What's new in Labor's new platform?
By Susan Laszlo
The release, two weeks ago, of Labor's draft platform coincided with polls showing Prime Minister John Howard's popularity at a record low. The Wik debate, the nursing homes fiasco, cuts to child-care and the government's intransigence on greenhouse have taken their toll. As Kim Beazley outstripped Howard as preferred prime minister for the first time, Labor strategists began talking up the party's chances of regaining office after just one term in opposition.
But if Labor is returned to office in the next election, it will be due more to anger at the Howard government's economic "rationalist" policies than to approval for Beazley Labor. Its lacklustre performance in opposition proves that the ALP's policies are not much different from the government's.
This is why Labor has released a draft platform that seeks to accentuate every little difference between it and the Coalition. It's an exercise in image-making rather than a major policy change.
While rank and file ALP members are finding it difficult to obtain the draft platform — making a mockery of Beazley's claim that the party is democratic — some 190 delegates are expected to rubber-stamp it at the party's national conference in Hobart in January.
In touch?
Most of Labor's leaders attribute the 1996 election loss to a failure to explain the changes introduced over 13 years in government.
ALP national secretary Gary Gray is more candid. In comments not widely circulated, he said that Labor alienated its traditional base because it "cut too much", "privatised too much" and "went too far with enterprise bargaining".
The draft platform is being marketed as the product of numerous tea and bickie chats with "ordinary Australians" around the country — particularly regional Australia, where Labor holds just seven of 51 seats. In fact, the draft platform was put together by five policy committees under the direction of deputy leader Gareth Evans, well known for his devotion to pragmatism rather than principle.
The draft platform is not just about wooing alienated former Labor voters; it also aims to win over disgruntled Coalition supporters from these regional areas, whose populations are suffering the greatest insecurity after a decade and a half of economic rationalism.
To Blair or not to Blair?
The big business press has urged Beazley to follow British PM Tony Blair and "re-modernise" Labor. Columnist John Hyde wrote earlier this year: "Blair's New Labour is ... the measure of economic rationalism in the UK ... It has committed itself to the Conservatives' public spending limitations and labour market reforms. It has promised not to raise taxes ...".
Beazley says the draft platform "revives some of Labor's best traditions" and rejects the need for the party to re-market or re-brand itself as "new Labor".
In 1913, Lenin accurately described Labor as "altogether bourgeois and altogether liberal". Since then, Beazley adds, "We've never been a convincing far left party". He insists that Labor need not drop its "socialisation objective" because no-one believes the party intends fulfilling it.
Beazley (who is from the right) does not need to follow Blair in smashing the left wing, because the "left" that remained inside the ALP by the time of the Hawke government was no longer a challenge to the right.
It should also be remembered that Blair originally borrowed much from Hawke-Keating Labor. However, the draft platform does borrow quite a bit from Blair where he has gone further to the right.
The platform is short on specifics and long on buzz words such as "security", "opportunity" and — more ominously — "reciprocal obligation". This is plagiarised from New Labour.
The industry and regional development platform talks up "strengthened local structures" through which regions would develop their own agendas and priorities. It promises that an ALP government would develop a "stakeholder strategy" involving "partnerships with community leaders". In short, business will be allowed to "lead" the regions undisturbed.
Economy
Goals are set of 4% economic growth and 5% unemployment. Keating's unemployment programs (mainly short-term training schemes) are to be restored, including more money for work-for-the-dole schemes (presumably along the lines of Labor's amendments to the government's scheme, which it voted for).
"Reciprocal obligation" means that, in return for the government's creation of "real job opportunities", unemployed people will be obliged "to do everything reasonably possible to become job ready and obtain work". In short, Labor will continue Howard's intimidation and scapegoating of the unemployed. Young people are not the only ones in the firing line: adults over 40 will also by targeted for low-paid make-work programs.
Labor says it will encourage manufacturing industries, agriculture, minerals and the service industries in an effort to boost economic growth and employment. This means it will continue handouts to business (as outlined in its August industry policy, which includes a five-year tariff freeze on 10 nominated industries). But handouts to business do not guarantee job creation.
The draft platform argues that "reciprocal obligation" would also apply to industries receiving government assistance — that they have a responsibility to specific jobs, export and investment targets. But no mention is made of how this would be enforced.
Education is another refrain borrowed, apparently, from Blair. Students will be provided with "learning security accounts" which would be redeemable at universities and TAFE colleges and other forms of post-secondary education. Entitlements would also be given to unemployed people for retraining. This is another way of extending user-pays education to suit business needs.
While Labor has ruled out a GST in its first term of office, it will not oppose a GST in the Senate if a Coalition government introduces one. Labor says it will close tax loopholes, but says nothing about increasing the top marginal rate (lowered under Labor from 60% to 47% — a gift of $4 billion to the wealthiest 5.6% of taxpayers) or the company tax rate (lowered from 49% to 36%, resulting in a real drop in revenue of $10 billion).
Industrial relations
Labor is trying to distance itself from its introduction, under Keating, of enterprise bargaining. That policy's natural evolution, under Howard, into individual contracts has proved extremely unpopular, especially among low-paid workers with little industrial clout.
The ALP hasn't explicitly said that it will scrap Australian Workplace Agreements or rehabilitate the award system, but it has said that it will repeal the "allowable matters" provisions of the Workplace Relations Act, which restrict awards to 20 minimum conditions.
Labor will not legislate for a shorter work week, and would provide "incentives" for employers to create "family friendly" policies for employees. Labor also plans to expand the ability of the Industrial Relations Commission to arbitrate.
The ALP will not be proposing a new accord with the ACTU leadership: after 13 years of real wage losses and social security cuts, union leaders couldn't sell another one to their members.
Environment
Neither is Labor much different from the Howard government on environmental policy. Labor supports the government's differentiation argument on greenhouse gases, believes that developing countries should be forced to adopt greenhouse gas reduction targets and supports a system of tradeable emissions.
Labor will keep its pro-uranium three-mines policy, although it is unlikely to close mines that have been opened up under the Coalition. While the ALP purports to support the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, it also supports the right of the US to experiment with nuclear weaponry.
The supposed "turnaround" on East Timor amounts to a string of contradictory, and therefore meaningless, statements. Labor reiterates its support for Indonesian sovereignty over East Timor but also says that there can be "no lasting solution" without "a process of negotiation through which the people of East Timor can exercise their right to self-determination".
In summary, Labor's new platform continues the Liberal-Labor economic "rationalist" consensus established in the 1980s. As the Financial Review's Tom Burton observed: "Despite the new language, in most areas it is essentially status quo".