Save the Labor Party save the country

It's time for Albanese to go

As the non-Labor side of Australian politics continues to reshape itself—a bit like Jeff Goldblum in The Fly—there is a dawning recognition amongst commentators and the broader political class that some longstanding presumptions of Australian politics no longer hold. Everything from the values of the major parties themselves, to the idea that we operate in a two-party system, to our relationships with China and the US are in state of flux that requires new thinking.¹

Karel Svoboda, Defenestration at the Prague Council in 1618, 1848 — Source.

Australia is under enormous pressure from international forces that are religitimising different degrees of fascism, and this includes undermining post-War shifts on gender and racial equality. Even in—or especially in—the United States, a dangerous plurality no longer believe in the presumptions of liberal democracy and international humanist equality and we are seeing abuses of the most vulnerable become increasingly normalised.

What’s more, the Trump Administration is actively spreading this toxic mindset around the world.

A number of recent articles have correctly pointed out that Australia risks shifting to the far right in the same way, and that whatever protections our electoral system provides, they won’t protect us forever and so we need to get our act together.

Couldn’t agree more, but I want to throw in a bit of historical caution about how we analyse what is happening, before explaining why I think all this means that Labor have to get rid of Anthony Albanese as soon as possible.

This excellent piece at Lamestream Media, for instance, looks at data from the recent Australian Electoral Study and notes that “even though the topline election results show the Coalition is struggling to maintain support, Australians are actually shifting to the right on pretty key issues, like immigration, Indigenous affairs, gender and climate (the number of Australians who think climate change is a serious threat also dropped in this survey).” The article says that it’s “a reminder that election results don’t tell the full story, and that Australia is still very susceptible to a lurch to the right, especially as the economic situation starts to deteriorate.”

The data to support this are in the article (and in the Study) and I am not disputing it at all. The word of caution I wanted to inject is that any notion that the country is shifting to the right depends on where you start to measure.

I was reminded of this while reading the new book by historian Henry Reynolds.

Looking From the North: Australian History from the Top Down has a really interesting section about the end of the White Australia Policy and it is a reminder of how far we have come. Reynolds notes that after the War, especially after the horrors of the Holocaust were revealed (or acknowledged), and as a process of decolonisation began amongst the ravaged European empires—all of it accompanied by the creation of various charters of human rights—Australia risked remaining an outlier.

Reynolds writes that “The White Australia policy maintained its hold on the electorate. It was still common to refer to racial purity, to the need to preserve the blood of our British ancestors and to breed out the colour in the biological heritage of the Indigenous minority.”

He explains that it was Australia’s diplomats who first began to pressure governments to change because it was they who were at the frontline of international contempt for our attitudes towards race:

Australia’s diplomats were calling in from all over the world that the status of the First Nations peoples and their ever-present poverty was an inescapable handicap, hampering the nation’s endeavours to enhance its prestige in a rapidly changing world. Australia had few friends or admirers among the non-European states or the countries of the Soviet bloc. The related problem was the White Australia policy and its manifest racial discrimination, which soft words could not ameliorate. Political leaders from both major parties realised that change was being forced on Australia, but that there was still strong community support for the old ways. So gradual reform and measured relaxation of entry requirements were undertaken while all the time there loomed the danger of being marooned in a corner with apartheid South Africa.

This reminded me of something else I read recently, in Geordie Williamson’s fab book about the dissolution of Australian literature, The Burning Library. One of the author’s Williamson looks at is Sumner Locke Eliot whose 1977 novel Water Under the Bridge, (set in the thirties), puts these thoughts into the mind of its main character:

Sometimes when the noon sirens wailed Geraldine wished that it were a genuine air raid, that bombs would drop, buildings explode in flames, death and ruin rip through the city, smashing the smugness of people in this surely most smug of all countries. So isolated, chauvinistic and proud of it, preening about everything Aussie, defending the White Australia Policy to keep the chinks and niggers out and patronising the pommies and dagoes. All the longitudes and platitudes of the whole cricket-loving, racing-mad, beer-swilling, sun-and-surf worshipping good-old-Bondi-beach nation of ingrained suburbia, of dear old mums and dads and kids. Truly, the whole vast country was one huge Mosman…

Any shift to the right that is happening now must be measured against all this, I think, a base that has shifted considerably since the 1960s. I am not making excuses for current trends, just indicating there was a time when things were much worse and we need to remember how we moved past those deeper prejudices.

The point I am making is that it wasn’t incrementalism that changed us for the better, but it might be incrementalism that takes us back.

Robert Manne, in another of the recent articles about these matters, wrote something important about how things have changed. “The seamless transformation of White Australia to Multicultural Australia appears to me one of the greatest achievements in the history of this country.” I don’t think we should forget that, or undermine it, anymore than we should ignore Manne’s subsequent comment: “As the emergence of Far-Right parties across the United States and Western Europe over the past decade ought to warn us, in the present epoch of Thermidorean cultural counter-revolution, the future stability of this kind of Australia can no longer be taken for granted.”

But here’s the thing.

You can’t merely hold the line against the sort of slippage we are seeing in the US and elsewhere; you have to fight back and assert the worth of those democratic and humanist values and you have to install them as an overt part of the national operating system. Anthony Albanese’s backroom, uninspiring, minimalist and retreatist approach cannot compete against a thrusting rightwing revolutionary force that has already gathered in the United States and that is gathering here.

The prime minister’s fervent wish for Labor to be the “natural party of government” is ultimately a conservative wet dream that takes our eyes off the prize while providing space for the far right to gather and set the agenda. Even amongst the current chaos within the Coalition, this shift is already happening, as the Lamestream article points out. Labor don’t need to go back to the crash-through-or-crash approach of Whitlam, but for heaven’s sake they need to fight the progressive fight with more conviction than they are currently exhibiting.

I doubt this will ever happen under Anthony Albanese.

1. Some, like John Quiggin, have been way ahead of the game on recognising all this, and some of the recent pieces by others are, to paraphrase Keynes, slaves to an actual living economist. Linking is your friend.