POLITICS: The right idea

Pragmatic community-mindedness can work for Latham, argues David Burchell MARK LATHAM’S ALP Conference address on ‘Enduring Labor Values’ gave the new Labor leader his first serious opportunity to sketch out his political philosophy. Up to that point it wasn’t easy for the average punter to fathom the man. The media either seems to hate him or love him - or even both at the same time. In December we sat agog over our TV dinners while Kerry O’Brien welcomed the new ALP leader by putting him on the couch. We waded through forensic assaults on Latham’s family history, carried out with a zeal worthy of Burke’s Peerage. And we endured the public trial of Latham’s personal character, in which foes were empanelled as witnesses for the prosecution, friends were enlisted as character-witnesses, and society reporters became moral arbiters. Whatever they may think of Latham’s manners, his dress sense, or the way he parts his hair, though, most journalists seem agreed on one thing. Despite the pile of books, speeches and articles that preceded his rise to power, they agree, Latham is no thinker. That reputation as a man of ideas is somehow phoney. ‘You’d be hard put to know what ideas Latham stood for’, the normally level-headed Greg Sheridan told us. ‘They’ve been so numerous, flighty, contradictory, often as [Kevin] Rudd once put it “just plain wacky”.’ The idea of Latham’s intellectual ‘flakiness’ wasn’t invented by the press gallery. It was first cultivated by Latham’s late opponents in the Labor Party, who dripped it into the ears of the press gallery with all the cloak-and-dagger of Shakespearian stage-murderers. Messrs Abbott and Costello reinforced it, with slapstick. And it was cemented by means of that longstanding convention in Australian public life that says that anyone who pretends to read books (let alone write one) is a poseur. It’s that old Australian schoolboy’s terror of being taken for the schoolroom ‘conch’, only taken to the next level. I doubt that many of the journalists who’ve endorsed this image of intellectual ‘flakiness’ have ever opened a page of Latham’s published output. Perhaps it’s time they did, while the sunscreen still glistens, and the backyard hammock still beckons. It’s true that Latham has experimented with a weighty array of social science concepts. But to describe him as a ‘magpie’ or a ‘bower-bird’ is simply and gratuitously wrong. In fact, Latham is a man whose general philosophy has remained remarkably consistent over time. From his forays into local government to his stint as shadow treasurer, he’s one of the few Australian public figures who has a recognisable and distinctive ‘take’ on our political situation, and sticks to it, terrier-like, through thick and thin. The best guide to Latham’s outlook is his weighty 1998 tome on Civilising Global Capital. On its release the book seemed an unapproachable tract on international and national governance. Time on the shelf has mellowed it, however, and it now comes across as a well-judged summation of the policy dilemmas of contemporary Labor. With the benefit of hindsight the really original part of the book is the middle section titled ‘Managing the Commons’. Here Latham returns to the prime task of social democracy, which he sees as being to manage the sources of social insecurity in a world of constant economic flux. This turbulence, Latham notes, has been our natural state of being for a century or more - despite the surface calm of the 1950s and 1960s. It’s not in itself a bad thing. It brings benefits, such as new economic opportunities, at the same moment that it confronts us with risks and anxieties. The problem is that the opportunities and the risks are distributed with dramatic - and apparently arbitrary - unevenness. The same forces that turn economic winners into confident, outward-looking cosmopolitans, serve to burden others with feelings of resentment, suspicion and dread. Labor’s particular problem in all of this, as Latham cannily observes, is that its policy vision relies upon a large degree of shared interest and common cause - while the effect of social and economic insecurity is to divide people, often bitterly, on lines of income, culture and geography. As robust individualists, modern conservatives are less troubled by these social tensions - indeed, they may even find them positively convenient, as the asylum-seekers controversy showed. Latham’s conclusion in 1998 was that Labor needs to find a new model for social democracy, one that addresses insecurity by encouraging self-reliance and independence, rather than relying on state charity. This conclusion has informed almost all the diverse plans he’s championed since, from the ‘aspirational’ debate to the matched-savings scheme designed to lift low-income earning families into self-sufficiency, and out of dependency. Mr Howard’s entry into the debate on our state schooling system gives this struggle over Labor’s soul a new urgency. The prime minister wants to recreate the battle-lines that have marked the debates over refugee policy and reconciliation. He wants to pit pragmatic suburbanites who want the best for their kids against inner-city idealists once more, the better to win the votes of the former. Public schooling has been a linchpin of our democracy and our civic life for a century now. It’s crucial to our self-image as an egalitarian country. It’s not an issue on which Labor can afford to roll over and play dead. Yet for Labor to toe the teachers unions’ line and present schooling as a Manichean struggle between the public sector and the market would be to invite sure political defeat. Few parents choose to send their kids to the local state school because of an ideological commitment to state provision. Rather, they do so because they see schooling as part of the life of their community. It’s this kind of pragmatic community-mindedness Latham’s Labor needs to harness, in this debate as others. Whether Latham can take the Labor Party along with him through this political minefield, however, is a different matter. The ALP is a sentimental beast, and ideological traditions tend to rouse it. The ALP National Conference was a resounding success for Latham, and for Labor. But that love-in atmosphere won’t last for long. The next few months will still be a very hard slog. David Burchell teaches in Humanities at the University of Western Sydney and is associate editor of APO. An earlier version of this article was published in the Australian on 28 January