The displaying of that sense yesterday (mon2nov) helps explain why John Hewson is having such trouble selling his GST and slash-and-burn industrial-relations policy.
It does not have much to do with Hewson’s personality. Rather, Kelly says, Paul Keating, as recession Treasurer, has made the Australian people shell-shocked, quivering and in search of security and stability in their lives. The last thing they want, therefore, is the security blanket pulled from under them by Hewson’s radical policies.
People were scared of Hewson because Keating had made them insecure, he said. Keating had inadvertently made the task of the radical reformer that much harder.
Kelly, now editor-in-chief of üThe Australian,@ was speaking at a National Press Club lunch after the launching of his book The End of Certainty.
He said the Liberal Party’s change from a party of the status quo to a reformist party of free-market radicals carries a big risk. The party had changed its policies, but not changed its ethos to a reformist party. Evidence of this was being seen in Victoria.
A reformist party needed propaganda, inspiration and persuasion, not just management of the status quo. The risk was whether the Liberal leader, John Hewson, had the ability to be an astute reformer to combine these talents.
In the book and at the lunch he said the 1980s marked a profound change in the Australian political tradition. The dismantling of five major elements of it were either completed or set well under way in the 1980s. The white-Australia policy was changed to multi-culturalism dismantled; protectionism was attacked; arbitration (protectionism’s hand-maiden) was crumbling in the face of enterprise bargaining; and the faith in government to fix social problems was in retreat in favour of individual responsibility and social welfare to the needy, not as of right.
The fact both sides in politics moved in the same direction underlined the extent of the transformation. There would be no going back.
“”The Labor Party of the year 2000 would be profoundly different from that of 1980,” he said.
Paul Keating would be looking for a new position for Labor, he said.
Mr Kelly predicted that Labor would be looking not for greater government intervention but smarter intervention.
To say that deregulation was in global retreat was a misreading, he said. Eastern Europe, Indonesia, Mexico and China showed that.
The challenge for politicians in the 1990s was to maintain the internationalisation of the Australian economy and to keep the Australian social values of egalitarianism and compassion.
Mr Kelly thought more books should come out of the parliamentary press gallery. Gallery journalists had criticised books by academics for not being lively enough. As gallery journalists were closer to the action they should write more books and help develop a consumer demand for them, as had been done in the US and Britain, especially in the Reagan and Thatcher periods.
The book has four themes: the internationalisation of the Australian economy; the Hawke-Keating clash; the change in the Liberal Party from status quo to reformist and how Labor’s superior electoral strategy delivered it the 1987 and 1990 elections.
The End of Uncertainty is published by Allen and Unwin. $29.95. 755pp.