Splintering To The Left, Part II

There was a time the ALP were the catch-all socially progressive party in Australia. Then they split over communism and while they stayed split, they had no chance to win government. Then they went back to being a big catch-all socially progressive party and were able to win government under Whitlam, Hawke, Keating and then Kevin Rudd. The recent development of the splintering to the left then is something that is likely to hamper the ALP's ability to form government on its own. Peter Hartcher has this article in the SMH.

As an electoral edifice, Labor has long stood on two pillars. One is the working-class vote. The other is the progressive vote. In April last year, Labor detonated one of those pillars.

The fatal moment was when Kevin Rudd walked away from the fight on "the greatest moral and economic challenge of our time" by deferring his emissions trading scheme.

And when Gillard unseated Rudd, she moved the government further and further to the right, further and further away from its progressive voter base. Gillard cut a quick and dirty deal with the multinationals on the mining tax, promised to put asylum seekers in East Timor, and signalled a total abandonment of serious action on climate change with her "citizens' assembly''.

A silly notion persists that Gillard is somehow on the left of Labor politics and Rudd was on the right. The truth is the opposite. Gillard was further right than Rudd on every major policy issue. That helps explain why Rudd's lead assassins were from the Right faction and his last diehard defenders from the Left.

The result? Labor lost 676,000 primary votes at last year's election while the Greens picked up 491,000. In other words, the Greens picked up three-quarters as many votes as Labor lost. We cannot know for certain that these were disillusioned and disgusted Labor voters going across to the Greens. But it's a pretty safe assumption that the vast bulk were.

Labor self-destructed as the party of the progressive vote. The Greens staged their best performance yet with 12 per cent of the vote and Labor's was one of its worst.

This is all true. Hartcher then analyses the ructions in terms of moves to the left and right which are all very valid, but I then thought it actually doesn't capture the whole problem. For instance, I've largely been a voter for the ALP in the Hawke-Keating years through to Kevin Rudd because it was always imperative to stop John Howard. John Howard actually represented the nastiest, meanest, smallest-minded social conservatives of this country, so at each and every election it was important to for me to vote against and vote out John Howard's electoral support.

But over time I've found myself at odds with my own voting: I am a free market capitalist. I was for the GST and not against it; I've not really been a unionist rank-and-file kind of ALP guy, I'm not a Catholic, and I'm not really invested in Socialism. I just hated John Howard and everything he stood for - entitlement and preserving entitlement including the entitlement to be racist bigoted and mean. I still think, "well, fuck you John Howward, fuck you very much" when I cast my mind to his prime ministership, which is not very grown-up of me, but that is the visceral loathing I've felt. I probably loathe Tony Abbott far less than that, though I do hold him in utter contempt for his Catholic-Church-driven hyper-idiotic nonsense positions on global warming.

So, the point is, the big tent of the Australian Labor Party was always a coalition of those who didn't like John Howard and the vestiges of White Australia Policy Squat-ocracy. To that end the ALP has knitted together the SBS demographic and the ABC demographic against the Channel Nine demographic, with the Channel Seven demographic as the swinging centre. (Channel Ten doesn't get a vote because its audiences are under 16, but I guess they are the 'yoof' vote).

Ultimately the limits of the ALP is that it can't be all things to all people in a world of very complex issues and social needs. It can't be that Bolshy socially progressive party and cater to the Catholic DLP right faction. It can't be totally committed to environmental policies while looking after the interests of the big end of business. It can't be corruption-free when it takes in organised ethnic votes.

And in a world of boutique consumerism where special needs are catered for by specialist services, it is inevitable that political parties begin to splinter around the urgency of the multiple individual policy positions. That is to say, the rise of the Greens is as the boutique political party for those who put environmental concerns ahead of things like workplace policies or gay marriage. Equally, the appearance of something like the Australian Sex Party in the last federal election is an expression of a party that places sexual and gender politics ahead of say, envrionmental policies. If you poked them deeply enough (pardon the pun) one would find they're probably about as equally progressive as one another.

It might be the case that this signals the end of the ALP as the one-party fits all progressive party in Australia, but it shouldn't diminish it from being a broker for all these ideas and policies.