Four Thoughts on Last Thursday

So last week happened, and almost everything that I have read regarding the anti-climactic spill that occurred on Thursday has been either analysing the pathologies of Rudd and Gillard that led to this bizarre spectacle or simply re-iterating the now overwhelming narrative that the ALP is doomed for electoral oblivion come September. I want to broaden the discussion somewhat so I wanted to share four thoughts I had on the whole business.

1. The way we elect leaders in this country is fundamentally broken.
Nobody who watched what unfolded on Thursday could possibly defend our current model of electing parliamentary leaders in the ALP. The comparisons made to the TV show Game of Thrones are spot on, in that Thursday looked like something that would be more likely to occur in Westeros than a modern parliamentary democracy. And don't even get me started on people who smugly tweeted along the lines of 'well we elect a party not a leader etc' and accuse the baffled of 'not understanding the Westminster system'; the way elections in Australia now operate are thoroughly presidential and even the country that created the Westminster system has developed an actually democratic way of electing its parliamentary leaders. The ALP needs to open up voting for its parliamentary leaders to all party members like most other social democratic parties around the world. It's not even a debate anymore.

2. The fault lines in the Rudd/Gillard conflict are psychological.
Any coverage of the Labor party's mechanisms have a tendency to blame its ills on the opaque and bizarre world of factions within the party, and a lot of the time that is quite reasonable. In this case however, these criticisms do not reflect the reality, as the Rudd/Gillard divide is bizarrely unfactional. Nor is the division ideological, any cause that unites Joel Fitzgibbon and Doug Cameron (both Rudd backers who represent the full ideological breadth of the party) cannot be. No, the Rudd/Gillard divide in the caucus is pure psychodrama, where each individual MP responds to the guilt, shame and terror of Labor's current electoral position in unique and often illogical ways. Nothing expresses this more clearly than the fall of Kim Carr, the Victorian Left powerbroker who actually oversaw Julia Gillard's rise to power, only to become a key Rudd supporter from almost the moment that she took over from Kevin Rudd as Prime Minister. What psychological forces could possibly have forced such a drastic change in his mind, I do not know. But at least let's not pretend that this is factional.

3. The Labor Party's approach to the coming election is increasingly existential.
At the risk of sounding like too much of a wanker, Camus would have had a lot to say about the Labor Party in its current state. There is an oppressive sense of despair within the party about the coming election and really about the movement itself, and it creates the kind of environment that lets events like Thursday occur without really surprising anyone. Labor, throughout its history, has lost a great many elections, and often they have been far more painful than this (1975 strikes me as the most devastating), and I do not agree with those who see the polls as entirely catastrophic. The polls do point to a loss, and a big loss, but certainly not the kind of electoral wipeout that has occurred to the ALP in Queensland or NSW in the past few years. But the prospect of losing this one comes at a time when the party sees itself as being in a state of crisis as a movement and against a resurgent Liberal party represented by Tony Abbott, and the result is that it feels as if the very notion of the centre-left government is in question. The fact that this election will be fought and (probably) lost in Western Sydney cannot be overstated, its almost a geographic enactment of Labor's identity crisis.

4. The Labor Party needs to sell something BIG.
The real problem with Thursday, and indeed all of this leadership business is that it looks petty. And it is, it is the sum of each caucus member's personal response to both leaders and the situation the party is in, and that is what has been dominating the media instead of what this government has actually achieved. This government has, in extraordinary circumstances, actually passed some incredibly important pieces of legislation, far more than they achieved under Kevin Rudd. The NDIS stands out as an exemplary piece of centre-left policy that extends the welfare state to people who need it the most. The problem, however, is that the Labor has compartmentalised their reforms and has not drawn a common arc between them to counteract the Liberal Party's false narrative of 'incompetence'. They need to sell a vision of Australia that encompasses all their reforms and they need to place their period in government in the context of the broader Labor narrative of creating a better society. The only way to defeat the cheap populism of the modern Liberal party is to talk to the Australian public like adults and reassure them as to why they periodically elect Labor governments to power. This strategy might not win the election, but it will at least unite the party and offer the media an alternative to talking about whether Kevin Rudd is a nice guy or not.

I'm just going to end on an endorsement of Mark Latham's Quarterly Essay on the Labor Party. There were parts that I disagreed with to the point of anger, but it is a stark and sober discussion on what the Labor party should be and anyone who considers these matters to be of importance should give it a read.