LABOR – THE STATE OF THE PARTY

Labor’s loss at the May 2019 federal election sent shock waves through the party that had been predicted to win the unloseable election. Polls over months had predicted a Labor win and the party was hugely confident as commentators assumed they would take the reins of office. On Monday 24 February 2020, The Hon Dr Craig Emerson, former Labor Minister and Co-Chair of the “Review of Labor’s 2019 Federal Election Campaign” and The Hon Dr Meredith Burgmann, former President of the NSW Legislative Council addressed The Sydney Institute to offer some explanations.

LABOR – THE STATE OF THE PARTY

CRAIG EMERSON

I would like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which we meet – the Gadigal people of the Eora nation – and pay my respects to elders past, present and emerging.

George Orwell has provided some useful advice for me and many others – never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you aren’t used to seeing in print. and never use a long word where a short one would do. So, in speaking about the prospects of the Labor Party I’m not going to go to try and sell you a pig in a poke. I’m not going to go into too much programmatic specificity either. I want to tell you, instead, a story.

When we were doing the Labor review with Jay Wetherill, we knew that we had to do an executive summary. But as Jay continued to do that the executive summary it continued to expand. Towards the end, Jay rang me up and he said, “Mate, I think we need an executive summary. We’ve got an executive summary but it’s too long, it’s too long.” So I looked up that Orwell phrase. I was trying to think of something that would do the job of in a nutshell. So, I am going to read you literally 500 words because it is a summary of the report. I’m sure 95 per cent of you will have read the entire report but this is for the other 5 per cent.

Labor lost the election because of a weak strategy that could not adapt to the change in Liberal leadership, a cluttered policy agenda that looked risky and an unpopular leader. Not one of these shortcomings was decisive but, in combination, they explain the result. Indeed, Bill Shorten led a united party, saw off two Liberal Prime Ministers and won all three campaign debates. Labor’s tax policy did not cost the party the election. But the size and complexity of Labor’s spending announcements, totalling more than $100 billion, drove its tax policies and exposed Labor to a Coalition attack that fuelled anxieties among insecure, low-income couples in outer-urban and regional Australia that Labor would crash the economy and risk their jobs.

I’ll now interpolate. They are the voters that Scott Morrison described as the quiet Australians.

The Labor Party has been increasingly mobilised to address the political grievances of a vast and disparate constituency. Working people experiencing economic dislocation caused by technological change will lose faith in Labor if they do not believe the Party is responding to their needs, instead being preoccupied with issues not concerning them or that are actively against their interests. A grievance-based approach can create a culture of moving from one issue to the next, formulating myriad policies in response to a broad range of concerns. Care needs to be taken to avoid Labor becoming a grievance-based organisation.

Low-income workers swung against Labor. Labor’s ambiguous language on Adani, combined with some anti-coal rhetoric, devastated its support in the coal mining communities of regional Queensland and the Hunter Valley.

On the whole, people of faith did not desert Labor, but Labor lost some support among Christian voters – particularly devout, first-generation migrant Christians. Other religious denominations did not swing decisively one way or the other. This is based on a reasonably sophisticated statistical analysis that I did with someone in the party office.

Higher-income urban Australians concerned about climate change swung to Labor, despite the effect Labor’s tax policies on negative gearing and franking credits might have had on them. There is no compelling evidence the election loss was an adverse reflection on Labor’s core values: improving the job opportunities, security and conditions of working Australians, fairness, non-discrimination on the basis of race, religion and gender and care for the environment.

Labor should retain these values. Its policies can be bold but should form part of a coherent Labor story, be limited in number and be easily explainable, making them less capable of misrepresentation. Labor should position itself as a party of economic growth and job creation. Labor should adopt the language of inclusion, recognising the contribution of small and large businesses to economic prosperity, and abandon derogatory references to “the big end of town”. Labor’s policy formulation should be guided by the national interest, avoiding any perception of capture by special interest groups.

Finally, a modern Labor Party cannot neglect human-induced climate change. To do so would be environmentally irresponsible and a clear electoral liability. Labor needs to increase public awareness of the costs of inaction on climate change, respect the role of workers in fossil fuel industries and support job opportunities in emissions-reducing industries while taking the pressure off electricity prices.

That’s it. That’s the 500 words. So, I just wanted to share that with you so that we’re working from a common information base.

Is the Labor Party in good shape? Yes, I think it is. Any party can always improve and always can learn from the past and from errors made but if you look at the Labor Party over its 130 years, just some of its achievements are Medicare, compulsory superannuation, the national disability insurance scheme and needs-based school funding. We can add to that the World Heritage listing of Tasmanian forests, of Kakadu and of the wet tropic forest of North Queensland and the protection of Shelburne Bay – an environmental treasure of brilliant white sand that was to be exported overseas and converted into glass. That is four icons with a fifth being Antarctica. I was pleased to be able to be with Bob Hawke and advise him all the way as Australia led the charge against the mining convention being signed for Antarctica.

These were big reforms, most resisted by the Coalition. And there were promises to undo Medicare, to take a scalpel to Medicare. Compulsory superannuation has also been under attack periodically. Then there were the big economic reforms of the Hawke/Keating period, a whole reorientation of the Australian economy away from one shrinking and lacking confidence behind high tariff barriers and tearing those barriers down while believing, rightly, that we could be confident in the world and particularly in the Asian region.

Bob Hawke foresaw the growth of Asia and, most particularly, China. During the Gillard Government I was the architect of the white paper on Australia in the Asian century. Many of those reforms, particularly the tariff reforms, were supported by John Howard as opposition leader so that there was some bipartisanship around that big economic reform program.

Now, Labor didn’t do everything. Even though it is the progressive party and the party of change, Malcolm Fraser was a strong environmentalist. It was the Fraser Government that put Kakadu stage one on the world heritage list. He welcomed and organised for Vietnamese refugees to come to settle in Australia. He was absolutely and totally opposed to Apartheid. So, we think he did good things. John Howard did something that a Labor government could never have done and that is introduce gun laws – something enormously courageous with Tim Fisher who passed away recently. What a legacy we have from those two for those gun laws. In fact, Barack Obama said not so long ago that there are three things that he would like for America that Australia has – compulsory voting, Medicare and its gun laws.I think most people in this room would probably think that’s a pretty good list.

In truth, most of the really big changes have been Labor changes. But one of the real problems that we saw in that 500 word Report summary was the high expectation of a Labor win. We called it banking the win. Everyone thought we were going to win, including the bookies and the betting agencies who actually paid out on the Thursday before the ballet.

Everyone was so confident that I understand, quite rationally, what all the progressive interest groups were doing. They went to Labor for commitments because after the election Labor would be too busy implementing its 240 policies. So, one after the other in the great effort of alliance building, Labor said yes, yes, yes and before long there were 240 policies costing $100 billion. Mind you, that wasn’t to blame re the budget because the revenue measures were bigger than the spending measures and would have fully covered those costs and led to a return to surplus and a better budget bottom line. But a lot of that got lost in the campaign and in the fury of it.

In the Labor Party we now have groups who are only there because of an interest they have – the environment, refugees, LGBTQI groups and so on. But if they’re in the Labor Party, you want them to be also interested in the rest of the Labor Party. One of the problems is that people saw that language around special interest groups and thought, “I know I’m not special but I still get to vote.” The truth is elections are actually won in the centre. That’s where most of the undecided votes are. And all of those quite worthy causes can be pursued in government. I’m not saying they shouldn’t be part of the advocating, but Labor needs to realise, as Hawke and Keating did, that elections are determined in the centre.

The Greens are arguably more vociferous opponents of Labor than they are of the Coalition because they compete with Labor for seats. The Greens actually prosper when they attack Labor. They don’t worry as much about the Coalition. So Labor shouldn’t try to beat the Greens. Let them do what they want to do, as Meredith said, without taking it for granted. Not too many Greens will be recommending preferences for the Coalition because that would damage them. So, we just need to be conscious about moving towards the centre.

The democratisation of the Labor Party, or of any party, sounds fantastic. But let’s understand what we’re talking about when we’re talking about democratisation by referring to one example of people being invited into the party to select the leader. That example is Jeremy Corbyn. As most people would have expected, Labour got smashed in the UK because if you pay five pounds you’re in the Labour Party. I don’t know if it’s one of the greatest branch stackings of all time. Jeremy Corbyn had the support of the branch membership, and he put forward a very revolutionary program. But voters said no because the centre said no. I’m not talking about left and right here. But there are pitfalls in letting people join the Labour Party whether you’ve got Labour tradition or Labour values thinking it will all work out well. It often doesn’t.

Finally, there is climate change. In the Report, we said we should not turn our backs on climate change. There’s a big debate going on now. It is believed by many that zero net emissions by 2050 is achievable. This is a debate that we should have. We can transform the economy, there can be a lot more jobs coming out of that approach than clinging onto every single job which Australia has never been able to do in its history. The debate is happening right now in Canberra and as far as I’m concerned bring it on.