. Labor
has never really been a voter-driven party. It wasn't
populism which induced it to change Family Law, get
out of Vietnam or recognise Aboriginal land rights: it
was a keen sense of justice which from time to time
struck a deep chord of resonance in the people.
Historically, conservative parties, now the radical
Tories, have appealed to the greedy: Labor sought to
be the party that cared. It won most voter support
when the people felt part of a community, when
altruism was at its highest. In the 1970s Labor was
identified with a sweeping change of mood, in the
1980s with progressive optimism: it went into
government, and became managerialist. Now the public
has lost that faith in the Party, which the Party
itself had lost.
The Australian Labor Party needs to make a bonfire
of its love letters to the politically correct
economists whose advice drove it to defeat. There
must be an intellectual and heart-felt challenge to the
received wisdom which made the ALP more
conservative than the Fraser government ever was.
The once-strong Labor voters have splintered off
and now worship at many altars. There is no loyal
working class, there are no large groups of professional
middle-class progressives. The largely moribund ALP
branches, once sources of local activism and ALP
policy, where enthusiasm is seen as evidence of
subversion, should be revived and empowered, and
take their place as the Party's life-line to the habits of
believing in the people. At the very least, Labor must
become an Opposition that challenges intellectually,
and makes people think, as well as a party that knows
how people feel. Above all, Labor must address those
fundamental concerns of the people: how to resolve
the tension between those who see a role for the
intervention and power of the State, yet desire to put
power in the hands of the people. How do we reconcile
greater equality, with sacrifices of liberty
Martin Luther King said more than 30 years ago
that if you haven't discovered something you would
die for, you aren't fit to live. Equally, a party without
a vision is not fit to govern.
•
Moira Rayner is a freelance journalist, and a lawyer.
She is not a member of the ALP. Her Internet address
is 100252.3247@Compuserve.com]
V OLUME 6 NUMBER 3 • EUREKA STREET 23