The future of the ALP?

[brian ross]

Where to now? Labor after the 2019 federal election

BRAD NORINGTON
JUNE 28, 2019
...
Bill Shorten should give Anthony Albanese the clear air he needs to rebuild Labor after a surprising, shocking defeat for which Shorten bears much responsibility

This is an extended version of an address to the Sydney Institute on June 24, 2019, titled “Where to now? Labor after the federal election”.

“A wise old hand on the Labor side of politics asked me a question about three weeks out from the May 18 federal election.

He said: “Can you recall any political party of our generation that has won government from opposition with a campaign proposing new taxes?”

I was tempted to think it was a trick question. Such were the heightened expectations Labor would sleepwalk into office, capitalising on a Coalition government weakened by leadership strife.

My student-of-politics brain kicked in. John Hewson led the Coalition to defeat in 1993, losing the “unlosable election” while advocating a goods and services tax.

John Howard went to the 1998 election, again bravely offering a GST. He won, just, but from government.

“No,” I told my wise contact, “I can’t think of an example from opposition, not in Australia anyway.”

“Exactly,” he said.

This was him talking history, but also his gut talking. It was a view shared by a growing number of party elders, despite polls pointing one way and a certain triumphalism that crept into the Labor leadership’s rhetoric.

They were worried about Labor tax policies that could unnerve the electorate. They were worried about a big target strategy, driven by over-confidence, that could hand a hardnosed politician like Morrison something to tear down.

Labor’s treasury man Chris Bowen needed a windfall: new revenue streams to pay for an ambitious spending program and still somehow meet the promise of a budget surplus. But tax increases were a difficult case to argue.

The end of tax refunds from franking credits on share dividends was a concept many voters possibly did not fully comprehend, though retirees on fixed incomes and other investors clearly did.

Ending negative gearing on new properties was straightforward enough, but middle-income voters might harbour hopes of buying an investment property one day and bore no resentment to those who did.

But there was something more about the attitude behind this Labor tax policy, which Bowen and Bill Shorten tried hard to justify on fairness grounds, that didn’t seem to gel with voters in the current economic climate.

It should stand as a salutary lesson to the new Labor opposition led by Anthony Albanese.

US VERSUS THEM

Preach consensus, don’t think an “us-versus-them” approach will win the confidence of the people.

Don’t be smug, as Bowen was, and tell voters that if they don’t like your franking credits policy, don’t vote Labor.

Don’t treat business from small to big as the enemy. Accept, as Labor realists Hawke and Keating did, that business generates the nation’s wealth, and there are gains to be had from proposing a genuine partnership between business and the workforce.

There were token campaign references to the need for economic growth, but Labor seemed not to barrack for the aspirational voter seeking to improve his or her lot by growing personal wealth through hard work. Or voters who accepted that benefits do come from business investment growing the size of the national economic pie.

Labor under Shorten as leader and Bowen as treasury spokesman were all about fairness, but they suggested it should happen chiefly from a classic redistribution of wealth based on hand-outs that penalised individuals who had done well and the so-called “big end of town”.

There was little substance to back up claims about a reduction of corporate income going to workers as alleged by Shorten in a low-consumption, low-investment, low-inflation economy.

The people listening to the Shorten-Labor message were not the just the victims of ACTU secretary Sally McManus’s imaginings of rampant wage theft by avaricious and exploitative employers, which Shorten seemed to embrace. Nor was it just the preaching-to-the-converted group of affluent voters willing to accept the costs of climate action or tax hikes because they could afford to.

The voters who could turn this election were ordinary employees with family as their chief focus. They were also retirees, small business owners, tradies and miners hoping to hang onto jobs.

Many of these were historically Labor’s own, doing it tougher financially in a flat wage economy with utility bills piling up despite a nominally low CPI. Yet they were wary too of a high-risk big spending agenda, and no guarantee of balancing the budget when policies such as cuts to carbon emissions were not costed and there were predictions of global headwinds ahead.

US VERSUS THEM

Preach consensus, don’t think an “us-versus-them” approach will win the confidence of the people.

Don’t be smug, as Bowen was, and tell voters that if they don’t like your franking credits policy, don’t vote Labor.

Don’t treat business from small to big as the enemy. Accept, as Labor realists Hawke and Keating did, that business generates the nation’s wealth, and there are gains to be had from proposing a genuine partnership between business and the workforce.

There were token campaign references to the need for economic growth, but Labor seemed not to barrack for the aspirational voter seeking to improve his or her lot by growing personal wealth through hard work. Or voters who accepted that benefits do come from business investment growing the size of the national economic pie.

Labor under Shorten as leader and Bowen as treasury spokesman were all about fairness, but they suggested it should happen chiefly from a classic redistribution of wealth based on hand-outs that penalised individuals who had done well and the so-called “big end of town”.

There was little substance to back up claims about a reduction of corporate income going to workers as alleged by Shorten in a low-consumption, low-investment, low-inflation economy.

The people listening to the Shorten-Labor message were not the just the victims of ACTU secretary Sally McManus’s imaginings of rampant wage theft by avaricious and exploitative employers, which Shorten seemed to embrace. Nor was it just the preaching-to-the-converted group of affluent voters willing to accept the costs of climate action or tax hikes because they could afford to.

The voters who could turn this election were ordinary employees with family as their chief focus. They were also retirees, small business owners, tradies and miners hoping to hang onto jobs.

Many of these were historically Labor’s own, doing it tougher financially in a flat wage economy with utility bills piling up despite a nominally low CPI. Yet they were wary too of a high-risk big spending agenda, and no guarantee of balancing the budget when policies such as cuts to carbon emissions were not costed and there were predictions of global headwinds ahead.

The lesson for Labor in the future is don’t lose sight of your shifting base.

And don’t lose sight of what history must suggest — that Australians are inherently a conservative people when government has changed hands only seven times since World War II. Labor has held government for only six of the past 20 years. It has won office from opposition only once during that period.

LABOR’S EXISTENTIAL THREAT

The topic Gerard has asked us to discuss today is “where to now?” for Labor. That requires some crystal ball gazing but also reflections on how Labor not only lost but went backwards last month.

Shorten and some others have rushed for excuses to explain the defeat after thinking the election was theirs. The most ambitious inside Labor were predicting a landslide — as many as 90 seats or 14 more that needed to form a government majority.

If the result ended up close, Victoria was regarded as the nation’s progressive trump-card state that could swing the election Labor’s way if party momentum stalled in Queensland. It didn’t happen. Labor won just three in Victoria, failing to gain anything like the gains expected as the Coalition mostly beat off the challenge. Labor margins slipped in some seats.

It’s been a simplistic response for Labor in denial to blame Clive Palmer or One Nation for scooping up voter preferences that undoubtedly did help the Coalition to victory in certain seats.

The fact is that Labor’s primary vote slipped to just 33 per cent. Such a low primary vote is an existential threat. It is a vote platform from which Labor can never win government, even with the Greens preferences it needs anyway.

The result was close in terms of the seat count, but Labor’s experience as mentioned above in Victoria is instructive. There is a nagging sense Labor played too much to its left-leaning party membership and “post-materialist” voters across the board rather than tapping into broader community sentiment.

The Coalition’s primary vote was not brilliant at 41 per cent, but it suggests a swag of swinging-voter aspirationals didn’t like Labor’s manifesto.

The Shorten “we wuz robbed” grab-bag shirks any kind of personal responsibility and denies policy failings by blaming a fear campaign on “corporate leviathans” from the big end of town (the banks and mining companies), and a certain “financial behemoth”, (code for Clive Palmer). It fixates on “powerful vested interests” in the media.

I don’t recall Labor sympathising with bleats of foul play from the other side after the 2016 election when the Turnbull Coalition almost lost — not just because of an ordinary campaign but because of calculated misinformation spread by Labor that Turnbull intended to privatise Medicare and defend hospitals.

Labor denialists also conveniently ignore vested interests and the odd financial behemoth on their side. The ACTU spent $25 million, including $10 million during the short five weeks of the official campaign backing Labor, while GetUp splurged $10 million-plus that did not do much else except aid Labor, despite that group’s claims to the contrary.

BRING VOTERS WITH YOU

There are signs Albanese-led Labor grasps the reality of broader factors at work in the defeat.

Albanese has acknowledged that “divisive” Labor policies and attacking the so-called “big end of town” were significant. In other words, a mistake.

Albanese has ended Shorten’s blanket ban on fronting the programs of certain influential radio hosts — Alan Jones, Ray Hadley, Neil Mitchell. In other words, he appears to accept it is better to open his party to scrutiny, even at a cost of criticism, as the best way to engage the wider community and win the debate.

Albanese appears to be hiring some experienced advisers, such as new chief of staff Tim Gartrell. In other words, he’s recruiting greybeards willing to draw on corporate knowledge and what’s needed to form a coherent message that fits both Labor’s values and what the public wants.

Let’s see how it goes — but it seems Albanese is not relying on the previous office’s Generation-X echo chamber, plugged into the post-material world, driven by arrogant self-belief and contemptuous of outside scrutiny.

We’ve also seen in recent days a determined attempt by Albanese to assert his authority as the new leader by staring down the rogue element of Australia’s most militant union, the CFMEU, and saying he wants John Setka out of the ALP. It’s a convenient distancing from his predecessor too, but more of that a bit later.

Labor can remain true to its values of fairness and equality, but it needs a rethink on the merits of reigniting class warfare, the bottom-line failure of Shorten Labor.

While a big-package, big-target strategy was a mistake, I’m not advocating a small one either. As another of my wise contacts tells me, Labor can never get away with a small target election campaign because of expectations placed on it as a progressive party. But it can focus on a few key issues, hammer them, and cost its big-ticket policies rather than calling it a “dumb question” when Shorten was asked during latter stages of the election campaign about putting dollar signs next to action on climate change.

Australian voters are not mugs, as Graham Richardson is fond of reminding. Late in the campaign Shorten floated a policy that 50 per cent of new cars would be electric by 2030, just 10 years away, and even gave the nod to Kim Carr’s dream of reviving a dead local car industry. Voters know an ill-formed gimmick policy when they see one.

THE POLICY PRESCRIPTION

Turning to policy, there are good and bad signs from the appointment of Chalmers as Labor’s new treasury spokesman. He comes to the position, on the face of it, as a sensible economist, a policy moderate and an articulate advocate who understands Labor needs to be a progressive party of the centre while also exercising financial rectitude.

But telling Alan Jones on the ABC’s post-election Q&A program that everything about his pithy point-by-point analysis about what went wrong for Labor was “as usual … a whole lot of rubbish” was puerile. It smacked of belligerent denial. The last thing Chalmers needs is the smug pose of his predecessor, Bowen.

We’ve since seen signs of a rethink with Chalmer’s remarks on the ABC’s Insiders, when he said:

“We accept that some of the language that we used in the last term, and I used in the last term, didn’t strike the right chord in the Australian community. We do acknowledge that. The second point that Anthony is making there is that if you’re on a good wicket in this country, we say good on you. That is a good thing.”

The most immediate policy challenge for Labor is what to do on tax.

Pressure has mounted on Albanese and Chalmers for a fortnight to agree that Labor should pass the government’s election tax cuts in their entirety — not just those earmarked for low-to-middle income earners, but the third stage for higher earners.

Politically, it is difficult for any Opposition that has just suffered a shocking defeat to contemplate blocking tax cuts mooted by the winning party before the election.

And one of the most painful scenes of the election campaign for Shorten in full glare of TV cameras — a Queensland coal terminal worker on $250,000 asking him to look at tax relief — must tell Labor that a tax break for higher wage earners is not just pandering to rich Liberals.

Still, as of now, Labor has chosen to take a stand. It is Albanese’s first big decision as leader by confirming Labor will oppose the third stage tax cuts giving more than 90 per cent of taxpayers a rate of 30 per cent or less.

It’s a position taken regardless of the government’s refusal to split legislation that covers its entire package and internal ALP ructions with Joel Fitzgibbon saying that if the package wasn’t split then, as he put it, Labor could not “deny the punters a tax cut from Opposition”.

Already, the Coalition is claiming proponents of the politics of envy are ruling the roost inside Labor’s shadow cabinet.

During the election campaign, some of the worried Labor hard-heads I mentioned earlier, fearful things were not going well, thought something was also wrong with the mathematics of Bowen’s policies, and that voters would cotton on.

They formed a view that Bowen had underestimated the impact of revenue measures, in particular the extent to which the financial burden would be spread to raise $6.2 billion by removing a tax refund and glibly promoting this tax break as a “gift” for a relatively small number of people who did not need the money and paid no tax. They wondered: how could so much be raised for so little pain?

THE POLICY PRESCRIPTION

Turning to policy, there are good and bad signs from the appointment of Chalmers as Labor’s new treasury spokesman. He comes to the position, on the face of it, as a sensible economist, a policy moderate and an articulate advocate who understands Labor needs to be a progressive party of the centre while also exercising financial rectitude.

But telling Alan Jones on the ABC’s post-election Q&A program that everything about his pithy point-by-point analysis about what went wrong for Labor was “as usual … a whole lot of rubbish” was puerile. It smacked of belligerent denial. The last thing Chalmers needs is the smug pose of his predecessor, Bowen.

We’ve since seen signs of a rethink with Chalmer’s remarks on the ABC’s Insiders, when he said:

“We accept that some of the language that we used in the last term, and I used in the last term, didn’t strike the right chord in the Australian community. We do acknowledge that. The second point that Anthony is making there is that if you’re on a good wicket in this country, we say good on you. That is a good thing.”

The most immediate policy challenge for Labor is what to do on tax.

Pressure has mounted on Albanese and Chalmers for a fortnight to agree that Labor should pass the government’s election tax cuts in their entirety — not just those earmarked for low-to-middle income earners, but the third stage for higher earners.

Politically, it is difficult for any Opposition that has just suffered a shocking defeat to contemplate blocking tax cuts mooted by the winning party before the election.

And one of the most painful scenes of the election campaign for Shorten in full glare of TV cameras — a Queensland coal terminal worker on $250,000 asking him to look at tax relief — must tell Labor that a tax break for higher wage earners is not just pandering to rich Liberals.

Still, as of now, Labor has chosen to take a stand. It is Albanese’s first big decision as leader by confirming Labor will oppose the third stage tax cuts giving more than 90 per cent of taxpayers a rate of 30 per cent or less.

It’s a position taken regardless of the government’s refusal to split legislation that covers its entire package and internal ALP ructions with Joel Fitzgibbon saying that if the package wasn’t split then, as he put it, Labor could not “deny the punters a tax cut from Opposition”.

Already, the Coalition is claiming proponents of the politics of envy are ruling the roost inside Labor’s shadow cabinet.

During the election campaign, some of the worried Labor hard-heads I mentioned earlier, fearful things were not going well, thought something was also wrong with the mathematics of Bowen’s policies, and that voters would cotton on.

They formed a view that Bowen had underestimated the impact of revenue measures, in particular the extent to which the financial burden would be spread to raise $6.2 billion by removing a tax refund and glibly promoting this tax break as a “gift” for a relatively small number of people who did not need the money and paid no tax. They wondered: how could so much be raised for so little pain?

In future Labor needs to get right not just its demographics, but its policy sums.

CLIMATE FORECASTING

Opinion polls have shown voters do want action on climate change, and no doubt Labor will produce a revamped emissions reduction policy for 2022. A Lowy Institute poll indicated that 60 per cent of those surveyed endorsed a more assertive government approach.

But to call questions about climate change “dumb” as Shorten did, or claim it is “impossible” to cost carbon emission cuts, as Mark Butler did, is to treat voters as mugs.

Next time Labor should fix meaningful targets, better sell the message about renewable energy and be realistic that thermal coal is here to stay for some time yet.

The Adani mine is likely to be off the agenda at the next election, approved and in initial stages, much to the relief of Albanese and federal Labor. The party was caught out as opportunistic and confused, holding a schizophrenic position at the election of pseudo support for the project in northern Queensland while arguing opposition for left-leaning city-dwellers in the nation’s south.

Asylum seekers pose a particular challenge for Labor’s new leader given that he has supported moves at recent ALP policymaking conferences to water down Labor’s tougher stance on boat people.

As leader, Albanese can now stick with Labor’s policy, which is little different to the Coalition’s in declaring that asylum seekers travelling to Australia by boat will not be settled here.

But Albanese Labor faces the more immediate problem that it remains vehemently opposed to repealing the Medevac bill as the government wants. It is a stance not likely to change and one that will remain a point of attack for Peter Dutton as the Coalition’s home affairs minister.

But more broadly, Labor faces a policy dilemma on what course to take with asylum seekers remaining Nauru and Manus Island. It was a risky move to appoint Kristina Keneally as Dutton’s opposite number on the frontbench, given her past public positions, but Albanese must hope she can somehow navigate Labor’s firm stance on boat people at the same time as advocating a compassionate outcome for offshore detainees whose ordeal has dragged on for too long.

The unwillingness of the Trump administration to take any more asylum seekers in refugee swap deals does not bode well for a solution before the next election unless Australia can get around the obstacles of New Zealand as a transfer country — or find another.

LABOR’S WORLD VIEW

On foreign affairs, national security and trade, we are likely to see a continuation of Labor’s mostly bipartisan policies: recognising the US as Australia’s most important ally; fostering a primarily regional approach to defence; and pursuing trading ties with China as the growing economic powerhouse it is.

But there should be some adjustments. Like Trump or not, there is no place for calling Trump “barking mad” as Shorten did in 2016. It was possibly a conundrum for Labor if the party won government and needed a working relationship with the current White House.

I suspect we will see Albanese the left pragmatist adopt a correct position diplomatically, keeping any criticism within the boundaries of friendship and co-operation.

Labor’s approach to China needs calibrating. Our relationship with China needs to be a mature one based on mutual respect and political realities. But Labor persists with an apologist view, especially in sections of the NSW ALP Right.

I’m thinking of naive support for Beijing’s Belt & Road economic program, rather than recognising what it really is, an investment rollout that serves to extend the Chinese Communist Party’s political influence and make smaller countries such as those in our Pacific region indebted client states.

Labor should be clearer in stating the case against the CCP’s territorial claims in the South China Sea, and recent hints about prosecuting its claim over Taiwan by force.

There needs to be an end to recent fawning that has ignored China’s disregard for the rule of law, lack of a transparency in the administration of justice, and denial of basic human rights.

Religious freedom in Australia is shaping as another test for Labor. Some poorly timed election campaign statements against teaching traditional views in religious faith schools, including regards marriage, are now recognised as a mistake that cost Labor votes in some western Sydney seats.

Chris Bowen, whose electorate includes a mix of Christians, Muslims and Hindu, commented after the election how people of faith could “no longer feel that progressive politics cares about them”.

Rather than a blunt “no”, Labor may need to engage with the idea of legislation to protect religious freedoms.

MENDING FENCES

A key area for fence mending is Labor’s relationship with business. It is ironic given Shorten’s past as leader of the right-wing Australian Workers Union that he was once a boardroom favourite but fell out badly with the big corporates as federal ALP leader.

Before entering parliament in 2007, Shorten urged cutting corporate tax to 30 per cent. Hard to believe now, but true. He presented himself as the union voice of reason compared his then militant enemy, the CFMEU. He socialised with rich businessmen — Dick Pratt, Solomon Lew, Lindsay Fox, to name just a few with Liberal Party links.

But all that was trashed by embracing the ACTU’s agenda to “Change the rules” and regard the business community as the enemy. It was an approach totally at odds with the consensus adopted by Hawke and Keating Labor during the years of the Prices and Incomes Accord, which included trade-offs such as real wage cuts in return for economic growth and improvements in social welfare.

There were some token attempts by Shorten to placate business, but too late. In a recent election post-mortem, The Australian’s Paul Kelly said a fascinating question is how much of Labor’s overreach and intoxication with the idea that the nation had shifted to a more progressive position was, and I quote, “how much Shorten did this to buttress his leadership internally”.

A good question indeed. Not only did Shorten spearhead an assault on the asset class and the big end of town, he signalled new laws if Labor was elected to regulate labour hire, to restore penalty rates, to enhance right-to-strike laws and the rights of unions to enter workplaces, to abolish the building industry’s union watchdog and to scrap a recently created registered organisations commission intended to police union governance, as recommended by a royal commission.

Shorten even floated taking annual decisions on setting the minimum wage out of the hands of the independent umpire, the Fair Work Commission, by imposing some undefined form of government influence on outcomes to improve the pay of low-income earners.

All of this was a sop to the ACTU’s activist agenda in which its secretary, Sally McManus, tied the union movement’s hopes of survival in the face of irreversible decline almost entirely to a rescue by government legislation that could back the clock.

Bizarrely, it ignored that McManus and her militant union backers wanted to revoke Labor government laws introduced with some fanfare by Julia Gillard to replace John Howard’s Work Choices. Those same laws were later overseen by Shorten himself as one of Gillard’s ministers and he had no problem with them at the time. These are Labor laws not revoked since by the Coalition, incidentally.

The idea that the independent minimum wage umpire should be monstered into doing the government’s bidding — a risky course if unions scored a government they didn’t like one day — also conveniently ignored how that umpire has granted minimum wage increases above CPI for a decade. It ignored how Australia has one of the highest minimum wages in the world.

LABOR AND UNIONS

Labor under Albanese is now at a crossroads in its relationship with unions. The CFMEU was once Shorten’s sworn enemy on the left. But he ended up needing that militant union to prop up his leadership because factional alignments that assured his position in his home state (Victoria) were fragile.

The result of that arrangement was like a deal with the devil that would have meant a constant stream of IOUs — if Labor had won.

What we see now in Albanese’s repudiation of Setka and the Victorian CFMEU’s long record of violence and intimidation is a determination to create distance between Labor and a culture that is toxic for the party’s future electoral success.

Albanese Labor is now helped, in a way, by government numbers in the House of Representatives and Senate that extend a lifeline to the operations of the nation’s union building industry watchdog and union regulator.

Neither will be scrapped. The test for Albanese is how he steers Labor through the Morrison government’s proposed Ensuring Integrity Bill, which is intended to make it easier to ban union officials based on a “fit-and-proper person” test, and deregister unions as a last resort in cases of persistent lawlessness or corruption.

The logic of Albanese’s line on Setka should be a willingness to accept the government’s point in moving this legislation, even if Labor is likely to want some qualifying amendments.

A sensible change on Albanese’s part is shifting Brendan O’Connor out of Labor’s industrial relations shadow portfolio. Fine chap though he might be, O’Connor had a conflict of interest as the brother of CFMEU national secretary Michael O’Connor.

Brother Brendan’s default position in opposing any scrutiny of egregious union behaviour and his description of some reasonable attempts to improve union accountability as Coalition “witch hunts” had come to border on the absurd. It was difficult to see his behaviour as other than guarding Shorten’s flank and trying to protect the CFMEU.

It’s unreasonable to expect Labor to go the extreme step, as advocated by some conservative critics, of junking its relationship with unions, despite their small representation of the overall workplace.

Unions now cover just 9 per cent of the private sector where most people are employed, a proportional suggesting they are little more than a lobby group like any other, not the voice they claim to be.

But the Labor Party cannot white-out history, nor should it, that it was created as the political arm of the union movement in the late 1800s. It needs to continue relying on unions as a primary source of political donations. It uses unions to blood some of its talent. To some degree, unions still give Labor some grounding by keeping it in touch with the concerns of ordinary people. Setting aside the rogue elements, unions that represent their members’ interests have a place in our democracy that should be encouraged by both major parties.

But Labor can adopt a more critical, even distanced approach when necessary and it can stop the tail wagging the dog. It can take heed of the model promoted by Bob Hawke, who deregistered the BLF after all. In his latter years, Hawke urged deregistration of the CFMEU as well. It should also not be forgotten that he smashed the domestic pilots’ union when it threatened to undermine his government’s regime of national wage restraint.

GET UP OR GET OUT

Labor should also reconsider its curious relationship with GetUp, the left-leaning activist group that claims to be independent and accountable to a million members in its campaigning on progressive issues.

This last election highlighted GetUp more than previously as the shadowy operation it is, aiding and abetting Labor despite the denials, and ruled by a Labor-dominated board of nine.

Those nine are really the organisation’s only members under its constitution. They are accountable to no one under a corporate structure that makes GetUp’s professed “members” little more than an email subscriber list.

Getup’s election campaign decision to target Josh Frydenberg, who hardly fits the description of right-wingers in the organisation’s crosshairs, showed Getup at its disingenuous worst as a vested interest acting to assist Labor. When did GetUp campaign against Labor for an asylum-seeker policy little different to the Coalition’s? When did GetUp call out Labor for its ambiguous policy position on Adani, or continued reliance on coal? The silence was deafening from a group that has put renewables and refugee policy at the top of its supposed independent agenda, again and again, while its Labor-dominated board has stayed mute about hitches with the party it really supports.

At least in the US, GetUp’s counterpart MoveOn, on which GetUp was partly modelled, is upfront about supporting the Democratic Party. Labor should stop playing footsy with GetUp and its unrepresentative post-material leadership. It should disavow GetUp or acknowledge that the organisation is an associated campaign arm similar to unions.

AUTHENTIC LEADERSHIP

Whether you are a Labor voter or not, Australians should welcome the federal ALP’s recovery after its shocking defeat. Our system of representative government is better off for there to be a strong opposition than can hold the government to account, and present as a credible alternative for next time. That is Albanese’s prime task.

We don’t have a presidential system, thank goodness, but the focus on our prime minister as some kind of presidential-style leader has grown over time. And despite the processes of cabinet, we’ve witnessed a trend towards more unilateral decision-making and “captain’s picks”.

Which brings me to my concluding argument about why Labor needs authenticity at the top — offering authority and reason for people to follow.

Bob Hawke’s authenticity helped attract wide community support when Labor took difficult decisions to open the economy to the wider world in the 1980s. In their own ways Paul Keating, Gough Whitlam and John Curtin were authentic leaders who deserve their place in the nation’s history.

Few others on the Labor side come close to matching them, and it is far too early to say how Albanese will turn out.

Albanese’s critics rightly point to his left-leaning even radical past, dating back to university days, and no doubt Labor’s left will try to exert pressure on him to go their way on all manner of policy issues.

But there is evidence the new Opposition Leader has moderated over time and become essentially a left pragmatist as old factional divides have collapsed and the party’s socialist objective, while remaining in its constitution, looks obsolete. Significant parts of the NSW Right have a warm regard for Albanese, even considering him one of theirs — despite past battles.

It is often forgotten that despite their hero status inside Labor and known allegiance to the party’s right, the ALP’s most successful politicians of the modern era, Bob Hawke and Neville Wran, came from the Labor left. The Right recruited them, and the rest is history.

Albanese is no saint. But when it comes to political baggage, Labor has just chosen a leader carrying hand luggage compared with the semi-trailer load of his predecessor.

Shorten has always shifted with the political winds. He backed two Labor prime ministers, then stabbed them in the back, arguably clearing a path for his own run at the job. He changed his religion and football team, when it suited, among other things.

As a Labor minister, Shorten initiated an independent inquiry into penalty rates, declared he would abide by its decision, then blamed the Coalition for a ruling that cut some weekend rates for which it bore no responsibility.

THE GREAT PRETENDER

Shorten’s heaviest baggage, counting most against his authenticity, is his union past.

As leader of the AWU, Shorten’s job was to maximise the wages and conditions of his members. Yet he presided over wage cuts for many of them.

One of the most notable cases, well documented by a royal commission, soft-glove though it was, is how he helped the Cleanevent company save $2 million by cutting night-time and weekend penalty rates for low-paid cleaners with the result that these workers suffered a drop in pay of $10 an hour.

At Chiquita Mushrooms, low-paid vegetable pickers were retrenched, then rehired by a union-preferred labour hire firm to work on lower rates.

On Shorten’s watch, the AWU accepted many hundreds of thousands of dollars in payments from employers in side deals that were negotiated at the same time of union wage negotiations for workers. Companies including ACI Glass, Thiess John Holland, Chiquita Mushrooms and Unibuilt handed over astounding sums that went straight into AWU coffers. These deals were not transparent. Workers belonging to the union negotiating for them were not told about the payments.

During the Shorten era, hundreds of workers were signed up as members of the AWU without their knowledge — including cleaners, jockeys, netball players. Their membership dues were often paid by employers with whom the AWU did deals, or they became ghost members, just names on union books that could artificially boost the AWU’s numbers in Labor conference forums — and boost Shorten’s party numbers on his personal road to power. The workers concerned did not know in many cases that they were members of Shorten’s union.

According to Mark Latham’s Diaries, Shorten told him at one of Shorten’s annual AWU balls at Crown Casino that he supported free trade — but he opposed it publicly because “that’s just for the members”.

Shorten gave at least $100,000 of his members’ money to help set up GetUp and became one of its inaugural board members. He gave more than $100,000 of members’ funds to ALP candidates, including himself. In both areas, it remains not clear at all that Shorten gained the required legal approval of his executive to donate this money.

All these matters raise questions about character and integrity. Was Shorten committed to serving others, or serving himself?

Whatever the answer, Shorten was not an authentic leader. Voters seem to have sensed it — even if they might not have been acquainted with the granular detail.

When the ABC’s Jon Faine asked Shorten in 2015 what he “actually” believed in, the best he could do was say: “Everybody is somebody.” What did Shorten stand for? I suspect we will never know.

It was a big ask to expect Shorten to change his spots if Labor had won with him as prime minister.

Labor needs an authentic leader from here on. No more pretenders.

TIME TO MOVE ON

This election just passed was really two elections. The first was a choice between the conservative side offering more of the same, and Labor more radical than usual with a big target agenda.

The other dynamic at work was the culmination of the Shorten vanity project. As Shorten admitted to The Australian’s Troy Bramston just two days before the election, he had been running since his late teens, apparently an aspiring prime minister in search of a reason to be one, doing whatever it took to get there.

The AWU was not just the stepping stone for Shorten to gain a Labor seat but the financial engine room for his personal quest to get to the top.

The Shorten vanity project has come to an end, freeing Labor to move on, despite some chatter about a comeback one day.

After six years of his own party’s internal leadership squabbling, Scott Morrison has gained some clear air to be a prime minister leading a united government now that Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull have gone.

Bill Shorten should heed the message. He should give Albanese the clear air he needs to rebuild Labor after a surprising, shocking defeat for which Shorten bears much responsibility.

Rather than be a wrecker, rather than pursue fanciful hopes of a comeback, it is time for Shorten to leave the game and find something else to do with his life.

Brad Norington is an Associate Editor at The Australian, writing about national affairs and NSW politics. Brad was previously The Australian’s Washington Correspondent during the Obama presidency and has been working at the paper since 2004. Prior to that, he was a journalist at The Sydney Morning Herald. Brad is the author of three books, including Planet Jackson about the HSU scandal and Kathy Jackson.

[Source]

[cods]

ye gods.... who the hell has the time to read all that..

apart from a rusted on that is?

[sprintcyclist]

ye gods.... who the hell has the time to read all that..

apart from a rusted on that is?

who could be bothered to read it all ?

[Redneck]

I read most of it!

(Tended to struggle at the end - phew bloody long article !)

Anyway on the whole - some good advice for Labor imo!

[The Reboot]

ye gods.... who the hell has the time to read all that..

apart from a rusted on that is?

Yeah screw that. I don't have time for bullshit.

[brian ross]

None so ignorant who refuse to see...

[IQS.RLOW]

The biggest problem that the ALP has is that their voter base is far left fascists like you which will ensure they have no future.
You'd prefer the greens or the socialist alt-left party of the moment, but know they will never get anywhere near the levers of power.
So the fascists car-jacked the party of the workers to push their radical ideology.

Like everything the left touches, the ALP will be a smoking ruined burn out and thrashed wreck that no political mechanic will touch with a barge pole

[Black Orchid]

Jodi McKay takes over NSW Labor. I don't know anything about her but can't help but wonder if she is there because she is female and will be taking on Gladys and whether Labor is just making up their quota.

Like I said, I don't know anything about her but I do like Chris Minns and he would have been my pick. *shrug

[cods]

I read most of it!

(Tended to struggle at the end - phew bloody long article !)

Anyway on the whole - some good advice for Labor imo!

lol mate I gave them my advise.... do you think they will take it??..

they only listen to the union anyway......

so whats happening with setka??????

[The Mechanic]

None so ignorant who refuse to see...

What are your thoughts Bwian?

Are you waiting to see what others write so that you can come in to try and kick them?

Put up or shut up