History’s aced, now move on

Mark Latham’s ill-conceived adventures in schooling policy and the Tasmanian forests resonated much better among Labor faithful than they did among the electorate more broadly.

And so in 2007 Labor has had, as it were, two successive sets of mistakes from which to learn.

It has had to learn how not to take the bait from its opponents but also how not to become the captive of its erstwhile friends.

The “Not happy, John” crew in a sense unites both of these sets of errors, tied together into a neat little political bundle.

As the PM’s recent biographers make clear, the chief players in the “Not happy, John” movement are mostly alienated former Liberals, fellow travellers of the old “wet” wing of the Liberal Party that was marginalised on Howard’s accession to the leadership.

Since 1996 they have become increasingly aggrieved, as much by the tone of the Government as by its substance. To them Howard represents a profound affront to traditional liberal ideals, both in the small-l and big-L meanings of that term. That’s why they hate him so viscerally, as a personality as much as a political figure.

But sticking pins in a voodoo doll of the PM is a parlour game for the politically impotent. It’s not where Labor needs to be.

Rather than reclaiming the soul of old-style liberalism, Labor’s job is to outline an image of social democracy that seems at once competent and relevant. Hence those unreturned phone calls to McKew.

And the determination of the McKew team to weed out the Howard haters among its volunteers and to use only those activists who are capable of remaining courteous, disciplined and positive.

After all, most Australians don’t hate Howard. (Whether they trust him is another matter.) Nor do they identify easily with voodoo doll politics and personal vilification.

But Labor’s learning process is not yet complete.

As every general knows, it’s important but insufficient to learn the lessons of the last war.

The danger is that you simply end up fighting the last war, albeit fighting it better than you did the first time.

Labor has cleared away its unloved policies and sidelined its more unattractive elements. It looks and sounds courteous, disciplined and positive, as the electorate has clearly observed. Yet it still has to put meat on some of those fine-sounding but frustratingly general policy proposals. Nor has it yet linked them up convincingly into some kind of vision of an Australia that is both aspirational and committed to the ethos of the fair go.

There is a danger that in becoming so precisely focused on avoiding political error, Labor may come to confuse political prudence with mere inaction. Field Marshal Rudd still has some fighting to do.