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As Labor insiders chafe against the regular and outspoken criticism from Labor’s elder statesmen, some say it provides the contestability that this government lacks. By Jason Koutsoukis.

‘The last free freedom fighters’: Labor’s war with its old guard

Former prime minister Paul Keating is greeted by Anthony Albanese.

Credit: Matt Jelonek / Getty Images

To the Labor wise men who gather for lunch in Sydney once a month – Paul Keating, Bob Carr, John Faulkner and other warriors of the past – there is no mistaking the writing on the wall.

The government led by Anthony Albanese is a timid troupe of shivers looking for a spine to run up.

Lickspittle, a favourite Keating put-down for anyone who shows the slightest hint of deference towards the United States or the United Kingdom, is a term collectively applied to the prime minister, his deputy Richard Marles and Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong.

Interstate members of the chorus, including Gareth Evans and Bill Kelty, aren’t holding back either.

The Albanese government’s instinct on an increasing number of issues, said Evans in his Barry Jones Oration last month, “has been to move into cautious, defensive, wedge-avoiding mode”.

Earlier in September, in a closed-room speech, Kelty told Melbourne business leaders bold reform shouldn’t be that hard. “It should also be an exciting thing to do,” Kelty said. “But there’s excuses. There’s a lot of good talkers, but they don’t do anything. My whole life, I was told things were impossible. Medicare was impossible. Super was impossible. But it happened.”

Former factional warlords such as Stephen Conroy and Alan Griffin, both ministers in the Rudd and Gillard governments, are also active on the sidelines, exerting influence around preselections where they can, and around policy.

For many Labor insiders, both in Canberra and across the country, the carping from the sidelines is an annoying distraction they wish would go away.

“What really struck me about the Hawke and Keating governments, and particularly the Hawke period, was that there were no Whitlam government ministers wandering around shitbagging the prime minister, his ministers or their priorities,” said one Labor veteran. “It’s one thing to say the government is on the wrong track, but to descend into the highly personal attacks that we are seeing is not at all helpful.”

One current member of Labor’s front bench expressed concern that nostalgia had addled Labor’s elders, making them forget the pressures of leadership.

“Have these guys forgotten how difficult it was to govern? The criticism they faced?” the minister said. “No one questions that the Hawke and Keating governments were great reforming governments, but it would be helpful if members of those same governments recalled the lows as easily as they do the highs,” the minister said.

Another Labor veteran rejected the charge the Albanese government had shirked major reform as a kind of wilful blindness.

“The energy transition to net zero is easily as big as the combination of trade liberalisation, industry policy, floating the dollar, financial deregulation and other moves to internationalise the economy – in fact it’s a lot bigger and much more complicated,” the person said. “The same mix of industry interests and conservative ideologies that opposed deregulation and economic reform in the 1980s, because they all hated it back then, are the same people opposing the energy transition.”

Governments never get credit for winning an argument, this Labor veteran said, pointing to Albanese’s changes to the previous government’s stage three tax cuts package as a striking example of that phenomenon.

“Remember when Albo’s changes to the stage three tax cuts package were political suicide? That if he went ahead and tinkered with the tax cuts it could prove fatal not just for his leadership but would haunt the government until election day,” the person said. “But then when he announced a redesigned tax cuts package to give 11.5 million taxpayers a bigger tax cut, what happened? This timid prime minister who is afraid of his own shadow somehow managed to take on a life-threatening issue and declare victory within 24 hours.

“The point is, the minute you have successfully netted down a reform and got broad support for it, it’s no longer bold reform, it’s just accepted wisdom,” the person added. “No one is questioning the wisdom of the policy.”

Another totemic issue for those wishing for a bolder agenda is gambling reform.

The House of Representatives Standing Committee on Social Policy and Legal Affairs, chaired by the late Labor MP Peta Murphy, released its report “You win some, you lose more” in 2023 calling for a comprehensive ban on online gambling advertising within three years. The prime minister kept his powder dry.

“Can you imagine what would have happened if we had said 18 months ago when the report came out that we would move to ban all online gambling?” the Labor veteran said. “Every conservative politician in the country would have been out there saying how this would kill every sporting code in the country, as well as half the country’s newspapers and television stations.

“We’re timid on gambling reform? Give me a break. The only way that consensus emerges on this is if we don’t lead it. If you’re the campaign director for getting that thing done, then the last Australian you want to sign up for it is the prime minister. Only by waiting and carefully considering the options can we come out with a policy that strikes a balance and has a hope of getting through the Senate.”

The Albanese government has no shortage of major reforms already signed off or well advanced, from the National Anti-Corruption Commission to overhauls of the National Disability Insurance Scheme, aged care, Medicare and the Housing Australia Future Fund and Future Made in Australia to come. It claims among its achievements two budget surpluses and a range of cost-of-living measures including energy bill relief, increased rent assistance and the single Parenting Payment, plus improvements in the economy such as falling inflation and rising wages. Former Albanese adviser Dean Sherr says while there is no question the government has been busy, keeping an eye on re-election is prudent politics.

“I think the key lesson that [Albanese] learned from the chaos of the Rudd and Gillard years, and the devastation that people in the Labor Party felt when we lost government after just two terms, was that progress is fleeting if you lose power before you can cement those changes,” says Sherr. “The Rudd government’s cap-and-trade emissions trading scheme was knocked back by the Greens and the Liberals in the Senate, and then Gillard eventually came up with a carbon tax … but when the Liberals won government a short time later the carbon tax was gone and climate action ended up more than two steps back.

“And as much as many people are sick of hearing about that, I think it does show the risk if your reforms aren’t bedded down and they aren’t future-proofed, and that if you charge ahead without consensus or without public support and public confidence, then you risk having everything ripped up and further back than where you started,” says Sherr.

“I mean no disrespect to the members of the Hawke and Keating governments, because I’m certainly mindful of Labor history and the contributions they made, but the world has changed since 1984.”

Still, Frank Bongiorno, professor of history at the Australian National University and author of The Eighties: The Decade That Transformed Australia, says there is more to the concerns raised by the old guard than just nostalgia and intergenerationalism.

“I think their concerns are referencing real differences,” says Bongiorno. “I think of how the Hawke government managed the US alliance – absolutely critical to the way in which it did so was contestability.”

Then foreign affairs minister Bill Hayden, says Bongiorno, had no hesitation in adopting a different kind of tone on the US alliance issues to the one adopted by Hawke.

“Hayden was much more measured, and the difference between the two of them gave the government’s policy on the US alliance – at a time when the US alliance was more controversial than it is today – a sense of roundedness. A sense that this was something that was actually being constantly debated, not just beyond the government but within it,” says Bongiorno.

“The difference between then and now is that I don’t have any sense that these kinds of issues are being seriously debated within this government.”

Issues such as AUKUS are being debated outside the government via pot shots from the old-timers, says Bongiorno – a generation that came of age in a government that did have contestability.

“The most vivid example was the MX missile tests, where Hawke had made a commitment to the Americans to allow the use of Australian bases for the testing of these missiles. He was rolled partly by the left, but he was also rolled by the right because he had made undertakings to the United States that had not been tested with the party. And then when they became contestable, he found himself in difficulty and had to back off. But it’s almost impossible to conceive of something like that happening in this government.”

People such as Paul Keating and Gareth Evans, argues Bongiorno, who had to argue the case for reform within their own government if they wanted to do something, are doing what they have always done.

“There’s been a bit of debate, obviously, in places like the national conference, but even the debate is obviously highly managed and a stark difference from what you would get during the 1980s at national conferences, which were very robust affairs. But the ALP today is not the same party, the whole branch structure out there with the literally hundreds of branches around Australia, with significant numbers of members who had opinions on things like uranium or the US alliance, or nuclear ships, or whatever the issue happens to be. That just seems to me to be a long way from where the Labor Party is today, and I don’t think that’s going to be turned around.”

One Labor minister reinforces Bongiorno’s point, saying Labor had got itself into a position where the party structures were sick.

“It’s becoming a top-down, invitation-only society,” the minister tells The Saturday Paper. “All the preselections are done by the national executive, and the leadership of the parliamentary party doesn’t actually believe in the rank and file. So these greybeards are voicing their criticisms because they have a view of where the party should be. But the other point is: if they don’t say anything, no one will.

“There is a place between complete anarchy and complete dictatorship, but the only people who can stand up to the party leadership, who will stand up to the party leadership, are Keating and Kelty and Evans and Barry Jones. They’re the last free freedom fighters in the Labor Party,” the minister adds.

“The truth is that the party doesn’t really exist at the moment. It’s either old people or ministerial staffers or a couple of union secretaries. No one’s joining. It’s practically impossible to join. But the pathology is masked by electoral success, by compulsory preferential voting that has until now ensured that Labor governments are elected at the state and federal level.

“We’ve got ourselves into a situation where we’re timid and we’re woke, and that’s pretty fucked,” the Labor minister adds. “Tax policies don’t win you elections, but it’s hard to win an election without a tax policy. The basic dissonance in this country, the intergenerational wealth gap, where it’s not just young versus old, but older, richer parents, has never been more important. On housing, climate, student debt and other issues that are so important to people under 30, I’m not sure we are talking to them.”

This is a problem, says Dean Sherr, that is exacerbated by a social media environment that encourages voters to want politicians to solve problems relevant to their own group or social demographic.

“This idea that a government has to be representative of the entire country, I think increasingly for a lot of people, especially young people, they don’t necessarily think about that. I think they’re looking for voices that resonate with their concerns and with their beliefs, and they want politicians who just speak their truths, and so they don’t understand concepts of caucus solidarity and the need for collective decision-making. But at the same time, you can’t have a government of 76 independents,” says Sherr.

“There are a lot of different communities being represented at the government table right now and I think increasingly we’re moving into a world where it’s harder and harder for different communities to all feel represented by the same messaging and the same policies.”

With Keating, Evans, Carr, Kelty and others likely to keep speaking out on issues that matter to them, another Labor insider said there was also cause for optimism.

“They’re outside the government but inside the party … the net effect of what they’ve been saying is that it’s got all of us thinking harder about AUKUS and how we can keep the party vital. That’s what debate is for, isn’t it?”

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on October 12, 2024 as "‘The last free freedom fighters’: Labor’s war with its old guard".

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