Ready, steady, go!

2025 is an election year

They had miles of proof that when Labor men got into power they had
forgotten the class that put them there. For twenty years they had been
urged to obtain Labor majorities. They had gotten those majorities, but
where was their heaven? ... Where were the golden streets? They could
see plenty of slums, of misery, of prostitution and poverty. They had been
following a vain dream and mirage.
Adelaide unionists, 1910, quoted in Jim Moss (1985) Sound of Trumpets

Let’s ease ourselves into the New Year. Or maybe not.

The Australia of the two-party heyday. (John Bracks, Collins Street, 5pm.)

The 2025 election will be the last chance for the Labor Party to be at the vanguard of a new political settlement. If they end up leading a minority government after the 2025 election, it will be within their ability to reshape our political landscape and install themselves as the natural party government for the foreseeable future. They will be able to reinvent our parliament around a cooperative, deliberative model that invites true Australian diversity into the governing process.

If they don’t do that and instead try and impose themselves on a minority government; insist they have a mandate; continue to demonise the Greens and merely play footsie with the rest of the crossbench; continue to rig the system against diverse representation; continue to allow the mainstream media and the Dutton opposition to not just disrupt the new parliament but, in doing so, undermine the very idea of a deliberative parliament in which the crossbench can play a role, then they will condemn themselves to irrelevance.

Worse, they will open Australia up to a triumph of the extreme right happening elsewhere in the world.

Needless to say, I don’t think we should get our hopes up about any of this. At the very least, Labor will have to replace Anthony Albanese with someone with energy and vision and a willingness to get their hands dirty standing up to reactionary forces within the media, but it isn’t remotely clear who within their ranks could fulfil that role.

The two-party system is a remnant of another era. In truth, it has served us fairly well, in more homogenous times, but those times are past. The era of the mass party is over just as the era of mass media is over. We have to rebuild nations for diverse times and for cooperative internationalism and relying on a two-party system to achieve that is unlikely to work.

If we are to normalise the idea of minority government, then at community level we need to ensure that the candidates elected are genuinely representative, not just plants with Clive-Palmer-type money behind them. The Voices Of movement has proved incredibly effective at genuine engagement and part of its strength is that it has so far resisted the party form. But there is a trap here and I will get to that.

As the year opens up, I’m not really interested in ongoing commentary on the upcoming election, though I guess I will be dragged into a fair bit of it this year. (Dragged, lol.) I’m more interested in the underlying forces, the malleability of class and power and how they are shifting. What is happening now has been building for years but it is an endless process. We shouldn’t be misdirected by the shadows on the wall: all eyes should be on the forces casting the shadows.

When Labor and the unions went all-in on neoliberalism in the 1980s, it precipitated a shift in our politics. The broad labour movement set itself as the vehicle for the restoration of hegemonic capitalism with a concomitant undermining of worker power and organisation. As academic Elizabeth Humphrys has put it, the “key aim of neoliberalism was the restoration of capitalist profitability and stable capital accumulation, which had been disrupted by economic crisis and, to lesser or greater extent globally, by worker resistance. Its consequences have included the diminution of organised labour’s power, the disorganisation of labour movements, and a significant upward shift of national income from the working class to the capitalist class.”

In Australia, she writes, “the unions [and Labor] helped execute key aspects of neoliberal transformation. These changes included real wage decline, structural adjustment through industry policy, the suppression of industrial action, and the re-regulation of the industrial relations system in a manner that weakened organised labour’s position.”¹

And here we are.

John Howard, rightly held up as the architect of much of what ails the country today, could not have achieved what he achieved without Labor laying this foundation. The disappointments of the Accord amongst the working class provided the conditions for Howard’s resurrection and triumph, and Howard was able to consolidate the neoliberal project started by Hawke and Keating. He was also able to stoke the discontent that continues to provide coherence to the right-wing project of anti-immigration and patriarchal control.

Anthony Albanese’s incrementalism and Labor’s lack of an obvious, viable progressive alternative leader amongst the parliamentary party is the greatest achievement of the neoliberal project in Australia. The two-party system has converged on a system where the major parties are working in a sort of antagonistic concert, are at one on too many key policies, and maintain only a facade of difference that manifests in a kabuki of confrontation, simultaneously stoked and milked by mainstream media.

Politics doesn’t have to be like this and people know it.

A third of voters no longer give their primary vote to a major party. Only 37 per cent of them support the same party from election to election as they flee disappointment and look for new places to invest their hopes. As the 2022 Australian Electoral Study noted:

Rising voter detachment from the major parties set the conditions for the unusual result in the 2022 election. Until 2022, single member electorates in the House of Representatives have largely masked this growing disaffection with the major political parties. Through the design of the electoral system, Liberal and Labor typically receive a much greater proportion of seats in the House of Representatives than votes. For example, in 2022 Labor won 51 percent of the seats based on 33 percent of first preference votes. In 2019 the Coalition won 51 percent of the seats in parliament, based on 41 percent of first preference votes. In 2022 the success of independents and the Greens in previously safe Coalition seats resulted in much more proportional outcomes for the Coalition – they received 36 percent of the first preference votes and 38 percent of the seats.

I don’t think we really know what the community independents movement means at this stage, but people are desperate for something better and that sector is becoming increasingly organised.

To tell the truth, I am all in on the idea of minority government. It is likely the only way of smashing the two-party stranglehold and cutting through the chords of power that hold the status quo together, replete with all the corruption that comes with that. But unless we also build a viable progressive, leftist movement outside the parliament, a model of genuine community engagement outside the two-party system and even outside the “centrism” of the community independents, we risk the same sort of strengthening of the status quo that happened when Labor swallowed neoliberalism whole.²

There is going to need to be meaningful confrontation, and a process that can stitch together a blanket that integrates the whole nation in its individual patches.

Alex Fein is exactly right when she argues, “the task before progressives [is] to focus on the material. To present a vision for delivering private splendour through alleviation of public squalor. To arrest Australia’s precipitous drop in standard of living - the worst in the OECD.”

In arguing for the demise of the two-party system, we have to be eyes wide open about what a new dispensation should seek to achieve, and how they should go about it. In understanding that, I’m more interested in the moon of politics than the earth of politics. Let’s watch the forces that move our political tides up and down rather than fixate on where the tide settles at a given moment.

That is the direction the newsletter will head in the months ahead.

1. Excerpts from How Labour Built Neoliberalism: Australia’s Accord, the Labour Movement and the Neoliberal Project, by Elizabeth Humphrys.

2. Or was it vice versa?