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Labor plays the losing game of imitation

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Bill Shorten

Bill Shorten needs to give his party a point of difference and not just chase the middle ground.

AAP: Tim Clarke

If one idea needs to be injected into this latest round of Save The Labor Party, it is probably this: stop trying to be the Liberal Party, writes Jonathan Green.

Party president Jenny McAllister says the ALP's senate preselection process is broken.

Party elder John Faulkner wants the job done by the rank and file.

Party Leader Bill Shorten wants non-unionists to be free to join a "modernised" ALP.

Party luminaries Steve Bracks and Bob Carr probably agree with Faulkner, because they all wrote a book on this.

After last weekend's Western Australia Senate vote, a plunge in ALP fortunes that resulted in the party polling just 6 per cent better than the ostentatiously marginal Greens, Labor has reverted to the one thing it does even better than self-destructive internal knife-fighting: yes, earnest, wrinkle-browed introspection on the limitless topic of party reform.

Various formulae will be advanced, all with differing degrees of complexity and ruthless self-criticism, and if past behaviour is any guide, most will be welcomed as vital ingredients to the party's urgent and necessary rejuvenation. And then they will be ignored ... assiduously ...  as the status quo of vested self-interest rouses itself, rolls over, farts loudly and crushes all hope of change.

It could be made simpler. And probably should be, for make no mistake the ALP is dicing with irrelevance and death here.

Death, just by the bye, might be the best option in terms of the future health of Australian progressive politics, a pursuit not contingent on the existence of the ALP, and one that after all these years of Labor's drift toward a failing combination of vicious introspection, pointless power mongering and the ideologically anodyne centre-Right, might actually be the healthier for its absence.

But that said, if one idea needs to be injected into this latest round of Save The Labor Party, it is probably this: STOP TRYING TO BE THE LIBERAL PARTY.

Differentiation, that might be useful, and quite possibly a more electorally advantageous technique than the ALP's current obsession with the fiercely contested middle ground. A middle ground that has shifted continually to the Right, probably since the ALP embraced the sort of free market reform that even Malcolm Fraser and John Howard were leery of in the late '70s.

Modern, professional politics sucks you to the centre of course, and its great trough of apathy, self-interest and indecision ... marginal campaigning by any other name, and it's there the ALP has pitched its tent, losing rough ideological edges along the way, playing a losing game of political indistinguishability with a foe for whom this is far more natural territory.

Migration policy is an obvious example of Labor arguing that white is black, or red is blue, that really, if you close your eyes, we are them. All part of removing the points of difference: a strange tactic when at the end of the day you are asking voters to make a choice.

On climate change it's been much the same. Keen to make a difference when even John Howard was offering a carbon trading scheme, and then so shy of making waves the ALP has compromised, deferred and buckled, finally dragged to action by opportunism.

On the economy ... well that's peas in a pod, the parameters of the allowed conversation tightly defined around surplus good, debt bad and please don't mention tax.

Labor is so close to being Liberal light it clearly strains the capacity for brand recognition out there among the general public.

And the personnel don't help.

The lesson from Joe Bullock's elevation to the top of Labor's WA Senate ticket is not one of union manipulation of the preselection process. That's only a bad thing because unions are as bankrupt an institution as our major political parties, too lost in graft and self-importance to offer much beyond a gravy train to influence for a chosen few.

No, the real issue with Bullock is that a man of his convictions could have a place in a party at least nominally wedded to the idea of being the country's socially progressive choice.

How does that make any kind of sense, unless the party he has been elected to represent has so lost its core of principles it can simultaneously accommodate a conviction for social equity alongside man's inalienable right to slag off at what's-her-name the lesbian with thingy the sex-change partner.

That sort of easy coexistence simply doesn't make any kind of sense, unless it's in a party that has traded its soul and core of belief in a desperate struggle to mimic what it sees as the most successful political traits of its opponents.

The home truth for the ALP is probably not to be found in the qualifications it sets for membership, or in the way it juggles its preselections. It's more likely to be unearthed in an almost archaeological pursuit of principles.

They might even develop a few challenging ideological angularities, the sort of thing that might convince voters sleepwalking through the dull conformity of modern political choice that at long last, they had one.


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