http://www.theage.com.au/text/articles/2002/08/04/1028157878238.htm
Democrats take a fighting stance
Date: August 5 2002
The Australian Democrats agonised about where they should stand in the political spectrum. Now they have had to decide, writes Robert Manne.
The Australian Democrats are busily engaged in the politics of self-destruction. Superficially the problem concerns power rivalries, like the current Natasha Stott Despoja-Andrew Murray battle of ego and will. More deeply it involves the struggle over the Democrats' core identity - whether it is a party of the centre or the left.
The crisis was triggered when Meg Lees, a natural centrist, suggested that the party prepare itself for a deal on the question of the complete privatisation of Telstra. Her suggestion unleashed the anger of those who thought of the Democrats as a party of the left which, on a question like majority public ownership of Telstra, must never compromise.
The crisis deepened when another centrist, Andrew Murray, said that under Natasha Stott Despoja's leadership, the party was tilting dangerously to the left. For Stott Despoja's allies, Murray's intervention touched an exposed nerve. The existence of deep divisions over the centre-left identity problem could no longer be disguised.
Since the French Revolution no one has been able to think about serious political difference without reference to an imagined line stretching from left to right. Where on this line the Democrats should be located has become a question of increasing puzzlement and complexity.
The Democrats began life in 1977 when an anti-Fraser Liberal, Don Chipp, joined with other disaffected small "l" liberals. Many had opposed the Vietnam War. Many were uneasy about the anti-Whitlam "coup" of November, 1975.
At this time the Democrats were unambiguously a party of the centre. By support for a program one scholar has called "social liberalism" - defence of the mixed public-private economy, progressive taxation, generous social welfare and so on - the Democrats hoped, precisely as a centre party, to be able to soften class conflict between capital and labour, which they imagined the bitter atmosphere of post-November, 1975, party politics ultimately to be about.
>From their beginnings, until very recently, the Democrats used the kinds of powers the electoral system offered them in a self-consciously centrist way. Unlike the other post-war major minor party, the DLP, they generally refused to favour either major party with their preferences. Even more importantly, frequently finding themselves holding the balance of power in the Senate, they were careful to show that they were willing to deal with either side of politics when it suited them.
As it happens, after the late 1970s, new breezes blew up in Australia that gradually drove the Democrats from the centre to the left. Most important was the profound shift in political culture. In the late 1970s the Democrats' economic program - between democratic socialism and laissez-faire liberalism, as it were - was genuinely centrist. Since the early 1980s, however, and the Western-wide neo-liberal revival - privatisation, small government, low tax, targeted welfare and so on - the economic values on both sides of politics have moved rapidly to the right. Simply by remaining loyal to the spirit of their once-centrist program, during the Hawke and Keating years the Democrats leap-frogged over Labor to become, from the economic point of view, a party of the left.
Moreover, at their birth, the Democrats were wedded to what political scientists now call the post-materialist agenda of the affluent middle class - the environment, civil liberties, women's and indigenous rights, multiculturalism and so on. During the age of neo-liberalism, as differences over economics narrowed, cultural clashes over post-materialist questions became the most important matters that divided left from right. Once again, simply by remaining faithful to their original set of preoccupations, the Democrats have found themselves occupying left-wing ground.
Until very recently the Democrats were able to live successfully with their strange, ambiguous identity - as a party of both the centre and the left. Why has this hybrid identity now begun to tear the Democrats apart? In my view the answer is to be found in the challenge mounted to them during the last election by the Greens.
In the 1998 election the Democrats won more than three times the Senate vote of the Greens. In 2001 the Greens' Senate vote began to approach that of the Democrats - a little under 5 per cent, a little over 7 per cent respectively. In the House of Representatives their vote was almost the same. Even more interestingly, in four inner-city Labor seats in Melbourne and Sydney, the Greens won between 12 and 16 per cent of the primary vote. In the battle to become the major minor party of the Australian left, the drift in the 2001 election was away from the Democrats and towards the Greens. Why?
The Australian political system is far more sensitive to underlying social sentiment than is commonly understood. After 1996, among the "losers" in the era of globalisation, disillusion with neo-liberal economic and cosmopolitan cultural values was reflected in the rise of the One Nation party. For almost five years Hansonism destabilised the Coalition. Eventually it was neutralised, following the Tampa "crisis", when the Howard Government successfully incorporated the xenophobia unleashed by One Nation with its decision to repel asylum seekers by military force.
The near complete capitulation of Beazley Labor to anti-asylum-seeker populism opened up a new space in Australian politics on the left - not among Labor voters in general, but among one small but influential group: the affluent, inner-city cosmopolitan left-liberal intelligentsia. Such people did not feel at home in a country that imprisoned asylum seekers or used armed force to drive them away. Such people still cared about ancient causes such as multiculturalism, the republic, Aboriginal reconciliation. Such people were disturbed by the ugly anti-Muslim mood. Such people did not wish to live in a country whose fundamental foreign policy consisted of the offer to support any US military initiative in advance. Such people began, in the election of 2001, to turn away from Labor not to the Australian Democrats but to the Greens.
Sensing this challenge, but divided on the question of how to respond, the Democrats could no longer postpone their decision about whether they were a party of the centre or the left. With the resignation of Meg Lees and the marginalisation of Andrew Murray, in the past fortnight the Democrats' fundamental existential decision appears to have been made.
Robert Manne is associate professor of politics at La Trobe University. E-mail: r.manne at latrobe.edu.au