Yesterday I attended a meeting with my favourite Australian politician, Jenny Macklin. It was a poorly attended meeting, which surprised me, given that Macklin does command some respect within the party. The issue of the meeting was the Labor Party’s policy review process, principally the education policy and employment policy. There is something of an irony in the way party members hardly attend a forum to discuss policy that will be the battering ram to defeat the coalition, yet will attend in their dozens or hundreds a meeting over the refugee question that Howard will use to return his party to power. I wondered if ALP members felt so battered that they were entering into a lemming like state of mind.
Many party members will repeatedly complain about the failure of leadership and policy to connect with the membership. However, when the opportunity to make one views on policy known to the leadership, the very ones who complain are nowhere to be found!
I pondered this question. One reason I could think of was the sheer cynicism that has grown within the party about policy. Very few consider that policy has much bearing on the way the party behaves when it is in power.
Another may be in the mental block (or an epistemological divide) in the ethos of the party between its pragmatism and goals. The party prides itself on its ‘pragmatism’ in politics
What is pragmatism? First, pragmatism is what pragmatism does. It is the habit of acting in disregard of solidly based scientific rules and tested principles. In everyday life, pragmatism is activity that proceeds from the premise (either explicit or unexpressed) that nature and society are essentially indeterminate. Pragmatic people rely not upon laws, rules, and principles which reflect the determinate features and determining factors of objective reality, but principally upon makeshifts, rule-of-thumb methods, and improvisations based on what they believe might be immediately advantageous. George Novack Pragmatism Versus Marxism: An Appraisal of John Dewey’s Philosophy, Pathfinder Press, New York, 1975.
The difficulty with the party’s pragmatism is that it ends up simply adopting the policies of the state bureaucracy, making the party indistinguishable from its predecessors. Consider that partnerships 21 public school funding scheme brought in by the previous government, criticised relentlessly by the ALP while in opposition and now adopted lock stock and barrel by and ALP government. The government wasn’t even bothered to recast the funding model with a new name.
Overcoming pragmatism seems to be a function of extraordinary individuals within the party leading the charge for new policy models being implemented in government bureaucracies. Whitlam is probably a good example. For all his faults and his terrible judgement about East Timor, Whitlam did have that risk taking sense of urgency that make for a good social democratic leader. Wednesday, 30 July 2003
8:05:39 PM 
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