Monday 29th of April 2024
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a light on the hill .....

a light on the hill .....

Labor's ''light on the hill'' is flickering. A fixation with climate change, stultifying spin and condescending paternalism are suffocating its formidable legacy. Workers, once the backbone of the Labor movement, are deserting the party. That's why the announcement of a McKell Institute in Sydney - a new think tank charged with reviving the party's intellectual gravitas - is good news for the Labor Party and the calibre of public debate.

The eponymous McKell, son of a country butcher, is a worthy choice. Born in 1891, as the Labor Party formed, William McKell rose to become premier of NSW from 1941 to 1947, when prime minister Ben Chifley made him governor-general - not bad for an erstwhile boilermaker.

However, if the think tank is to live up to its name, it is also a challenging and awkward choice. Labor now barely resembles McKell's Labor, in terms of either its personalities, practice or policy.

For a start, modern-day McKells are too rare. Almost all federal Labor cabinet ministers are the products of elite universities. McKell's ministers were lucky to have finished high school - McKell himself left at 13.

Yes, demographics have changed, but still only 40 per cent of Australians have university degrees. The Labor Party no longer provides remotely the same political platform for ordinary workers, its supposed base.

Moreover, McKell eschewed the internecine factionalism that bedevils modern Labor. In 1939 he wrested the Labor leadership from Jack Lang, the disgraced former premier, ending ''20 years of unparalleled disunity'', according to the historian Don Rawson. The pragmatic foundation he laid helped keep Labor in power for another 18 years, a feat unlikely to be matched by contemporary Labor governments.

Further, McKell - also NSW treasurer - demonstrated ''unerring signs of fiscal rectitude'', a biographer wrote in 2000. Unlike his conservative predecessors, he proudly presided over successive surpluses, even when Australia faced a genuine crisis: invasion. By contrast, the Rudd and Gillard Labor governments are overseeing the biggest series of budget deficits since 1945, in response to banking trouble in Europe.

McKell was ''a strong advocate of states' rights'', writes the NSW parliamentary historian David Clune, and he would be horrified by modern Labor's centralism.

Both major parties, but Labor especially, have eviscerated Australia's federation. For the nation, Canberra's victory over the states has been pyrrhic. It has diluted accountability, quashed diversity, confused the electorate and shackled the economy with superfluous bureaucracy.

A lone voice of reason in his own party, McKell railed against the Commonwealth's ''temporary'' 1942 takeover of income tax, presciently arguing ''a state government that has received a mandate from its people . . . would find itself not only incapable of giving effect to its approved policy, but also in the humiliating position of having to conform to the ideas of the particular government [in Canberra]''. As McKell feared, Chifley made the arrangement permanent in 1946, which for McKell was a regrettable, ''major disturbance'' to our federal system.

In his 1917 maiden parliamentary speech, McKell lambasted the ''great financial interests'' he believed nourished conservative politics. Indeed, aversion to rent-seeking finance was a common strand in Labor lore.

Yet modern Labor proposes to deliver those very interests a tremendous gift: another 3 per cent of workers' wages to gnaw on, as a result of lifting the superannuation ''guarantee'' from 9 per cent to 12 per cent. Not to mention the ''free'' or highly subsidised guarantees the Labor government has bestowed on banks since 2008.

Perhaps the McKell government's environmentalism provides a link with modern Labor. McKell argued that the state's natural resources were at least as important as the ''physical mental and moral calibre of the people''. But his Department of Conservation had little in common with today's Department of Climate Change. McKell took a practical approach. He made the region around Mount Kosciuszko a national park, and his government worked directly with farmers to conserve the state's soil, forests and water supply.

Schemes to influence the world's climate, especially those benefiting financial interests, would probably not have appealed to him. Indeed, Labor's carbon and mining taxes jar when set against McKell's 1944 Redfern policy speech, which dwelt on how best ''to develop our country to its utmost . . . and to assist existing primary and secondary industry so they may maintain themselves against world competition''.

It is likely McKell would be most repelled, however, by the vapidity of our parliaments - now replete with nauseating ''Dorothy Dixer'' questions and grandstanding. Despite his large majorities, McKell revered parliamentary debate, gagged the opposition not once and was respected on both side of the Speaker's chair.

In the Legislative Assembly he argued it was ''the duty of every one of us to make this an institution of respect and reverence in the eyes of the people''. One opposition Country Party leader even remarked that ''the average quality of debate [owing to McKell] has exceeded anything that I have heard in my 23 years of parliamentary life''.

How sad it is that such comments today would elicit guffaws of laughter.

Modern Labor is in crisis because it neglects the concerns of the ordinary people McKell's Labor stood up for. Indeed, it is not clear which side of politics William McKell would support today. The McKell Institute should resolve that uncertainty.

ALP In Poll Doldrums | Ben Chifley And Light On The Hill

 

lights out .....

In the 20 years that I have been monitoring the mood of the nation in Australia I have never seen us at such a critical juncture. The "Australian dream", which grew from former prime minister Ben Chifley's "light on the hill" speech and provided a shared framework for our collective ambitions in the last half of the 20th century, is cracking before our eyes.

Just when we want leadership and a new vision of what Australia can, and should, be for the next 50 years, our political leaders appear incapable of providing either.

The political classes of Australia are living in one world and the public in another. In the words of eminent American social researcher Daniel Yankelovich, these worlds have different agendas, vocabularies and concerns and they are barely connecting with each other. The consequence is a significant and serious disconnect between public policy and the Australian people.

Public policy appears to be focused on the environment, public transport, the NBN and gay marriage, which are of low priority for the public, according to our own research. People are far more concerned about the future of the economy, rising unemployment, the cost of living and traffic congestion.

As a consequence, people have now stopped listening to the political classes and are focusing on their own lives until they can take their revenge at the next election.

Despite the unique robustness of Australia's macro-economic metrics, Australians are less satisfied with their lives than they have been since the "recession we had to have" at the beginning of the 1990s. The root cause of this lack of satisfaction is the erosion of belief in the achievability of the "Australian dream".

The "Australian dream" is remarkably simple and uncomplicated: a happy family, being in control of life, having the time to enjoy life and having enough cash not to have to perpetually worry about money. As Chifley described it, "bringing . . . greater happiness to the mass of the people".

So where has the dream gone? Look first at the most widely shared aspiration, "having a good marriage" and "raising happy and successful children". The failure rate of marriage is about 40 per cent, according to Australian Bureau of Statistics figures, and for a growing number of couples marriage never happens. Even if it's the only bit of Latin they know, most people know what de facto means.

Certainty the future for children is undermined on all sides. Have we reached the limits of economic growth? Is Australia doomed to become as crowded and congested as the rest of the world? Will the children be able to afford to buy their own home when they grow up?

Of equal importance in the "Australian dream" is the idea of being in control of life. Years of economic reform, competition policy and globalisation have removed the simple certainties from day-to-day life. In just 15 years the proportion of adults who feel that they are in control of their own lives has halved from 60 per cent to 30 per cent. Excessive choice and reform fatigue have exhausted middle Australia.

Home ownership and eventually paying off the mortgage come next in the hierarchy of aspirations. The problems of housing affordability are too well known to comment on. However, the emerging problem, which many are beginning to confront now, is house price deflation. The bubble in housing prices, which grew through 2010, is beginning to deflate; hopefully gently, but possibly with the catastrophic collapses seen in the US, Europe and Britain. With falling house prices comes uncertainty about personal wealth. The public response has been a dramatic turnaround in savings as everyone remembers what nanna said, "a penny saved is a penny earned". This new prudence is what is hitting discretionary retail spending so hard.

"Being fit and healthy" was always an implicit part of being Australian. An active outdoors lifestyle and abundant, affordable food contrasted with the deprivation of post-war Europe and Asia. Unfortunately this lifestyle has turned out to be extremely dangerous. The media now bombards us every day with warnings about the diseases of affluence, childhood obesity and even the Aussie barbecue causing cancer; but rarely provides us with easy to understand solutions to the problems.

No small wonder that unresolved health worries have risen year after year, while satisfaction with personal health status has fallen by more than 20 per cent in the past decade.

Contrary to much of the partisan commentary on "work/life balance", most Australians enjoy their work as much as they enjoy their leisure. In the past five years time pressures have been eating into our ability to enjoy either. A combination of congestion wasting more time in traffic and changing work patterns, particularly more women entering/re-entering the workforce, have all conspired to the growing sense of having not enough time to enjoy life.

And finally, having enough money to afford the important things in life rounds out "the dream". This is not aspiring to luxury and conspicuous consumption, but to the simple pleasures in life.

The fear that the global economic malaise will infect Australia is growing. We may have dodged the GFC, but will we avoid the next pandemic? This drives the new prudence as saving rates reach levels not seen since the 1980s and spending commitments are severely curtailed in the face of uncertainty about incomes and employment into the future. Adding to this concern has been the seemingly usurious escalation of utility charges for no obvious reason. In part this fuels the opposition to the carbon tax, which 80 per cent believe will put up the costs of everything.

This level of uncertainty about the future and dissatisfaction with the political leadership from Canberra is greater even than that which dislodged the Keating government in 1996, according to Newspoll. At least at that juncture there was seen to be a viable "relaxed and comfortable" alternative from the Howard-led opposition.

Today that is not the case. This disaffection and disconnection with Labor is greater than it was in 1996, but the Abbott-led opposition has yet to provide a credible vision for the Australian dream of the 21st century. Australians want a new "light on the hill" from somebody, anybody.

David Chalke is a consultant to the Australia SCAN cultural change monitor, which is run by Quantum Market Research and based on a survey of 2000 adult Australians each year since 1992.

Ben Chifley | Light On The Hill Speech