Australian Labor Party vs Liberals: a deep ‘pre-budget deficit’ of clarity indeed
On 18 March 2012, the Australian Labor Party released a paper to attack the Liberal opposition on budget calculations. The gist of the note is to prove that Opposition policies would put the Federal budget $9 billion into deficit in 2012-13; in sharp contrast with the Labor Government’s commitment to return the budget into surplus by 2012-13.
You are not dreaming, “Let’s look at the underlying cash balance”… this is Labor semantics on the attack!
Confused? You are not the only one…
So it is really worth pausing and pondering the messages that this note is sending. I will leave it to more eloquent bloggers such as @Dr_Tad to develop their thesis on the Crisis of Labor (see a very good analysis at Left-Flank). However 2 quick points deserve to be made:
1 – Such an obsession with the “billions” is a guaranteed losing strategy for a Labor party
Prima facie, as a candid observer of Australian politics, you might think “well, good on Labor to take on the Liberals and put numbers on the table to prove them wrong. If Labor think they are doing a good job at managing the budget, they should say so.”
The trouble is that this type of stunt coming from a Labor party is called “attacking the Tories from the Right” and it is totally against nature. Time and time again, all over the world, it has proven a disastrous strategy for the Left parties who tried. The reason is that it legitimises the arguments of their Liberal and Tory opponents whose whole raison d’être is to campaign in favour of a very strong emphasis on economic rigour, ahead of social policies.
Indeed, not only does this Labor brochure pledge allegiance to the rule of the billions, but it also mounts its argument by denouncing a series of policies on the premise that they would be too expensive to afford: Mental Health Package, Chronic Dental Disease Scheme, a national dental scheme as part of Medicare, proceeding with a national disability insurance scheme, extending the solar hot water rebate, big spending on road infrastructure within Sydney, funding to redevelop a range of rail networks, including upgrading the Sydney to Brisbane coastal rail link and the inland rail network from Brisbane to Melbourne, building a range of new country dams, paying for carer superannuation.
You would be forgiven if you pinched yourself wondering why a ‘Labor’ government would want to lash out against its political opposition by choosing to go after policies that look like they could well feature on a Left platform (we’re talking about medical schemes, infrastructure building or supporting carers!…)
After such a pamphlet asserting budgetary discipline as an essential political compass, how can Labor possibly go into a campaign denouncing the inflexible orthodox devotion to hard cold economic management traditionally advocated by the Tories? How credible will Labor be if economic conditions worsen in the future, and they have to let go a bit of deficit in order to provide more welfare?
Imagine yourself in the shoes of Labor voters supposed to bat for the side of politics that puts a higher priority on social policies against the harshness of rational economics. Think how inspired they will be voting for that team at the next elections …
The same devastating consequences bit the French Socialists in 2002 when they tried to outdo the populist Right by toughening up their rhetoric on security and crime fighting. Not only did they fail to win votes, but they basically sent the signal to voters that this obsession with perceived delinquency was the right one to have. So what did those voters do? They went for Le Pen who had been building his National Front’s franchise on the topic for more than 20 years. And the Socialist candidate got crushed to the point of not making it to the second round of the presidential election.
2 – The second point is a lighter observation about the visual chosen for the cover
I don’t know if it is common practice for the Australian Labor party to “re-brand” the Australian southern cross as a yellow star pattern over a red banner. However, whether deliberate or not, the obvious mock-up of the Chinese Communist flag on the brochure tells more about Labor’s confusion than a 1000 Op-Eds: the day you decide to mock your opponents by dressing them in your wider political family’s memorabilia, you know you have really lost something on the way.
In conclusion, we read from Labor luminaries that social democracy is in crisis (see incoming Australian Foreign Minister Bob Carr writing about it here in the Australian Financial Review). Well, with stunts like this there is little doubt about it. But contrary to what is written in those articles, it is not because the social model itself has lost relevance (from Zuccotti Park to Syntagma Square people are crying out for a return to more equalities!) but because the ‘progressive’ parties supposed to look after it have simply forgotten or have deliberately chosen to ignore its values.
Indeed, this is exactly what blogger @Get_Shortened observed in her piece applying British historian Tony Judt’s remarks to the perversion of Social Democracy in Australia last year. Despite the Australian Labor Party stating in its constitution that it is “a democratic socialist party and has the objective of the democratic socialisation of industry, production, distribution and exchange, to the extent necessary to eliminate exploitation and other anti-social features in these fields“, “the current Prime Minister and Federal Labor Leader Julia Gillard defensively chooses (the strategy) to distance Labor from the past and its former values and actively pushes the Party’s agenda towards ‘the future’ which just happens to include a suite of more liberal, fiscally focused and socially moderate values.”
In fact, this crisis of identity has become such a headache for those on the Labor side wanting to enjoy the status-quo of power, that they are not only witnessing or lamenting social democracy’s decay, but also enthusiastically accelerating its passing and volunteering to plant the nails in its coffin.
{ leLaissezFaire – Sydney, 19 March 2012 }
Pre-budget Deficit Tony Abbott and the Coalition
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Many thanks for that @redrabbleroz. As mentioned on the twitter stream, a totally relevant passage and an author I wasn’t aware of. Deficiency fixed and book on its way.
I think this passage from Sheri Berman sums up the current problems facing the ALP pretty well:
“As leftist parties reorientated themselves toward gaining political support and power…they naturally selected as leaders technocrats and managers rather than intellectuals and activists – people comfortable with, and good at, the ordinary politics of ordinary times. These new leaders often presided over unprecedented power and political success, but they lacked the old-timers’ hunger, creative spark, and theoretical sophistication. As a result, by the last decades of the twentieth century, the democratic left had largely become estranged from social democracy’s original rationale and goals, clinging only to the specific policy measures that their predecessors had advocated decades before. Few recognised that these policies, while crucial achievements in their day, had originally been viewed as only a means to a larger ends, and fewer still tended enough of the movement’s original fires to be able to forge innovative responses to contemporary challenges. This left them vulnerable to other political forces offering seemingly better solutions to pressing problems.”
- Sheri Berman, The Primacy of Politics: Social Democracy and the Making of Europe’s 20th Century, p.188