Forty Years in the Making – Why Leadership is the Least of Labor’s Troubles

Nick Cater is an Australian journalist and author and Chief Opinion Editor at The Australian. He has held editorial executive posts at The Weekend Australian, The Sunday Telegraph and The Daily Telegraph and in 2006 edited The Howard Factor. In 2013, Nick Cater published The Lucky Culture, a book which has opened debate on the intellectual dominance of the left in Australia since the 1970s. On Tuesday 2 July, Nick Cater addressed The Sydney Institute to discuss the Australian Labor Party and its woes. The paper which follows is an edited transcript from the presentation.

FORTY YEARS IN THE MAKING – WHY LEADERSHIP IS THE LEAST OF LABOR’S TROUBLES

NICK CATER

Thank you Gerard inviting me. I’m most honoured.

As I was thinking about this speech, I was reminded of when I turned up in Adelaide 24 years ago. I got a job at The Advertiser and, being very new to town, was a bit like Julia Gillard’s UK adviser John McTernan. Really, I didn’t have a clue about Australian politics.

It was the days before Google and my chief of staff said, “I’ve got a job for you.” He said, “We’re doing a series called ‘Where are they now?’” I thought “Oh, oh, here’s trouble.” He sent me off to interview somebody called Des Corcoran. Being my first day, I was too shy to ask anybody what Des Corcoran’s claim to fame was; so I just fronted up. I said “Des, I’m here to do a story ‘Where are they now?’ and my first question, if you’ll excuse me, is ‘Where were you then?’” (laughter)

He explained that he’d been the Premier of South Australia and fought in Korea. Then he took me out on his back deck, gave me a couple of beers and fulsome history of Labor. But I found that question, “Where were we then?’” quite a useful one whenever I’ve looked around Australia to try to make sense of it. And it was the approach I took with this book. Before I could say why it is that we’re now in this position where we have this enormous cultural divide, I needed to ask where we had been.

First of all, I had to make sense of how we got here, what sort of country we were in pre-history (before 1989) before I arrived. So that’s where I started. And, on the question of the Labor Party, I’ll start with a little party history of my own.

In just 13 years, Labor has had as its leaders Keating, Beazley, Crean, Latham, Beazley, Rudd, Gillard, Rudd. It’s simply no longer credible, I’d suggest, to argue that Labor’s problem is its leadership, and needs just a little bit more bloodletting for Australia’s oldest party to be suddenly on track and electable again. It’s clear to everybody that this institution is in structural decline with chronic problems that go back for many years. How many years? Well, I suggest at least 40.

I didn’t set out in The Lucky Culture to write a history of the Labor Party but it seemed to me that some things needed to be straightened out. The official history of the Labor Party, the received history if you like or the one Labor people tell themselves, seemed disingenuous in the extreme. It is littered with half-truths, myths, and strung together with a glorious narrative emanating from some indistinct light on the hill.  The characters are badly drawn, they are black and white, there are heroes and villains, with the heroes lorded and the villains virtually ignored or airbrushed from the official account with the audacity of a Soviet propagandist.

This Labor history has been devised, of course, by the intelligentsia, which is hardly a neutral player in the great destruction or seminal moment in the 1960s when Labor turned itself on its head. This was when the alumni took over the worker’s party, much as they were later to take over the workers’ cottages, and began to rip out the fireplaces.According to the received account, the “It’s Time” election in 1972 was a glorious national uprising when the Australian people overthrew the conservative colonial overlords and emerged blinking into the sunlight to greet the new dawn.

The “It’s Time” anthem reinforces this legend. It’s history not as it happened but as we imagine it happened, the evocative images of a choir, a congregation joined in worship, a gospel tune. All this suggests it was not so much an election as an anointing, as though Gough Whitlam came to power not through a popular ballot but through popular acclaim. Labor’s messiah complex starts at this point.

Phillip Adams once wrote that “he [Whitlam] did not have ministers he had apostles, we were devotees, we were disciples, his weren’t policies, they were miracles”. The real story of course is somewhat more prosaic. “It’s Time” was not the anthem that captured the zeitgeist of an entire nation. It was an attempt at persuasion, a tacit admission that much of middle Australia needed convincing that the country should change at all. It was evidence of a nervousness within Labor that the wider electorate might not be as captivated with the progressive narrative as the sophisticates lurking in the background. There was that fear, which comes back time and time again, that there may be another Don’s Party.

In 1971, the year before the “It’s Time” election, Labor’s market research company Spectrum International discovered large pockets of voters, in a choice between Whitlam and the incumbent, were mysteriously prepared to vote for Billy McMahon. With the departure of Arthur Calwell and Robert Menzies, most young progressive had assumed that social conservatism would suffer some kind of Darwinian demise. But it was proving maddeningly resilient.

Donald Horne in The Lucky Country described the language of the older political generation as “obsolescent”. Australians were “spellbound in boredom” he said, impatient to move on in a country that was rundown, old-fashioned, puzzled, resentful. Yet the qualitative research commissioned by Labor said something quite different. The team at HR McCann Erickson delivered a brutally frank appraisal of Whitlam’s weaknesses that we can read in hindsight the early signs of the deep philosophical divisions, which barely registered at the time, but by 2013 had splintered the party.

Overall, the surveys endorsed Labor’s change of leadership in 1967 demonstrating that Whitlam’s modern approach broadened the party’s appeal. In 1966 only 14 per cent of professionals had voted for Calwell, but by 1972 four out of 10 were backing Whitlam. Even the bosses were warming with 21 per cent of managers signalling their intention to vote Labor in 1972 – up from 14 per cent under Calwell. Support for Labor amongst skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled workers increased. The most significant gains were among Catholics.

And Whitlam was winning the youth vote. In 1966, Australians in their twenties overwhelmingly supported Harold Holt over Arthur Calwell (53% to 32%) By 1972, Whitlam had turned that around, 50 per cent for Labor 35 per cent for the Coalition. Yet, the McCann’s research had uncovered flaws in Whitlam’s personality, focus groups found him cold, distant, inhuman, an intellectual loner who gave impotent answers to potent questions.

Significantly, voters seemed to be troubled by what the researchers euphemistically called “special issues”, land rights, tariff reductions, the environment, divorce law reform, race relations. Immigration in fact was a potential minefield they said for Labor, the Coalition had dismantled the White Australia Policy or started to dismantle it but Labor was going to pay the price. Researchers noted comments such as “Vote Labor and get a nigger for a neighbour” were beginning to emerge. They urged Whitlam to pull back, to argue that he would reduce all immigration and Whitlam dutifully did.

In an interview with David Frost, Whitlam, celebrated as you’ll remember as Labor’s great multiculturalist made this pledge, “I don’t think the scale of migration which we’ve had up to now is fair to the migrants or fair to the Australian.” Four decades later, I have argued that tension between Labor’s intellectual progressive sentiments and the working class pragmatic social conservatism is yet to be resolved, far from it. In fact, it’s essentially the same source of Labor’s current crisis. Just as Whitlam was obliged to repudiate the progressives’ position on immigration, so Kevin Rudd is now forced to turn the switch on asylum seekers from fair to tough.

The “It’s Time” campaign would also set the pattern for how Labor would respond to such philosophical tension. Rather than reasoning, to come to some kind of accommodation, Labor turned to the developing science of electioneering and techniques which we would today recognise as those used by spin doctors. Whitlam invested his trust in advertisers and marketers, finetuning his election platform in the light of their advice – stage managing, photo opportunities, softening his image by allowing his wife Margaret to take centre stage. For the first time, we saw a politician in Australia described as a product. And there was a product to sell, of course – the modernisation of Labor under Whitlam was the most startling metamorphosis of a party in Australian political history.

In a single term in opposition, the workers’ party was transformed from a bastion of social conservative trade union, working class members into a progressive, reform movement. By unilaterally reinventing the party’s purpose Whitlam challenged Labor’s claim of historical continuity, the faithful guardians of tradition, the keepers of the eternal flame. Yet, the reform party was also able to reach beyond the proletariat to members of this new intelligentsia who were graduating in ever increasing numbers from Robert Menzies’ super-sized universities.

“It’s Time” would be the first political campaign in Australia to have abandoned the raw, spontaneous rhetoric of the stump and embraced technocratic marketing. For the first time a leader would seek endorsement not just as a leader but as a brand, the party would be a brand. McCann compared Whitlam to Johnny Walker whiskey and he noted that 50 per cent of the market in the early 1970s was Johnny Walker, leaving 101 other brands to share the rest. On a taste test people, McCann said, people can’t tell one from another. What they really perceive is not the whiskey in the bottle but what’s imagined to be in the bottle.

This was the framework around which the “It’s Time” election was conceived. It was inherently contemptuous of the electorate itself, assuming that voters did not need intellectual persuasion. It was enough to pull the wool over their eyes. Whitlam would not be portrayed as the custodian of eternal Labor values since they were damaged goods. He would be presented as the moderniser whose task was to sweep away the past; he’d seek affirmation not from Labor’s elders or founding fathers but from its celebrities and youth.

Labor’s gain of eight seats gave it a majority on the floor of the House, but this hardly amounted to a national consensus. Whitlam won the seats in outer suburban Sydney and Melbourne, but there were swings against the ALP in South Australia, Western Australia and outback Queensland. Labor gained 12 seats but lost four – two in the west and one each in South Australia and Western Australia. Alan Reid wrote later, “It was as though, for Whitlam’s advisors and consequently for the ALP, Australia stopped where the pavements of Sydney and Melbourne ended.” It was an attitude for which the ALP would pay dearly at 1975 election.

The cleverness, or perhaps even the carelessness, of the “It’s Time” slogan left open the question, “It’s time for what?” In 1972 the “It’s Time” slogan danced around the internal philosophical tension within the party that Whitlam single-handedly attempted to reinvent. It was a master trope of non-prescriptive politics like Barrack Obama’s “Hope we can believe in”. “It’s Time” was a blank slate upon which people could project their own vision for the future. There were risks however, in this sort of strategy. By leaving so much to the imagination, an incoming prime minister is hostage to the electorate’s fancies and is obliged to attempt to be all things to all men. The worst danger is that, having confused the voters, a party starts to become confused itself about what it stands for.

Until the 1960s, the ALP was a party of muscular unionism run by a cadre of shop floor activists. They were indifferent and at times openly hostile to intellectuals. The “longhairs” Jack Lang called them, dreamers, the sons of wealthy parents overtaken by misty idealism who preferred the philosophy of William Morris to that of Karl Marx or Engels. The antipathy was mutual.

In Donald Horne’s estimation, the average union leader was petty and conservative, and not very good at his job. Their organisations were amateurish and irrelevant to the life of modern Australia. Biding his time as deputy leader in the early 1960s, Whitlam saw the educated middle-class as his natural allies. It was a growing cohort. Robert Menzies had initiated the expansion of higher education in the late 1950s, but those who benefited from it were largely those happier with the progressive side of politics, the Liberal Party, although of course there were some exceptions.

In Whitlam’s view, the compact between the thinkers and the workers would be essential to a modern technocratic social democratic government. It was the job of universities to train these people. First, however, he had to tame the ALP’s anti-intellectual tendencies, and they were strong. Writing in Meanjin in 1965, Arthur Burns said that when he tried to join the party he’d been made to feel like a permanent pre-adult – a member of a class that the other ALP members were against.

The relationship between brain and brawn was less troubled in Britain where the Fabian intellectuals had helped build the Labor party in 1900. In the United States, the democrats had avoided any firm or formal agreement with organised labour and in France it seemed intellectualism was not only compatible with socialism but compulsory.

The Australian Labor movement, however, was a product of its time and place. It began with a brotherhood of agricultural brawlers with a rather brutal attempt to collective bargaining that included torching shearing sheds, sabotage of stage coaches and the scuttling of cattle steamers. The ALP’s culture mirrored a broader suspicion of intellectuals around Australia – it was a product of a pioneering imperative that we didn’t take intellectuals too seriously. We rewarded doers rather than thinkers. Practical men, the fixers of the fence as opposed to those who delivered papers on agricultural enclosures.

The biggest obstacle for the rapprochement in the early 1960s, however, was Arthur Calwell. As Labor leader, he was anything but stupid but he was hardly the man to build a bridgehead to the campuses: “I’ve got nothing against university education,” Arthur Calwell wrote after his retirement, “But I’ve met many non-university educated people who’ve displayed a much broader knowledge than the doctors, lawyers and economists and others who deserted their professions for politics.”

By the time the ALP met for its 1965 conference, the intellectual forces had amassed the strength for a showdown. Don Dunstan led a move to drop the White Australia Policy from the party’s platform. Then Whitlam threw open the tent flaps to the white collar professionals in his key note speech to the conference: “Intellectuals and white collar people know that their decisions will be more effective and their advice more heeded under Labor. … This party needs intellectuals and the intellectuals need this party.” It was a defining moment for modern Labor, a marriage of convenience between working and middle classes that looked hopeful at the start but would deteriorate slowly into a deep seated quarrel.

The two sides had radically different expectations. The workers wanted a party they could trust to do the right thing by them. The intellectuals, on the other hand, signed up to a party that they expected to do the right thing by others. One that would fight oppression wherever it was. One partner supported the interests of working people, the other partner fought for the oppressed – the victims of capitalism, sexism, racism, all the victims or a heartless society and a rotten system, the vulnerable who for whatever reason had fallen through the cracks.

Middle Australia sought security and comfort from Labor. Ben Chifley said that the movement would have fulfilled its purpose if it could make someone more comfortable, to give a mother or father a greater feeling of security for their children. Yet by the 1960s, intellectuals had come to see security and comfort as a horrifying prospect. They equated comfort with complacency, contentment with the contentment of suburbia – a sentiment that was against change.

The dynamics of progressivism insisted that social and economic justice could never be fully achieved since that would stop the movement in its track. Social reform, therefore, is a never ending process. Yet, despite the awkwardness of the partnership, the intellectuals needed Labor if they were not to become what Whitlam would later describe, in another context, the nation’s largest pressure group.

On its own, without a political host, the progressive movement would be relegated to insignificance in a robust and unforgiving democracy. It would become, in other words, the Australian Democrats. On balance, it’s clear that Labor needed the intellectuals if it was not to become a relic of the past. Whitlam the moderniser needed educated men and women, people driven by the power of ideas, capable of delivering a practical program of reform on social democratic principles.

Calwell’s crowning achievement, of course, was to lead Labor to its worst defeat since World War II and he agreed to step aside. Yet, even then at the start of 1967, the prospect of an openly intellectual candidate running for the leadership of the workers party seemed and extraordinary proposition. Just two days before the ballot, Alan Ramsey and John Stubbs predicted in The Australian that Whitlam’s middle class background would be a big problem for him. “He was considered by many of the party’s rank and file to be an opportunist,” Stubbs and Ramsay wrote, “A silvertail, a liberal who ratted on his own party.”

Yet Edward Gough Whitlam overcame the impediment of dual degrees to become the duly elected leader of the opposition. Three other intellectuals were chosen as his praetorian guard, Lance Barnard, Lionel Murphy and Sam Cohen. Ramsay began his splash in the following morning’s Australian with an extraordinary intellectual coup. He wrote: “It is a break from Labor’s tradition and a sweeping victory for the party’s new look politicians.”

Yet, the deep animosity between Calwell and Whitlam – between the old guard and the new – cannot be explained merely as a personality clash or an intergenerational altercation. It was a confrontation of two opposing sets of values – an emerging fault in Australia that was far wider than the gap between the Labor and Liberal parties. It was a clash between the cosmopolitan values of a growing tertiary educated middle class and the rest of the country. A division between the abstract and the practical. A contest between the wisdom of the academy and the wisdom of the street.

Whitlam’s capture of the Labor Party represented a political victory – progressivism over conservativism – but the victors made one critical mistake. They assumed that social conservatives were finished, that they would inevitably lead to progressive thinking and once the crusty old guard had passed away but they were wrong. The progressive left’s reluctance to recognise the endurance of social conservative sentiment has caused it to misread the electorate for more than four decades. It prosecutes its agenda in the arrogant expectation that the popular ignorance will one day be banished and that people can be convinced to change their minds.

But by condemning the beliefs of it’s fellow citizens, without trying to understand why they believe what they believe, they’ve fallen for the fallacy that reason takes primacy over emotion. The emotions of sanctity, loyalty, decency and respect which could explain why people polled what the intellectuals believed to be bad ideas, are being largely ignored by western social democrats since the early 1970s and they continue to pay the electoral price.

Never in Australian political history has a change in leader thrown a party into a handbrake turn as spectacular as the one that occurred when Whitlam grabbed the wheel from Calwell. Yet philosophical underpinnings to the transition were, by necessity, downplayed by the party in its official history. It cannot acknowledge that Labor is prone to making a sharp turn in any direction. It would damage the brand of a party which treasures its legacy and claims to uphold universal and eternal values.

Consequently, the party’s historians have been unwilling to recognise that Whitlam unilaterally redefined the party. He changed its purpose – he altered the currency of redistribution from cold hard cash to less tangible benefits of health, education and protective rights. Four months after becoming leader, in his famous speech to the Victorian Party Executive, Whitlam declared: “Wages and conditions are no longer the chief determinants of real living standards.” It was a breathtaking claim, the things for which they had fought for 80 years had been accomplished.

And Whitlam continued: “The health and housing of ourselves and our families, our children’s education represent the most important social capital this nation has to offer. The things the government provide are those which determine whether the community enjoys a true measure of equality”. Modern Labor had begun its quest for social justice; substantially, it was to enlarge the role of government. Whitlam would pick up where Chifley left off with one difference. Rather than nationalise the banks and the airlines, he’d nationalise the business of everyday life. Whitlam would say  that he quality of life depends less on the things which individuals have tamed for themselves and more on the things which the community provides for all its mebers, from the combined resources of the community.

Whitlam’s speech writer Graham Freudenberg wrote, “From that night on, nothing would ever be the same for the Labor Party”. Indeed, Whitlam’s election campaign speech in the 1969 election delivered on the 1October at the Sydney Town Hall marks, I believe, a turning point in politics. For the first time since Andrew Fisher, an ALP leader abandoned the rhetoric of stability and fashioned an agenda around the narrative of change.

Whitlam’s 12,200 word address is a fiscal monetary and budgetary commercial-free zone. Employment gets a passing mention as Whitlam promises a parliamentary enquiry into Aboriginal welfare. The only reference to business is in connection with the government owned Post Office. Trade crops ups three times when Whitlam praises the vital work of the government controlled shipping company ANL. In short, it’s a platform of the cognoscenti, promising nothing less than a crusade to give all the opportunities to which they’re entitled in a rich and growing nation. In place of steadiness, security and solidity, Whitlam offered renovation, rejuvenation and reinvigoration in a world where opportunity would be equalised, democracy revitalised and dignity restored.

Labor’s fortunes since Whitlam demonstrate the folly of those assumptions. When Labor oppositions have campaigned on jobs and wages and conditions – Labor’s code for sound economic management – it wins government. As Bob Hawke did in 1983, and Kevin Rudd did 24 years later. But there always remains a propensity for the party to go astray, to drift off on some progressive adventure. And this takes it away from the concerns of everyday men and women.

This happened in 1983, when Labor attached itself to the deep ecological forces opposing the Franklin Dam. That decision cost Hawke votes, and there was four per cent swing to Labor in 1983, across the country, but it was reversed in Tasmania with a four per cent swing away from Labor. It was an early lesson for the party that green politics could not just be sprinkled like glitter, that tree hugging photo opportunities exact a price. Philosophically, at least, ecologism was even less compatible with democratic socialism than communism. Marx, afterall, only wanted to take over the factories, the Greens want to close them down.

Yet, broadly, Labor failed to see the danger. Nature conservation was a useful tool against the Coalition and the environment turned into a partisan issue. Old Labor figures like Hawke’s first Environment Minister, Barry Cohen, were cautious about overplaying their hand. But the successor, Graham Richardson, saw no reason for holding back. He wrote, “We had the perfect convergence. What was right was also popular.” Yet, as Richardson was to discover, the causes dearest to the hearts of nature lovers can be brutally unpopular with the workers. As Peter Walsh reminds us in his memoirs, “The demands of the ecological movement are insatiable.” Every compromise, every agreement, is seen by them to be no more than a launching pad for another assault on industry and employment.

Thus a Labor government, knowingly, put south Tasmanian blue collar workers at a great disadvantage, workers living in an area which already had an unemployment rate of between 20 and 24 per cent out of work. And this not for any valid environmental reasons, but simply to appease bourgeois the left and middle class in the gentrified suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne. In the rarified atmosphere of federal politics it was becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish between the practical interests of the working people and the symbols that fascinated the middle classes. The party had begun to construct a new philosophy of failure.

To step back for a moment from the contemporary political circus, it seems clear that Labor’s crisis is directly linked to the pursuit of progressive ideas. On the touchstone issues of the environment and immigration, it’s chosen the sophisticates’ applause ahead of the pragmatic social conservatism of the masses.

The fact that Julia Gillard felt able to enter into a formal alliance with the Greens shows how removed the broader political class has become. Belatedly, in 2012, senior members of a disorganised and demoralised Labor Party began to repudiate the folly of seeking that alliance. New South Wales party secretary Sam Dastyari told the Weekend Australian, “We’re kidding ourselves if we think they – the Greens – are our friends. The Greens are to the left what Pauline Hanson and One Nation are to the right. They share the same ridiculous, albeit different, economic agendas.

It’s impossible to explain the drift of the progressive movement within Labor without considering the climate of the debate in the nation’s principal cultural institutions – the universities and the ABC – where public investment in cultural capital has produced peculiar results. New recruits of the political class were themselves products of the same degree factories and had received the same narrow, unimaginative educations.

The media class, the political class, were cut from the same cloth. People were more interested in ideas than things. They were fascinated with the abstract rather than the concrete. They were graduates who had chosen to work in the creative sector, as distinct from the wealth creating sector. Rather than challenging and probing tenacious progressive arguments, politicians, professors and producers have reinforced one another’s prejudices and encouraged a false certainty. If the ABC really is Labor’s best friend, as some suggest, it’s the worst friend they could possibly have.

If nothing else, I think that Kevin Rudd’s second coming may at least have broken the spell of the Messiah complex. I detect little optimism within the party that Kevin Rudd offers a path for redemption, even if he should contrive an unlikely election win. Former Labor leader Mark Latham, in a hard hitting review piece in the Australian Financial Review on Saturday, sheeted the problems home to the breakdown of factional discipline and unprincipled personal ambition in the party.

Perhaps, but that’s only a symptom, in my view, not the problem itself. To find out what’s at the heart of Labor’s crisis you can do worse but to go back to Latham’s previous analysis in From the Suburbs which is now 10 years old. Latham correctly identified the emergence of a new influential group in the 1970s who found a home in higher education, public broadcasting and other cultural programs. “These are the new insiders,” wrote Latham, “the progressive establishment led by academics, artists and other cultural producers … they have little experience of suburban life or suburban values, they practise a symbolic, abstract style of politics. They dominate the debate. The dividing line in public debate is not a question of left versus right but it is a struggle between the insiders and the outsiders.”

Where should Labor be making its home on this new cultural landscape? Clearly it is where Latham said it should be, where it always used to be, shaking the tree and rattling the cage on the outsiders behalf. “Our job,” said Latham, “is to give them hell.”