Can the ALP left make a difference?
By Mandy Pearson
With the ALP now in opposition, we are hearing the rhetoric about the need to "rebuild the party". But what does this mean in practice?
The ALP was in opposition from 1976 to 1983. That was also a time to "rebuild the party", to get back in touch with "Labor's natural constituency", in preparation for another ALP victory. What was the role of the left, and what happened to it once the party was rebuilt?
Back then, the left power brokers were people such as Tom Uren and Arthur and Ray Gietzelt. Also on the rise was Brian Howe. Uren and the Gietzelts were early casualties of the Hawke-Keating ascendancy, but Howe's star rose even further, and he eventually became deputy prime minister.
In those days, the ALP left was inching closer to the Communist Party of Australia (CPA). John Baker's article "When Opportunities Went Begging" in GLW #221 outlines this process very well. It happened, not as the result of a turn to the left by the ALP, but because the CPA had embraced Eurocommunism.
With Eurocommunism, both the CPA and the ALP left found a justification for pursuing reformism as a "revolutionary strategy". The line went something like this: active state intervention would lead to irrevocable gains for the working class, "revolutionary reforms" which might throw up new political forms, change both gradual and total (P. Beilharz, Transforming Labor, 1995, pp. 106-107). The strategy rested on a social contract, which should be a contract for a socialist program.
Social contract
In the early 1980s, such a contract was forged. The CPA was instrumental in drafting it and having it accepted. The Prices and Incomes Accord promised that in return for guaranteed wage increases and social benefits (the "social wage"), unions would practise wage restraint, in order to encourage investment and the "trickle down effect", eventually creating jobs, benefiting working people.
Was this the best the left could do? It is widely acknowledged that the Accord was only an incomes policy at best. Besides, the social wage could never redistribute income from rich to poor, since it relied on the tax base, which is mainly made up of taxes from wage and salary earners. So at best it allowed redistribution from the not so well off to the very un-well-off, what Leo Panitch has pejoratively called "socialism in one class".
Less well recorded is the process, while Labor was in opposition, of the settlement with "social wage activists", the many middle class and working-class community and lobby groups, which were encouraged to view an ALP victory as the method by which their demands would also be fulfilled.
There were many of these groups, such as those coming under the umbrella of peak bodies like the Australian Council of Social Service (ACOSS) and its state affiliates. Their level of activity had been heightened due to the increasing attacks of the Fraser government, to which they formed a natural opposition, and they were increasingly drawn into alliance with the ALP as it used its best left voice to champion those affected by Fraser's cuts.
ALP members were active, many genuinely so, in community campaigns aimed at improving the lot of working-class people. Brian Howe is a good example. As a minister of religion in Fitzroy in the 1970s, Howe was around the campaigns to stop freeway construction and the destruction and clearance of many working-class neighbourhoods in the inner city. Through the Council for Urban Research and Action, he was also instrumental in raising consciousness about the poor treatment of public tenants in high rise blocks and the effects of poverty.
Many activists in these campaigns were drawn towards the ALP at both the state and federal level. To be fair, many campaigns did not fizzle out, but these activists often focused their attention on ensuring that the ALP had the "correct policies" to carry it into the elections, and thus to win the votes of the various welfare, academic and activist pressure groups and their wider constituencies.
For example, even though the overwhelming theme of the ALP's housing policy document (the Hayden Housing Plan) was support for home ownership, there was also a commitment to double public housing stock in 10 years, and the initiation of some experimental housing programs. These last two features were lobbied for heavily by the peak housing community organisation, National Shelter, and its state affiliates.
The view at the time was that a true public housing sector, a "third sector" could be created, quite different from the residual welfare role played by "public housing" hitherto. This was in the spirit of the compromise whereby a program would change the structure of the system, without any need for struggle, at the stroke of a policy pen. The assumption underlying such a view is of an independent state, in which decisions could be taken which would entrench working-class interests in the overall fabric of government.
Coopting
After the Labor victory, there were always activists who mistrusted such strategies and they continued to be active, and to criticise the ALP when it failed to live up to its promises. But what of the layers of left supporters who placed their faith in the ALP? Some joined the ALP, swept up in the left rhetoric, the promise of a better world through negotiation, rather than struggle.
Some were drawn into the bureaucracy. Sometimes this was a conscious strategy of the ALP, but often these activists were enthusiastic about carrying through the policies they had helped draft, to attempt to ensure their implementation matched the promises. Others found jobs in the newly burgeoning community sector in a myriad of government-funded programs and organisations. Brian Howe became minister for social security and was given the task of carrying out some of the worst aspects of the retrenchment of the welfare state.
Deregulation of the Australian economy by the ALP from 1985 meant that government budgetary decisions were increasingly placed under scrutiny by the money markets, now given an important mechanism to register their disapproval by shaving millions off the "wealth" of the country through a loss of confidence on the stock exchange.
Economic rationalism
The lesson the ALP left and its supporters (including supporters of the Accord) failed to learn in the early 1980s was that economic rationalism in social policy was an unavoidable consequence. Hoping for a renewed Keynesianism, a renewed commitment to full employment and social programs, they were faced with the ALP in office having to carry out economic rationalist policies. Many of them embraced the rhetoric, not least of all, Brian Howe.
Successive budgets, it seems, failed to dim the hopes of those dogged supporters of Labor. The ACOSS Newsletter in recent years has looked like a series of press releases from government departments, "good news" stories about small program increases or endless reviews of government policy so that you can feel good about being consulted.
At the launch of a small but innovative housing program in Melbourne in 1986, by then housing minister Chris Hurford, groups demonstrating outside against federal housing budget cuts were asked to desist by bureaucrats and ministerial minders alike. The implication was that they should be supporting the ALP for delivering a policy innovation, even though that meant less money overall.
Brian Howe illustrates the trajectory of the left while Labor was in power. As social security minister, faced with successive budget deficits, Howe presided over the "closer targeting" of programs, which meant cuts in the social wage. Later he held the portfolio of Housing and Regional Development, where he had responsibility for public housing policy.
Just after his impending retirement from politics was announced, Howe contributed his vision for housing policy to the Prime Minister's Statement on Urban Reform. It should be read by all who think the strategy of rebuilding the left inside the ALP in the 1970s and 1980s was and is worth the effort.
Howe's vision was for an essentially privatised "public housing" sector, whereby the federal government would be responsible for rent subsidies and the states would pick up the tab for capital expenditure (now almost totally subsided by the Commonwealth). Not surprisingly, the Victorian housing minister said he didn't want a bar of it. States would lose massively by such an arrangement.
Who would benefit? The scheme was a voucher scheme, where people are given money to purchase the service themselves, rather than use the agency of the state to provide. It's the sort of thing Milton Friedman, a previous darling of the economic rationalists, used to wax lyrical about.
Howe justified it by saying that it would provide people with "choice" — you can either rent from an exploitative landlord, whose rights are better protected than yours, or from a public housing authority, which may not have the type or location of housing you need (if you can get off the waiting list, you'll probably be offered high rise).
The ALP left and housing rights supporters may well ask how this expands the public housing sector. The benefits would mainly accrue to the private sector, and the public sector would, as we have come to expect, be left bleeding to death. But it's your choice!
Old rhetoric
Choice, empowerment, consumer participation, are many of the buzz words which the left has used to draw in layers of activists to support the ALP's various election campaigns and to keep them loyal. Keating-style budgets have left those words with a hollow ring.
The ALP left and its supporters in unions and the community sector have ignored these lessons. They have resurrected some of the old rhetoric and heralded the "living wage" campaign, in concert with community groups. Why is this seen to be necessary only under a Liberal government? Surely these workers were just as low paid only a few months ago under Labor?
Partly, it signals a return to the "rebuilding" tactics of the ALP of the late 1970s, when layers of activists were coopted into campaigns to highlight the difference between Liberal and Labor, with the important outcome of increased votes for Labor at the next election.
The rebuilding certainly worked back then — for the ALP. Those who may be drawn into campaigns in the next few years around social policy issues should be asking themselves whether it worked for previous activists and movements.
The movements, or those segments of them which persisted in their campaigns even when it meant criticising the ALP, certainly suffered from the loss of talented activists to the ALP and bureaucracy. They suffered also from the ALP rhetoric that their demands had been met.
The ALP was aided and abetted in this by the peak welfare groups. Come election time, these were only selectively critical, and always highlighted the worse policies of the Coalition. By pursuing this line, they locked themselves into the same old Lib/Lab game. What is needed now is the building of genuinely independent, campaigning movements, which continue whichever Lib/Lab is in power.
A coalition of such forces, united in common programs, would be much better placed to turn around the defeats suffered by working class people under Labor, and to fight those which will continue under the Libs. This doesn't mean that you don't work with the best of the ALP in campaigns. Just don't get sucked in when you do!