Nonetheless, it would have been laughable to suggest that Australia’s maiden female Prime Minister would oust the then unelectable nerd Kevin Rudd, in the process making him the first Labor PM to fall before his first term expired. Fast forward to 2010 and Gillard’s ascent is still a high-stakes gamble. If Labor wins the election, Gillard will take pride of place in the pantheon of Labor heroes. Similarly, the factional powerbrokers who ousted Rudd will be hailed as political geniuses.
However, if Labor loses, the recriminations will be bloodthirsty and ongoing. Labor will face a soul-searching period in opposition akin to the fallouts following its numerous schisms during the 20th century.
Indeed, might a 21st-century antipodean George Dangerfield chart Australian Labor’s downfall to this period? The English journalist-historian’s 1935 book, The Strange Death of Liberal England, chronicled the demise of the Liberals as the party of government in Britain.
In the mid-1800s English liberalism had appeared unassailable. However, rocked by internal crises and the Irish home rule conflict, Asquith’s impotent pre-World War I government destroyed the party’s credibility. Eventually, British Labour took over as the party of the Left.
Could we, too, be witnessing the strange death of Australian Laborism?
Despite their moralising humbug, ageing parliamentary leader and quite disgraceful role in the downfall of Labor’s rejected emissions trading scheme, the Greens are snapping at Labor’s electoral heels. Polls consistently show the Greens’ primary vote at extremely healthy levels.
Several Labor Left high-flyers face the fight of their political lives in next month’s election. If the Greens can break into the lower house, perhaps in Lindsay Tanner’s soon to be vacated seat of Melbourne, this fight will morph into a full-blown war.
As Dennis Glover argues, environmentalism now represents an existential threat to Labor.
For instance, if we track Rudd’s downfall to his calamitous ETS backflip, then climate change politics has rapidly claimed the scalps of Rudd, Howard and Malcolm Turnbull.
Long term, however, Labor has the most to lose (and perhaps gain). There will of course always be some form of conservative party occupying the political spectrum’s Centre-Right. By contrast, who leads the Centre-Left will be up for grabs over the next half century.
If it manages to get itself re-elected, how Gillard Labor governs over the next three years will go a long way towards deciding whether it is the social-democratic ALP or Greens-led environmentalist movement which triumphs.
So where now for Labor? In his recent book Ill Fares the Land, historian Tony Judt declared that traditional social democracy had exhausted itself. All that remained was to pursue the politics of fear; to preserve past gains, most prominently that of the welfare state.
I profoundly disagree. Indeed, as I argue in a chapter for a forthcoming book on the future of Australian progressive politics, distinctive 21st-century local and global challenges can only be met by social democrats.
The most salient is of course the environment. Despite the failure of Copenhagen and Labor’s ditching of its ETS, climate change, even if considered as prudent risk-management, cannot be tackled by disaggregated individuals or unregulated markets.
Nor does the solution lie in utopian schemes and moral grandstanding or, as academic and former Greens candidate Clive Hamilton foolishly warned, by threat of coercion and the suspension of democratic institutions.
For just as social democrats civilised capitalism during the 20th century, so they are best placed to begin the painful process of transitioning national economies towards a carbon-neutral future. If they don’t — and here Gillard would be best advised to reintroduce some form of ETS — then the Greens will deservedly prosper. And yet there have been hints that Labor intends to take a literal leaf out of Judt’s book. Rather than espouse a positive program of nation-building reformism, Labor’s 2010 electoral pitch will be one of fear, specifically of Tony Abbott and the spectre of Work Choices.
This would be a mistake. A Labor government that promises not to be like the other mob, or merely a softer, more palatable version, might capture swinging voters in the short term; in the long term, however, it may well be penning the political obituary of the party.
The University of Sydney’s Nick Dyrenfurth is co-editor (with Tim Soutphommasane) of All That’s Left: Ideas for a Progressive Australia (forthcoming from UNSW Press).
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