
Issue No 86		02 March 2001

LaborNET	Ask Neale	Tool of the Week

Politics

Beazley the Bridge Builder?

As the Howard Government flounders, Brett Evans looks at the challenges Kim Beazley faces as his hour of destiny approaches.

After the 1992 British elections someone asked Labour's Neil Kinnock: "Did you, in your heart, believe you were going to win?" Kinnock replied, "You believe you're going to win, and you believe you're going to lose. And you hold both views with equal conviction".

Even after Labor's stunning victories in Victoria, Western Australia and Queensland, I can imagine Kim Beazley saying exactly the same thing; he is one of the ALP's great pessimists. But the fact remains: Beazley looks more like an alternative Prime Minister than at any other time in the past five years. So what would be a Beazley Labor Government's greatest challenge be?

In his controversial Bulletin interview, John Della Bosca said: "I have seen flashes of Kim as potentially a really good leader and capable of carrying the imagination of the public". One of those rare glimpses occurred a fortnight before Christmas in December 1999 when Beazley gave an address to the Ashfield Uniting Church in Sydney.

For a notorious waffler, Beazley's speech was brief and to the point. After listing the problems he believes that Australia faces - poverty traps, falling educational standards and opportunities, homelessness, suicide, growing inequality, unemployment for some and longer hours for those with jobs - he got to the nub of the matter.

"And all this is happening", he told the congregation, "because it is a hard, competitive world out there, and we are more a part of it than we have ever been. And that hardness is creeping into our soul, because we haven't been ready - or we don't know how - to defend the fairness that makes us Australians".

And then with an element of honesty we don't usually expect from our political leaders Beazley said: "Now I could also tell you that this is all easy. That it is all the fault of the other side, and if you got rid of them, and elect us, it's all sunlit uplands from here. But its not easy. This is a national journey, and not just a journey for the national government at that. It demands that we all step out of the comfort zone".

Unfortunately, the ALP - an institution vital to Australia's democracy - has not stepped out of its own comfort zone. Labor has reformed many aspects of Australia's economy and society in the past two decades, but it has barely attempted to reform itself.

After thirteen years in government spent overhauling Australia's moribund economy and embracing globalization, Labor lost some of its raison d'etre. Was it running the economy for the Big End of Town or the Australian people? And was the party running itself purely as a platform for the personal ambitions of its senior members?

If Labor aspires to more than simply achieving power; if it aspires to govern Australia, to define, then pursue, our national interests in an era of globalization, then it must get its own house in order. It is a hard competitive world out there, and every time Labor contributes to the voters' disenchantment - through its thuggish culture of branchstacking, for example - it makes Australia a harder place for it to govern, and a harder place to change for the better.

The lesson of Peter Beattie's victory in Queensland, for example, was not that the party's internal workings are irrelevant to electoral success. On the contrary, the Sheperdson Inquiry could have been a mighty disaster for Labor. Luckily for Labor, the canny Beattie was able to turn the 'rorts affair' to his advantage by distancing himself from his own party and denouncing the rorters. To the electorate it looked suspiciously like leadership. But imagine the carnage if, like former Premier Wayne Goss, Beattie had been a member of the AWU faction.

By flicking the switch to vaudeville Queensland-style Beattie kept Labor in the contest. and when the National Party defied its leader, the lacklustre Rob Borbidge, and pursued preference deals with One Nation, it was all over bar the shouting.

According to the social researcher Hugh Mackay, "Australians seem to be lacking a guiding story that connects leaders and people". Defending fairness in the age of rapid and unpredictable change by making Australia into a 'Knowledge Nation' might be the story Labor wants to tell, but it's a hard message to sell if the people aren't listening because to so many of them Labor looks like part of the establishment, and part of the problem. If One Nation - or its equivalent - is still with us in 2004, and still putting incumbents last, then it could be a Labor government which suffers at their hands.

In his speech to the Uniting Church Beazley said: "Lately it's been hard to tell the difference between what is inevitable change, and what is plain unfair. A lot of things are being called inevitable, when they are really negotiable. So should we in politics really be surprised when people say 'well, if it's all inevitable, what do I elect you for?'".

Certainly the Labor Party shouldn't be surprised. For the longest time it was Labor who said things were inevitable, that change was the only constant, that ceaseless reform was its own reward. And a lot of people in the Old Australia, the Hansonite tendency for example, got heartily sick of it.

"All of us are elected with a duty of care to the society we live in", Beazley went on, "We are elected to understand the social fault-lines that traverse our nation like a jigsaw puzzle: dividing regions from regions; the bush from the suburbs; the west and east of our cities; skilled workers from unskilled; and indigenous from non-indigenous. And the question we all face is how much stress these faultlines can bear before they fracture".

It's a cogent summation of the state of the nation; but what Beazley didn't mention, however, was the faultline dividing the governing class from the governed; the politicians from the punters. Building a bridge across this particular 'faultline' could be Beazley's greatest challenge .

Brett Evans' book 'The Life of the Party: A Portrait of Modern Labor ' will be published in April by UNSW Press.

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Issue 86 contents

Interview: Master of Opposition
Over the past five years, John Faulkner has turned the Senates Estimates structure into his own House of Pain. He explains the art of Opposition.

Politics: Beazley the Bridge Builder?
As the Howard Government flounders, Brett Evans looks at the challenges Kim Beazley faces as his hour of destiny approaches.

Unions: Lashing & Loathing at Patricks
Three years since one of the Howard Government�s most infamous episodes, the Waterfront War, Zoe Reynolds discovers how casuals are now doing the doing the dirty work on the docks.

Legal: Workers Without Rights
Mark Morey outlines the legal status and (lack of) rights for foreigners in Australia on working visas.

International: Dispatch from the Dispossessed
Mahendra Chaudhry, Leader of the People's Coalition and the Fiji Labour Party comments on this week�s court decision.

Economics: Business Power and Mobility
The US election season makes it patently clear how Big Business is able to transform its financial resources into political power via campaigncontributions.

History: The Spoilers and the Split
The Movement, Groupers, the DLP and The Doc. All have been blamed in various ways for the ALP split in the 1950s, ensuring the ALP was kept out of federal government until 1972. Can One Nation return the favour?

Review: The New Hard Politics
Dennis Glover argues that policy has taken over from spin as the political battleground of the new century.

Satire: Bradman Latest: Family In Dramatic Court Action
The family of the late Sir Donald Bradman yesterday sought a restraining order against Prime Minister John Howard after it became apparent that he wants to be involved in every single detail of the The Don's funeral.

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