Keating shot down Albo, but similarities are eerie
PAUL Keating emerged from his China-branded political crypt last week to helpfully remind us about the cyclical nature of Australian politics. Back on this day in 1996, Keating – having been punted as prime minister a few weeks earlier – was just another unemployed 18th century French architecture bore in a nation with one solitary remaining Labor government.
Labor’s Bob Carr ran NSW. Federally and in every other state, however, it was Libs and Nats across the board.
Skip ahead to the present and things are much better for the ALP, leaving aside the vigorous gummings dished out to senior
Labor figures at the National Press Club last Wednesday.
Keating may now be toothless in terms of any real influence, but any attack need only be strong enough to injure its targets.
A kitten can demolish a dandelion. By that measure, Keating’s targets were exceptionally well chosen.
Anyway, we’ve gone from one NSW Labor government in a Coalition nation 27 years ago to one NSW Coalition government in a Labor nation today – not including Tasmania, which then as now doesn’t count.
And by late on Saturday night, Chris Minns could well have defeated Dominic Perrottet to become the NSW Premier-elect.
Labor’s mainland sweep will be complete.
At least for now.
From this point, assuming a Labor win in NSW this weekend, a study of past cycles-within-cycles could point to either continued or even long-term Labor dominance, or to a Coalition revival. Keating may be counter-intuitively relevant to this, for there are echoes in his own decline and defeat in Labor’s current federal government. Similarities are clear, no matter how much Keating may disagree with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese about submarines.
As PM, Keating went big. Nationchanging big. No picture was so big that it discouraged Keating’s meddling. Journalists and those who decades later would vote Teal lapped it up, of course, but ordinary Australians recoiled.
The biggest hint of national discontent with Keating and his bigminded government came in the month before the 1996 federal election, when Queenslanders turned on Labor in a state poll.
Dire economic circumstances under Keating were reason enough to vote him out, but voters were also repelled by his big-picture ambitions during what was for many a time of significant financial struggle.
Late in 1995, a year that recorded 8.5 per cent unemployment, Keating turned up at a fancy Sydney hotel to address the Australian Republican Movement’s annual dinner. It was a ghastly event, beginning with the spectacle of then-ARM chief Malcolm Turnbull sprinting to Keating’s limo so he could dutifully open the PM’s door.
Keating’s speech was, in tone if not in specific content, much the same as an Albanese oration on the Voice to parliament.
“There’s only one way to an Australian republic,” Keating declared, all those decades ago, “and that’s with the only party which gives real meaning and expression to the great breadth of national sentiment and identity.
“That is, of course, the Australian Labor Party.
Like all great reforms, the Labor Party will have to carry the weight of this one too … We will be appealing to the Australian people who are sceptical and pragmatic but not bad judges and who are not averse to necessary change.”
Voters never bought this stuff. They’re likely to not buy the Voice, either, particularly if Labor’s promised $275 per year power bill reductions keep soaring in the opposite direction.
(Keating had good moments, of course. His 1995 speech also demanded that multiculturalism “never become an ideology or a bureaucratic citadel of political correctness”, and further observed that our community “will selfdestruct if it begins to mistake diversity for the mainstream”. Correct on both counts.)
Contrary to self-help guru Napoleon Hill’s dictum – “every failure brings with it the seed of an equivalent success” – in every Australian political success lies the seed of failure. In 2007, following Kevin Rudd’s election as PM, Labor held all seven governments. Labor’s seed of failure in that triumphant example, obviously, was Rudd.
By 2014, every government in the land bar South Australia’s was run by the Coalition, which, in turn, destroyed itself federally by giving us that door-opening Turnbull fellow.
State Coalition collapses followed. A conservative recovery may depend on how much Albanese and Minns replicate Keating and Rudd.