Trevor Cook

Gillard gets poll bounce after Rinehart deal

Interpreting opinion polls is a murky business.

Everytime a government goes up or down in the polls, commentators race in to offer a, hopefully, plausible explanation.

The usual logical method is post hoc ergo propter hoc (after this therefore because of this). 

It is one of the most common, if not the most common, fallacies that we humans are prone to.

Most monthly opinion poll movements are within the margin of error, so no further explanation maybe necessary. Such an approach is not good material for attention grabbing headlines.

Poll movements might also be the net result of a myriad of causes - again not too interesting in a headline.

Instead commentators like to pick some recent event and suggest that it has caused the poll movement - post hoc ergo propter hoc.

This week's newspoll was good for Gillard and the ALP - so which event to pick?

The Government's compensation package might be one cause - but those goodies hadn't really begun to flow in earnest when this poll was taken last weekend.

Most commentators seemed to have settled on the idea that the public is growing tired of Abbott's relenntless pursuit of Craig Thomson. There is anecdotal evidence that some in the public are unhappy with the bullying of Thomson. But there is still overwhelming disgust at the HSU saga, and it has tarnished the ALP and will continue to do so while it remains unresolved.

But maybe the rise in support is because the EMA deal struck with Rinehart to bring in some foreign workers actually worked for the Government by suggesting that its class war wasn't serious and the Government was still capable of taking good economic decisions in the national interest.

The TV news bulletins carried plenty of coverage of outraged and exasperated union officials, which might also have helped the Government's standing in the community.

Of course, the popular media is dominated with misinformed xenophobia on the foreign mineworker issue. Nevertheless, we are talking about small poll movements. It might just be possible that some voters who switched to the LNP this year because of the Government's class war frolic have been tempted back. The Opposition is hardly strong on front-bench economic credentials.

I'm only guessing but I doubt that an interpretation of the polls that suggested Gillard was trumping Abbott on economic policy would get much consideration in the News Ltd editorial conferences.

Bob Carr for PM?

This should be a joke. Perhaps it is. But things are so crazy that seasoned journos are saying they've seen nothing like it since 1975 or 1983. It's febrile. The ALP caucus is in a state of despair and panic. So they should be - anyone in the ALP who thinks their seat in the House of Representatives is safe is an idiot. They could lose to the Libs, they could lose to the Greens. They know it. This is a Hunter S. Thompson weird time. It's febrile down there in Parliament House, and when they get back from their electorates for the Budget session it's going to get intense and combustible. And the PM is playing with flame throwers not matches. So I guess anything could happen and probably will. Stand by folks this is a time when it gets real exciting. It's a once in a generation game-changer.

Labor in crisis: why it's different this time

My post yesterday on the Queensland election and what it means for the ALP's future drew some criticism along the lines that a) internal structures don't matter much because the voters don't care and b) the ALP has been in trouble before and has come back. These are good and valid points, but I think they are not relevant this time, here's why.

Organisational structure does matter

The popular idea that the voters don't care about organisation and structure is itself a symptom of Labor's problems. Labor used to see itself as a 'movement' not just a professional political party. It saw the involvement of a large section of the community in the movement, particularly through the union movement, as a particular strength. In fact, the ALP was Australia's first mass party and its arrival forced the conservative side of politics to become more inclusive and seek the participation of community-based organisations. A few weeks ago I wrote a piece that explores the long-term decline of the ALP's base. Essentially the decline of the blue collar workforce, and blue collar unionism, has seen the ALP's base shrink. One reason for advocating a move to some form of primary style preselections is to re-engage with a broader base and to regain some sense of the party as a movement, a party of the people as well as for the people.

Why it won't be easy to come back this time

The second point relates to the one above. The decline in the ALP's base has become reflected in a preciptious fall in the ALP's primary vote.

There have been 43 federal elections. Exclude the first three, when the ALP was establishing itself as a serious contender, and 1931 and 1934 when the ALP in NSW was split from the federal ALP, that leaves 38. Of those 38, the ALP's primary vote has fallen below 40 per cent on just 7 occasions.

The first occasion was in 1966 (39.98%), the next occasion was 1977 (39.65%), both of these election outcomes were historic and disastrous defeats for the ALP (and both prompted internal reforms). The next occasion was 1990 (39.44%), which saw the emergence of the Greens and their displacement of the Democrats, the first time the ALP actually won an election with a primary vote below 40%. Note that all three occasions here the ALP vote was just a tick under 40%. 

The ALP then lost the 2001 and 2004 elections with 37% of the primary vote, the cumulative result of these two defeats was to give the Howard Government control of the Senate. Then the ALP "won" the 2010 election with 37%, and its reliance on the Greens has become more formal and obvious. It is doubtful that the ALP can win with anything below 37%.

Over the past 20 years, the ALP has relied on a strong flow of preferences from the Greens, but it is doubtful that this can continue to save Labor from the consequences of its declining base. For a start, the Greens have failed to build their own vote in recent state elections - suggesting they are a protest vote not a genuine third force. Second, over-reliance on the Greens might be driving more conservative ALP voters towards the Coalition. 

Fast forward to 2012. The ALP's primary vote in polls at the national level has hovered around 30% often less since Gillard announced the carbon tax was back on the Government's agenda. The primary vote in the Queensland election on Saturday was 26.6%, in the NSW election last year it was even lower at 25.5%.

These recent results suggest that an historic shift in the electorate's attitudes towards the ALP is occurring. 

The ALP can't win without a sharp increase in its primary vote and that will force the ALP to revisit its policies, organisation structures and candidate selection processes.

Queensland election: Labor must end the insider game

The 2012 Queensland election follows a similar rout of the ALP in NSW, and the lessons are pretty much the same. It boils down to opening up ALP pre-selections and attracting a broader gene pool. 

These two election outcomes are much bigger than a natural swing of the election cycle. The Australian electorate is sending a real message to Australia's oldest political party: it's time to change.

I believe the electorate wants political candidates that have a broader range of backgrounds than backroom politics and blue collar unionism. They don't want devotees of ideological positions (witness the Greens failure at recent state elections), they want people with a track record outside of politics (in business or community organisations), who are middle of the road, and who are good representatives and competent administrators.

That means pre-selections and even leadership recruitment needs to be opened up and become inclusive. It can't be the preserve of the officials of affiliated unions and a few hundred active party members.

A big lesson from these two state elections is that the electorate has tired of broken promises, lies dressed as clever spin and all the rest of the Carr-inspired media cycle politics. If the ALP doesn't move quickly to show it's listening, the federal election next year is going to be awful. Probably the die is already cast. 

The ALP has always been very bad at internal reform, how many more record defeats will it take before it realises something big has to be done?

Does the ALP still have a base?

I contributed this piece to the Conversation today.

In recent days, Treasurer Wayne Swan has been prosecuting a puzzling assault on a few billionaire mining magnates. Commentators have struggled to come up with a plausible explanation for his political strategy. Many have resorted to the idea that it is an appeal to “the ALP base”.

But is there still a base to hear the appeal?

Base, class and inequality

The idea of a “base” hints at the existence of a working class that has interests in common. It suggests a broader political project to reduce inequality and the disadvantage caused by wide disparities in wealth and income. Class and inequality, however, are concepts that few modern ALP leaders would dare to mention in polite company.

When I was growing up in the 1960s, our family was very much of the base. One of our articles of faith was that the worst ALP government was better than the best Coalition Government. The ALP was our party, the party of the workers. The Liberals were for the bosses and, as my mother warned, even the good bosses will throw you out on the street when it suits them. The divide was clear.

In two major speeches on the ALP given by Prime Minister Gillard in 2011 the words “equality”, or for that matter “inequality” were not mentioned. Gillard’s campaign speech in 2010 also made no mention of equality and inequality. By way of comparison, Whitlam’s famous 1972 campaign launch speech mentioned “equality” 17 times, “inequality” seven times and “inequalities” five times.

The ALP’s rhetoric has changed to reflect the declining relevance of the unionised blue-collar working class.

The collapse of blue-collar unionism

Union membership and union density have been in steady decline in Australia since peaking in the late 1940s or early 1950s. It fell far more sharply in the 1990s. Between 1986 and 2008, union density fell from 45% to 19%.

Union density did not drop below 40% between 1913 and 1992, and was usually much higher. In areas of blue-collar employment, the union density figure was closer to 75% at its peak levels in the 1950s and the blue-collar working class consistently made up two-thirds of the workforce between the 1890s and the 1950s.

By 1981, white-collar workers made up almost 40% of the workforce compared to 28% in 1969. The typical union member today is female, university-educated and working in a professional role in a service industry, particularly health, education and community services.

A study done for UnionsNSW in 2003 found that more highly qualified employees (i.e. in terms of educational attainment) were more likely to hold positive views about unions, and that employees with lower or no formal qualifications were more likely to think Australia would be better off without unions.

A new base?

The collapse in the old base was partially offset during the past few decades by a new urban middle class concerned with rights-based issues and the environment. In recent years, this new base has been deserting the ALP for the Greens.

ALP branches started to attract white-collar members in the late 1940s. During the 1960s, the ALP began to draw increasing numbers of teachers and other tertiary educated professionals. By 1981 blue-collar workers comprised just one-quarter of employed branch members in the Victorian ALP.

Unions affiliated to the ALP, mostly blue-collar, have felt the full effects of the collapse of union membership. Big unions covering university-educated professionals like theAustralian Nursing Federation (ANF) and the Australian Education Union (AEU) have been far more successful in maintaining high unionisation rates.

Unions like the ANF and AEU remain outside the ALP and have not been included as part of a new base. Former union officials still dominate the federal ALP caucus, but very few of them come from these more successful unaffiliated unions.

Despite many internal reviews, the ALP has yet to change its structure to attract a new, or broader, base.

Suburbanisation

Inner city areas where people supported the ALP with loyalty and intensity broke up as post-war generations headed out of the terrace rows for more distant quarter acre blocks.

In some of these new suburbs, cultures have grown up characterised by aspiration, mega churches and self-employment. They live in big houses and drive big cars. But there are also lost suburbs of congregated social disadvantage where hundreds of thousands of children grow up in homes where no-one has ever had a full-time job.

The sense of tribalism that underpinned the old ALP unionised blue-collar base has dissipated during the suburbanisation process.

A fractured picture

There is no longer a clear divide, and no base held tightly together by shared work, union and community experiences. The ALP left its old blue-collar base as the traditional working class was collapsing. Now, the it faces the more difficult challenge of winning support from a range of social groupings that share much less in common.

Sentimental appeals to the world of 50 years ago are unlikely to do much to unify the ALP’s fractured base.

 

An end to the labor project?

There was an interesting discussion about the future of the ALP on Late Night Live last night. One panelist, journalist Paul Kelly, raised several times the idea that the historic labor project may have simply come to an end. Unfortunately, it didn't get explored in any depth. I did some work on this question in earlier drafts of my thesis (forthcoming) but dropped it for space and other reasons.

One way of exploring this idea is to think about what we might say the labor project is comprised of. From reading much of the history of the time, I think we can identify five key elements:

• legislative protections for unionism
• economic development and secure jobs
• improvements in the living conditions of working people
• the creation of a society where inequality is kept to a minimum
• access to parliament for working class men (later women as well)

If we review these elements of the project it is a mixed picture. 

Protections for unionism, long taken for granted, are now continually under attack.

Economic development and secure jobs is an objective that is a year by year proposition, especially since the GFC has reminded us that full employment is not a permanent feature of capitalism. 

Material living standards have improved to an amazing extent in the last century. But expectations have also increased, interestingly cost of living pressures remains a potent electoral issue at state and federal levels.

Inequality has increased in recent years. It is an area where (earlier) gains can easily be reversed particularly through taxation and social policies.

Without the ALP, very few blue collar men would have had access to parliament. There was just one ALP MP with a university education in the first federal caucus (and he was trained in theology). Today, almost all ALP MPs have been university educated. There were more men with blue collar backgrounds in the ALP's first caucus then in the much larger group in today's parliament. This is certainly one area where the ALP's success in expanding access to higher education suggests an end to the labor project.

The picture is mixed, but it does not suggest the labor project is over. But maybe it has to be rethought. And re-imagined. When people like Gillard and Swan talk about 'true labour hearts' it sounds a bit archaic, which seems to me to be a shame. It sounds more outdated and outmoded than it really is.

An ALP leadership death rattle?

It seems unlikely that the ALP can recover from the bitterness of this 'soap opera' to win the next federal election. What happens after that is the big question.

Despite the laughable attempts by the ineffective Wayne Swan to portray the on-going leadership battle as an ideological contest, with Gillard apparently having the real labour heart, those famous words from Act 5, Scene 5 of Macbeth (the best play ever about the nature of political power) are more apposite:

It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Yet, it does signify the ongoing disintegration of the ALP. The ALP's problem is not factions (after all the Hawke-Keating governments were much more 'factionalised') it is the fact that the factions have crumbled into fractions and have lost much of their ideological purpose. The ALP's factions today are little more than transient coalitions for personal advancement; as such they are inherently unstable. 

The second problem is the unrepresentative nature of the party itself.

The 103 person caucus, as a group, is far less representative of the party's base, much less swinging voters, than it ever was before. This allows Rudd to appeal above the caucus to 'the people of Australia' with some considerable legitimacy.

So we now have a dispute between Gillard supported by caucus and Rudd supported by the electorate.

As a result, caucus will choose its leader next week, but the victorious Gillard will have even less credibility and authority with the broader electorate. As King Pyrrhus famously said: one more victory like that will completely destroy us.

Only the adoption of some (limited) form of US-style primary system will help overcome this widening gap between the ALP and the electorate.

Labor's 'gordian knot' and the myth of leadership

The ALP is beset by long-term problems that it scarcely knows how to deal with. Instead, the party focuses on 'leadership' in some bizarre form of the 'great man' theory of history. Yet, there is hardly any ideological and policy distinctions between any of the candidates for ALP leadership at federal and state levels. These leadership candidates rely on messaging, narratives, news cycles and all the other branding / PR nonsense that infected both the Rudd and Gillard leaderships, and dates back to the Carr premiership in NSW when the ALP finally abandoned ideological purpose for advertising slogans. 

For starters, what is the relevance of a 'labour' party dominated by blue-collar unions (and the catholic controlled SDA) in a post-industrial world? The 'typical' union member these days is female, university-educated and works in the health, community services and education sectors. Second, the ALP branch structure has been declining (or collapsing) at a faster rate than unionisation. Third, the internal structures of the ALP are archaic and profoundly undemocratic. Efforts to reform the ALP national structure have been on-going since the 1960s or longer (Whitlam was a passionate advocate of a genuinely national, rather than federal, structure). Efforts to ensure that union affiliation to the party reflected changing patterns in the union movement also date back to the 1960s and can be found as late as the 2002 national review (by Wran and Hawke) but have been largely abandoned in the 2010 review. 

Everyone knows about these problems, they are just too hard. They raise the question of whether political parties can really change their character or whether they are doomed to die and be replaced by new parties. In this context, a primary vote around 30 per cent is a a disturbing phenomenon for the ALP. Can the ALP really retain its historic links to unions (as representative organisations of the working class, whatever that might mean these days) and reach out to new social groupings, the 'tradies' (typically self-employed, or employed in micro-businesses) on the right and the inner-city green groupings on the left?

In last year's NSW election, voters deserted the ALP for the Coalition rather than head off to the Green left. Despite this the ALP has tended to see its problem as being one of winning back the green vote. This seems the only plausible reason for Gillard's decision to abandon an election promise and introduce a carbon tax (which I think is good policy but bad politics having specifically ruled it out in an election campaign just a few months previously), handing the political initiative to the Abbott-led Oppposition and ensuring that she is unelectable (what value would her 2013 election promises have?). Perhaps, Gillard will describe the carbon tax in her memoir as a politically costly decision but one worth taking in the national interest. Solace in rationalisation.

If Gillard is unelectable then should the ALP revert to Rudd? In a world where ideology and policy differences matter little, the voters must look to competence. Most of the front bench of the ALP seem to have publicly endorsed the idea that the Rudd Government was chaotic and characterised by administrative incompetence. I don't think Gillard has done much to change this public perception of incompetence (episodes like the Australia Day fiasco only serve to undercut her efforts). If it reverts to Rudd, does that mean more pink batts and exorbitant scholl dunnies? Does it mean another thousand reviews and then reviews of the reviews and lurching between policy paralysis (why did the Henry review take so long to be released?) and policy surprises (a mining tax?)

The damage has been done. They got rid of Beazley and saddled themselves with Crean and then Latham and then Beazley again and finally turned to Rudd in search of the great leader who would deliver them from the political wilderness. Rudd won a great victory and then turned out to be a bit light on when it came to policy (20/20 summits and reviews, reviews), they turned to Gillard (supposedly a great negotiator and hard-working policy wonk) who immediately blathered her way through meaningless messages to a not-quite defeat and then negotiated away everything to the cross-benches in desperation. And then the carbon tax decision and then everything else. And a primary vote that rarely rises above 30 per cent. And now some think that Rudd is the solution. With any luck he might be less bad than he was before, but its unlikely he will have changed much - and his policies will be the same as Gillard's. 

It's not as though the ALP has become an ideologically right-wing party; it's more that it is a mish mash of neo-liberalism and protectionism; anti-middle class welfare on some issues but not others. Best of all - why is an atheist living in a long-term de facto relationship opposed to marriage equality? What's the messaging in that one, dude?

In NSW, we've seen it all before. Changing leaders doesn't change much because the leaders are not the principal problem; the party is the problem. The ALP's policies are not that different to the Coalition's; it just hopes that their leader (whoever it might be) will be considered less worse than Abbott by the swinging voters. 

Is Abbott sinking? (from @sspencer_63)

Federal Labor needs more than a leadership change

Sure, Gillard is a hopeless prime minister. Everything she does seems to go pear shape. And quickly.

It may not be her fault, not in the sense that she is a bad leader, a horrible person, a twit.

Though she does have some form when it comes to plain, straight out stupidity.

Gillard came up with the 2004 election clanger - Medicare Gold - a true shocker.

She devised the ALP's infamous immigration policy as Opposition spokesperson - it's ironic that she is wearing the blowback from this crazy tougher but kinder approach.

No, Gillard's real problem is desperation.

A smart (i.e.in the Machiavelllian, Mario Puzo sense) politician would have insisted on Kevin leading the party to the 2010 election. 

She should have told the conspirators that it was too late for a change so close to the election.

If Kevin won (almost certainly with a reduced majority) the party could have told him to move on sometime in 2011. Presumably, the colleagues would still have despised him just as much.

If Kevin lost, well she would have been Opposition leader and had to do what every great PM has done and that is win from Opposition (except Curtin who became PM after a vote of no-confidence).

I think coming from Opposition would have given her much greater authority with the electorate - it always seems to.

But she couldn't wait.

And then when the election result was inconclusive, she couldn't say no either.

The Greens got a carbon tax, Wilkie got pokie reform, Oakeshott got a tax forum.

And the ALP got back into the Lodge with enough saddle bag lead to defeat Black Caviar.

Where's Labor's issue, what's happening with Education. Crean seems to have put that particular revolution to sleep - or was Gillard's performance in that portfolio so bad that the ALP has decided that the less said in that area the better.

Desperation for office is a poor substitute for cold, hard political calculation.

Kevin is probably desperate too. Desperate for a second chance to prove the detractors wrong.

But, if Kevin comes back, he'll inherit Julia's leaden deals. Pretty soon he'll be looking as dopey as she does at the moment.

If the ALP is going to win in 2013 (yes I realise how stupid that sounds) it will have to come up with an issue that can turn the election into a referendum. 

Something that makes the mob want to vote ALP. Something about which Abbott can't say 'me too'. Something that can unite the ALP's blue collar and green-leaning constituencies. 

A Labor version of Howard's "who do you trust on interest rates".

They hope that Abbott himself could be that issue, but the electorate seems to be getting used to the idea of Abbott PM.

In any event, the Abbott bogey isn't good enough to turn this doomed ship around.

If Kevin's got that issue in his knapsack, then he might succeed.

God knows what it would be.

If he hasn't got the silver bullet issue, it will be a sad reprise to his roman candle like political career.

One year on - the Rudd assassination revisited

A year ago I wrote this post, see below, which I think pretty much stands up. At the time, I thought Abbott would probably win the 2010 election, which he almost did, now I think he will win the next one in a canter. Gillard has turned out to be much worse than anyone could have imagined or feared. Nothing she does works. She stands for nothing. The Australian electorate has pretty much given up on her completely. Her prime ministership just shows that the ALP's problems, federally as in NSW, go far deeper than who happens to hold the top position at any particular time:

I was not a big fan of Kevin Rudd. He had many flaws, many of which (ill-treatment of staff) I find abhorrent. He made many stupid mistakes, like relying on inexperienced staff and failing to build strong support bases in the ALP. His media strategy was often ludicrous. He didn't delegate and he excluded the Cabinet and the caucus too often. Some of these failings were the flipside of his political strengths - bright, driven with policy ambition and above the murky world of internal ALP politics .

But he did do many great things. He got the ALP elected for a start. He won the leadership because the caucus believed Howard would win again. If Labor had lost in 2007, WorkChoices would be established law and the union movement would be stuffed. Paradoxically, his image of being above unions and factions was just the persona the labour movement needed to turn the YR@W campaign into a political winner. And he said sorry to the stolen generations - as great a day as Canberra is ever likely to see.

And he deserved to go to the next election as PM. When I was growing up, so long ago now, the ALP was the party of ideas and soul. It lost more than it won - but its failings were endearing. The ALP had soul. It loved its leaders. It was motivated by ideas, as well as the pursuit of power. It was ever-likely to tear itself apart about some principle or policy. It was infuriating, but it was also something that deserved the lifelong loyalty of many Australians through thick and thin. A leader under fire from mining billionaires and the Murdoch media would have become a Labor legend not a pariah. I know those days are gone, but I think we have lost a lot with their passing. 

Rudd was also scapegoated. The narrative is that it is all about Rudd, without him the story goes the ALP will romp in. I'm not convinced. Rudd's popularity collapse was prompted by policy changes notably the ETS background and the mining tax which were Gillard's and Swan's as much as they were Rudd's. In addition, the ALP's TPP vote improved in the last of the 4 Newspolls. Some secret polls conducted by the NSW ALP and / or the AWU apparently show a disaster not evident in the published polls.

So the ALP panicked. The official reason was that the government had lost its way. That's what happens when you've got no soul. It hopes the assassination of Kevin Rudd will boost its chances. I doubt it. They will have to gut the mining tax and toughen the asylum seekers policy. If that doesn't work - then what? The ALP has handed Tony Abbott a huge win. Opposition leaders don't often provoke Governments to dump incumbent PMs, because its an obvious sign of weakness and panic. The ALP has mired itself again in factionalism, faceless men and external union influence. Very big negatives with swinging voters.

Who is Julia Gillard? No doubt we will be deluged with the usual media honeymoon frenzy. But I'm so far been unable to get a fix on who she is and what she believes in. Where does she differ from Rudd. More consultative? Yawn. She is a woman. Great, but won't win anymore votes than it loses. She is a good debater. Is she a good campaigner? Don't know.Does she have much to say? Not so far. I suspect the appeal of Gillard will fizzle. After all, we know a lot more about who Abbott is then we do about Gillard.

And will she be there for a full-term? After the Rudd assassination, you might vote for Gillard but that's no guarantee that the ALP factions won't assassinate her if she hits a bit of whitewater.

I think Rudd would have won this year's election. Especially if the shadowy figures had got behind the government and promoted its cause rather than leaking leadership stories to News Ltd for weeks and months. Rudd was in a better position than most prime ministers six months out from an election. 

I suspect that Abbott will now win. Gillard doesn't have long enough to establish a real connection with voters and I think that the criticisms of the Government are a product issue not just Rudd's style. If they get rid of those product issues there won't be much reason left for swinging Liberals and blue collar workers (Howard battlers) not to go back to the coalition after a brief flirtation with Rudd Labor. 

Radical change to the ALP is required. In my piece (tear down that wall), reacting to Senator Faulkner's Wran memorial lecture, I argue that the time for tinkering at the edges is over, only a major opening up of the ALP's pre-selection processes can reverse the decline Faulkner so accurately depicts.

I have also written some other pieces recently on this general theme:

- Paul Howes and the mysterious membership figures

- Howes and the carbon tax ultimatum

- Nowhere to go: Unions and the ALP

- Gillard's Whitlam Oration: unions, greens, equality and opportunity

- Comeback: What NSW Labor needs to do now

- Rodney Cavalier: "Power Crisis"

You can also download my paper to the Australian Political Science Association at the end of last year on the unions-ALP, based on interviews with ALP MPs and union officials done for my PhD thesis.

Paul Howes, unions, ALP and the carbon tax

The Conversation has published this morning my latest piece on the subject of the relationship between unions and the ALP under the heading: "Howes' carbon tax ultimatum all in a day's work for union boss":

Public conflict between unions and the ALP is nothing new. But with the besieged Gillard government clinging to office, and unions desperately needing to prove their value to members, the current conflict brings Australia’s oldest relationship closer and closer to the precipice of separation.

(Previous stuff - I wrote a piece on this subject for ABC Unleashed, published last thursday. The text is available here. I also wrote a paper for last year's Australian Political Science Association on the unions-ALP relationship using some of the research for my phd (due for submission in August). That paper is available here. You can also read my review of Rodney Cavalier's Power Politics here.)

Genuine welfare reform: 3 essential steps

That old chestnut the welfare cheat has returned to distract the gullible. Welfare is an area where big structural changes are needed not mickey mouse, tough love measures.

1. Benefit structure. Two problems. First, differences in payment levels encourage people to opt for disability and aged pensions. Everyone knows it. But the only way of dealing with the problem is to increase the level of unemployment benefits - expensive and it doesn't fit the tough on welfare cheats narrative that pollies love. Second, the rate of benefit withdrawal (what you lose when you start to earn) results in ludicrously high, and inequitous, Effective Marginal Tax Rates: "High income families receive a greater percentage of an extra dollar earned than low income families, with middle income families suffering very high EMTRs."

2. Job Network. Like its predecessor, the Commonwealth Employment Service, it is biased towards finding jobs for people who would probably find them on their own even if it took a little longer. The hard to place clients get by-passed. It looks good on the performance stats and its more profitable. But it doesn't help get people into jobs who really need help.

3. Public transport. Welfare dependency, for want of a better term, is concentrated in places like south-west Sydney that lack effective, cheap transport. It is a tragedy that the former NSW Government did so little during its 16 years in office. But if Gillard or Abbott want to get people into jobs they need to deal with the very real physical and financial barriers to participation.

Put together these three problems and you can explain much of the 'why won't people get off welfare' issue that pollies and shock jocks love. But will the Federal Government's May Budget do much to address them? Not if the last decade of welfare reform is anything to go by.

Gillard's Whitlam oration: unions, greens, opportunity and equality

What does the ALP stand for?

Gillard says she is sick of hearing this existential nonsense. 

Yet, she used her speech last night to state her view of Labor's mission.

The answer is: a nation a of social climbers.

Social climbers with a non-pretentious Aussie style, but make no mistake, the ALP worships the god of social mobility. 

Gillard's speech is redolent of Mark Latham's vision of aspirational voters. Of semi-skilled workers in Sydney's west with an eye on the stock market. Of mums working three jobs to send the young Julias of tomorrow to a good private school.

And like Marko she intones those meaningless sentiments: the Labor way, the Australian way.

Equally, she makes a point of repeating Kenneally's great piece of denial and self-delusion: They didn't leave us, we left them.

It sounds like Billy Sneddon's analysis of the 1974 election: we didn't lose, we came second. 

A real leader would just say we stuffed up, here's where ...

Nice sugar-coatings are Ok as long as you don't believe them yourself.

Gillard uses opportunity 12 times in her speech, and never mentions equality or inequality.

Concerns about inequality have been air-brushed out of the rhetoric of today's ALP.

But it's not that easy, as a recent study found:

 While it is often assumed that social problems bear little relationship to average incomes, the evidence suggests that income differentials within populations matter a great deal, and this is as true of American states as it is of countries around the world.

In the most unequal countries and states, there is more gender inequality, too, and these places are less generous. A higher proportion of people suffer from mental illness, and more use drugs.

Less egalitarian countries have six times as much obesity. Educational attainment is poorer, with higher dropout rates, shorter periods of paid maternity leave and less early childhood education. Teenage birth rates are higher, and it is young men from disadvantaged neighbourhoods who are most likely to be the victims and perpetrators of violence.

In more unequal countries, children experience more bullying, fights and conflict, and rates of imprisonment are five times higher. Although it is possible that heath and social problems cause bigger income differentials, inequalities are the common denominator.

You can't separate equality and oppportunity in the glib way Gillard implies. Opportunity doesn't solve economic and social problems, only policies to address the worst aspects of inequality can do that. Policies that bring down the cost of housing, policies that provide cheap, reliable public transport for people in outlying suburbs. A progressive taxation system. Means-tested welfare payments. More of that please.

The Gillard government stresses about obesity but not inequality; the media highlights the bullying problem, but not inequality. We talk about the symptoms of inequality as if they were all separate problems that can be addressed with an education campaign or something similarly inexpensive.

Focusing on opportunities is simply code for abandoning the goal of keeping inequality to a minimum. Wealth and income disparaties don't matter to Gillard, just a better prospect for the next generation. Not fairness today, but fairness tomorrow (and then only for the academically bright). Labor's political ambition has been diminished.

Worse still, Gillard uses another dishonest sleight of hand to suggest that dismantling the welfare state is central to her project of creating more opportunities:

Creating opportunity and enabling social mobility has required different policies in every age. We have moved beyond the days of big government and big welfare, to opportunity through education and inclusion through participation.

What poppycock.

Government is bigger now than under Whitlam: more spending and more regulation. And it has accelerated under the Rudd / Gillard governments. For instance:

The federal government spending share of gross domestic product will increase by 2.6 percentage points this financial year, with a further increase of two percentage points forecast for next financial year, the biggest increases since the early 1970s. Government spending will reach 28.6per cent of GDP in 2009-10, a figure unprecedented in peacetime. Government spending has increased 13.5per cent this financial year, an increase unprecedented since the Whitlam era, and it will increase by a further 3.9 per cent in 2009-10. 

It's all about what the money gets spent on. And how it is distributed. And what impact that has on inequality.

Gillard, like Abbott, wants to get tough on the unemployed and the disabled, while leaving in place the whole edifice of middle-class welfare that the Howard Government did so much to increase.

Unions get one mention in Gillard's speech. Australia's 2 million union members will be doubtless pleased to know that Labor still supports the role of unions. Hardly a fulsome vision for unions in the modern Labor way.

The Greens, by comparision, get six mentions. As the ALP continues its stupid obsession with a minor party on its left.

Forget the Greens, Julia, and focus on inequality. That's the way to win back the heartland. Some warmed over version of John Howard's political ideology won't do it.

Gillard's struggle to find legitimacy

Six weeks after sort of winning an election, Gillard has finally moved into the Lodge and her fellow assassins are still trying to make the case for why they knifed Rudd. Lenore Taylor's piece on 'the chaotic last days of the Rudd Government' still falls short of providing a convincing case. The problems of the Rudd Government seem to be solely of Kevin's making and embraces the conflicting notions that he couldn't make decisions and that he made too many unpopular decisions (mining tax, ETS, asylum seekers).

The fact that this rationalisation stuff is still being retailed just shows how pervasive Gillard's legitimacy problem is. Add to that the presence of Rudd on the world stage (lol) looking far more prime ministerial than Gillard and you can see that this is a problem that's not going to go away anytime soon. And of course Gillard's election campaign, and the outcome itself, now the subject of much internal hand-wringing and blame-shifting, hardly did anything to confer legitimacy on Gillard's prime ministership.

Gillard is still basing her claim to legitimacy on not being any of the alternatives - Abbott, Rudd or Turnbull - she is yet to establish a positive claim for herself. We've had endless stuff about opportunity, education and hard work. These are banal and hardly controversial, they are an agenda from a few decades ago. The 'real julia' is apparently really, really passionate about this stuff, but it is not clear how all that passion is going to translate into real reform.

If the Gillard Government is doing something big, or plans to do something big, it is keeping it well hidden. I suspect that the real lesson the Gillard Government learnt from Rudd's downfall is that electoral survival is about avoiding controversy, and that means avoiding real reform.