Like most 1 year olds, my little boy’s choice of toys is both amusing and a little deflating. Having just bought him a life-size plush dog to play with, it was with mixed emotions that I watched him ignore it in favour of an empty cornflakes box. While I was busy wondering how long I’ll be able to get away with giving him empty boxes for Xmas, my attention was snapped back as the box went skidding across the floor in a fit of temper. With some developmental significance that is entirely lost on me, his favourite game at the moment is putting stuff in other stuff. In this case, he had put his toy shovel inside the cornflakes box and could get it back out again. An impressive tantrum ensued. The arms were flapping and the feet stamping in way that couldn’t help but remind me of Karl Rove (while immediately consoling myself with the fact that my boy is only one and will grow out of this behaviour).
I didn't want those cornflakes anyway!
Being more than just excellent YouTube fodder, Rove’s childish antics on the night of the US elections highlight a deeper point. As a good friend of mine once put it, “Those tory bastards believe their rightful position is in government.” When you honestly believe you’ve been born to rule, losing must be such an insult to the natural order that a petulant display of primitive emotion is the only available and appropriate reaction. It almost makes Rove and the whole Fox News menagerie seem human. Almost.
In Australia, the centre-right Liberal Party is not as vulgar or aggressive as their Republican colleagues in this attitude. But the belief is still there and permeates much of the media in the form on an ingrained and implicit narrative that the Liberal Party is the party of government and that Labor is nothing but big spending, economically dodgy, hopelessly factionalised and mired in dirty Union politics. Liberal “believers” see themselves and their party as above politics – a movement of rationality and order. God bless ‘em. The reality, of course, is that a political party is a political party is a political party (the clue, folks, is in the name). Even our gracious benefactors in the Liberal Party have shown they are not above making mileage out of drowning children, buying votes or having the occasional public factional hissy fit.
But when you just know you have a god-given right to rule, you have a vested interest in the status quo. Thus, in the Liberal Party, in among the dusty relics of conservative values, we see strict leadership structures and obedience, and a largely administrative policy base, where efficiency is the watch-word.
This is where the opportunity for the Left exists and where much of the antagonism toward the Gillard government may stem.
If the Right is born to rule, the Left must earn that privilege. There is little value then in the Left trying to do so solely on a platform of efficiency and “responsible government”. The Right owns these virtues. Rather, we look to the Left for ideas, change and innovation – a creative humanist agenda with a leadership willing take a risk on the big idea. At its best, the Right delivers us an efficient world, where we all advance, albeit not in step. The Left, at its best, makes us want to be fairer and proud in that fairness. It makes us want to be better – better as individuals and better as a nation.
The Australian Labor Party has a record of this kind of creative humanism, with the introduction of universal healthcare, expansion of higher and vocational education, a re-orientation of our nation away from Europe to embrace our Asian neighbours, a robust social welfare system and more. Big ideas. It’s not that Labor owns social justice issues, I’m told there are some bleeding-hearts left in the Liberal camp, it’s that Labor – the Left – are willing to directly affect social issues through a policy agenda of active change from the ground up, rather than the top down. So the Left gives us Medicare and a better, inclusive education system – building the substrate of social development. The Right gives us “The Intervention” in Indigenous communities and, before that, The Stolen Generation – policies premised in that innate belief that “we know best”.
And so we come to the Gillard government. It’s very failing has been to allow big ideas to be transmuted into administrative reform. On the issue of the environment and climate change, the solution is a new tax. On the issue of an equitable sharing of wealth from the nation’s mineral resources, the solution is another tax. On the issue of refugees, the solution is bureaucratic: offshore processing. On the issue of education, the solution is a website and metrics. These are not the inspiring and aspirational policies that people look to from the Left. In fact, they look a little and sound a little like a conservative, administrative agenda ... but this duck don’t quite waddle right and don’t quite quack right.
Lost your pluck?
Now, much that is written here may be unduly influenced by fondness for things passed or even selective memory, but the point remains: by failing to provide an agenda of ideas, a politics of hope and inspiration, the Gillard government has violated our expectations. It is this violation that has marginalised Labor in the minds of many in our community, even among the “true believers”. The spite often directed at Gillard is too vicious to be the spite resulting from poor governance (especially when, by global measures, we’re actually doing OK). It is the spite of a broken promise. Not just a specific promise, like never introducing a carbon tax, but a larger promise – perhaps reinforced by the fact that Gillard is our first female PM – of fresh ideas to build confidence in ourselves and raise up our view of ourselves.
The essential promise of the Left is and must be: our ideas are better. If the Left moves to administrate rather than inspire, to a politics of efficiency rather than aspiration, it will be doomed. It simply can’t play that dry game as well as the Right and, anyway, what reason would we have to vote for them – why go for the hybrid when we already have those who were born to rule in this vein? Indeed, the cultural legacy of the Howard years is an Australia largely focussed on entitlement and selfishness – a national psyche of demand and gratification. We need political leadership from the Left to change our view of what is important and what is possible. We need an agenda of ideas ... [fades to static]
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