Wake in Fright
It's time to reset our thinking about where the parties stand
I’m getting thoroughly sick of apologists for Anthony Albanese excusing his and his party’s behaviour by blaming the likes of News Corp and more nefarious groups like Advance for “forcing” Labor to do certain things.
As anyone remotely familiar with my writing over the last 20+ years will know, I’m hardly a fan of the Murdoch stable, and I’m certainly not blind to the sort of pressure that is brought to bear on politicians of all stripes from such quarters, but the idea that Anthony Albanese is somehow being forced into actions—from slow-walking climate mitigation to inviting the Israeli President to Australia—is a nonsense we need to get past.
Even if you accept, in the instance of the Herzog visit, for instance, that the prime minister was presented with a lose-lose situation—that inviting the Israeli President or not inviting him would set off a chain of criticism from one group or another—you still have to acknowledge that a decision was actually made.
The prime minister is not a child and not without agency and he decided. Don’t his supporters realise that by arguing that he was somehow “forced” into making a decision that, absent such pressure, he would not have made, they are actually denigrating him in a much more serious manner than those who merely criticise him for making a bad decision? They are, in effect, accusing him of choosing short-term expediency over fundamental values.
In doing this, they are not displaying empathy for someone in a bind; they are rationalising actions they themselves think should not have been made.
There is a bigger point.
When someone keeps making lose-lose decisions in a certain direction, as Albanese continually does, you have to be grown up enough to recognise that just maybe what is happening is not that the PM is somehow acting against his better judgement, but that he is displaying who he actually is. If you want to support this on the grounds of “practical politics” then at least own the fact that this means you value concessions to the right more than you do actual progressive policy.
The usual retort to this is that if you are too radical all the time, you lose support from the supposed “centre” and that this just makes it easier to elect actual right wing governments, and I am not blind to the dilemma. But again, if you are going to make that argument, at least own its reality. What you are actually saying is what I said above, it means you value concessions to the right more than you do actual progressive policy.
The idea that by making such concessions in order to stay in power you are somehow opening the space in which progressive policies will eventually be enacted is nothing but a rationalisation. What’s more, it is something that can actually be measured in the real world and I don’t think anyone would argue that Labor has become more left-wing since the 1970s, would they?
In fact, once you realise that “the centre” is not something that exists independently and objectively but is something created by the actions of players from all along the political continuum, then you also realise that what incrementalist policies actually do is close down that so-called centre space. They don’t open it up, they close it down. If you keep making concessions to the right in the name of owning the “centre”, then all you are doing is shifting the centre to the right.
The good news is that fewer and fewer people buy into this BS centrist argument and are looking for alternatives. Changes in voting patterns over forty years bear this out. The bad news is that the alternatives people find are often on the far right, as the current surge in support for One Nation suggests.
I’ll say it again, slightly differently: a large part of the reason this slide to the right keeps happening is precisely because Labor make concessions to the right such that they are barely differentiated from the centre-right itself. The desire to be the “natural party of government”, as Albanese has spelt out as his aim, is nothing more than a desire to own this centre-right space.1
But owning the centre-right and being the centre-right is a distinction without a difference, and where does that leave progressive politics?
There is an even more important discussion to be had about how all this happening in an international environment of right-wing influence and technological change such that the need for an overt politics of the left to reassert itself is more vital than ever, but I will leave that for a future post.
I would add that I would count myself amongst those who, until quite recently, clung the idea that Labor would somehow save us, but it is a position I can no longer maintain.
You’re right to emphasise this, Tim. Albanese with his huge second term majority and his central role in shaping the ‘new’ ALP owns all of this.
Albanese has made all the key decisions, often unilaterally and with minimal consultation (eg. overruling Plibersek and Chalmers).
Most decisions are typically delayed after dithering, and sometimes ill-advisedly in the spur of the moment.
Whether the former (Stage 3 tax cuts, Bondi RC) or the latter (AUKUS, Voice to Parliament) he has more often than not been ham fisted and delivered for the establishment either by design or by incompetence.
A lifetime in juvenile student politics, backroom factional dealing and the sheltered workshop that is parliament has not prepared him for leadership; quite the contrary. Granted, some things are done well (at least in comparison to the shitshow that is the LNP) and any missteps are blown out of proportion by a media desperate for clicks, but the litany of bumbling hubris and lack of any ambition is becoming dangerous to the progressive cause itself.
His more competent management of a rotten system is not addressing the plight of ordinary Australians, and so disgusted with the Colesworth that is the present Australian party politics they are starting to turn to the fantasists as a ‘F you!’ to the establishment. The right may appear to be unraveling before our eyes, but it is actually just realigning around a far more toxic point of gravity.
The irony in all of this is that a man so desperate to leave a legacy as a Labor Legend is instead steering the party onto the rocks of becoming an anodyne facilitator of corporatism and the asset classes,
lacking any salience for a working class* that is being ground into the dust.
*working class in the broadest sense, ie. requiring a wage to subsist.
What I find bizarre is that Albanese was (is?) considered to be on the left of the ALP because he is (Was?) from the left wing of the party. Yet his behaviour since becoming Prime Minister, in my mind, places him on the right of the party and centre right on the political compass. He appears to be wed to neoliberalism and managerialism. He may very well make the ALP the ‘Natural Party of Government’ but at the cost of the ALP being no different from the Coalition in its government style and being no relation to the Hawke/Keating government let alone the Whitlam government.