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 The blatant lies, the tinder box temper, the gaffes that expose social attitudes fifty years out of date.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.