In his article ‘Unity Is Death‘, Liam Byrne argues that ‘within the contemporary ALP, there exists no force capable of articulating a vision for Australia that fundamentally challenges the neoliberal orthodoxies that have dominated its recent thinking.’ I think that this claim is not strictly true.

Members of the party have been dissatisfied with decisions taken at federal and state levels around plans to privatise government assets, reductions in government spending to achieve budget surplus including welfare ‘efficiencies’ like the changes to the single mothers’ payment, and alterations to the size of the public sector, amongst other things. The Hawke and Keating suite of changes to deregulate and remove tariffs were not necessarily popular at the time, either. This article in Challenge magazine by Louise Tarrant, Wake up and get out of bed, clearly expresses frustration with the economic direction of the ALP, calling for action to deal with increased inequality and an increasingly insecure job market.

There is also evidence of alternative conceptions of economic strategy in the party. The ALP has shown promise in its plans to transition to an economic model that shows more concern for environmental issues through things like the Murray-Darling basin plan, the insulation program and the price on carbon emissions. There is also a transition that is oriented towards services and information necessitating intervention to develop markets, and a stronger focus on education (through the school buildings program, for example) and innovation to facilitate that transition. Healthcare was also a priority under the Rudd-Gillard governments, and the NDIS is arguably a key strategic reform in the disability sector. Party members have also articulated a need to increase social wages like the Newstart allowance, and to improve access to public housing and public transport.

As a fair number of post-mortems have argued, areas where the party fell over include the first attempt to introduce carbon pricing, an inability to sell its achievements (such that the Coalition successfully argued that programs suffered from poor implementation), and in that perception that all the elements within the party have bowed to the neoliberal conception of economy and no longer stand for the interests of the people or the workers. Public arguments that the ALP should loosen its ties to the union movement do not help, regardless of whatever problems unions are facing. If the ALP does not stand for the worker, then whom does it stand for? It’s not a tie that should be broken.

If arguments about direction are taking place in the party, if it still has some life in it, then the problem is more about attracting talented and interested people back into the party, particularly into the more left-leaning section of the party. It seems that old school worker politics no longer sells and that some people are intimidated by strident unionism. People who would otherwise support positions that strive for equality are frightened off or go and join other parties. Others, including Guy Rundle, are contemptuous of perceived weakness, and think that the Left is no longer able to win intra-party fights in order to set the policy direction.

It may be the case that the Left needs to tone down identity politics and present itself as more welcoming to attract people and win issue-based fights. Appearing as a closed off silo only suitable for people with certain views and methods doesn’t help the cause or deliver solutions to problems of insecurity.

We also need to think on a broader scale and incorporate geopolitics more openly into domestic policy ideas – if we confine arguments only to ‘foreign policy’ or ‘international affairs’ then we miss opportunities for policy transfer and we fail to acknowledge the international scale of some issues. In a globalised world, solutions to inequality and insecure labour markets cannot be developed as easily as they could during the post-war period and resentment of the super-rich and their financial practices is perceived by them as an attack on job-creators. There is an argument that globalisation has removed the need for a social consensus to improve the circumstances of people in a given state so that they have more disposable income for consumption of goods because companies are no longer bound by or to the nation state. Arguments to abandon globalisation and turn to localisation instead are unfeasible – that horse bolted a long time ago. But proponents of localisation often represent people disenfranchised by processes of globalisation and immigration, which shift work offshore and that can lower labour costs for some types of workers. So we have to start thinking about developing solutions to these problems at the international level.

Pulling people all over the world out of poverty, improving conditions and wages for them, and giving them the capacity to contribute to decision making processes will stabilise labour markets and increase human security for all of us. Environmental problems are also increasingly global – pollution, climate change, and resource competition are things we need to plan for as part of the international community. ALP policy would benefit from a focus on strengthening diplomatic capacity and doing more than just restoring aid to the previous levels from when Labor was in government. Reform must continue – initiatives that would open up the party and give members more capacity to influence decision making within the party cannot be jettisoned because of perceived threats to any given power base. Lastly, we cannot condone the kind of aimless public squabbling that tells the people that the ALP is not focused on the issues.

We must be united against self-interest, inequality and conditions that deliver human insecurity – or we will all be united in witnessing the death of the party. And that will be a very sad thing indeed.