PRIME Minister Julia Gillard described it as a Government that had “lost its way”. This week Climate Change Minister Greg Combet used slightly different words. He said the Australian Labor Party had failed ”to make sure that people grasped what drives us, what our values are”. The difference is significant.
The Gillard view suggests the primary aim of the Labor Party is to be in Government, and if it looks like losing government then it has lost its way and must change in whatever way necessary to get back the popular support needed to win.
The Combet view is that the primary aim of the Labor Party is to implement its values, and the way to do that is to convince voters that the values are worth it, that Labor holds those values and should be supported into government to implement them.
The former is government by focus groups, polling and quick policy fixes, of perpetual campaigning to stay ahead in the polls and to stay in government. The latter, presumably, would surrender government rather than surrender core values. Or at least surrender leadership in the polls and continue to pursue the core values in the hope that the voters ultimately come round to support those values and policies.
The former attitude says you change policy and values to meet present voter views. The latter says you keep good policy and values and attempt to change voter views.
If Labor persists with the former it risks, in the long term, being replaced by the Greens. The risk, admittedly is not huge, but it is there.
It sounds a big call, but Labor should look at its own history to see the possibility — Adam Bant as the Kier Hardy of Green Australian politics.
Bant was the first Green to be elected to the House of Representatives at a general election. Kier Hardy was the first Labour member of the House of Commons. He was elected in 1892.
In the late 19th century in Britain, working people either did not vote or supported the Liberal Party rather than the Conservatives. Gradually, people like Hardy realised that the Liberals would not act in the interests of working people and so they should seek to enter Parliament themselves. Thirty-one years later, Labour formed its first minority government with Liberal support.
For a long time, Australian Labor has worked on the principle that environmentalists have nowhere else to go but Labor. So in a preferential system, Labor need not be too concerned about responding to Green concerns. Green success would be restricted to places using proportional representation — the Senate, some state upper houses and the ACT and Tasmanian lower houses.
The conservative Coalition would never be better than Labor on the environment, so the Greens would remain a minor nuisance, so the theory ran.
But when a few other concerns are piled on top of the environment, the Greens become a little more than a nuisance, and the preferential system, rather than helping the established order militates against it.
In the Howard years, many small l liberals were happy to support Labor in the naïve surety that a Labor Government would pull out of unwinnable wars, treat refugees decently, chase chaplins from schools, stop filling the coffers of private schools, stop middle-class welfare and run a more open and accountable government.
Having been betrayed in 2010, many voted for the Greens, particularly in hitherto safe Labor seats in the inner city. In a preferential system, if the Greens get ahead of the Coalition in such a seat, they get the Coalition preferences, which in Bant’s case was enough for him to win the the inner city seat of Melbourne.
The question is whether this is a trend, or a one-off. That question might be answered later this month at the Victorian state election. Several state seats share territory with the federal seat of Melbourne.
The phenomenon could be seen in the ACT at the last election. In several polling booths in the inner north, the Greens easily out-polled the Coalition, and Labor was shy of the 50 per cent majority to win without preferences. If these circumstances pertained across a whole electorate and the Coalition directed preferences to the Greens, the Greens get elected over Labor.
In the meantime, the Coalition primary vote is staying stable. Labor is in the invidious that the more it panders to the Howard battlers, Bogans, the prejudiced and the Bush, the more it loses to the Greens in the inner city.
It is worse for Labor when coupled with things like the position in NSW which under Labor runs on a system of government by the mates, for the mates and of the mates.
For the immediate present there may be a core Labor support, a bit like supporters of a football team – an emotional, visceral attachment that can never be severed to support another team no matter how attractively it plays.
We might get some understanding of the level of that core support in NSW next March. Could it be lower than a quarter of the vote? If so, a Green takeover is not so fanciful.
Whether the Greens could surpass Labor as one of the two major forces in Australia depends on many things.
The behaviour of the Greens themselves is critical. If their new senators display signs of economic irresponsibility and bright-green dogma, the swing they achieved in 2010 will fall away. After all, the inner city Green-voting latte set will not be attracted to hair-shirt wearing extremists.
Labor’s behaviour is important. If it goes the Combet route and temporarily risks losing the votes of the “battlers”, it may stop the rot to the Greens.
The Coalition’s conduct is of some moment. Under Tony Abbott it is unlikely to attract many of the small l liberals who went Green in 2010. Malcolm Turnbull, however, might be a different proposition.
Economic, social and physical conditions will be important. In Britain, in the first decades of the 20th century the increasing conflict between labour and capital saw the Liberals’ support drift, leaving the Conservatives and Labour to be the two main political protagonists.
It may well be that environmental conditions and an inability by Labor to articulate values to which people can be attracted will similarly result in the replacement of Labor by the Greens in the next few decades.
Much will depend on the overall level of selfishiness in the electorate.
Voters might well be affronted by rigid dogmatic ideology, but they like their politicians to stand for something other the mere urge to govern no matter what.
CRISPIN HULL
This article first appeared in The Canberra Times on 6 November 2010.