At the end of next week a 'special symposium' will be hosted by Macquarie University to mark the three decades since the ALP-ACTU deal helped to elect the Hawke Government in 1983. The good and the great of the Accord era will be there (Hawke, Crean, Kelty etc) as will many enthusiasts from the academic community.
The Accord was Australia's odd experiment in corporatism at the national level. Odd because the labour movement (or at least its leaders) seemed to embrace corporatism at the same time and, at least on the political side, with the same enthusiasm as it embraced the neo-liberal agenda then sweeping the anglophone world.
The
ACTU’s adoption of independence and external lobbying involves a direct
rejection of the dependence and internal lobbying approach involved in the
social democratic style Accord arrangement. The adoption of union
revitalisation strategies is based in critiques of the impact of these social
democratic arrangements on union vitality and membership engagement.
In
fact, for the critics inside today’s union movement, the Accord is viewed
through the lens of a contemporary focus on re-building membership. The Accord
was good for working people, but it was, they say, bad for unions.
While a
few interviewees found merit in both the Accord and the organising model, seeing
them as appropriate responses to the circumstances of their times, most leaned
one way or the other.
This evening Sydney University's embattled vice-chancellor sent out this email to students:
Dear students,
As you will know, the proposed visit of the Dalai Lama to the University in June has been the subject of sensationalist and misleading media reports. Throughout discussions regarding the potential visit of His Holiness, the University and I personally have been consistently committed to the principle that academics can invite to the University anyone whom they believe has a legitimate contribution to make to public debate. It is not within the power of a Vice-Chancellor, or anyone else, to withdraw an invitation issued by an academic unit to an outside speaker, absent concerns such as public safety.
I am therefore pleased to advise that the Director of the Institute for Democracy and Human Rights, Professor John Keane, has this afternoon made the following statement.
“The Institute for Democracy and Human Rights (IDHR) at the University of Sydney and representatives of His Holiness the Dalai Lama have agreed to host an on-campus lecture for students at the University of Sydney, in mid-June 2013. This will be the first engagement of the Dalai Lama during his Australian tour.
The IDHR looks forward to hosting His Holiness the Dalai Lama under the theme ‘Education Matters’.
The University of Sydney and IDHR remain firmly committed to the principle that academics are free to invite to our campus anyone who has a legitimate contribution to make to public debate.
It is hoped the mid-June event will form part of a determined commitment of the University of Sydney to develop a constructive dialogue on matters concerning Tibet and the wider region.”
Now in her 71st year, Bronwyn Bishop (MacKellar, NSW) has been in federal parliament since 1987, first as a Senator before moving to the lower house in 1994.
Coming after Hewson lost the 'unloseable election', her move to the lower house was seen as a step towards the Liberal Party leadership and achieving her ambition to become Australia's first female prime minister.
Many years ago, I was seated next to Ms Bishop at a dinner party at a private home in Sydney's eastern suburbs (don't ask).
At one point, she told me in a pleased, slightly confidential tone that she and Mrs Thatcher liked to stay in touch and enjoyed catching-up occasionally. Clearly, I was to understand by this information that they saw each other as kindred spirits.
There is no doubt that Ms Bishop's putative leadership style owed a lot, if not everything, to her admiration for Britain's "Iron Lady".
Even today, as the member for MacKellar approaches the despatch box with another citation of the standing orders you can see traces of that steely, the lady's not for turning, schtick that she hoped might allow her to crash through to the Liberal leadership, a quest that most observers saw as quixotic.
It is also a reminder that amongst all the celebration of Maggie Thatcher as a 'conviction politician', rejecting consensus, sticking to her principles against all opposition, that more often than not this style of politician is a harmless joke flapping about on the margins in a democratic polity.
Much depends on the times. Thatcher was there when the UK, like most of the Western world, was going through an episode of economic and social upheaval. In this context, her simple certainities and simplistic ideas came across to many as an island of hard rock in swirling flood waters.
Luckily, Australia went down the consensus path. Not least because Hawke and Keating could convey a sense of political strength and authoriity without prompting riots and the destruction of many communities.
Australia is a much better place because voters rejected Fraser's divisiveness. Partly, because Howard was forced into the centre and away from the ideological fringes he had tended to inhabit (until, of course, he returned to type with workchoices).
Much also depends on the issues a conviction politician chooses to fight on.
Bishop, like many such people, has been notable for a poor choice of issues to get all principled about. Including an ill-considered defence of tobacco advertising.
Abbott, a great admirer of Bishop, has been trying to play down this aspect of his political persona in recent times.
Like his other great mentor, John Howard, he knows that to be taken seriously in mainstream politics you (mostly) need to occupy the centre and be willing to consult, listen and change your position as the political winds demand.
A vietnamese proverb has it, apparently, that a man who would travel along a river must make many turns.
In office, Howard was the master of the deft u-turn.
An article of faith for the post John Howard Liberal Party is that, like their heroine Margaret Thatcher and the US tea partiers, it doesn't believe in society (we're all individuals, and families), and so it hates anything that smacks of collectivism, universality, and everything else they see as mere euphemisms for socialism.
Menzies' Liberals were, like the ALP, big on nation-building, so a few modest efforts at building social infrastructure were OK. When Menzies won in 1949, he essentially pushed on with Chifley's Keynesian, full employment policy framework with very little change. The sort of the economic policy agenda that would have a modern Lib sniffing about creeping socialism (and, god forfend, public debt). But, ah you know, post-war reconstructionism (basically an effort to avoid another Great Depression) was sort of working and popular.
The problem for the modern Libs, as with the US republicans, is that the public only sort of buys into their views about individual responsibility and the trickle-down, and then only in a theoretical sense, as long as it applies to someone else and not to them.
Howard's Libs spent a lot of time in Opposition trying to come up with a way of ditiching 'socialised' medicine without making anyone worse off.
This effort reached a nadir at a media conference given in January 1990 by then Opposition shadow health spokesperson, and much vaunted rising Liberal star, Peter Shack, who had to concede that the Libs efforts had failed miserably.
In attempting to explain this fiasco, Shack offered the lame, but accurate, "we've never been good at health policy". This has remained one of my favourite ever media conference moments.
And so in 1996, John Howard making sure his efforts to make the Lodge hit no unnecessary ideological snags this time around threw in the towell and supported Medicare, promising to retain it.
The Libs also hated compulsory superannuation and long struggled against it, yet it survived Howard's 11 year tenure as PM pretty much unscathed. Instead, the Libs made super even more favourable to the rich. If we have to have socialism, let's at least have socialism with a decent social hierarchy embedded in it.
Now we have the NBN. The Libs hate it - too much public money being 'wasted' on too many people - but what can they do. Despite its well-publicised delays, cost blow-outs and so on, the NBN remains highly popular in the electorate. It is especially popular in National Party electorates.
Broadband seems now to be up there with health and super as something most Australians seem to believe most people should have good access to no matter where they live, or how wealthy they are. We Aussies believe in freedom with a bloody strong and wide safety net.
One problem for the Libs is that their efforts at a 'private' solution on broadband access were tried during the Howard era and like Shack's health policy it just didn't add up. They just couldn't get it to work. Like health for everyone, they discovered, broadband for everyone actually costs money.
Turnbull's new broadband policy is an attempt to have an NBN by any other means.
Poor old Malcolm, usually so urbane and confident looked a little like Peter Shack yesterday - out of his depth and trying to flog a crock.
The Libs don't dare do a Howard and just throw in the towell on this one as a lost cause. Well, not yet. There's the problem of trying to not let Abbott be revealed as a policy neophyte. Howard could at least fallback on a wellspring of ideological and policy gravitas.
But this is just a staging point in an ongoing process. As Turnbull (in an Abbott government) tries to iron out the problems in yesterday's hodge podge the Libs will end up with something that is damn close to Conroy's NBN.
The sooner we get to that bipartisan position the better for all of us.
Update: Two references to Shack's health policy debacle - Grog's Gamut: "I can remember poor old Peter Shack being pilloried for not producing a coalition health policy in 1990". Politically homeless: "Not since 1990, when then Shadow Health Minister Peter Shack admitted that the policy he had developed in his portfolio area for his party didn't actually add up, has there been a bigger policy debacle (not a gaffe: a policy debacle)."
A Gillard win on 14 September would be historic in terms of a come fro behind win in modern times, as Peter Brent noted this morning:
You’ve got to compare trend with trend, average over a unit of time (say three months) with average over the same unit in the past.
And across the polls, over sustained periods, the ALP is further behind in two-party-preferred voting intentions than any party has been since the mid-1980s and then gone on to win the next election.
(I say “mid-1980s” because that’s when Newspoll began. This is the problem discussing polling precedents; we really mean back to the 1980s. Before then the data becomes scarce with, from 1940 until the 1970s, the odd Morgan poll and pretty well nothing else.)
The only sustained period of worse polling for a government was the Coalition’s last year in office in 2007. Given the outcome, that’s not encouraging.
The Keating government in its final term 1993–96 was in a better position than the current government.
Former attorney-general Nicola Roxon has lashed out at ''misogyny'' within Labor ranks, after the release of an anonymous dirt sheet attacking a candidate in the preselection battle for the safe seat of Gellibrand.
A SCANDAL sheet making defamatory claims about a candidate's sexual history and honesty while working for the Health Services Union has poisoned Labor's attempts to run an orderly preselection ballot for the federal seat of Gellibrand.
Unions mount court challenge to donation laws - National Times
The laws, introduced by the O'Farrell government in 2011, ban donations from anyone other than individuals on the electoral roll and restrict what individual unions affiliated to a political party can spend on campaigns.
They also prohibit the payment of affiliation fees such as those paid by unions to Labor and restrict the ability of Unions NSW and business or environment groups from receiving money from member organisations to run political advertising.
In Australia, nominations for state and federal parliamentary seats are called "pre-selections." Meetings are held at the district branches of each party and the members choose a candidate. Because this is a small-scale, parochial exercise, ALP pre-selections are controlled by those who can bring the most local ALP members to a meeting. The factions, and the unions which back each faction, can always ensure that enough members turn up to a branch meeting to determine the outcome (sometimes known as "branch stacking"). For this reason, even though the unions are now less than 20 percent of the workforce in Australia, they retain a disproportionate share of political power within the ALP.
Unsurprisingly, the US guys have been taking a lot of interest in the internal workings of the ALP (there are several well-informed and insightful expositions of the workings of the factional system and its relationships with affiliated unions) and the question of who might succeed Rudd as PM and when.
Here are some interesting snippets I came across.
Cable dated 23 December 2009
Powerbrokers confide the
factions will assert themselves when Rudd's popularity wanes.
One theory is that Rudd is developing a "praetorian guard"
based on the historically powerful New South Wales Right to
head off any challenge from Gillard; that it was no accident
that Rudd promoted Arbib, Bowen and Clare (all from the New
South Wales Right).
Cable dated 25 February 2009
Two ALP Right factional leaders we have spoken to,
AWU President Joe Ludwig and Senator Don Farrell, former head
of the SDA in South Australia and the most influential
powerbroker in that state, both agreed that Rudd's political
power in the ALP is now unchallenged, but they opined that
the factions would reassert themselves once Rudd's popularity
declines. Although Gillard is currently Rudd's heir
apparent, factional maneuvering could ultimately deprive her
of the leadership. Right-wing powerbrokers, the key to
winning the leadership, are likely to prefer one of their own
- such as the leader of the Victorian Right, Bill Shorten -
for the job.
Cable dated 13 June 2008
New South Wales Right powerbroker Mark Arbib (protect)
described her as one of the most pragmatic politicians in the
ALP.
When we reminded Paul Howes (protect), head
of the right-wing Australian Workers Union, that ALP
politicians from the Left, no matter how capable, do not
become party leader, he said immediately: "but she votes with
the Right."
Although long appearing ambivalent about the
Australia-US Alliance, Gillard's actions since she became the
Labor Party number two indicate an understanding of its
importance. Poloffs had little contact with her when she was
in opposition but since the election, Gillard has gone out of
her way to assist the Embassy. She attended a breakfast
hosted by the Ambassador for U/S Nick Burns who visited
Canberra just days after the election. At our request, she
agreed to meet a visiting member of the National Labor
Relations Board, after prior entreaties by the board member's
Australian hosts had been rebuffed. Gillard is now a regular
attendee at the American Australian Leadership Dialogues
(AALD), and will be the principal government representative
to the AALD meeting in Washington at the end of June.
(COMMENT: Although warm and engaging in her dealings with
American diplomats, it's unclear whether this change in
attitude reflects a mellowing of her views or an
understanding of what she needs to do to become leader of the
ALP. It is likely a combination of the two. Labor Party
officials have told us that one lesson Gillard took from the
2004 elections was that Australians will not elect a PM who
is perceived to be anti-American. END COMMENT)
The paucity of basic political skills among the Gillard Government's top leadership group continues to damage the ALP's chances of a respectable result in September.
If Gillard hoped for clear air after the recent leadership fiasco, she will have been bitterly disappointed by this week's events.
First, the sideshow. After, Gillard's rhetoric about "Australian jobs for Australians", and "putting Australians at the head of the job queue", ugly Hansonite rhetoric, we have seen daily revelations that 457 visas are widely used in the union movement and that the two remaining ALP state governments (SA and Tas) are among the largest employers of 457 visa workers. Something about glasshouses. A good political operative would have checked first.
Second, the friendly fire. Some Rudd supporters have clearly left the reservation and their respect for Gillard and her Cabinet are at such a low ebb that they feel free to come out and lecture the Government on a near daily basis. Crean and Fitzgibbon attacking on superannuation, Kim Carr weighing in on the Gillard Government's treatment of single mums on welfare, Ed Husic slamming the decision to subsidise a Disney film. Disunity is death, but it is also a sign of weak leadership.
Third, the massive strategic blunder. Who in their right mind would let some debate on cuts to superannuation run out of control less than six months before an election? The Government let this run, it refused to rule anything in or out. It looked arrogant with its 'we'll let you know on Budget night' rhetoric and just plain silly with its 'trust us' rhetoric. This Government does not have a well of trust to draw on in the electorate (there will be no carbon tax etc). It has, again, found itself alone and friendless with even the union-based industry funds weighing in against it. A good operative would try to line up some supporters before launching forth.
What exacerbates these problems is the sheer inability of Gillard, Swan and other senior figures to actually win a debate. Much is said about Abbott's success as opposition leader, but he has been helped enormously by the inability of the Government to launch, sustain and win a political argument on anything controversial. Remember Abbott was not one of the stars in the Howard Government, sure he has probably grown but he has not given any sign yet that he is a great political talent (his mishandling of the negotiations after the 2010 election is one sign of his own lack of political skill). The Opposition has been doing a lot of work to try and refashion the Abbott image and make the attack dog look like a serious contender for the Lodge - but it remains a work in progress.
Gillard's public utterances are marred by stilted 'messages' and a droning delivery which has people switching off in droves. Despite nearly 3 years in the job she still hasn't got the hang of talking naturally and persuasively to audiences. She talks down to people and she doesn't appear to have much of real substance to say. This appears to be a media performance problem, apparently one-on-one and on those little campaign 'meet and greets' she impresses people but it just doesn't translate onto television or radio. Strangely, in a mirror of her opponent, her most memorable performance was an attack (on misogyny) speech.
Swan is Treasurer at a time when the economy is outperforming most of the developed world, yet he is continually on the defensive. He rarely engages in any real debate, preferring to stick to pre-scripted messages. Plus he looks tired and wearied by the job. Six years into the job, he has no great 'iconic' reforms under his belt. Like Costello, he will be a Treasurer between Keating and whoever the next great Treasurer turns out to be. His handling of the mining tax and the surplus issue have been abysmal and done great damage to the Government. In fact, Swan's surplus dump just befor Xmas may have been the moment that sucked all the oxygen out of the Governbment's mini-recovery at the end of last year.
There has been some serial failure in the Finance portfolio too, with neither Lindsay Tanner or Penny Wong making much headway against the middle class boondoggle inflicted on this nation's finances by Howard and Costello. It's not all their fault, of course, neither Rudd (who should have done something in that first budget) nor Gillard have shown much courage in this area. Weakness here is a big reason why the Government is facing the task of selling a tough budget just months before the election. Chickens coming home to roost.
There is no great political or policy talent on the Opposition front benches (except the exiled Malcolm Turnbull), the economy is going well, some good if half hearted reforms on education and disability are in the pipeline - the Gillard Government should be lapping a hapless Abbott and his coterie of plodders. Yet, through it's own problems, it's own lack of political skill, the Gillard Government finds itself on the canvas with the ref screaming 5, 6, 7 ...
The biggest retirement reform since the age pension, compulsory superannuation is one of the ALP’s greatest achievements.
Before it was introduced, as part of the Hawke Government’s Accord with the union movement, superannuation
was mostly a benefit enjoyed by well-paid, male, white-collar workers such as judges, politicians and public servants.
The scheme is simple; it is essentially a compulsory savings scheme for an ageing population that is not good at saving, made more attractive by concessional tax treatment.
Without compulsory superannuation, most of us would be facing a far tougher time in retirement.
It is another great social policy achieved at the cost of some inequity in the treatment of low and high income households.
Dermot Ryan, the Irish chief of staff to TWU boss infamously here on a 457 visa, has contributed a comment piece in today's Irish Times which portrays the ALP in glowing terms and advocates it as a model for its Irish counterpart (Ryan is a member of both parties):
But the big difference in Australian politics is that generally speaking, politicians (and voters) choose a side. Those on the centre left are members of the broad church known as the Australian Labor Party (ALP) and those on the centre right are members of the other broad church – the Liberal/National Coalition.
Like many Labour parties worldwide the ALP was born out of the trade union movement, and today it values that close relationship, while reaching out to business and fighting with Conservatives for the support of the aspirant working class. Australian Labor’s membership is made up of social democrats, socialists, communists, social progressives and almost everything else in between.
It keeps all of these together by organising into “factions”. The “right” faction includes members who, while sharing the vision of an Australia that promotes equality of opportunity, believe it is best achieved by reigning in the excesses of capitalism, rather than overthrowing it. It is the faction that includes most members of Irish descent, including the highly regarded backbench MP Deborah O’Neill, (a former Sydney Rose), who holds one of the country’s most marginal seats.
The socialist or “left” faction attracts many of the radicals within the movement, some of whom might be termed militant, and also attracts most of the party’s social progressives.
One issue which demonstrates how the ALP reaches out to a wider constituency is the issue of marriage equality. A recent vote in parliament to legalise gay marriage was defeated. The ALP did not impose a whip on its MPs, deeming it a “conscience” vote. The majority of Labor MPs voted in favour, with a significant number voting against. However, the right coalition enforced a whip with all of its 70 or so MPs voting against, dooming the Bill to failure. This allowed the ALP to show that it is the party most likely to make progress on the issue in the long term, while allowing its MPs who represent the vital battlegrounds in places such as Western Sydney to represent the views of their socially conservative electorates.
I wonder whether the ALP will be seen as such a rosy model after the September election.
I have worked in politics, public policy and strategic communications for over 30 years. I was recently awarded a doctorate in Australian politics at the University of Sydney. My thesis was on the (changing) relationship between the ALP and unions. I have been blogging since November 2003 and over the past decade I have written many articles on politics, public relations and social media for newspapers, magazines and websites. I love literature particularly John McGahern and James Joyce.
The header photo is of the Clarence River taken before dawn at Ulmarra in 2012.
