Yahoo Finance Chris Bowen says Labor needs to win back supporters who have been 'looking elsewhere'
Chris Bowen has issued a blunt warning to colleagues that the lessons of the pandemic don’t automatically make a case for centre-left governments, and “assuming the times will suit us or a mood for change will sweep us in with the tides is a sure-fire recipe for disappointment”.
The senior New South Wales Labor rightwinger and shadow federal health minister has used a new essay titled “Australia’s social democratic moment?” to argue Labor won’t win the next election unless it reconnects with voters who have historically looked to the ALP to improve their living standards “but have been looking elsewhere in recent years”.
Bowen says Labor in 2020 needs to define opportunity and aspiration more inclusively, finding better ways “to tell the story of our commitment to working people – and it can’t just be that we will make it easier for the children of the working class to get out of it”.
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He says the challenge is to convince voters Labor is not “merely interested in providing pathways to improved social mobility, but also improving the lot of those who can’t or don’t want to take that path”.
Bowen’s essay appears in a new collection of contributions by right faction players, including the former Labor leader Bill Shorten, the current deputy leader Richard Marles, and frontbenchers Jim Chalmers and Ed Husic, edited by Nick Dyrenfurth of the John Curtin Research Centre and unionist Misha Zelinsky.
The think pieces come as Labor MPs are ending 2020 at a low ebb after internal ructions, including a bruising public battle between Joel Fitzgibbon and Mark Butler over climate policy that culminated in a shouting match at the shadow cabinet and Fitzgibbon’s departure to the backbench.
With Labor MPs questioning whether they are currently well positioned to win a contest with Scott Morrison, Bowen has increased his visibility in recent months with speeches and reflections reiterating the need for Labor to reconnect with the suburbs; a call in August for Labor to significantly narrow its policy offering and reframe climate change as an economic issue; and a speech in October declaring Australia was facing a “pandemic” of insecure work.
In the new essay, Bowen says the global health crisis has reinforced the value of centre-left policy prescriptions and the “power of government” but that would only convert into a public mood for change if Labor made the case for government with “great care and precision”.
He says Labor can’t appeal to a university-educated professional class to the exclusion of working Australians. Bowen says Labor must also “reflect on how our rhetoric, positioning and prioritisation on matters as diverse as faith and freedom of religion, education and recreation have been received by voters who were once regarded as a reliable support base”.
Bowen notes a majority of the current generation of MPs and activists were the first in their families to go to university, living the “journey of improved social mobility”.
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He says education, and higher education, remains an important part of Labor’s ethos “but we also need to find ways of emphasising we are not merely interested in providing pathways to improved social mobility, but also improving the lot of those who can’t or don’t want to take that path”.
“Life must not be so miserable at the bottom or the middle as to demand a mad scramble out of it,” Bowen says. “We must guard against opportunity being seen narrowly as only through university or earned for those at the very top”.
He says opportunity “involves the capacity to have a fulfilling, secure job with agency in one’s life – not subject to the vagaries and callousness of the gig economy. It involves the opportunity to get a trade. It involves opportunity to live free of chronic disease which ravages lower socio-economic communities.”
While Labor’s internal debate about climate policy has become a proxy battle about whether the party’s policies are too progressive – which is the territory the Bowen essay traverses – the shadow health minister insists Labor can’t “duck” the existential challenges of the times.
Bowen says climate change and rampant land clearing around the world will make pandemics more likely, and climate change is the biggest health threat of the 21st century. But Labor can not afford “to ignore the concerns of workers concerned that their jobs and communities are already insecure enough without the added insecurity caused by action on climate change”.
As well as the contribution from Bowen, Shorten uses his essay to argue the lesson of the pandemic is “to fight for and retain a strong national economy of diverse industries”, including providing “tactical support” to “preserve industries while they evolve to changing needs”.
Shorten says the health crisis has “allowed people to look behind the curtain and see the dangers of Australia acting like a craven global outpost, the dangerous holes in sovereign capability, the places where dogma is stretched paper-thin over yawning chasms”.
Husic – who recently replaced Fitzgibbon on the frontbench – uses his essay to argue contemporary Labor should not be a facsimile of Bob Hawke and Paul Keating.
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Husic says Hawke and Keating succeeded because they changed the national conversation. He says Labor in 2020 has to be prepared “to challenge orthodoxy that sits outside of our party and within it”.
“Our future success will be defined by evolving with the times we’re in, crafting a compelling agenda that earns wide support and being courageous enough to reform where circumstance dictates,” Husic says.
Marles, the deputy opposition leader, makes the case for Labor to embrace a culture of entrepreneurship. “Australia must radically change its cultural attitude to trial and error that comes with taking risks – we must accept that failure is sometimes a necessary precondition to success,” he says.
“Setting the right economic conditions will allow the ambitiousness that leads to prosperity.”
