On Borrowed Time

by Robert Manne

  Another matter for reflection, if Rudd is restored as Labor leader, is the party’s relationship to the Greens. Under Rudd relations were very poor. Under Gillard, mainly through force of necessity, they have improved. It seems clear that in the short and the middle term, if the Left in Australia is to have a future and if the populist conservative tide is to be turned, some form of Labor–Greens alliance is vital. On the one hand, Labor now relies on Greens preferences to be elected and on the support of the Greens in the Senate for the passage of reform. On the other, without a Labor government, the Greens are powerless to realise their vision for Australia or implement any part of their program.

  Rudd turned his back on the Greens and looked to the support of the Coalition for the passage of his emissions trading scheme. Because of Abbott’s election as leader of the Liberal Party, he failed. Gillard looked to the Greens for the passage of her carbon tax and renewable energy investment legislation. She succeeded. Not having learned from this experience, the Gillard government, following the High Court’s ruling on the Malaysian Solution, implicitly looked to the Coalition for asylum-seeker policy support. This was always entirely foolish, much more than Rudd’s gamble on Turnbull for the safe passage of the emissions trading scheme. Abbott has always intended to use the asylum-seeker issue as a means to power. Principled compromise would undermine his aim. If Rudd is restored as Labor leader, in my opinion he should immediately seek the support of the Greens over asylum-seeker policy. Already the current Labor immigration minister, Chris Bowen, and the Greens support an annual refugee quota of 20,000. In two three-year periods – 1999–2001 and 2008–2011 – between 1000 and 1200 asylum seekers have drowned on their way from Indonesia to Australia. Reflecting on that sobering and terrible fact might prove of sufficient moral weight for the Greens to come to recognise the need for something new.

  Most importantly of all, if Rudd is restored to the Labor leadership, and if the loose Labor–Greens alliance is to prosper, his government will need to find a new progressive agenda that will appeal to the working and middle classes of Australia.

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  In my view Labor’s popularity has always rested on its capacity to implement practical social-democratic reform. In contemporary Australia there are at least four great holes in the social welfare state. Families struggling with mental illness or with major disability are cruelly and scandalously abandoned by the state. Both a radically expanded mental health reform program and the Productivity Commission-approved disability insurance scheme should, in my view, become core elements of the program of the second Rudd Labor government. Moreover, while those without means have decent medical protection because of the previous reforms under Whitlam and Hawke, they have no capacity to pay for dental treatment. Means-tested provision of dental treatment to low-income Australians should be a high priority for the second Rudd government. Under Keating, Australia introduced a vital reform – compulsory superannuation. The present rate is however inadequate. Raising it gradually, from 9% to 15%, should be another core goal of the second Rudd government.

  For all of this, of course, new money needs to be found. It was in part because of its sound financial position that Australia was able to survive the global financial crisis. Obvious sources of funding do however exist – there is room for a revision of the new tax on mining; for the paring away of some upper middle class welfare, like reducing the all too generous subsidies available to the wealthy for private medical insurance or the provisioning of elite private schools; and for increases of income or capital gains taxes for Australian society’s increasingly prosperous top 10%. If it becomes clear to Australians that there is a choice, on the one hand, between the fundamental wellbeing of families or individuals of low or modest income struggling daily with devastating problems of dental or mental health or major disability and, on the other, the marginal sacrifices that can be asked of families or individuals now flourishing on incomes of $200,000 or more – I think I know what the majority will choose. It will however require truly skilful political leadership to make it clear that this is indeed the kind of choice we as a society now have to make.

  On present indications, under Gillard or any of her likely successors, Labor will be destroyed at the next election. Under Rudd – on the basis of a social-democratic, social-justice and environmental agenda, capable of appealing to both the broad suburban middle and working classes and the left-leaning inner city professional elites – there is at least an outside chance of forestalling the arrival of a regime of unthinking and unscrupulous populist conservatism under the prime ministership of Tony Abbott. It is this outside chance that should be grasped, even if that means the offer of a junior portfolio to Julia Gillard and the no doubt temporary exile of Bill Shorten to the government’s back benches.

  The Monthly blog, 23 January 2012

  LABOR’S LONG GOODBYE

  Almost every political observer recognises that unless something altogether unexpected happens, by late 2013 Australia will have an Abbott government. The more contentious question is what has gone wrong for Labor. This piece is offered as a contribution to a necessary debate. How is the unpopularity of the Gillard government to be explained?

  It is very common to explain the malaise of contemporary Labor by concentrating on deep structural factors. These factors can be summarised, brutally, like this. The influence of the trade unions within the party is too great. The influence of the non-union parts of the party – that is to say the rank and file membership inside the fast-withering party branches – is too weak. The formalised factions and their leaders wield altogether too great an influence over the inner workings of the party. The party has lost the capacity to recruit outstanding candidates from varied backgrounds to its parliamentary wing, now drawing its new parliamentarians primarily from loyal time-servers who have previously worked in the trade unions or as political advisers. The party has lost the ability to attract the allegiance of idealistic younger people almost all of whom, if they move into party political engagement, gravitate to the Greens. The Labor Party has gradually lost a large part of its historical demographic – the traditional working class – and more recently also of its newer social base, the left-leaning professionals who have also gravitated to the Greens. Finally, having embraced neo-liberalism under Hawke and Keating, and having absorbed populist conservatism from the prevailing atmosphere of the Howard years, the party is ideologically disoriented. It now appears to both the electorate at large and to former party members and voters, to stand for nothing, to have no transformative agenda, to be defined by no real beliefs.

  There is no doubt considerable truth in all these claims about the structural weaknesses of the contemporary Labor Party. However as an explanation of the federal Labor government’s present discontents, concentration on such matters does not seem to me at all persuasive. All these structural factors are long or middle term. Yet the collapse in the popularity of federal Labor has happened very suddenly. Under Rudd, trade unions were as powerful as they are now; party branches were as weak; parliamentary candidates were selected from no less narrow a base; left-leaning students and professionals were almost as attracted to the Greens; the Labor program and ideology were hardly less confused than at present. And yet for two and a half years Kevin Rudd led one of the most popular governments in post-war Australian history. As long- or middle-term factors cannot explain the unpopularity of the Gillard government, another kind of explanation seems required. The one I favour is historical.

  In my view, the strange and rather sudden collapse of the Gillard Labor government is grounded in a series of mistakes and miscalculations, beginning with Rudd in 2008, spiralling out of control in 2010, but only becoming irreversible and lethal with Gillard around the middle of 2011.

  The first strategic error was Rudd’s 2008 asylum-seeker policy. Rudd might have retained the shell of the Pacific Solution – the threat of offshore processing for asylum seekers who arrived by boat – and humanised the policy by abandonin
g mandatory detention (beyond a few weeks for health and security checks) and increasing the number of refugee and humanitarian placements from 13,500 to 20,000. As the cruel Howard policy had indeed “stopped the boats”, such a policy would have inflicted no suffering and would have given the prospect of a decent life to additional thousands of refugees. Rudd’s policy inevitably and predictably saw a return of the boats. A different policy would have benefited more refugees but would not have been open to political exploitation by a ruthless populist conservative like Tony Abbott.

  The second strategic error concerned a failure of administrative attention to detail during the highly successful Rudd government stimulus program. The schools building program was vulnerable to criticism over cost blowouts in the public sectors in New South Wales and Victoria but was, on balance, popular. The home insulation program, however, did the government considerable harm because of its thoughtlessness and because its slovenly implementation cost several lives.

  By 2010, then, because of the trouble facing its asylum-seeker policy and its insulation stimulus program, the still highly popular Rudd government became for the first time somewhat vulnerable.

  The third strategic error of the Rudd government was to trust the Coalition and to cold-shoulder the Greens regarding negotiations leading towards its most important piece of legislation – the emissions trading scheme. Rudd placed faith in the capacity of Malcolm Turnbull to deliver bipartisan support. When Turnbull lost the Liberal Party leadership in November 2009, and when Tony Abbott made it clear that the Coalition would oppose the climate change legislation, the Rudd government began to lose its way. Rudd could have now opted for a double dissolution and negotiations with the Greens. Instead he allowed members of his cabinet – including his deputy, Julia Gillard – to talk him into postponing the emissions trading scheme for the next three years. Not only did it now seem as if Rudd believed in nothing, but in considerable numbers left-leaning inner city voters now defected, probably permanently, to the Greens.

  The fourth strategic error followed close upon the climate change debacle. Badly stung, Rudd now attempted to prove that he did indeed believe in something by announcing his government’s commitment to the Ken Henry committee’s suggestion of a resource rent mining tax. The error here was not with the decision but with the absence of political nous at the moment of announcement. Rudd needed to prepare the ground more carefully. He might have commissioned, for example, a white paper on the new mining tax, and initiated a long-term and broad-ranging national conversation on how not to squander the resources boom. In the manner that the mining tax was announced, Rudd underestimated the ruthlessness and the deep pockets of the mining interest. He underestimated the ideological enmity of the Murdoch press, especially the Australian. And he overestimated the loyalty of his party.

  The fifth strategic error of the contemporary federal Labor Party was probably the most consequential. By June 2010, although its reputation had been badly dented inside what might be called the political nation, the Rudd government still had not lost the trust of the electorate. There is a lot of ruin in governments; they can withstand many errors and bad patches. By June 2010, there was for Rudd still time for repair. Mystery still surrounds the decision now taken within the party – to remove one of the more popular prime ministers in recent Australian history, the man who led one of the only nations in the Western world to emerge from the global financial crisis without recession. There were three main consequences of the swift and secretive unseating of Kevin Rudd. The coup made it impossible for the Labor government to run on its record at the next election. The rushed mining tax compromise the coup leaders swiftly negotiated with the big three miners ensured that the resources boom was indeed certain to be squandered. Most importantly, the rather sinister quality surrounding the coup instantly revived the old Menzies canard, that Labor was a party run by “faceless men”.

  The sixth strategic error is the one I find most difficult to explain. Having convinced Rudd to postpone the emissions trading scheme legislation for three years, having promised the electorate that her government had no intention of introducing a price on carbon, having scrambled back to government as the leader of a minority government, Prime Minister Gillard now signed an agreement with the Greens for the creation of a parliamentary committee to broker the outlines of a carbon tax/emissions trading scheme. Given the problems this created, Gillard’s thinking is almost impossible to fathom. On the one hand, if Gillard did believe in the need for a carbon price, why had she convinced Rudd to postpone for three years? On the other hand, if she did not believe in the necessity of a carbon price, why did she agree to a negotiating process with the Greens? Gillard could not argue political necessity. There was no possibility that, in the absence of an agreement, the one Greens member of the House of Representatives, Adam Bandt, would have supported an Abbott government. By talking Rudd into postponing his climate change legislation, Gillard helped destroy Rudd’s reputation. By promising the Australian people before the election that her government would not introduce a price on carbon, and then signing an agreement shortly after the election for a process leading to carbon price legislation, she helped destroy her own. Gillard outlined her carbon tax legislation in July 2011. It is no accident that it was in July 2011 that her government’s already poor public opinion polls now went into free-fall. Gillard was not only introducing a new tax whose absolutely real necessity she was incapable of explaining. She was also a “liar”.

  Labor’s seventh strategic blunder came in February 2012. It was always inevitable that Kevin Rudd at some stage would make an attempt to regain the leadership of the Labor Party. Not only did he regard his removal as illegitimate, but all opinion polls revealed that he was almost twice as popular as his successor, Julia Gillard. If Rudd had been patient and had waited for the Queensland election and for the almost inevitable succession of disastrous public opinion polls that would follow, by mid-2012 support for his return within the Labor Party caucus might have gradually become almost irresistible. In the looming leadership contest, however, inside the Rudd camp, one misstep followed hard upon another. Rudd and his supporters signalled his leadership ambitions far too openly. When his enemies in the Gillard camp decided to publicly acknowledge that Rudd was preparing a challenge, rather than waiting to be dismissed as minister for foreign affairs and acquiring thereby a second halo of popular martyrdom, Rudd hastily resigned. Flushed out by the Gillard loyalists, Rudd’s challenge had come far too early. Prime Minister Gillard was as a consequence overwhelmingly endorsed. The one, no doubt slim, possibility of a Labor election victory under a second Rudd prime ministership had been forfeited.

  There are grave structural weaknesses within the contemporary federal Labor Party. There are also deep factors threatening the future of all parties within the social-democratic tradition. All these structural weaknesses and historical challenges for social democracy eventually need to be assessed and where possible corrected. But in my opinion they are not responsible for the federal Labor government’s present discontents (or indeed for the disasters besetting the state Labor parties). Federal Labor’s woes rest rather on a string of particular, mostly avoidable, tightly interconnected strategic blunders. As a consequence of these blunders, Tony Abbott now seems certain to be prime minister before the end of 2013.

  The Monthly blog, 29 March 2012

  MALCOLM TURNBULL: THE PROMISE

  Sometimes the result of the narrowest election truly matters. If a few hundred citizens of Florida had voted for Al Gore rather than George W. Bush in 2000, there would have been no invasion of Iraq and the question of climate change action might still be on the US political agenda. Or, to move from the global to the local, if in December 2009 a couple of Liberal Party parliamentarians had voted for Malcolm Turnbull rather than Tony Abbott, Turnbull might still be leading the Liberal Party, he or Kevin Rudd might be prime minister, and the political culture of populist conservatism that overtook Australia during the Howard y
ears might by now be losing its grip.

  With these thoughts in mind, in early 2012 I emailed Malcolm Turnbull requesting an interview. He accepted within minutes, stipulating only that we did not discuss Tony Abbott. This suited me; I had no intention of pressing him pointlessly on whether he was satisfied with his present political lot – shadow minister for communications and broadband – or whether he hoped once more to lead the Liberal Party. I wanted to speak with him because he was almost the only senior politician in Australia who seemed willing to go “off message”. Also, because since losing the Liberal Party leadership he had delivered a series of unusually interesting speeches on a wide variety of topics outside his portfolio, which were crucial to the future of the nation – the rise of China, the global politics of climate change, the need in Australia for a sovereign wealth fund, WikiLeaks and the rule of law, democracy and the decline of newspapers. Most importantly, it seemed to me that Turnbull was the principal inheritor of the noble but now threatened liberal tradition stretching from Alfred Deakin to Malcolm Fraser, and the principal obstacle to the Howard-inspired and Abbott-led transformation of the Liberal Party from small-l liberalism to populist conservatism.

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  Many people think it was a matter of accident that when Turnbull finally came to Canberra it was as a member of the Liberal Party. During our morning together in his parliamentary office in Canberra, Turnbull acknowledges he has been offered a safe Labor seat on several occasions, once by Paul Keating. He claims that he was never seriously tempted. He would not be comfortable within the tradition of Labor; elements of the Labor Party – in particular its trade union wing – would not be at all comfortable with him. Turnbull offers a rather conventional distinction between Liberal and Labor philosophy. “I think the best way I’ve been able to really distil it is that the Liberal view of the role of government is to enable the citizen to do his or her best. Whereas [with] Labor on the other hand, deep in their DNA is a belief that government’s role is to determine what is best.” Turnbull reminds me that he was a member of the Liberal Party in 1973, a distinctly unfashionable position on the political spectrum for a young man of unusual talent, energy, imagination and ambition during the heady days of Whitlam.