Where To From Here For Labor?

Cassandra Wilkinson is a founder of Australia’s youth arts and culture FM radio station FBi and a social commentator who writes and speaks about the virtues of freedom from rock ‘n’ roll to immigration and the WTO. She is also a former senior adviser in the NSW Keneally Government and the author of Don’t Panic: Nearly everything is better than you think [Pluto Press]. On Tuesday 19 June, Cassandra Wilkinson joined Rodney Cavalier, author and former NSW Minister, and author Jim Macken in a discussion of the Labor Party and its future.

WHERE TO FROM HERE FOR LABOR?

CASSANDRA WILKINSON

A quick note of introduction. I am advertised tonight, as I often am, as a former senior adviser to Premier Keneally. It’s true enough, as far as it goes, but I have a few other odds and sods of experience that put me in a position to contribute an answer to tonight’s question.

I am also a business woman, a social entrepreneur, an author, co-founder of a public access radio station and a community garden, sometime newspaper columnist and was for eight years a political wife. As well as being on the party side of public policy making I was a senior executive in the public service, a director in a “big four” consulting firm and I currently serve on the boards of three charities.

So when people said the party needed to preselect people with experience beyond professional politics, I had rather hoped they might be talking about me. It turns out they weren’t. So I can now add that uncomfortable suffix failed candidate” to my credentials as well.

My run for pre-selection in the variously described “first”, “historic” and “record” public primary was based not on any serious likelihood of winning but in order to test some thinking about whether Labor remains the right party for me.

This is not a question I chose to examine lightly. I have devoted the larger part of my adult life to the party. The first few years were devoted variously to the anti-logging campaign, Resistance and my abiding passion for local music, which took form in the establishment of FBi Radio.

So if the Labor is the wrong party for me as many people both inside it and out have suggested, that would arguably indicate I wasted many years and a good deal of my reputation on a mistake.  Albeit one that netted me a fine husband and a good living.

By my early 20s I had thrown off the foolish conceits of youth and abandoned the socialist left in favour of the Labor Party of Paul Keating. My studies in economics and philosophy had lead me toward the classical liberalism of Mill but I saw the Labor government as an ideal balance of liberal economics and socialist safety nets and hands up for those in need.

I got a call one day in second year university from a friend’s mother’s ex husband: “You’re always going on about changing the world,” he said. “Would you like to come and help?”

Needless to say I ran and didn’t walk. I got to Canberra as Creative Nation was being written and at 23 it was likely the last year of my life that it would make complete sense to devote myself to a prime minister who would save the country with tariff reform and Art.

I quit my band to help re-elect Paul Keating. Sydney music lost the optimistic fuzz pop of Raymond Luxury Yacht and the country lost the last prime minister who ever dared tell us to toughen up, start saving and get competitive or be left behind. Since then, politics has slowly become an exercise in reassuring everyone they are doing it tough and deserve more of someone else’s money.

The Liberals now support high taxes to pay for what were once regarded as Labor social goals: Medicare, family payments and pensions, environmental protection and maternity leave. And, since Work Choices is “dead, buried and cremated” and everybody wants to subsidise the car industry, it’s hard to see what serious differences exist on economic policy except for the carbon and mining taxes.

Simultaneously, Labor is busy turning itself into what its opponents have long accused it of being – a party of clumsy big government socialism. Labor opened up the “bonsai” economy, engineered the national electricity market, created sustainable funding for higher education through HECS and significantly unwound centralised wage and price setting.

It’s now in a coalition with Greens and agrarian socialists, busily re-nationalising communications infrastructure; building an internet firewall to decide what we can see and say online; and writing volumes of new environmental, financial and industrial regulations to tell us how to run the businesses that generate the taxes that make it all possible.

Worst of al, the party that once stood for the working class now accounts for itself principally to the middle class. Labor politicians have been captivated by dilettante concerns at the expense of pressing social challenges.

Whales occupy time and talent that could have been applied to flat lining literacy or the still unfinished task of national health reform. Cows have been treated as constituents while the workers and businesses who sell them became collateral damage in the battle for the hearts and minds of an over serviced middle class.

Every marginal issue has a lobby group and every political party and politician without a sufficiently rigid spine is at their mercy. No one dares say that most of these “problems” from saving white pointer sharks to saving a single car factory don’t matter enough to distract attention or money from finishing the Pacific Highway, increasing the number of dentists, teaching kids to read or keeping people out of jail.

The last thing a politician – especially a Labor politician – seems able to say is “sort it out yourself”.

Working to establish our radio station without public funding it was clear to me that private enterprise and civil society would be more powerful tools for achieving my goals than waiting for a bunch of dinosaurs in the Australia Council to give us permission to make some noise.

We raised a million dollars from private donations and venture capital loans and got on with giving the Vines, WolfMother and the PreSets their first big breaks. Making like punks, we were DIY about social capital. It made me especially skeptical of the hands I saw outstretched in my day job. I wrote a book about it called Don’t Panic Nearly Everything is Better Than You Think. It was a plea to people in my line of work to throw the rent seekers out of their offices.

In government, I experienced the steady takeover of policy formulation by interest groups and lobbyists, subsidy farmers all eager to get a piece of their neighbours’ pie. Most ministers eventually became captured by these groups who traded their political friendship for a seat at the banquet.

Those in power became concerned only with carving up the pie and expended little thought or effort on growing it. Economic management let alone economic reform became a lost art.

Most of our senior politicians today have barely any economic literacy and there isn’t a Button or Walsh let alone a Keating among them. I heard a senior minister say a few months ago that the present Cabinet is the equal of any Labor has sent to Canberra. He may have been lying to promote morale or he may not read books. I can’t be sure.

It wasn’t just forgetting that followed the end of the Hawke-Keating era but repudiation of the legacy. Party President Bernie Riorden called on Hawke and Keating to apologise for the years of reform which had prepared us to thrive in a globalised world.

Keating wrote a prescient letter to the now state opposition leader as Robertson trashed Morris Iemma’s electricity industry reforms. The letter notes that with the proceeds of a sale denied him funds for new infrastructure and with the Premier humiliated by his own party conference there can only be defeat on a large scale to come.  The MPs who would lose their seats would hang grimly, he said, around the neck of the man who now proposes to lead Labor back to power.

I declare here two interests – that Michael Costa was, if unwillingly and begrudgingly, a mentor of mine. Also, that one of those political casualties was my husband whose once marginal Labor seat is now a safe Liberal seat.

In the struggle for Labor’s soul the socialists have the upper hand. Although they complain constantly that Labor is too “economically rationalist” that has not been the case for 20 years. If Labor had a chance to embrace economic rationality that chance was lost when Kevin Rudd penned his essay in the Monthly slamming the greed of markets and insisting on a greater role for the state.

This is the Rudd whom Simon Benson tells us in Betrayal made a promise to Iemma that if he held off on his power reforms Rudd could ride his union funded bandwagon to the Lodge after which they would “fuck them together”. Rudd may be better placed than Gillard to take on Tony Abbott but he is no better placed to resolve the struggle for Labor’s soul.

And what of the Right? There really isn’t any such thing anymore.

I joined Centre Unity assuming in my youth that the group had backed the Hawke-Keating reform agenda as a matter of principle. Sadly, most in the Right are distinguished from the Left only the basis of more conservative social attitudes.

The Right became a machine which rewarded loyalty over competence and so lost its ability to produce people who could lead. The group is now dominated by professional unionists and machine men who are as socialist as anyone in the Left. Those who believe in market based solutions over central planning can be counted on perhaps two hands and  a foot.

I have had kind approaches to join other parties. I have had less kinder approaches to get the hell out of the Labor Party.  But for now other parties don’t seem a better solution than fighting for the values that brought me to Labor in my youth. Back then, with his characteristic prescience, Paul Keating could see what was coming. “What it boils down to, is wider nature strips, more trees and we’ll all make wicker baskets in Balmain. Then we’ll all live in renovated terraces in Balmain and we’ll have the arts and crafts shops and everything else is bad and evil … These people are trying to make my party into something other than it is… They’re appendages. That’s why I’ll never abandon ship, and never let those people capture it.”

Mark Latham is the only post Keating leader who was able to articulate the struggle that grips us. The struggle is between the socialist middle class and the aspirant working class.

In that struggle, I side with those who believe they have a right to a job not to a social worker. I side with those who have not yet gained enough comforts to trade them for the approval of Greenpeace. I side, in short, with the people who still need us most.