Mark Latham’s rise to the Labor leadership sent a ripple of hope through the centre-Left and small ‘l’ liberals. And with good reason. A third Howard Government would ensconce a Government whose actions more often than not resemble those of a bunch of boorish business execs loose on the town, marking their territory by moving from one act of vandalism to the next while daring their rivals to match their path of destruction.
Personal attacks on high court judges; lending legitimacy to racially and ethnically divisive political movements while quietly pilfering many of their policy ideas; ripping up the laws of the sea; portraying vulnerable people as perpetrators of self-interested infanticide; going to war to placate a paranoid ally; scandalously diverting public money to prop up private schools while presenting themselves as defenders of the free market; instituting a raft of draconian surveillance laws (comprehensibly documented in Jenny Hocking’s contribution to the latest edition of the Arena Journal) — the sorry list of the conservatives’ misdemeanours could go on and on.
To its eternal shame, Labor has far too often acquiesced. The prospect of a Latham Government has been greeted by some as the beginning of the end for Howard, and it may well be. Short of physically assaulting another employee in the service industry (or anyone else for that matter), Latham can afford a couple more gaffes, including the odd bit of on-air feistiness. Whitlam, Dunstan, Hawke and Keating primed the public for more colourful Labor leaders than their conservative counterparts. Add to this his homespun suburban character and Latham has, at the very least, dragged Labor to the precipice of electability.
There remains, though, Latham’s authoritarian streak. The proposal to send parents of unruly children to parenting school and the faintly Orwellian portfolio of community relations, are just two examples. The optimistic view is that such proposals are little more than a strategic counter to the conservatives. Part of the goodwill towards a future Latham Government derives from his close realtionship to Gough Whitlam — a connection given some prominence in Margaret Simon’s recent Quarterly Essay, ‘Latham’s World’. The implication seems to be that a Latham Government would be a bold, progressive government in the mould of Whitlam. The authoritarian elements would, therefore, be no more than a tactic to neutralise conservative critics, to be quickly discarded once safely in government.
That may well turn out to be the case. Or it may not. There’s some reason to think that it won’t. Tony Blair’s record — the inspiration for many of Latham’s ideas — is instructive here.
Prior to his victory in 1997, many of Blair’s supporters turned a blind eye to the abrasive edges of the Blair Project as if they were no more than a strategic counter to Conservative criticisms of British Labour as irresponsible, incompetent and soft in areas like welfare, law and order and industrial relations. Blair’s tactic was to take on Toryism on its own turf, talking tough to placate voters astounded at the incompetence of the Major Government but wary of Labour. The expectation seemed to be that many of the socially and economically regressive elements of Blairism would be quietly dropped once safely in government, leaving the progressive core in tact.
Things turned out somewhat differently. When it came to punitive social policies, Blair was a man of his word. The authoritarian elements remained, with harsher approaches to law and order; attacks on single mothers, pensioners and the unemployed; and a more hard-line approach to asylum seekers that was, in part, spurred on by the Howard Government’s malicious little campaign against asylum seekers.
Latham isn’t Blair and Australia isn’t Britain. Nevertheless, there is reason to expect that a Latham Government will follow a similar trajectory. On the issue of asylum seekers, for example, Latham’s instincts are towards maintaining the present arrangements, framing the issue as a law and order matter.
In January 2002, in response to a letter from the secretary of the NSW Labor Council asking for MPs to support NSW Labor for Refugees, Latham defended Federal Labor’s support for the current detention regime on law and order grounds:
Groups like Labor for Refugees look at atrocities such as the Woomera riots or the payment of money to people smugglers and declare, the people who did this need help ... The first priority for a just society is to help needy people within the collective boundaries of the law. The first priority of your organisation is to find excuses for people who break the law.
He went on to suggest that groups like Labor for Refugees claim that people who:
... oppose an open door policy are ignorant, racist and emotive is a massive slur against the working class. In my experience, working people do not regard this as a question of race. They see it in terms of decency and legality (Sydney Morning Herald, 2002).
This year’s National Conference resulted in some changes to Labor’s stance, committing a future Labor Government to closing the detention centres on Naurau and Manus Island. But the new policy is more tweaking, rather than a comprehensive departure from the Howard Government’s regime.
If the Coalition is returned, which is a distinct probability, these authoritarian impulses may come to the fore. Indeed, another term for the Coalition may create the conditions for a perfect storm; one in which the forces of reaction coalesce to create a political climate where the ALP decides that the only path to power is to outdo the Coalition’s punitive approach. The leadership ambitions of Peter Costello and Tony Abbott will obviously complicate this situation, alternatively averting it or intensifying it.
More optimistically, a Labor victory may well be the making of Mark Latham. The fact that he only defeated former leader Kim Beazley by a small margin — and that, even then, many of those who voted for him did so because they couldn’t bear a return to the Beazley doldrums — may mean that Latham’s authoritarian instincts are reined in and his madder policy schemes (giving financial assistance to enable people on low incomes to purchase shares, for example) are given the flick.
Should it come to pass in the next election, a Latham Government would likely combine elements of populist labourism with social conservatism. Expect to see a modest government that tinkers with the present policy settings rather than a bold reformist, progressive government in the mould of Whitlam. Which is another way of saying expect a run-of-the-mill ALP government.
