By ABC's Jonathan Green
Photo: Anthony Albanese pledged to uphold Labor values and tradition if he were elected leader. (AAP: Dan Himbrechts)
In a world in which appeals to tradition and the loyalties of the last century have lost their effect, the Australian Labor Party may or may not have a place, writes Jonathan Green.
A lot is changing in our world.
Those of us interested in media matters can accept, thanks to the weight of long argument and continuing evidence of commercial decline, that the daily newspaper might soon be a thing of fond memory.
National institutions like the Sydney Morning Herald (established 1831) and The Age (established 1854) might well be spending their last few years in print. It seems as likely as not.
We accept this flux. Some of us might even embrace it. These changes are part of the nature of our times, a moment of extraordinary transition in the fabric of that most fundamental property of our culture: the mechanisms through which we share information, the lines of increasingly quick and complex connection between us.
The notion of community is being reshaped by a revolution in communication. It's a process without a visible endpoint, and with almost limitless implications.
In the face of that sort of change, why should we assume that any institution or framework is impervious? The test will be one of adaptability, the willingness to be open-minded, to embrace new modes of connection and the closer, more organic interplay of community.
If this has implications for media, why should it not also have implications for politics? Could we imagine a Parliament that, let's say, worked from home? Could we imagine a political structure that interrogated us a little more closely on issues of our interest? One that made use of the possibilities of a newly connected world, possibilities that would have seemed fanciful when our first Canberra-based federal parliamentarians boarded various steam trains and made their way slowly across the sun-browned, sheep strewn pastures that flanked the infant capital in 1926?
They have moved buildings but precious little else has been changed about the fundamental ways in which our leaders and representatives do their business.
This was a Parliament that would grow to embrace the great ideological dichotomy that has shaped our politics since the middle of the last century, a constant double bill that has pitted the Australian Labor Party against a conservative coalition of Liberal and Country/National Party MPs.
And the ALP, well, of course, it went back even further than that, to 1891, a time of strikes, strife and great triumph for organised labour.
On Tuesday night in Sydney, we saw the launch of Anthony Albanese's campaign to lead that same ALP, an event staged in a trade union hall and filled with pledges to uphold Labor values and tradition.
This is of course a campaign that to the party's great credit is being thrown open to the ALP membership, 40,000 or so people whose vote on the leadership will have equivalent weight to 80 or so MPs. But that's progress of a sort for a party that lately seems a little low on inclusion.
Albanese made his pitch:
I'm putting myself forward though because I think at this time, I've got the vision, I can bring unity to the party, and I've got the strength that's required to take on Tony Abbott and bring him down in one term ... The way that I would see the coming period of opposition is that we need to defend our legacy. We need to defend our economic, social and environmental gains.
Greg Combet was there in full support:
When you have just lost an election, you need to look for someone who is very strong, someone steeped in Labor tradition...
And that, for fans of the social democratic agenda, is what's on offer: the defence of a legacy somewhat tainted by recent and quite resounding defeat, and a legacy best defended by drawing on century old values of the labour movement; a movement that in these modern times barely exists, one that represents some 13 per cent of private sector workers, and that for all its historic gains and significance can't help but be seen as something oddly antiquated.
Is this the foundation for modern progressive politics: a call out to the nineteenth century?
It might be a big step of the imagination, but the time might come when we could conceive of a world in which the Sydney Morning Herald no longer thumps on the driveway each morning and in which the Australian Labor Party no longer carries the burden of Australian progressive politics.
In a funny way it seems a political institution even more resistant to change than modern conservative politics, a brand of ideologically vigorous politics that seems far more in touch with the – sometimes admittedly quite lunatic - concerns of its popular base, a connection that carries with it a great intrinsic political strength. Our Coalition parties seem energised by their brushes with connected, community-based radicalism.
Which takes us to the Victorian seat of Indi, a seat held now by independent MP Cathy McGowan, after a campaign that turned a traditionally safe conservative margin on its head.
How? Through community activism, and resource. Through a campaign that worked to connect the disparate strands of a disgruntled electorate and focus its energies and concerns to unseat a member who seemed to struggle to form that same sense of community connection.
All parties should look to this example, and perhaps imagine a future for our politics in which campaigns of this type might just become an increasingly applied norm, some run by established party organisations with the wit to see the possibilities, others organised against those party organisations that do not.
It's a world that will change almost everything. A world in which appeals to tradition and the loyalties of the last century will have little effective place. A world that might have an Australian Labor Party, but a world, that, equally, might not.
Jonathan Green is the presenter of Sunday Extra on Radio National and a former editor of The Drum. His book, The Year My Politics Broke, is out on October 1. View his full profile here.
Modern politics 101: adapt or perish - The Drum (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)
