Revelations that Labor former prime ministers Gough Whitlam and Bob Hawke are on the payroll of billionaire businessman Richard Pratt should come as no surprise. After all, the former Labor government prided itself on its close relationship with the likes of Kerry Packer, Rupert Murdoch, Alan Bond and Laurie Connell — not to mention Gerry Hand's sordid dealings with business cronies of Indonesian dictator General Suharto.
While these revelations may, at times, cause some passing embarrassment, Labor is not about to alienate its mates as it embarks on navel-gazing over its election loss.
Labor is, and always was, a party of big business. The current hand wringing and angst, as Labor sets out to rework its program to help win back those who deserted it at the last elections, are cosmetic.
Proof of this is the parliamentary party's lacklustre — some might say non-existent — performance on the opposition benches. (Even the Democrats have done a better job of opposing the part sale of Telstra within the confines of parliament.) In addition, many Labor leaders in the trade union bureaucracy and environment, migrant and women's groups have resisted calls from the ranks to organise a broad fight back against the Howard government's attacks. Some, like the CPSU leadership, would have much preferred to adopt Beazley's "non-obructionist" approach.
Labor's leaders have made it clear that they are not about to jettison the party's commitment to a program of neo-liberal austerity.
Thus deputy leader Gareth Evans told a gathering recently: "Absolutely the wrong lesson to learn from our defeat would be for Labor to retreat from the broad direction of the economic issues we pursued in government". In other words, for this so-called social democratic outfit, there is to be no retreat from the commitment to govern in the interests of the corporate rich.
Beazley underscored as much after the election when he said he agreed with the Howard government's deficit reduction strategy and, more recently, when he conceded that Labor would not block the budget in the Senate.
Labor has set itself the task of wooing back the "middle ground". From all accounts this means tailoring the "fight back" against Howard to its electoral needs and sidelining — if possible — all those who are serious about stopping Howard now.
Also, according to ALP frontbencher Mark Latham, Labor should adopt a more "flexible welfare system". He believes that the state should take less responsibility and allow for a "self-financed system". Another frontbencher, Lindsay Tanner, believes that "less emphasis" should be placed on "cash transfers" and more on social institutions, such as Medicare and the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme.
The truth is that Labor in government was already moving in this direction — it toyed with increasing Medicare co-payments and significantly tightened welfare eligibility — setting the scene for the Coalition to continue where it left off.
"Handouts" (as welfare is now being described) to targeted groups ares cited by Labor strategists as one of main reasons Labor lost the elections. While this is rubbish, it is being used to sow divisions among working people. The truth is that Howard won the elections because Labor alienated much of its traditional base, abandoning any commitment to maintaining the social wage component of the Accord. Profits went up while wages stayed low. The attempt to showcase its "commitment" to its base by allocating a few miserable sops to some groups failed miserably.
Tanner, currently the darling of the ALP pseudo-left, represents one of the new breed of ALP careerists. The Financial Review's Malcolm McGregor's description of Tanner, as "a pragmatist with an appreciation of the policy constraints on a modern social democratic government", is accurate. While Tanner's argumentation may differ from that of Latham, in the end they both agree on the principle that governments — Labor or Liberal — have no alternative but to implement neo-liberal austerity to keep Australia "competitive" within the globalised economy.
Labor is not about to be reformed. Neither will slick marketing fool many people. However, unless those who feel betrayed by Labor start out on the hard task of building a party which puts people before profits, working people will again have to choose between Tweedledum and Tweedledee at the next election.