As the election date approaches, poll, media and caucus pressure is making it almost impossible for Prime Minister Julia Gillard to carry on leading the Australian Labor Party (ALP) and her government, regardless of the final leadership outcome.
The emphasis on the public arena as mediated by mass media is on the size of Gillard’s defeat and not on the nature or the impact of her policies. The coverage is trivialised and personalised. The election outcome for the government is defined only in terms of who is liked and who is not liked by the electorate, so that an electoral wipeout can be avoided.
The prevailing view is that only through the election of a new leader, either the return of deposed former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd or perhaps the election of a newcomer, such as Bill Shorten, Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations, can the Labor Government avoid electoral annihilation.
Given all this, there is not much an elected leader, any leader, can do in order to change the course of events or to save her or his own skin. Even though, admittedly, Julia Gillard did make mistakes that undermined her position. Her handling of Kevin Rudd, to name an example, was not politically wise.
However, the prevailing argument about the need for a leadership change fails to address the most fundamental question that the Australian Labor Party should have addressed a long time ago. What does modern Labor stand for? Which sectors of modern Australian society continue to express themselves electorally through Labor? How relevant is Australia’s oldest modern party even to its own constituencies, in 2013?
Labor, in the first decades of its life, used to be the party of the working class and of Australian nationalism. Later on, with Gough Whitlam’s generation, Labor reinvented and ‘extended’ itself by becoming the party of the reform minded middle-class, of the peace movement, of the women’s movement, of the post-war immigrants.
Today, the traditional working class has disintegrated because of the changing nature of the globalised economy. Furthermore, the reform minded middle-class is expressing itself electorally also through the Greens.
The ALP continues to be the major party of social reform in Australia, but it is not the only party with a reformist agenda to the centre or to the left of centre in this country.
Does modern Labor, regardless of the outcome of this coming election, recognise the need to have a strategic alliance with the Greens? Is this not what the Liberals and the Nationals have been doing together, quite effectively, all these decades?
Other questions that need to be answered if Labor is to remain a governing party in Australia are the following:
How extensive, how relevant, how effective is its 2013 reform agenda, to the wider community? How well is this agenda communicated? Is modern Labor willing to reform its organisational structures in order to empower its ordinary members, in order to give them powers and opportunities given so far only to its labour union affiliates?
Labor’s future as a political force depends on its ability to reform and revitalise. This is an issue that goes far beyond the leadership question at the next federal election.