Opposition frontbencher Martin Ferguson has called for the Labor Party to return to basics and appeal to its working-class roots. He accused the former Keating government of pandering to special interest groups, saying the ALP had been taken over by a middle-class elite, including many tertiary-educated women, who focused too much on special interest groups.
In the introduction to a new book on the gentrification of the ALP launched last this week – Labor Without Class by Michael Thompson — Mr Ferguson said the ALP forgot key members of its heartland: women who were not in the workforce. Mr Ferguson suggested that Labor’s message in the mid-1990s was hostile to non-working women and this caused a collaspe in the vote.
Mr Ferguson’s comments were rejected by his leader, Kim Beazley, who argued that Labor was beating the Coalition on women’s vote, votes in poorer seats and votes overall.
Mr Ferguson may be right about Labor appealing to special-interest groups, but his party will find itself in great difficulty if it takes up his suggestion about taking Labor back to its working-class roots. The working class is shrinking. The irresistible force of globalisation and huge increases in labour productivity in Australia mean that the old manufacturing base of the Labor Party has shrunk to a point where it would not sustain a major party. Even when manufacturing was at its height and Labor was closely tied to its working-class roots under Arthur Calwell, it did not attain office. Labor only got power after Gough Whitlam appealed to a younger, educated, idealistic, outward-looking electorate. Hawke, though ostensibly appealling to the working class was a Rhodes scholar. Moreover, his Cabinet was carried on the Whitlam thinking.
There have been conflicts within the Labor Party as it has broadened its appeal. The intellectual side that speaks for internationalism, feminism, mulitculturalism, the environment and Aborigines does not sit well with the blue-collar side which puts jobs before the environment and is not especially concerned about minorities.
The Liberal Party has conflicts, too. It has (a few remaining) small l liberals who stand for the freedom of the individual in all spheres. These are pitted against those whose individualism is limited to economic matters but who otherwise would like the state to regulate morality.
Indeed, there is often more in common with the small l liberals and intellectual Labor than there is within the party divide. And similarly for blue-collar Labor and the Liberal moralists. For example, last week Mr Ferguson got support from Prime Minister John Howard that went beyond mere mischief-making. The back-to-basics appeal by Mr Ferguson rang true in Mr Howard’s ear.
It may well be that by 1996 the public saw the Keating Government as arrogant, aloof and serving special interests. But the main reason for its demise, surely, was the recession we had to have. Moreover, if the Hawke and Keating Governments were seen as pandering the special interest groups, one of the most pandered to was probably the union movement and its officialdom – the people representing the blue-collar roots that Mr Ferguson wants Labor to go back to.
Nor is the Coalition immune from special-interest group politics. They have treated farmers, private schools, business, private health funds and so on.
The answer for Labor is not to return to its working-class roots, because that is another narrow interest. The answer is to continue to aim for broad support, but in doing so not to be unreasonably generous to one special group or another. At present, the politics of special interest seems to be the damnation of both major parties.