I've been reading the (presumably)* South Australian political blog The Piping Shrike for a few months now. It's far more interesting than the usual run of yay-Labor boo-Liberal (or the reverse) blogs out there.
The writer's main thesis is that a major realignment has taken place in Australian politics. Ever since Hawke and Keating destroyed the power of the unions, the battle of interests between business and unions has been irrelevant, and politics has become a mere excersise in managing public services. Hence, Prime Minister Rudd's job is to restrain the ALP from its traditional spending agenda:
The November election did not fully complete the transfer of power. There is still unfinished business and that is what is driving the pace of Rudd’s program. The ALP is a party in transition and in effect there were three groups with claims on the 24 November result; the Rudd team, the unions and the traditional power bases in the ALP. Having mobilised all sections of the party to attain power, Rudd’s agenda is now to remove those competing claims.
The easiest to deal with are the unions. The $30m of members’ dues spent by the unions on an anti-Workchoices campaign may have partly been directed at voters, but it was also intended to increase the unions’ bargaining position with the incoming government by claiming that it owed its victory to repealing anti-union legislation.
If this is the case, Rudd doesn’t seem to be listening. The IR announcements made by Rudd and Gillard once in power have been more notable for what it retains than replaces. Much more of Howard’s Workchoices structure will remain in place for almost all of the government’s term than was indicated from Labor’s election platform. Howard’s Workplace Authority and unfair dismissal laws continue until 2010 and calls by the unions to go back to the AIRC have fallen on deaf ears. The new government has not even conceded on symbolic acts like replacing the public spokesperson for Workchoices, Barbara Bennett. Threats by the unions to organise strike action to speed up the dismantling of Howard’s Workchoices regime have been met with a reminder from Gillard that such political industrial action is now illegal and that the law will be enforced. With this going on, the ‘Education Revolution’ is a useful way of keeping the party on-side, and it is why Gillard holds both portfolios.
However, the party itself is also being side-lined starting with the traditional power bases. The Right faction power-brokers have just been handed their worst front bench result in living memory. Not only that, but those from the Left like Gillard, Tanner, Faulkner and Wong occupy key positions that arguably over-shadow the traditional plum roles of Treasury and Foreign Affairs held by the Right. But even though the Left faction brokers can claim nine out of 20 ministry positions on paper, they haven’t a lot to be happy about either. These ‘new Left’ ministers are playing very different roles from left ministers in the past. If anything they are almost opposing the traditional pro-union and government spending left program. While Gillard introduces Labor’s most anti-union legislation ever, Tanner in Finance and Faulkner are leading the clamp-down on spending across the Ministry and cuts, which had been targeted at $10bn before the election, but are now apparently to be doubled.
and former Prime Minister Howard's job was to make it appear as though he had a historical mission when in fact he had no ideas (the diversion into UK political history is merely to illustrate the writer's points about Australia):
Contrary to how it is discussed now, Thatcher’s moderate support from the UK electorate against a divided opposition in the 1980s rested not on her right-wing ideology, but her pragmatism. She was a response to the exhaustion of Labourism and a union movement that had failed to restrain the wages of its members in the Winter of Discontent. It was their bankruptcy that allowed her to wind the whole thing up with the defeat of the miners in 1986. The subsequent election was her high point after which her government began to fall apart as it had nothing left to do. She tried to revive a sense of purpose by pushing through the Poll Tax but the pointlessness of it gave her ministers nothing to counter its unpopularity. The British left liked to think Thatcher’s fall would lead to their revival but it had actually happened because her mission to destroy the left’s agenda had been accomplished.
If this all sounds a bit familiar let’s get clear the differences. When Thatcher took over there was at least a seemingly militant union movement. When Howard took over there was not. He and Reith ran around trying to make the waterfront dispute into their Miners Strike but it fooled no-one. Howard’s problem was that not only had the union movement clearly had its day but we also had here a Labor Prime Minister to tell everyone the fact. It was why Keating was persona non grata on both sides of the fence for a decade. His return to the national stage last year not only showed Labor had finally moved beyond its union roots with the election of Rudd, but that for the little fraud in Kirribilli, his time was up.
Workchoices was Howard’s Poll Tax, not because it was the cause of his downfall, but because it just highlighted the government’s irrelevance. It was so irrelevant that even as a symbol for a demoralised Liberal opposition to cling on to, it has needed to be dropped so they can do deals with their business backers. But for self-styled conservative leaders, it is that irrelevance (and of those who oppose them) that they refuse to see. Instead, it becomes seen as a problem that they were too ideological at the end rather than having no ideas at all. So begins their madness.
*The Piping Shrike appears on the state flag of South Australia
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