Tony Abbott, the ALP and progressives
While progressives direct their righteous anger against
repetitive rightwing sloganeer Tony Abbott, Catherine Magree asks
whether they are ignoring a more insidious threat.
It’s all there — the creepy smile, the shifty eyes, the stiff walk.
The blatant lies, the tinder box temper, the gaffes that expose social
attitudes fifty years out of date.
Tony Abbott’s the cloak-wearing villain we all love to hate and we’re
the kids at the Sunday afternoon pantomime who scream in unison when
the villain arrives on stage:
“Look! He’s right behind you.”
Sure, he’s been temporarily pushed aside by the Clive Palmer and Al
Gore circus and even made to look relatively accommodating and centrist,
with the revelation that he was willing to negotiate with Palmer on
climate change legislation and the two held a meeting on Thursday to
discuss Palmer’s demands. But Abbott’s hamfistedness and ideological
extremism make him an easy target and will no doubt re-emerge.
In the lead-up to his recent overseas trip, comedian John Oliver’s video about ‘Tony dumb dumb’, went viral while domestic commentators like Bill McKibben called him the new George Bush. His every move is greeted with
howls of derision from the progressive press, which have accused him of
killing off the fair go with the savage welfare cuts in the recent
Federal budget.
Even those who voted for him don’t like him.
His personal approval rating following the budget – only 30 per cent, according to Newspoll – wasn’t too far behind the worst of Gillard’s. The Hoopla’s Corinne Grant has labelled John Howard a hero in comparison. Even parts of his own party are rebelling.
The public’s revulsion for the Federal Budget has boosted the fortunes of the progressive cause.
Its measures are so extreme – such as under-30s having to wait for the dole for six months
– that they’ve become a rallying point for progressives of all stripes.
Students have marched in the streets against the deregulation of uni
fees and pensioners are furious after being assured by Abbott before the
election that there would be no changes to pensions or Medicare in his
first term.
Meanwhile, commenters on online journals are urging Greens supporters
to stop criticising the ALP and stand in solidarity against the
Coalition menace.
Responding to the reporting of Scott Ludlam’s anti-Labor comments at a Greens conference, ‘Alpo88’ urged Ludlam to:
‘… understand that the common political foes are the Liberals ...
try not to play the stupid game of ... repeating Liberal nonsense
against Labor.’
Bill Shorten must be rubbing his hands together with glee. Like
Abbott before him in relation to Julia Gillard, he doesn’t have to do
anything to attract the electorate’s support — just not be Tony Abbott.
Sure, there are rumblings in the ranks about asylum seekers but he knows
he can represent the Australian ideal of the fair go without having to
do much besides oppose the Coalition’s harshest measures.
But we have to ask: who’s really pulling the strings here? And is the
ALP really the answer to the country’s woes? If we look at its policies
and recent actions rather than its rhetoric and origins, can it really
be called a progressive party at all?
When it comes to taxation revenue, Australia has a structural deficit
— yet the ALP has only ever fiddled around the edges to tackle it.
Readers will remember the huge build-up that preceded the proposed tax
increases to the superannuation nest eggs of millionaires that the ALP
foreshadowed in 2013 — and the anti-climax when it became evident the
changes would only affect 16,000 people and would fail to claw back the billions foregone due to the generous concessions introduced by Peter Costello.
Negative gearing remained untouched during the ALP’s entire time in office.
Instead of getting rid of the Government subsidy to private health
insurance, Labor merely means tested it. In the lead-up to the 2007
election, Kevin Rudd matched most of the Howard Government’s tax cuts to
the tune of 31 billion dollars — and once in office the ALP government boasted about being a low-taxing government.
Cancelling tax cuts and reducing tax breaks for the rich would have
funded much-needed welfare increases. By 2012, even business groups and
right-wing economists like Judith Sloan,
as well as ACOSS, the Greens and unionists, were calling on the ALP
government to increase the dole by fifty dollars a week — a chance that
is now lost.
Instead, the ALP kept dole payments stagnant and hit single-parent
families the following year, moving them from the parenting payment onto
the lower Newstart rate.
If the Abbott–Hockey changes to Newstart get passed, the suffering will
be even more extreme, but the roots of it will have already been sown.
The superannuation industry was just one of the many powerful lobbies
that the ALP ultimately failed to stand up to, which also included the
gambling, mining and banking industries. In fact some ALP ministers made
an art form of attacking powerful industry lobbies as if they were running the country rather than the Government.
It’s worth also asking what would be happening now if the ALP had managed to scrape into power at the last election.
What would the party’s stance have been on the development of Abbot Point
and the dumping of dredge spoil into the Great Barrier Reef, as well as
the expansion of coal mining in the Galilee Basin, for example? Some
indications may be gleaned from the fact that, in February 2014, the ALP
voted with the Coalition
to grant environment ministers future immunity against court challenges
to environmental decisions. And, while in government, the ALP stated
clearly that it intended for Australia to keep shipping coal overseas till the cows came home and bugger climate change policy.
As progressives, we’ve become too focused on parties as brands.
We still expect Labor to deliver because we assume that it’s part of
the broad progressive movement. Yet it’s been clear from day one that
Rudd’s and then Gillard’s ALP was doing just enough to appear
progressive without changing the fundamentals.
We all know that Abbott is a creature of the Murdoch press
and the IPA and the business interests they represent. But the Murdoch
papers supported Kevin Rudd in the 2007 election campaign and, with the
unprecedented level of reach of these papers, it’s fair to assert that
they helped to create him as the ALP leader — commentators noted at the
time that he was ‘John Howard lite’.
Rudd’s proposed emissions trading scheme was a fossil fuel friendly
scheme that locked in failure, with carbon emissions reductions that
were conditional on international agreements and massive compensation to
polluters. It was indicative that Rudd was willing to negotiate with
Malcolm Turnbull on the scheme but refused to talk to Bob Brown.
Rudd did try to stand up to the mining industry with the 2010 mining tax, but the original aim of the tax was to lower the Australian dollar
and strengthen the non-mining sectors of the economy. Gillard
eviscerated the tax and promised to cut ‘green tape’. In the 2013
election campaign, resurrected Rudd Mark II showed who the real masters
were, promising ‘a small business friendly’ government and an asylum
seeker policy that only the Daily Telegraph and Pauline Hanson could love.
The online commenter ‘Alpo88’ urged Scott Ludlam to ‘be mature’.
Perhaps it’s we who have to face the painful truth that a one-term
Abbott Government would not mean a progressive Australia, where the fair
go is more than just a slogan.
Perhaps it’s time to throw our support behind parties and individuals
like Ludlam who don’t cave in to the big end of town, and who
consistently produce, and vote in favour of, progressive policies.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License
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