Australia a ‘green Wall Street’? Labor moves to the dark side as a party of capital

The most important thing that happened at last week’s jobs summit occurred before it started.

On the Thursday morning before Albopalooza got going (or Albostock, Chalmersella or Burning Jim, as you prefer), Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek announced that Australia would be open for business in selling “ownership” of carbon offsets arising from areas of undisturbed natural zones.

Australia is going to be a “green Wall Street”, she told the media.

Doubtless this was all planned and authorised by the party, and there was no attempt by Plibersek to upstage a prime minister who has sidelined her in government and all but excluded her from the jobs summit. But it doesn’t hugely matter. It’s clearly an authorised policy and expresses very clearly the Albanese government’s intent to be a government and party of capital, its facilitator and agent.

Thus the proposed shift to allow for multiple-firm enterprise agreements is designed to raise wages but without changing the overall industrial relations framework, which leaves most strikes illegal. The preferred option of unions and workers — industry-wide agreements — is excluded because it opens the possibility of workers striking as workers of occupation X, rather than as employees of company Y or Z.

The language of debates over this projects the macroeconomic view of higher wages as a means of demand stimulus first, and puts workers’ rights to a greater share of the wages/profits ratio second. 

The language of proposed social services is equally saturated with the language of capital. Numerous speakers advocated substantial extensions to no-fee childcare because women were “an untapped resource”. The slightest mention of any other way of being in the workforce — of the quality and character of work — barely got a mention. 

This was Labor’s coming-out ball as the party of capital. The absence of the Liberal Party leadership was not only an irrelevance but something most of the industry peak-body groups were secretly relieved by. Without Liberal Party leader and deputy leader, business, government and unions could get down to the business of planning a stable system in which workers would be delivered to the market in a smooth and orderly manner. 

And just in case there was doubt about it, any significant raise to the JobSeeker and other benefits was rejected — and then yesterday, the CPI-indexed regular raise to the payments was celebrated as the biggest ever. Yes, it is, because inflation is the highest it has been. But it’s worse, because such indexing does not accurately reflect the rise in real basic costs for low-income people. So Labor was celebrating the greater impoverishment of the benefits-dependent through the process of inertia.

In Parliament yesterday, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese answered a question on such matters by wryly noting that he was once again a tenant of public housing by being in the Lodge. 

Since people are dying every day from the penury of benefits — from poor food and missed meals, from the waiting lists for publicly provided medical services, from the sheer despair and heartbreak of “living” on these poorbox handouts masquerading as a benefit-wage. This was an obscene and callous “joke”. Albanese is not a personally callous or sadistic man, in a way that numerous Coalition MPs are, so how did he come to be in the speaking position where such a remark might be a good idea?

The answer of course is that the Labor Party centre, now occupied substantially by the party “left”, cannot let itself fully acknowledge that it has become the party of capital; so it maintains a distorted perception of the relationship between its policies and reality. Under state Labor governments during the Coalition decade, housing and health services were hollowed out, leaving hundreds of thousands at the mercy of the market, and a significant fraction of these in daily desperation. 

Thus Albanese can make a “joke” such as he has because he’s still projecting onto the present the significantly better public housing system he lived under. He is rightly proud of where he got to from there. If he and his mother had been living in a circuit of spare rooms, cars and motels, he may not have got to the despatch box to say what he did. The fact that he could even say it shows that he hasn’t really internalised how far from a genuine social democracy this country has got to. 

But he’s not the only one living in a distorted reality. Progressives across the country are in a state of delusion, unwilling to admit that this Labor government is nothing like they thought it would be. What they hoped would be a centrist government in dialogue with them is a party of capital, one that turned its back on progressivism sometime in 2020-21 and now has no use for it whatsoever. 

Essentially, what has happened is this. For a decade or so since 2010 and the rise of the Greens as a genuine third force, Labor was in utter denial about this shift in politics. It couldn’t accept a lost legitimacy among the broader knowledge class, as the Whitlamite representative party, and couldn’t recognise that the age of the one big progressive party was coming to an end. So it spent a decade trying to recapture both the inner cities and the more socially conservative suburbs and regions. 

This probably lost it either the 2016 or 2019 elections, and there appears to be nothing consistent about the strategy. It seems to have been a chaotic lurching between panic about being beholden to the Greens again, a residual sense of heroic mission, and wounded amour propre concerning its role as champions of the oppressed. It has created some genuinely freaky moments, such as the triannual competition for Labor preselection for the seat of Melbourne, which the party should run as a Masked Singer-like talent show and sell to Stan. 

Finally Labor got wise. The 2019 loss concentrated the mind, but what really got some change happening was the continued sluggishness of 2020-21, when it looked like the Coalition could slither back into power in 2022 — and, if then, indefinitely. The people who finally got the message — that the mass of the country was more individual-familialist than it once was, and its values a conservative-progressive mix — were the left who had hitherto held out to retain some progressivist imposed mix.

In the election campaign, Albanese reaffirmed a commitment to the stage three tax cuts, and reaffirmed in the debate that a woman was a human female and not a matter of self-definition. Those moves may not have been the vanguard of Labor’s narrow victory, but were essential to ensuring it wasn’t outflanked. 

In accepting that this was what they had to do, Labor’s left leaders went through their “third period” moment, so named for the Bolsheviks’ transition to full Stalinism in 1928. People who had risked death for the liberation of humanity became the agents of terror-driven state capitalism — and accept that this reversal was the only way to forward their original politics without becoming, y’know, Trotskyists.

On a smaller scale, the Albanese group has passed through this. In pursuit of political success, it has shed the last vestiges of the left economic-socially progressive mix that drew it into the movement in its student days. In finally admitting to itself that it was a failed movement, and that there was nothing of it left, it was thus liberated to be audacious, creative and to pursue the original aim through its opposite. You can hear the exuberance in its members’ voices. They’ve become “giddy with success”. 

Progressives looking to Labor for some sort of post-election shazam move have been knocked about by Labor’s new approach. Many seem to have believed that Labor would not really keep the stage three tax cuts, and would put through meaningful benefits rises, and had not simply turned its back on progressivism. The response to such a spurning has been a barrage of criticism towards Labor. 

That’s fine, but it fails to recognise how such criticism used to be effective. Back in the day, the right ran the party, the left was insurgent. When the party moved rightward, it was attacked from the outside, and the left would then join that attack from within. The right would know that the left would maintain solidarity up to a certain point. But strategically and selectively, the left would stage an internal fight that would threaten Labor’s outside image and internal policy. At that point, the right would back down and negotiate. 

That doesn’t work any longer, because the left is now the agent of Labor’s conversion to a party of capital. There is no internal partner to work with external critics of right-wing policies. So the external criticism lacks political force. Indeed, it’s worse. Labor is using the hail of criticism from progressives to show its suburban mainstream voters that it is not beholden to the lefties and greenies. Progressives have been trying to gee themselves up about the impact they’re having. Where? In Guardian Australia? Radio National? These are pimples on an elephant’s butt. 

There’s consequently been a bit of shoot-the-messenger going on, and it’s fairly indicative. Some of it is bitter, irrational and above all hypocritical.

Your correspondent suggested that Labor’s commitment to the cuts was due to a calculation that some high-income working-class people would decide their vote on the cuts. Having won power and wanting to keep it, they weren’t going to renege. This was constructed as an economic argument in favour of the cuts, by John Quiggin. It very clearly wasn’t. It was described as some sort of “four-dimensional chess” or “master plan” strategy.

It was the very opposite — that would have involved reneging on the commitment and then trying to spin it. Greg Jericho did a Troy Bramston and invoked a Bob Hawke policy reversal, from a time when politics was far less micro. “Sing it, Greg,” someone remarked, which caught the cultish mood. Others invoked Tony Abbott as a model for breaking your political promises, which seemed like full self-parody. 

Many of these people were deceiving themselves, claiming that Labor could invoke the “times have changed” mantra. This ignored Labor’s renewed commitment to the cuts during the campaign itself. Without that gap, the argument to renege is simply urging Labor to do what progressives raged against Morrison for: straightforward lying. How can they justify this? They can’t. Progressives take the point that society would be better off gathering the taxes available on the old schedule — mostly true in left-wing terms — as not merely a strategic but moral licence to break a campaign promise. It’s sheer elitism, veiled by rendering a political argument on taxes as unarguable common sense.

And the air of desperation around it is a clue to what’s not being acknowledged: that we have exchanged a right-wing government whose chaos allowed for a certain porousness for an efficient right-wing government whose smooth competence in crowding us out, leaving much-reduced scope for action.

What’s being presented as heroic intellectual resistance has a self-indulgent and self-deceiving air. Progressives are going to have to find new ways to jam up the government. Maybe it wasn’t Albostock, but Albomont, and someone just got whacked with a pool cue. “Green Wall Street” was just the latest such. The beatings will continue, until the morale improves.  

Has Labor shifted away from its progressive leanings? Let us know by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.