With the passage of the climate change bill, the Albanese government and the Australian Labor Party come to a position of effective dominance over the country that may be stable for some time. This was not a given from the election result, with its bare majority and a crossbench Senate.
They could have left the climate change targets unregulated to avoid a possible Greens ambush; they could have been facing an opposition which accepted the general principle and then poked holes in the execution, thus making some gains as a party of review and challenge. The party could have been under attack at the state level in Victoria, from a renewed opposition, landing blows on a compromised, tired and disliked Andrews government.
But none of that has happened; indeed, everything is the reverse.
The government’s smooth deal with the Greens and the teal independents deprived the right of what it was desperate for, a carbon pollution reduction scheme rematch, and there was a minimum of paying out on the Greens. The opposition’s mad-dog question time strategy — on the PM meeting a CFMMEU official, for example — sounded obsessive and unfocused.
The kicker was Nats MP Pat Conaghan trying to bring down Greens MP Max Chandler-Mather during his maiden speech, complaining of his “state of undress” for not wearing a tie, which gave Speaker Milton “Herman Munster” Dick the opportunity to slap down Conaghan while Chandler-Mather laughed.
Could it get any more shambolic? Yes, with the appearance of the amazing crushed-velvet “Marquee” Mitch Catlin, PR to the stars and to Matthew Guy, for a hundred grand in direct payment, which occupied everyone until the John Barilaro hearings came round again, and we were all given the spectacle of a true grotesque, wheedling and self-pitying. This marked the total collapse of the Coalition across the nation, and at every level of political action.
There is not only no stable Liberal government in the country — in Tasmania, it’s dependent on an independent, and the premier is changed fortnightly — there is no functioning opposition either. This is a pretty extraordinary one-sided situation for the country to be in. Our federal system has usually ensured that there was always some state leader who could project force and power. But Dominic Perrottet is the nearest thing, and he comes across like a Christian wedding planner.
Labor’s commanding status in relation to this shemozzle becomes almost total. The unity of purpose and clarity of projection is substantial. Rationality and consistency is the dominant feeling around, which gives a sense of legitimacy that spreads well into the people who voted against them. There is a retroactive sense that this had to happen as it has.
This is added to by the effectiveness and command of the state Labor. The two new ones in South Australia and Western Australia are highly popular. It’s a measure of the degree of command that the battered and bruised Andrews government is even more dominant in Victoria than it was. The federal and state governments are now integrated in overarching purpose and action.
But this command and unity makes something else visible. Labor is now the party of capital, its expression and means of coordination and integration. With its final burst of pre-election commitments to not raise taxes, including corporate taxes, its clear communication to the resources industry that it would be hands-off, and its standing back from any notion that it would enforce a specific or programmatic national interest in matters economic, Labor moved into a space that the Coalition had vacated by its adoption of clientelism and cronyism: that of the manager of intersecting parts of capital, and the guarantor of stable circumstances for accumulation and profit. In doing so, it decisively withdrew from any last residual notion that it was in some way a party that represented workers in the political sphere.
That judgment may seem unusual given that Tony Burke has just gone up against the private sector in threatening to close the loophole as regards enterprise agreement cancellations. In fact it fits well, and it fits with everything the government does, separately, with regard to the Fair Work Commission.
By leaving the FWC in place, as designed, and emphasising the mode of use — a government advocating and petitioning to it — the Albanese government is cementing in this type of state-party-class relationship. A Labor government is going to argue for a more generous treatment of workers by capital, and may shift regulations as such, but it is not going to make any changes that would shift structural power relations even slightly.
Having made the commitment to be the alternative party of capital during the election, Labor is now on the way to becoming the organic representative of such. The COVID pandemic fast-tracked a process under way since the 2008 crash: the ever more substantial involvement of the state in keeping capitalism going day to day by propping up demand, and the active involvement in supply chain problems.
With multiple sectors to be integrated in a way that the market now cannot do efficiently, post-social-democratic parties become the preferred agent of capital in state power. The old bourgeois parties of capital, when they fail to understand the need for this switch — the switch to whole system management, rather than simply advancing the interests of one segment within it — become outdated, become agents of system disruption.
Since what capital requires most for profit-making is a reliable framework, consistent over time, the failure of old bourgeois parties to supply that causes capital to desert them. When industry bodies, one by one, peeled off from the Coalition to back a specific and legislated emissions target, the Coalition simply called them traitors. They didn’t get it, and they still don’t.
Labor’s commitment to capital thus dictates, and is expressed by, its actions on social issues. The benefits system is taken over and run on an enduring principle: that it is there to discipline and shape the able-bodied worker, not to ensure their interests and rights as citizens and human beings. Thus the commitment to the new Workforce Australia procedures; thus the refusal to raise basic JobSeeker and other rates. The desperate poverty they create is a social terror strategy to prod people back to work; the collateral damage to those who can’t work or find work is judged acceptable.
The NDIS retains its role as parallel to Julia Gillard’s Fair Work Commission, that of enforcing neoliberal practices in social services, as the FWC neoliberalises employment relations. Bill Shorten’s recent “I didn’t know” hissy fit about the NDIS scandal — hundreds of severely disabled people more or less permanently hospitalised, because there is no capacity within the subcontract-oriented NDIS to care for them — fools no one. Everyone in the care sector knew that the NDIS would come to this situation eventually; it has been talked about for years. What is required, backstopping NDIS, is a state-based care system, steered by the needs of such people to live as full a life as possible. This is exactly the sort of approach which Labor now cannot suggest on any significant scale.
Labor’s role as the party which integrates capital and social life, such that neoliberal capitalism is smoothly, rationally, non-corruptly extended to all areas of existence, is mirrored in federal-state integration by Labor governments. State Labor governments privatise social agencies and regulatory bodies to this end. They turn infrastructure development from the provision of things we need to mass creation of investment and demand, all to fill the ever-present threat of a vacuum.
Victoria’s “suburban rail loop” is an example of this. It is the enactment of Keynes’ observation that it would be best to tender out digging holes in the ground to get demand going if you can think of nothing else to do in a slump. Its purpose is to provide a pretext to create new “activity centres” which now bypass planning regulations entirely; Big Infrastructure will then get vast value capture with its loop tunnel commitments and can turn suburban town and village centres into ghastly high-rise mini-cities, essentially obliterating the notion of neighbourhood. The alternative — planning urban development in a genuinely social fashion — is now out of reach. Some of these “big builds” have a dual character, in that they are genuinely social in intent. But if Labor were still a genuinely “social” party of any sort, there would, for example, be a lot more emphasis on housing rather than transport.
But state Labor’s role goes further — into all social legislation. The Andrews government’s parallel recent initiative has been to create draconian protest laws against actions on logging in central Victoria. The link with capital is not immediately obvious: there’s no real money in this forestry; it’s to keep a few sawmills going and keep the forestry section of the CFMMEU from arcing up. Old growth could be replaced with new renewable timber products to keep these sawmills working; in any gap caused by doing such, it would be cheaper to send every timber worker on a luxury ocean cruise than continue existing arrangements.
But forestry isn’t the main game of these new laws. Their purpose is to permanently change Labor’s relationship to social protest after its century of being first a working-class party, and then a progressive coalition energised by new social movements. That is now absolutely and finally gone, and is being enthusiastically driven out. Labor’s new laws aren’t for the forests; they’re for the cities, in the years and decades to come, a rehearsal for Labor’s role as enforcer of social space being seen as primarily a place for capital, accumulation and profit, and everything else secondarily. Any reform Labor is associated with will tend to be socio-cultural and individual — gender stuff, assisted dying, etc — rather than socio-economic or political. The pathway opens for Labor to be a fully integrated authoritarian neoliberal party, increasingly the discipliner of the people it once sought to represent.
In the early days of this new relationship, the Coalition exists simply as a rump of old capital, desperately hoping that culture wars might keep it together. The Greens and independents will emerge as the true opposition. Will emerge? They can, if they understand what has occurred, and strive to put together a unified core alternative program, which stands up for the idea of a society geared towards human ends, against the endless extension of capital, driven by many decent people who have become the devil’s party without knowing it.
