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Structural change in Australian politics

By Peter McMahon - posted Friday, 17 August 2012


The recent blow-up over Green preferences in the Australian Labor Party (ALP) is indicative of some major structural changes in Australian politics. The existing two-party system so beloved of the Australian political establishment is under threat, and although the powerbrokers in the Labor and Liberal parties both hope to see off the threat posed by the Greens, they will soon find out that their problem is insoluble because of factors that go way beyond national politics.

The major parties would argue that the two-party political system ensures stability as they effectively act as two slightly different sides of the same national administration. But although this was a reasonable argument while things were going well, in times of change this basic political structure of two-party rule only acts to prevent open debate and necessary policy reform.

The reason why the stoush occurred between Labor and the Greens was because Labor has been the party of reform and therefore both closest to and most obviously threatened by the Greens. However, the Liberal Party will also face the same problem, a dilemma represented in embryonic form in the Turnbull alternative to Abbott’s reactionary approach.

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For over half a century Australia has been ruled by a political system dominated by a de facto agreement between the two major parties to limit the political debate to certain core issues. At the heart of these issues is the concept of maximum economic growth, with implications for essential social welfare matters like employment and interest rates. This agreement emerged in the first three decades of the post-war boom when the previous core debate over social justice or market power as core drivers of national development was submerged under acceptance of economic growth as the main game.

Labor’s original position was based around the concepts of social cohesion over all else based in notions of union power as a counter balance to business power and national development policies, including import protection, as a way of promoting economic development with reasonable social cohesiveness.

The political debate in Australia occurred within a wider framework of global development. The post-war orientation of the West, driven in large part by the triumphant U.S., was increased mass-industrial production to ensure high employment and cheaper goods, and thus popular support, and anti-communism to undermine leftist alternatives. The Liberals explicitly supported this orientation and Labor, after some internal turmoil (remember the DLP), also acceded to this position.

With Menzies as Prime Minister, two decades of strong economic growth and social conservatism underpinned Liberal national government, but as the economic successes and associated social change led to more diverse popular concerns, Labor under Whitlam regained power at the national level in 1972. However, Labor came to power just as the post-war international system was coming apart and his guided national development policies came unstuck due to funding problems.

The next Labor government came to power as neoliberalism arose to transform the global situation, epitomised by the election of Thatcher in the U.K. and Reagan in the U.S. Neoliberalism promoted dramatic rises in global markets, especially finance markets, and in transnational production and trade. In the early to mid-1980s Prime Minister Hawke and Treasurer Keating tried to have it both ways by opening up the national economy to global forces while supporting social cohesion through a union-based economic accord.

In reality they were removing most of the remaining political controls over national development, something previous Prime Minister Fraser and Treasurer Howard had been unable to do. With the possible exception of the role of unions, which were nonetheless in decline, the gap between Labor and the Liberals was narrowing to almost irrelevance. In essence they both accepted neoliberal doctrine and only differed over marginal social issues.

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When Howard came to office he dumped the unions and extended the economic measures to open up the economy to the increasingly powerful global forces. The great structural shift in Australian politics from a mixed economy to (increasingly global) market domination was then complete.

Along with the globalisation of the economy came the rise worldwide of some new concerns, in particular the peace and environmental movements. The peace movement, stimulated by the provocative emphasis on military confrontation by the U.S. under Reagan’s administration, surged and then subsided as the Cold War ended. The environmental movement, however, grew from strength to strength as scientists warned of ever more pressing problems, most importantly global warming.

In Australia the shift away from balanced national development, with its focus on infrastructure and maintaining high levels of social welfare in terms of access to good standards of health and education, steadily built up stresses in the political system. Furthermore, the environmental problematic, especially the concern with global warming, was shifting closer to the centre of popular debate. This growing concern was a core shift driving Kevin Rudd’s victory in 2007.

The shift of Labor to the political centre and the growing concern over environmental issues created a vacuum, which was eventually filled by the Greens. The Liberal-Labor political establishment initially wanted to view the Greens as either political opportunists (like the Australian Democrats) or simplistic extremists (like One Nation). However, unlike the Democrats, who were explicitly created to sit between the two major parties but moved to the left as Labor moved rightwards, or One Nation, who mostly reflected growing unease over globalisation, the Greens actually represented a genuine historical movement, and a global one at that.

Early on the Greens were not particularly effective in translating the growing popular concern into political power, but over time they learned the political game and gained an effective leader in Bob Brown. When the national Labor government faltered and Gillard replaced Rudd, the Greens were given an opportunity to influence the political process, most importantly by picking up the carbon policy issue dropped by Labor.

The Greens, in company with independents, saved Labor’s political bacon, but Labor now faces some critical decisions. Basically, do they accept the Greens as legitimate partners in policy making, or do they try to despatch them from the political scene? This represents a genuine crisis for Labor, but it also has profound implications for the Liberals as well.

The issue has come to a head in Labor, and it is as much about Labor’s crisis as it is about the rise of the Greens. The uneasy collaboration between Right and Left in the ALP, a gap almost as wide as the apparent gap between Labor and Liberal, was essentially maintained because the ALP Right was embedded in the in union movement. The ALP Right was an increasingly self-interested body within the ALP focused on power at all costs (and the benefits that flowed from that), but its link to outer suburbs lower classes (later called ‘Howard’s battlers’), its pragmatism and its reliance on electoral technique gave it an aura of competence that the Left could never really shake.

The growing failure of this model of political power, however, was highlighted by the role of right-wing power brokers in the replacement by Rudd by Gillard as Prime Minister, but powerful people rarely concede gracefully when their time is up. So they decided to target the Greens, recycling the old arguments about the Democrats and One Nation, and especially the canard that only the core two parties can actually govern.

The logic of this argument is classic in its duplicity: only the two major powers can govern, therefore a vote for other parties is a wasted one. As such, all political movement is to be contained within the two-party system. Furthermore, all policies other that the ones pursued by the two-party agreement are inherently extreme and irresponsible. The code for this last accusation is policy ‘costing’, as if smaller parties can get access to such resources and as if such ‘costing’ has ever really mattered anyway.

As things stand Labor is in genuine trouble, and their relationship with the Greens is only one aspect of their predicament. But the emerging situation presents a critical dilemma for the Liberals as well.

The Liberal Party is currently represented by two alternative leaders: Abbot is reactionary, parochial and oddly economically illiterate, while Turnbull is a genuine small ‘L’ liberal, urbane, economically able and reasonably aware of global changes.

The interesting structural shift here is that the ALP Right and Abbott Liberals are increasingly lining up together on the big issues, symbolised by their mutual hostility to the Greens as the new political force. On the other hand, collaboration with the Greens in government is currently much easier for Labor, and if the Liberals want to be able to exercise this option they will need to reposition themselves by sidelining the reactionary Right.

As usual, the ALP Left has been made quiescent by Labor being in government, the natural preserve of the power-focussed ALP Right, but if Labor loses power nationally there will be a big fight within the Party. In particular, there will be calls for real reform of the type constantly acknowledged by a series of internal reviews but never implemented. All these reforms will dilute the power of the ALP Right and aim to make the Party more open to outside ideas and talent.

Similarly, if the unpopular Abbott wins power he will face a number of hugely difficult issues due to global forces, such as global warming, the economic crisis and growing migratory flows worldwide. In all these areas, Turnbull or someone like him will increasingly seem like the rational alternative that could oversee a similar opening up of the Liberal Party.

So, in a real sense, the ALP Right and Liberal conservatives will find more common ground in attempting to preserve the two-party power-sharing system with its focus on narrow economism than they will have with the rest of their own parties.

This looks like a good situation for the Greens, but they have their own problems. How much do they compromise principle to achieve policy influence? Should they focus on core environmental issues (such as global warming, energy and infrastructure policy), or should they present themselves as an overall progressive party (with policies on sexuality, drugs, euthanasia and the like). The first option, where they are undoubtedly electorally strong, would work best if they seek alliances with the major parties, but the second, where they are painted as extremist, would suggest they aim at eventual Green government. These are core dilemmas, and if they are mishandled the internal struggle could undermine the Greens at a critical time.

The world is changing fast. Global scale problems - and everything really important is global scale now - have shown up the inadequacies of political systems everywhere. To start with, politics is still national, not global (there are no global political parties), and the national governments that are still dominated by class-based parties, such as the Democrat-Republicans in the U.S. or Conservative-Labor in the U.K., have increasingly shown themselves to be fundamentally incompetent and corrupt.

There are alternative political forces emerging around the world, such as Green parties, the U.S. Tea Party, the Occupy Movement, and so-called extremist parties in a stricken Europe. This global change will increasingly affect Australia, especially as the economic boom subsides and the global economic crisis hits home, and an already creaky political system based in two-party rule comes under ever-greater pressure.

A key driver in all these changes is the dominance of political debate by ever more powerful media interests, and the concurrent spread of new technologies that enable greater information flows and interaction. This accelerating trend is as important as the rise of mass-industrial society and the associated social classes that in turn generated the main political parties of today.

In the end specific choices in regards to policies and personalities, not to mention luck, will play an important part in exactly what happens, but what should be clear is that major structural change is underway in Australian politics. As such, the current debate on the relationship between the ALP and the Greens is just the beginning of developments that will wake this country from its political lethargy.

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About the Author

Dr Peter McMahon has worked in a number of jobs including in politics at local, state and federal level. He has also taught Australian studies, politics and political economy at university level, and until recently he taught sustainable development at Murdoch University. He has been published in various newspapers, journals and magazines in Australia and has written a short history of economic development and sustainability in Western Australia. His book Global Control: Information Technology and Globalisation was published in the UK in 2002. He is now an independent researcher and writer on issues related to global change.

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