Back to the future with Mark Latham’s Quarterly Essay

In mid-1983, Michael Foot led the British Labour Party to a disastrous general election loss. The party, already in opposition, lost 60 seats in a 9.3% swing against it. Labour barely scraped into second place ahead of the SDP-Liberal alliance, with just 27.6% of the vote. Foot’s economically interventionist manifesto and socialist rhetoric were blamed for the scale of the loss.

Agreement on a Parliamentary Budget Office

I wrote a post the other day about the widespread calls for a Parliamentary Budget Office. Now the Greens and Labor have reached an agreement that, amongst other things, commits the parties to pursuing a PBO.

The agreement says:

The Parties agree to work together and with other parliamentarians to implement parliamentary reforms, [including] establishing within 12 months a Parliamentary Budget Office within the Parliamentary Library with the structure, resourcing and protocols being the subject of decision by a special committee of the Parliament which is truly representative of the Parliament.

So, the agreement between Labor and the Greens settles three things: that they’ll seek to establish a PBO, that it will sit within the Parliamentary Library, and that the rest will be decided by a committee. That leaves an awful lot yet to be decided, including the crucial question of precisely what the PBO’s role will be.

Bernard Keane and Jeremy Sear have each backed the creation of a PBO in recent days, without making it clear what role they envisage for the institution. I suspect that some PBO supporters, particularly on the left, may resile from their support if the Parliamentary committee recommends a strong PBO (although there are good arguments in favour of a strong PBO, as Nicholas Gruen outlined in the comments on my last post).

I’ll watch the process with great interest.

What do progressives care about?

I would describe myself as politically progressive. I want all the usual things that my fellow progressives so vocally agitate for: humane treatment of refugees, strong environmental protections, equality (including marriage rights) for all, reconciliation with indigenous people.

But I don’t only care about those things. In my view, to be politically progressive is to care about substantive equality of opportunity, dignity in work, quality public health and education systems that are available to everyone.

It’s becoming increasingly clear to me that these are lower-order priorities for many of my fellow progressives than issues like gay marriage. Today, my twitter feed has been full of people (understandably) railing against the conservatism and disappointing timidity of this election campaign. But, apart from a few unionists I follow, no one has mentioned the big announcement this morning that all workers who earn less than $108 000 per year will have all their entitlements protected by law in the event that their employer goes bankrupt.

This is big news. The Howard Government created an ad-hoc program that they stitched together to prevent a bit of political embarrassment when a company went bust owing its workers thousands of dollars, and a certain Stan (brother of John) Howard was on the board. The scheme was never legislated, meaning it could be revoked or modified by ministerial decree, and workers’ payments were capped. The ALP this morning pledge to create a scheme that is uncapped for almost all employees, and is enshrined in law.

This is the sort of thing that I would have thought progressives would celebrate loudly. Unions have called for a scheme like this for years. Instead: near silence.

It’s widely acknowledged that the ALP’s support base is split between a few different groups. In caricature, they’re the inner city ‘elites’ and the outer-suburban working class. Perhaps the indifference among twitterers towards this policy and others like it show that the gap between the two groups is really larger than I had previously allowed myself to believe.