Sitting Pretty: Even if Australia's incumbent Liberal Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, somehow manages to scrape together a ramshackle government, Bill Shorten has almost certainly done enough to keep his ALP colleagues’ daggers in their sheaths. Labor’s voters are especially delighted that Turnbull’s discomfiture is the result of Shorten turning the Liberals’ own weapons against them.
BILL SHORTEN’S FOREWARNINGS may yet ensure a rich electoral
harvest for the Australian Labor Party. His prediction that Medicare,
Australia’s public health system, would be at risk if Malcolm Turnbull and his Liberal-National
Coalition were returned to office certainly focused the minds of Australia’s
poor. Fear of losing Gough Whitlam’s greatest legacy to the Australian people,
combined with Compulsory Voting (which ensures that poor Australians actually
vote) may yet be enough to make Shorten Australia’s next prime minister.
Even if Turnbull somehow manages to scrape together a
ramshackle government, Shorten has almost certainly done enough to keep his ALP
colleagues’ daggers in their sheaths. Labor’s voters are especially delighted
that Turnbull’s discomfiture is the result of Shorten turning the Liberals’ own
weapons against them.
Election after election, the Liberals and their right-wing
media allies have employed scare tactics against Labor. This time, however, it
was Labor doing the scarifying. What’s more, those scare tactics contained a
sizeable kernel of truth. The Liberals would
relish the privatisation of Medicare. Why? Because it’s an article of
ideological faith among Australia’s “economic rationalists” that the private
sector is better at supplying services than the state. To claim, as Turnbull
did – repeatedly and with growing exasperation – that his party harboured no
such intentions raised disingenuousness to new heights.
Shorten’s tactics recall those employed by Helen Clark in
the New Zealand general election of 2005. On that occasion the warning issued
was about housing and the likely consequences for state house tenants of a Don
Brash/National Party win. It was enough to see the large South Auckland polling
booths tip the balance in Labour’s favour.
Twelve years on, and Labour’s 2005 warnings concerning
housing and the fate of state house tenants are being vindicated almost daily.
That it has taken so long is because National’s ideological antagonism towards
state housing, which Don Brash displayed openly and honestly, has been
camouflaged and concealed by John Key’s government.
It has been National’s intention, ever since winning power
in 2008, to eliminate the state as New Zealand’s default housing provider.
According to the economist, and author of “Generation Rent”, Shamubeel Eaqub,
New Zealand’s stock of state houses – proportional to its population – is at
levels not seen since 1949. At the core of National’s housing policy is the all-too-familiar
neoliberal negation of the state’s capacity to respond to social need. In terms
of practical policy, this is expressed by facilitating the entrenchment of the
private sector as the only legitimate provider of housing – even for the poor.
The radicalism of this new policy regime is only slowly
being recognised. Much easier to spot has been the sudden emergence into public
view of the consequences of the state abdicating its role as housing provider
of last resort. The grim spectacle of families living in their cars has
stimulated public outrage and forced the National Government’s hand.
At the National Party’s 80th annual conference, held in
Christchurch over the weekend, the Prime Minister announced the establishment
of a billion-dollar Housing Infrastructure Fund (HIF) to kick start what is
intended to be a local government-administered housing construction programme.
This latter effort seems likely to become the responsibility of a new legal
entity – the Urban Development Authority (UDA). The first cities to receive a
UDA will be those currently experiencing the fastest population growth:
Auckland, Hamilton, Tauranga, Christchurch and Queenstown. The HIF will not,
however, be empowered to issue genuine grants to these cities, only loans, and
the funds expended are to facilitate the plans of private property developers
exclusively.
Dismissed by Labour Leader, Andrew Little, as “a rushed,
piecemeal policy that hasn’t been thought through”, Key will, nevertheless, be
hoping that voters receive these announcements as evidence that his Government
is, at last, “doing something”. It is nowhere near enough, but unless Labour
executes a radical overhaul of its own, very similar, housing policies, Key’s
latest efforts will be compared not unfavourably with his opponents’.
The extraordinarily close finish in the Australian general
election is, in part, a reflection of the extremely drab selection of colours
in which both the Left and the Right were content to paint their country’s
future. What most Australians experienced was an overlong campaign
characterised by limitation, negation and fear. Without the enforced
participation of Compulsory Voting, Turnbull’s Liberal-National Coalition would
have been returned handily. The self-interest of the “Haves” would have seen to
that.
To ensure the participation of the “Have Nots” in 2017, New
Zealand Labour will have to offer much more than Shorten-style scare-tactics.
To compensate for the lack of compulsory voting, Little needs to devise a
campaign that is expansive, affirmative and chock-full of hope.
If a broad programme of state house construction does not
lie at the heart of that campaign, then a hung parliament will be the most that
Labour deserves.
This essay was
originally published in The Press of Tuesday,
5 July 2016.
