... and ain't I a woman?: Labor without a clue
Reading Martin Ferguson's preface to Labor Without Class: The Gentrification of the ALP by Michael Thompson, the latest offering to emerge from the "what is the true nature of the Labor Party" debate sparked by Mark Latham and Lindsay Tanner's musings, one can almost hear his sigh of relief that he has found somebody that agrees with Labor's right-wing course.
Ferguson, the federal Labor shadow minister for employment, training and population, supports the conclusions of a book which is self-described as "a controversial exposé that lays bare the take-over of the workers' party by the 'chardonnay socialists'".
While Ferguson acknowledges that Labor needs to address itself to a wider constituency if it is to remain relevant and electorally successful, he goes on to say that it would be a "profound" mistake for the ALP to repackage itself as "the party of the 'progressive, activist' middle class or the 'rainbow coalition' of special interest groups".
Ferguson is also quoted on the back cover describing Labor Without Class as "draw[ing] attention to the too often self-serving agendas of special interest groups, who are skilled at cloaking their self-interest in the language of compassion, and whose moral outrage is often levelled at fundamental working class values".
So who are these interest groups that so raise the ire of Ferguson, Thompson and their ilk? While launching the book recently, Thompson identified them as environmentalists, multiculturalists and feminists, among others.
While it is true that there is a layer of women in the ALP who emerged from playing leading roles in the women's liberation movement of the late '60s and '70s to become the "femocrats" of the mid-'80s and '90s, the feminist "agenda" is not incompatible with working-class interests.
The women's liberation movement was a profoundly working-class movement, and this was what forced the Whitlam Labor government and later governments to legislate for women's rights.
Affirmative action policies, anti-discrimination and equal opportunity laws benefit all women, and ultimately all working-class men, not just a small elite. While male workers benefit individually from women's double shift of unpaid and paid work, the lower status of women workers brings down conditions for their male counterparts. The fight for equity for women in the workplace is not at the expense of men; it is a fight to raise the living standards of the working class as a whole.
It is precisely because of the right-wing conservative agenda of the Coalition government that anyone who is genuinely concerned about the working class should support any fight against Howard's anti-woman policies.
Claiming that the "feminist agenda" is not beneficial to working-class women, is saying that working-class women do not need choice — the choice to work if they wish, to contribute to society by being a full-time parent if they wish (and still utilise child-care when needed), or to combine the parenting and part-time work.
The reason the ALP fails to be relevant to the working class is because it has never been a party for the workers, male or female. Even in its most left-wing incarnation, when it was forced to the left by progressive mass movements, the Labor Party did not fight against big business rule.
Through its stranglehold on the leadership of the union movement, it has prevented struggles for more than a few crumbs, and it has sold out the very notion of internationalism by its betrayal of people from other countries, like the East Timorese.
Ferguson is right: there are problems with the ALP. His solution is to bring the ALP back to its white male blue-collar working-class (who incidentally were retrenched in large numbers during the last ALP government) roots. This will not lead it to be relevant to the women, migrants and those on welfare, who make up the vast majority of the working class in Australia.
By Margaret Allum