Last week was a depressing week in Australian politics but it was also clarifying
Thoughts arising from Dutton's nuclear fallout
In a zone of insecurity…the tribes were mustering.
—Evelyn Waugh
The circus that greeted Peter Dutton’s announcement of his nuclear fantasy dominated #ozpol last week, and the reception he received reminded us of the underlying battle that defines politics in this era.
As the solstice slipped by at the end of last week, we saw more clearly than usual that the cleavages in our political system continue to find expression within the growing divergence between, on the one side, the main legacy parties, and on the other, the independents and minor parties.
That is to say, in our emerging “three-party” system, Labor and the LNP are more and more likely to agree on key areas of policy to protect their traditional dominance, while the real engine of governance shifts to the crossbench.12
It goes deeper than that, to be honest, because we are also being swept along by international forces that are realigning the world order in complex and not very reassuring ways. All of that is happening in the context of issues around climate change and technological change, as well as within the forty-year wake of an economic dispensation that has concentrated wealth at an almost unprecedented level.
But let’s keep the focus on Australia for now.
As someone who tries to accentuate the positive in how we do politics, it is increasingly difficult not to be feel let down by Labor and the LNP in a way that has little to do with policy per se or even with ideology. We-the-Australian-people are doing our best, using the unique tools of Australian democracy, to respond to forces undermining democracy around the globe, while our major parties are engaged in a conspiracy of self-preservation that is blinding them to how politics has changed and how it might be better.
We need to be clear about this: there is nothing inherently wrong with backing nuclear energy, but to drop it into the conversation as Peter Dutton did last week was cynical and hateful and it needs explication. God knows, I have my problems with Paul Keating, but no-one else nailed the betrayal inherent in Dutton’s approach better than he did:
Only the most wicked and cynical of individuals would foist such a blight on an earnest community like Australia. A community which fundamentally believes in truth and decency and which relies on its political system to advance those ideals. Dutton, in his low rent opportunism, mocks the decency and earnestness which recognises that carbon must be abated and with all urgency.
He’s right. How dare any party leader come before us and present to something as important as his party’s energy policy with no detail addressing its implementation. But this doesn’t happen in a vacuum: what we have to realise is that this approach is increasingly a feature, not a bug, of party politics and I’ll unpack that more as we go along.3
Keating also pointed out—along with any number of other commentators—that Dutton’s nuclear policy is nothing more than a delaying tactic to keep fossil-fuels in play in Australia for as long as possible, and I don’t think there is any doubt about that.
Meanwhile, Bernard Keane and a few others have highlighted another significant aspect of Dutton’s announcement, that it represents a re-embrace of the state by our main rightwing political party, and I think this bears some consideration. Keane sees this as a loss for genuine liberals “who want a market economy allowed to operate without massive intervention,” but I suspect it is other than that.
For a start, I think such analysis draws too hard a line between the state and markets. As the traditional party of capital, the Liberals have always been willing to use state power to advance capital’s goals, and John Howard’s 900 pages of regulation posing as “deregulation” of the labour market— WorkChoices—was the classic example. Even a fully nationalised energy policy would leave ample opportunity for capital to turn a buck. So, while Dutton’s approach to nuclear may violate the niceties of liberalism, it doesn’t necessarily upset capital. And in the meantime, as noted, the policy helps keep fossil fuel companies in contention, more or less indefinitely.
There are other aspects of Dutton’s embrace of state power that should interest us.
One is that whatever finally replaces energy derived from fossil fuels will require a complete realignment of the economy, the sort of realignment that can only be done by a state, or at least, the sort of realignment that any state is going to want to have as much control over as possible. Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò sets out the matter in this interesting article in regard to renewable energy, but the same logic applies to nuclear:
The global rise of price-competitive renewable energy, particularly solar power, is genuinely good news. But this will not, in and of itself, lead to the phaseout of fossil fuels. The prevailing definition of “energy security” used by developed countries—“a stable and abundant supply of energy,” as the European Union puts it—makes the intermittency of solar and wind power a political and technical liability, which opponents of energy transition have long seized upon. While technological breakthroughs in energy storage and transmission have made it possible to provide meaningful energy security even with intermittent energy sources, enacting this possibility would require serious, coordinated investment in public energy systems.
Each major party is, in their own way, implementing delaying tactics to accommodate the fossil fuel companies, a primary example of the convergence I am arguing is happening. As Greg Jericho writes this week, “Last Friday, while everyone was racing down nuclear-powered rabbit holes, the environment department (led by the environment minister, Tanya Plibersek) approved a coal seam gas pipeline in Queensland. This approval ‘has effect until 30 June 2069’. And on Tuesday the department approved the Atlas stage 3 gas project in Queensland out to June 2080.
“[W]ith the Coalition now calling for nuclear power and throwing around laughable concept art of reactors that will never be, the government can look good by comparison. It is free to ensure fossil fuels are released with excess abandon, with little media scrutiny and with less recompense to the Australian citizens who own the gas and will suffer greatly from the climate change caused by their emissions.”
Convergence, baby.
There is one final aspect of Dutton’s embrace of nuclear energy that I want to highlight because it, too, speaks to realignment of his party with the powers of the state.
The leader of the Opposition is aligning himself with the forces of the international right, the far right, in fact, who have recognised that state power is necessary for them to respond to the white grievance that is at the heart of their project. We can’t underestimate the extent to which the radicalisation of the conservative right—including the capture of the US Republican Party by the forces of Trump—is driven by a white, patriarchal and Christian grievance and the extent to which they are fighting for a post-democratic, white nationalist settlement. On the scale they imagine this happening, it requires the mobilisation of state power. And Peter Dutton wants himself a slice of that pie and no amount of handwringing about having abandoned traditional liberal, small-state values is going to keep him from trying to grab it.
(Not to go off at too much of a tangent, but it is worth watching this Robert Reich video that highlights the anti-democratic tenor of this embrace of Christian Nationalism.)
To understand the major-party convergence I am talking about, we have to set these changes in the Coalition against equally consequential shifts in how the Labor Party understands itself.
Hawke and Keating embraced the market politics of neoliberalism in the early 1980s, arguing that Australian prosperity required international markets for our goods, international investment in our economy, and ongoing immigration. They abandoned the purely labourist roots of the Labor Party and repositioned the relationship between capital and labour via the Accords, and they tried to civilise the global capital their economic reforms had unleashed by establishing social protections like Medicare and compulsory superannuation.4
And look, the approach had its moment, even if the ultimate political beneficiary of their reforms was John Howard.
Long before Francis Fukuyama, Hawke/Keating embraced an end-of-history liberalism that sought a post-political settlement, a technocratic approach that left governance to a professional elite and that consequently disengaged them from grassroots politics that is ultimately necessary to ground any democratic political party.5 The approach tethered Labor to industry and corporations in a way that has made them—and the sort of progressive politics they traditionally represented—hostage to vagaries of the market economy and the influence of the businesses at the centre of it.
This sort of rationalisation inevitably leads away—is to designed to lead away—from the “messiness” of community engagement to the sort of bloodless politics Albanese has practiced since Labor were elected in 2022, the sort of steady-as-she goes, don’t-rock-the-boat incrementalism that tends to centralise power in the executive, undermining the public deliberation that should be at the heart of a body that calls itself a “parley-ment”. It leaves their base abandoned, their ability to attract new, younger members radically compromised, while also forcing them to focus on short-term political management rather than long-term policy goals.
It is not that there is no value in this approach, only that it breaks the connection with the very people you are meant to be representing, leading to long-term decline, as we are seeing reflected in the primary vote of the LNP and Labor People rightly see that the major parties are more aligned with the views of vested interests than the national interests—let alone community interests—thus creating the space for the third force of independents and smaller parties.
It almost beggars belief that Labor has, for instance, allowed themselves to be drawn into the sort of uncompromising support for Israel that is undermining their standing amongst key immigrant factions in the outer suburbs of our capital cities as well as amongst young people more generally. It is even more astounding that Labor is openly campaigning against the Greens, paying for newspaper and social media ads and putting up billboards attacking a party that not only provides the preferences that keep them in power but who many of their own supporters second preference anyway.
Do Labor really not understand that many of their own supporters take these attacks on the Greens personally, as a judgement on their own preferences?
While it is true that the Greens represent an electoral threat to Labor in certain seats, such hostility is only likely to be counterproductive.
But instead of figuring out a way of aligning with a party who should, in many ways be a natural fit, and using some sort of formal or informal coalition to “fight Tories”, Labor give the impression that they see the Greens as their real enemy and the LNP as simply the legitimate opposition.
This, too, is convergence.
Labor and the LNP are not, let me stress again, the same, but their alignment on matters as various as AUKUS, asylum seekers, media policy—including the desire to ban social media for kids—interest rates, deficits, Israel and foreign policy more generally, as well as the go-slow approach to climate mitigation that I have outlined above, certainly means that we-the-people must increasingly rely on the crossbench to provide any sort of alternative vision.
I’ll try and sum up.
Dutton’s nuclear announcement—bereft as it was of anything resembling detail—cannot be understood as a serious policy option, and that was never the point of it. It was a way of reinvigorating the party and consolidating Dutton’s vulnerable leadership. That this involves turning themselves into—as Bernard Keane shows—a version of National Party has a certain logic to it, especially as the Nats came out of the 2022 federal election in better shape than did their “senior” partner in the Coalition. And given that the Liberal’s path back to government is anything but clear, the only political play they have is to double down on a politics of division anchored in something that at least looks like serious policy.
And that is the role the nuclear announcement is playing.
It’s a cynical and dangerous way of doing politics, but we shouldn’t underestimate its efficacy, especially when the Labor Government is doing so much to alienate its own base—which shrinks at every election anyway—and is stumbling along with its technocratic incrementalism that is failing to address the concerns people actually have.
I keep coming back to something I quoted from Alex Fein from Redbridge a while back: “Across cohorts, people are not begging for the ‘sensible centre’ to hold. They are longing for relief that is structural - from a system they perceive as rapacious, that they believe is actively harming them and the people they love.”
In times of uncertainty, we are drawn to extremism. The leader who sticks to his guns and eschews compromise offers the illusion of having, if not the answer, then at least an answer. We mightn’t trust them, or like them, or even think they are right, but we will grasp at straws, and the more solid a leader can make that straw seem, the more likely we are to reach for it.
In a two-party system, this approach can work a treat, and so our best defence against it is to disrupt the duopoly centralising parliamentary power and replace it with a radical decentralisation that reinstates power at the local level which then ultimately expresses itself within the parliament as a government of coalitions: minority government in other words.
The more Labor and the LNP converge, the more likely we are to seek a dominant crossbench.
This is in no way to imply that there are no meaningful differences between Labor and the LNP, only that as their primary votes erode both become agents of the status quo.
Another example of what I am talking about is the idea of “party discipline” which has come to the fore this week because Labor Senator, Fatima Payman, crossed the floor on a vote about recognising Palestine. I’ll write something about this soon: it’s too much to fit in here now.
What should also worry us is that Dutton was not just so disdainful of his obligation to deal with the electorate in good faith, but that he was so confident that a significant section of the political class, including the media, would back him no matter what he said. So, he felt happy to stand before us last week and serve up a proposition that wouldn’t pass muster as a high school pol sci essay.
Their reforms included many types of social wage beyond these including education reforms, increased social security payments, rent assistance and a maternity allowance.
There were lots of books about this in the 90s from disaffected Labor Party members, the most memorable being, I think, Michael Thompson’s Labor Without Class.
The ALP & LNP will work together to reduce the threat that independents pose to them. A strong cross-bench that out votes a combined L/LNP is what we need. As to those two claiming it’ll lead to fractured gov, well imo that’s what we’ve had for the last 12 yrs, and I’m more than prepared to tolerate another 10 to see their combined power muted. We need a strong third force in politics that isn’t driven by party policy paid for by donations.
As an aside, how long will I need to read about Albanese nearly in tears, this time over “threats” to his family by some 16-18 yr old. FFS, how was this kid going to get past all the security that his family will have around them. Those tears are as valid as his “poor old ma” tears some time back. I’ve got no objection to men crying, but his comes across (to me) as not objectively warranted.
I hadn't seen Keane's article, but I had one in The Conversation based on the same facts, but reaching the opposite conclusion. However, we make the transition, we need the state to do a lot more of the heavy lifting
https://theconversation.com/achieving-net-zero-with-renewables-or-nuclear-means-rebuilding-the-hollowed-out-public-service-after-decades-of-cuts-233107