reply to Verity Firth’s email urging me to vote for her in the ALP’s Policy Forum:

Hi Verity and team

I am ineligible to vote. After 17 years including some very active ones, I cancelled my membership of the ALP on 27 March. I don’t want to be seen to be part of a Party perpetuating the conservatives’ punitive policies toward asylum seekers. The Gillard Government’s policies feed straight into and out of a racial undercurrent the ALP should be leading Australia away from. And incidentally, in the context of the Australia in the Asian Century White Paper it sends the message “sure we’re open and responsive to Asia, so long as there’s a dollar in it.’”

Decades from now historians will look back at the present asylum seeker “issue” in much the same way we look back now at the White Australia Policy.

I can only hope should you reach the policy forum you take this on-board.

Regards
M J MacNamara

…too late you’ve lost me.

This week I got several reminders of the mid-90s. It began last Saturday morning when we turned up for Bryce’s under 13s cricket game at Cherrybrook against West Pennant Hills. We were very quickly being flogged – three wickets in the first over including Bryce. I’d switched my phone on and noticed a missed call and a voice message from Drew Simmons, President of the NSW Division of the Australian Democrats. When I got a chance I listened to the message from the night before and phoned Drew back. Drew apologised – I’d won the most votes in the ballot for Vice-President of the NSW Democrats but my eligibility had been questioned on the grounds I hadn’t been a member long enough. Rules are rules, I said, and it was a very gratifying result at any rate.

Made my way to the NSW Democrats AGM that afternoon and couldn’t help but be reminded of the old days in the ALP – a collective including concerned senior citizens, ex parliamentary candidates and Party veterans, a forthright and earnest vanguard of activists, and one or two of the next generation. I was heartened, and I met a number of very impressive people for whom I hold very high hopes. The future for the NSW Democrats is promising, but qualified by the divisive internal machinations of the Party which permeates from the Federal Executive and is reflected in the State Executive – as I worked out through the course of the day. But like I said, promising. Clearly under Drew Simmons’s leadership the NSW Democrats are on the ascendancy.

I quickly fell into a small kabal with a few fellow new members with whom I share similar interests and geography – all enervated and inspired to work the political system toward the things we believe in. Discussion with my new camarada carried over beyond the AGM and by weeks end I couldn’t help but be drawn out by the various reminders of my time as an activist with the ALP. Yesterday I was asked if I’d crossed paths with Bob Ritten of the ETU and couldn’t recall, but it forced me to run a search on a whole pile of documents from that period. I hadn’t read this stuff since it was written – minutes of meetings of The Entrance-Long Jetty Branch and the Dobell Federal Electorate Council of the ALP, both of which I served as Secretary in that period, and correspondence I’d written on behalf of those Party units. A shapshot in time – letters about party machinations and letters to Gareth Evans and the Central Coast Peace Forum on Chirac’s nuclear testing in the Pacific and UN inaction in Bosnia and landmines, to Wyong Shire Council about parties ripping up sports fields, to Beazley and Willis about bank fees and fee free accounts, to Brereton, to Keating warning a referendum for a Republican president chosen by a two thirds majority of parliament would fail, to condolences for the families of Fred Daly and Ena Griffin and much much more. Some of those things eventually came to pass.

Date-stamped from 1995 to 1997 most are in file formats my current version of Word won’t open, but I can open in notepad. The period is interesting in that it covers the closure of what we now call the Hawke-Keating era. I eventually halted and lingered over a curious document which like the others I’d forgotten I’d written, I have no recollection of writing it whatsoever. I appear to have put it on Dobell FEC letterhead with President Bill Leslie’s name alongside my own, and labelled it ‘Media Release’, but I can’t imagine it ever being published and sincerely doubt I ever sent it. I’d doubt Bill would have let me. All the same there was a reason it stopped me in my tracks. It captured the end of an era in, I hope, a unique perspective.

DOBELL FEDERAL ELECTORATE COUNCIL PO Box XXX The Entrance 2261 

Secretary Mark Gallagher (043) XX XXXX     President    Bill Leslie (043) XX XXXX

Fax: (043) XX XXXX 

__________________________________________________

3 March 1996

MEDIA RELEASE

Somewhere around eight o’clock last Saturday night, deeply engrossed in the task of scrutineering in Dobell, I was paying little attention to a nearby comrade with a mobile phone jammed in his ear.  He was calling home to see how the kids were.  I was more concerned with the ballot papers being counted before me indicating some sort of a swing in an unsavoury direction.  I was starting to figure on maybe three or four per cent. 

When James got off the phone he seemed a little worked-up as I caught him in the corner of my eye bounding toward me.  His son had told him we’d lost seven seats in a “landslide”, and “Michael Lee was in trouble in Dobell”.  That was as detailed as the message got.  I thought “Seven seats?  Where?  Queensland?  Not exactly a landslide?!  Four per cent swing isn’t nice but we can hold Dobell on six per cent.” 

These were the first indications I had of the drama unfolding.  I had known it was possible we might lose but reckoned we’d claw our way over the line.  Of course I’d been so passionate all day in telling everybody else around that we’d romp in I even had some veteran Liberals conceding by four o’clock – two hours before polling closed.  None of us could have predicted the severity of this loss.  Not even with twelve months worth of negative polls sitting on the dresser at home.

Within an hour I’m jumping in the car to whip down to the Michael Lee’s electorate office, knowing the results from my booth indicate a five and a half per cent swing.  My booth is traditionally less friendly to Labor so while I’m concerned I figure across the whole electorate we’re probably not in quite so bad shape. 

You can imagine my surprise when I flick on the radio and somebody says “Liberal forty seat majority..”  Then again when I walk into the office to find a high profile Federal Minister at the keyboard trying to calculate how many hundred absentee and postal votes he needs to pick up to hold his seat.  We’re looking at a seven per cent swing.  In the adjoining electorate of Robertson Frank Walker has been frog-marched out of Gosford.  Is this for real?  Surely it’s just a bad dream.

I was thirteen when Labor came to power Federally.  I was concerned but not active enough when Unsworth was scuttled in New South Wales, and did my bit to help put Carr back in there.  After ’93 I was naive enough to believe the ineptitude of conservatives would only deepen until they’d eventually become politically irrelevant.  So here I stand facing my first defeat.  And what a lesson it has been.

I managed to anticipate some of the terms I’d be hearing as I tuned into Channel 9’s Sunday the following morning.  Jim Whaley, for example, liked ‘decimating’.  Someone else thought ‘soul-searching’ was appropriate.  A Liberal interviewee offered ‘go away and work out what they stand for’.  Bob Hawke stumped me though when he used one I hadn’t anticipated.  He said ‘bullshit’.

The official Labor assessment of the defeat is the “it’s time” factor.  No party can expect to be in office forever.  When we assess our performance the length of time one holds office is less relevant than what we have achieved, how our initiative and energy have affected Australia. 

No achievement could be more important than to be the first Government in either Colonial or Federal history to reject the notion of terra nullus – to legally recognise, embrace and promote the broader recognition that human society existed on this continent prior to European settlement – societies with law, religious faith and iconography, social order, education, foreign policy.  Gough Whitlam once said that if he was remembered for only one contribution to this nation he wished it would be for the fight to redress the historical treatment of indigenous peoples.  For Labor this struggle has never been merely an exercise in political correctness or pandering to an interested minority.  As a political organisation whose most fundamental principles are fairness and equity this is more than a cause – a stiring obligation to humanity. 

Much is made of the aparrent de-polarisation of Australian politics from the extremes toward the middle-ground.  Labor is seen to have moved toward the right and now the Co-alition toward a more moderate conservatism.  But there remains an important philosophical difference.  In conservative politics greatest emphasis is placed on the freedom of and opportunity for individual human endeavour, while obligation to ‘the other’ is conditional.  Basically, where Labor and the Democrats share common ground is in a philosophy placing the obligation to society paramount to the freedom of individual endeavour.  Freedom is thus more conditional.  This is not to suggest that freedom of the individual is not an important principle to Labor or that conservatives are bereft of any social obligation. 

So what has a cadet of the labour movement learned from all this?  First of all I am not convinced of what degree we have influenced the conservatives to moderate themselves.  I am convinced they’re not quite so politically inept as they had been in recent years. 

And when it comes to conceding defeat, if you have achieved many important things, if the faith you have held throughout dictates an obligation to humanity, and if you have made this world a little fairer in some way, then there will be no quivering of lips, straining in the vocal chords, or tears for the cameras.  You have not failed and therefore have not really been defeated.

And thus began the Howard era. The reference to the Australian Democrats is interesting I guess considering where the road has taken them and me a decade and a half later.

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve also been reading the Australia in the Asian Century white paper. It’s a broad and constructive document, an excellent snapshot of where we’re at as a nation and an optimistic statement of intent. It has many of Labor’s of nation-building hallmarks, but it’s not the Party I joined nor the Party with which I found victory in defeat back then. The document demonstrates many of the failings as I see it of the ALP today. Full of wonderful sentiment, but in reality it represents an absolute consultant-fest where at every turn Labor’s capacity to deliver will be consumed by its emphasis on the process rather than results. This is what left the former NSW Labor Government unable to deliver on straightforward projects despite significant investment of time and money – like light rail, or a modern public transport ticketing system after a decade of running the project and $70 million to one consultancy alone. And all this talk of engagement with Asia taken alongside our treatment of asylum seekers – under Labor’s leadership the message our nation is sending to the world is yeah we’re very open and responsive to Asia, so long as there’s a dollar in it.

Why I quit the ALP

On March 27 I cancelled my membership of the Australian Labor Party. After seventeen years it didn’t seem an easy thing to do, literally letting go of something you believed in. Seventeen years is not a small portion of anyone’s life so I hope I at least demonstrated a capacity to hold on. I’d known for a long time it was no longer the party I joined at the start of 1995. It was either a matter of getting in the middle of it and being responsible for change – becoming active again and influencing the agenda and the platform, or waiting for it to get back on course and once again become the institution that had inspired me to be part of it. In recent times I realised neither of these things were ever going to happen. Surprisingly once I’d done it quitting turned out to be a natural and very easy thing to do. A great weight was suddenly lifted from my shoulders, a new sense of freedom I hadn’t anticipated.

Most Australians have diverse backgrounds so it is not unusual that I should come both from a line of uncompromising arch-conservatives of the countrified variety and from a line of died-in-the-wool ‘Light on the Hill’ types for whom Labor is as fundamental as the blood in your veins. I began to develop a political consciousness from my teens onward, a time when the Hawke Government was leading Australians toward a more inclusive, multicultural society where no-one was left behind, when Howard and other conservatives were still preaching a racially based nationalism and fighting against things like the Mabo Decision in the High Court, which was nothing more than the recognition that the indigenous people who lived on this continent before European settlement were human beings after all, and not part of the fauna. That’s all it said, and yet the conservatives hated it. They stood for placing commerce above all other priorities and not incidentally what all conservatives, politicians and their constituents, had in common was hatred toward some sector of the community or another. The only difference between the conservative politician and the conservative voter was that those who voted conservative liked to express their hatred, whereas the politician for reasons of pragmatism had to be more subtle. That’s why during the Howard era the concept of ‘political correctness’ was so attacked. To all who liked to denegrate and marginalise their fellow Australians, whether that be single mothers, the unemployed (dole bludgers), coons, wogs, refos, poofters, slope-heads, unions – the conservatives were their party.

By my mid-twenties I’d scraped through university full of optimism for the future. Oh yes, like many young people I believed I was going to really make a mark on the world. The reality in the mid-90s was somewhat different however. There was a recession and unemployment was bobbing around above 10% – 11.7% for males I recall at one time (unemployment rate for males was consistently 1% higher than for females). Around me family members were losing homes and businesses. Job hunting was an extended period of trauma. Those years have left me fundamentally altered – not as dramatic but sort of like the Great Depression or WWII had left my grandparents altered. After two years out of university I stopped counting at over 200 job applications, 3 dozen job interviews and 8 jobs (the uncertainty went on for another year but I was too numb to care). Some of those jobs suited me fine but were only temporary roles, or only part-time. The jobs I held longest were as a brickie’s labourer and as part time (15 hrs per week) mailboy at the University of Newcastle Central Coast Campus – jobs I was proud of but simply not long term prospects. It was this period in general and two jobs I had in particular that drove me to join the ALP.

My first permanent full-time job after university (I’d been in the workforce three years before enrolling at uni) came after about a year and a half of job hunting. I had high hopes for it – an office job in a medium-sized growing Sydney company with an international affiliation and a young and vibrant team. Their business was correspondence courses but to say they were providing distance education would have been stretching a very long bow as it turned out. My job was customer service which I soon learned consisted of a number of scripted responses to deflect and perpetuate the duping of disgruntled customers, of which there were many thousands. It was all about the small-print. They more or less exclusively advertised through TV Week and Take 5 magazine because, in hindsight I realise, they knew the demographic they were after. Though there were several courses, probably their most popular product was a “Child Care Diploma”, and this one illustrates the company’s approach as good as any. The Child Care Diploma as I recall cost $399 (in 1995 so I guess in the vicinity of $1000 in 2012 terms). People would either post in a form from the magazine or telephone the company and be sent some paperwork including an ‘enrolment form’. This particular course and the manner in which it was delivered attracted mostly young unemployed women, a great proportion of them stay-at-home mothers without the freedom or confidence to get along to TAFE, and all of them hoping a job in the growing Child Care industry would help get them out of a rut. Sooner or later though they generally worked out that the company’s “Child Care Diploma” wasn’t worth the paper it was written on. Sure, they were sent some courseware – some written exercises and multiple choice questions, but for good reason in order to actually work in Child Care a person needs to be certified. This course provided them a fine looking “Child Care Diploma” but no certification nor training or experience relevant to certification, referred to by the authorities and the industry as the remarkably similar sounding “Child Care Certificate”! My job was to field their calls and letters, and the calls and letters from their parents, lawyers, local Members and police, refer them to the fineprint on the back of the form they’d signed, advise them there were no refunds and continue the charade that they were committed even if they were still paying a course off in instalments. Many very sad duped people continued to pay their piddling instalments for months or years after they’d given up on their meaningless courses. Day after day the heartbreak and anger was palpable – one after the other. It was clear this was the company’s business model, they were out to dupe people.

Here I was seeing it first hand, in the middle of greed above any thought for treating your fellow human being with the minimum level of decency. Not incidentally, with their blue suits and designer dresses, their expensive jewelery and expensive cars, their North Shore location and a monthly thank you from the parent company for all the money we’d funnelled back to the UK – these people were the conservative heartland who John Howard stood for first and foremost before any of his ‘battlers’ got a look in. The battlers were being duped, exploited and heartlessly pilfered by them with the same indifference you might expect from the lowliest petty-thieving jailbird trash. The true urban conservative constituency.

The following year, my demoralisation having deepened through a relationship break-up in no small part due to my employment prospects, I stumbled into a job in a telephone sales call centre. It was like a call centre battery (as in battery hen) with a long corridor lined by little room after little room with a dozen telephone cubicles running along the walls of the room. Each room was a different “company”, most of them selling a different set of products but some of them selling the same products as a “different company” down the hall. I was handed the Gold Coast edition of the Yellow Pages – my “territory”, and began calling all of the businesses who my products were relevant to. I quickly learned it was no coincidence my book was very dog-eared, and many potential customers remembered ‘me’ from before. I copped many doses of abuse from customers who learned from bitter experience that my sub-standard products were not fit for the professional purposes they had been purchased.

The origins of the Liberal Party of Australia are, as the name suggests, reactionary. In literal terms in order to be ‘liberal’ one must be ‘liberated’ from some constraint. Though in some countries the political term ‘liberal’ indicates the liberation from social constraints of a moralistic nature or of tradition, in Australian political history (as in Japan coincidentally) it was applied to the liberation of business, commerce and private endeavour. Thus we sometimes hear reference to the small “l” liberal as opposed to the large “L” Liberal. The Labor Governments of Curtin and Chifley steered Australia through WWII and the post-war reconstruction, a time when fiscal and social order were necessarily subject to a great deal of institutionalised control and austerity. This culminated in ’49 with Chifley threatening to Nationalise the banks, who were seen by some as profiteering with no regard to social responsibility (interesting in the current context, Smokin’ Ben might almost get away with it today). The Liberal Party’s rise came out of the Australian peoples’ desire to be free of this – enough with all the austerity and the controls please! The Liberal Party and in particular their founder Bob Menzies were seen as the great liberators of Australian commerce and enterprise and that informs conservative politics in this country to this day. But there’s a middle ground to be struck. Business should not be liberated to the point of being able to exploit and do harm to the vulnerable.

I joined the Australian Labor Party because in those days they stood for inclusivity, for all Australians, for accepting and embracing the diversity that is humanity. Their inclusivity extended not just to our country but they were outward looking, seeing our place in a world that included all of the world, not just an English speaking world, a British Commonwealth, an Anglo-Saxon world or a world populated by people of Western European roots. The contrast with the conservatives was definitive. The conservative parties stood for a narrow idea of Australia from the past based on a racially homogenised society only acheived through the notion of “assimilation” or acceptance of others’ origins only on the grounds that they give them away and adopt our perceived origins as their own. The ALP were the party for people who not only recognised the diversity in the world but treasured it, held it up as an ideal. This empathy for all people was also consistent with Labor origins, though I do recognise that protectionism on racial and nationalistic grounds was part of the small ‘l’ labour movement for a good portion of its first century. That said, to exploit and do harm to others in the name of material self interest had always been what the ALP fought against. They also therefore held the middle ground when it came to the place of business and commerce in society. This last point enabled the ALP to be more open-minded and receptive as a growing awareness of the vulnerability of the natural environment began to gain momentum and this was also a fundamental reason I joined the Party. When the environment was a dirty word for the conservatives, and ‘greeny’ was just another term in the long list the conservatives used to be derogatory about their fellow Australians, Labor was taking leadership on the environment.

It was Gough Whitlam who recognised that Labor’s place in Australia was to take its base in standing up for workers against exploitative commercial self-interest and extend that to all those who would otherwise be powerless or marginalised, not just workers in relation to their bosses but  women in relation to men, minorities of sexuality, racial and religious minorities, the less wealthy. It extended Labor’s franchise and it informed the ideal of governing for all people which remained genuine through the Hawke and Keating eras and was applied not at the exclusion of those in positions of power but by engaging with them, being from within them, and it resulted in many years of Government for the ALP.

What went wrong.

During that period Labor continued its evolution into a slick professional political fighting machine. A big part of that was the application of some science to politics. This consisted of commissioning increasingly more sophisticated polling and commercial market research techniques and employing commercial marketing theory. Labor were not alone. One of my casual jobs during that sketchy period of employment was as a door-to-door interviewer for Roy Morgan Research. Howard, Downer and Costello were being mooted as alternative leaders in the years before the ’96 election.

In those days this application of methodology still appeared to only supplement the process of politicing and actual political leadership informed by the moral conviction of the leader still trumpted it. By the time of Beazley though at the turn of the millennium it was all about getting a handle on public opinion and engaging consultants to tell you how to push the right buttons with the Australian public. When the commentators talk about the ‘Labor machine’ nowadays they don’t even realise themselves what they’re referring to is a virtual gaggle of psychologists, both amateur and professional. Thus you get a term like ‘working families’ repeated ad-nauseum until the general public is literally mentally sick from hearing it. Yet the ‘professionals’ stick dogedly to their theory impervious to the distress they’re in fact causing the community, completely and utterly out of touch. People see straight through this as ‘method’ and they only vote for you because you’re the least detestable option at the time. The only ones who are deluded by the ‘keyword ad-nauseum’ theory are the Parliamentary ALP themselves (and possibly, though not necessarily, the consultants they engaged who told them to repeat it beyond sanity). This is what we have in the place of statesmanship and community leadership from the ALP and on this front the Libs have it all over them. As miopic, unfair and un-inclusive as much of the Conservative platform can be at least it comes from conviction. They are able to effectively lead public opinion instead of trying to second-guess it, to follow it, because they’re not afraid to reveal themselves.

The hegemony of methodology in place of a soul at the head of ALP provided the genesis of the Latham implosion. Latham tried to take the reins of the Party believing it was his right and in fact his obligation as leader. However the psychological approach to politics by that time so firmly entrenched in the Party seeks to place the party leader in a straightjacket. Latham reacted the same way many people would, by going mad.

You’ve got to wonder to what extent this same tension between political leadership and methodological politics also contributed to Rudd’s falling out with his Parliamentary colleagues despite his popularity with the public.

The net result is soullessness, a party that may get some political results but without legitimacy, a party not reaching the potential it otherwise would. More specifically, and something I take personally, it’s resulted in a party that did not take its natural place in neutering the dark side of the Howard era of politics but instead perpetuates the inate racism arising out of such things as the ongoing demonisation of asylum seekers. After more than a decade of waiting for a Labor leader to lead in the direction that Whitlam, Hawke or Keating would have I belatedly have to accept that this is not a party that I want to be seen to be associated with.