We Need To Talk About How We Talk About Labor

It’s time to admit it.

In September we are going to see the Government lose an election with the kind of floundering petulance so rarely witnessed outside of primary school swimming carnivals. It is going to be a shellacking so comprehensive that the sum total of Antony Green’s election coverage will be ‘It’s the Coalition, dickheads. Pub? Pub? Pub it is.’ Anyone who tells you that Labor can still win is either lying or has fundamentally misunderstood the meaning of ‘Labor’, ‘can’ or ‘win’ .

And progressives are already going through our stages of grieving. We’ve Denied and Bargained and soon we’ll Accept, but for now, we’re Angry.

And rightly so. There’s an anger here that’s borne out of a total bewilderment. The speed at which Labor has fallen from favour has been completely staggering. It’s been the Lana Del Rey of governments.

I remember election night in 2007. I’m one of the few people at my party who does. Amid the beer and the wine, we bought two bottles of liquor — one red and one blue. Whenever Labor picked up a seat, we drank from the red, the reverse for the Coalition. I still have the unopened bottle of blue curacao. (Still unopened because curacao is pretty much the worst thing out).

Had you told anyone that night that this is where Labor would end up in just six years, they would have, statistically, vomited on your shoes. After apologising, they would have called you insane. But here we are, with a primary vote that refuses to budge from the low 30s, and a Prime Minister with the second lowest approval rating that the nation’s ever seen.

There’s a view — and one I’ve adopted in articles before — that we have a Government thwarted at every turn by a toxic Opposition (I’m looking at you, Christopher Pyne — albeit through a polished surface lest I turn to stone), and a media complicit in that toxicity. Add to that the independents, and a razor-thin majority, and it’s a miracle that Labor have managed to push any reforms through at all.

And while there’s nothing necessarily wrong with this view, there’s something conspicuously missing.

Because if progressives in this country want to move on from what happens in September, we are going to need to come to terms with a very unpalatable fact. We are going to have to shift focus away from Tony Abbott and his front bench of nuclear arsehats, and admit that Labor have, independent of the nasty man of the other side of the house, let them down.

We can do this without buying into the hysteria and invective of the right; there’s no need to paint ‘Juliar’ on a placard and join the confused and angry throng of Jones’ acolytes marching ceaselessly toward Canberra. We don’t need to start demanding to see signed papers from the AWU, or costings of school halls, or whatever else Andrew Bolt is upset about this week. In fact, we don’t even need to listen to Andrew Bolt at all.

We just need to stop defining the entire progressive movement in terms of opposition to Tony Abbott. We need to drop the fiction that Labor’s inability to act in a satisfactory way on asylum seekers, or marriage equality, or a mining tax, or welfare has been completely divorced of any cowardice or ineptitude on the part of our own Government.

We can shake our fists at News Ltd until our wrists give out; we can wail and gnash our teeth at the prospect of Tony Abbott in the PM’s seat; we can threaten, like a child stomping off a soccer field, to move to New Zealand — but none of this is going to address or even make sense of the problem. Cathartic, perhaps, but so is yelling at the furniture when you stub your toe.

I remember watching the Slipper/Ashby affair unfold, and being furious. Furious at the Coalition for engineering such a despicable stunt, furious at the media for swallowing it initially, furious that there would be no repercussions for the Opposition. But here’s another thing I could have been furious about:

I could have been furious that the poaching of Peter Slipper from the Coalition was an equally dirty and cowardly move. Acquiring Slipper wasn’t about survival — the ALP had the numbers in the house; this was to make sure that Andrew Wilkie’s vote wasn’t essential so they could renege on their agreement. And upon what radical conditions did Wilkie’s support hinge? Already watered down poker machine legislation. The fight to combat systemic problem gambling in this country was ditched because Labor got spooked by a lobby group, and instead of sticking to its principles or even engaging in a debate, we instead got the unbearably depressing and embarrasing soap opera that was James Ashby’s Federal court case.

Now imagine the Government had had the spine to go to this fight. For sure, those groups are powerful and there would have been a stoush, for sure, but it would have been about ideology rather than a sordid federal court case about mussels and creepy texts.

Or to put it another way: who exactly are we to blame for the appalling asylum seeker policies we’ve seen enacted? Is it the conservative party who distorted the issue, or the Labor government who willingly accepted their premise?

Why is this important? Given that the result of the 2013 election is beyond doubt, why can’t we focus on the undeniable good Labor has done during their difficult stint in government? After all, it seems that the last thing Australian politics needs is more negativity.

It’s important because the stories we tell ourselves are important. If the story of the 2013 Federal election is one of a valiant government losing out to a sneaky and underhanded opposition and complicit media, then Labor can keep plodding along as it stands, an enduring testament to opportunism and mediocrity.

If the left were to hold the Government to account with even a fraction of the determination of the right, then we may have something beginning to resemble a major party in line with progressive values.

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Ben Jenkins is a Sydney-based writer. He writes for TheVine and Daily Life, as well as The Chaser. You can read his blog, or follow him @bencjenkins.

Feature image AFP/ Marty Melville.