LABOR has become an electoral machine largely devoid of purpose and risks a period of “unprecedented bleakness”, the former finance minister and party powerbroker Lindsay Tanner says.
In a blistering assessment, Mr Tanner argues the party has become so hollowed out that even its signature polices such as the national disability insurance scheme and the national broadband network were motivated more by political expediency than internal belief.
Speaking in New York, Prime Minister Julia Gillard rejected Mr Tanner’s views about Labor lacking purpose, and his criticisms of key policies.
In a forthcoming collection of essays, Mr Tanner argues it would be a “grave mistake” for Labor to believe its poor standing in the polls at state and federal levels was cyclical because he believes it may be structural.
He said the party had declined due to an increase in affluence, which had eroded the party’s original working-class base, the rise of “cynical manipulators” in senior positions, and the growth of the Greens.
“Labor has become an electoral machine largely devoid of wider purpose,” he argues in his essay, Politics Without Purpose.
“Labor governments still do good things but at the behest of random external forces, not any kind of inner calling,” he says.
“This delivers some electoral success but it is inevitably fleeting, and meanwhile the political capital on which longer-term electoral competitiveness depends, is slowly melting away.”
Mr Tanner says the substantial increase in pensions, granted when Kevin Rudd was prime minister and he was in cabinet, was driven by external political circumstances, not purpose.
“The unedifying gyrations on climate change and asylum seekers over the past 15 years hardly suggest a clear purpose,” he says. “The national broadband network was an improvised response to an unexpected situation.”
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/political-news/labor-has-lost-its-purpose–and-soul-20120925-26jjk.html#ixzz27WkCz5Pi
