Labor won the last election by convincing enough people that it would be little different to John Howard while convincing enough other people it would be completely different. One group was always going to be crying into its beer, and that group was always going to be the “progressives”. Early signs of it have started appearing – see here .
No group harnessed progressive opinion and chanelled it towards the ALP more skilfully than GetUp. It did this by opposing the government on issues with narrow appeal which were unlikely to be taken-up by the MSM or the ALP, while still appealing strongly to a sizable minority. As a result GetUp often had the field to itself and was able to tap a rich vein of funds by appearing to its constituency to be ahead of public opinion, and the sole protector of it. It’s the market position that environmental groups like the ACF, Greenpeace and WWF are familiar with, but the big difference here is that GetUp acted as a third-party recruiter of supporters for Labor in a way which environment groups don’t.
Which raises the question of how they survive when their side is in government.
GetUp’s solution is to ask their members to vote on an agenda for the new government. This is dangerous for them. Advocacy groups survive on the perception that they achieve results. Winning on an issue can easily achieve that, particularly if you pick the right one. And securing a win for your party in a general election is the most stunning demonstration of power. But succeeding in having a whole agenda implemented is a lot harder than being on the winning side in an election, so I was interested in having a look at the results of their survey.
The agenda is interesting from a number of points of view. In the lack of contradictory evidence, I’ll assume that the results represent “progressive” opinion, in which case they show how priorities have changed over the last few years, and also how much this opinion divides both from public opinion, and the government’s likely priorities. Get ready for a steady saline drip from the Left into their collective tipples.
Top priority is “Becoming environmentally sustainable (e.g. climate change, water, forests, marine habitats)”. As the last election was primarily fought on climate change, that’s a reasonable choice. Second priority is “Making high-quality primary, secondary, and tertiary public education accessible to all Australians” which is where things get a bit harder. Pity they lumped all three sectors together, but I’ll bet that a large proportion of respondents wanted to see funding changes in tertiary and secondary education, and while electors always want more money spent on education, it’s hard to see that being compatible with Lindsay Tanner’s $18 billion surplus.
Third priority is “Respecting the rights and improving the living standards of Indigenous Australians”. That’s where it gets really tricky. While the Howard government probably didn’t win any votes over its Northern Territory intervention, it did demonstrate that the orthodoxy of the last 30 years on Aboriginal affairs is dead for some time. The public have rejected it, and so has Kevin Rudd.
The list is also interesting for what didn’t make its top priorities. Health, poverty and withdrawing troops from Iraq weren’t in the top three , although they were in the top six. Maybe this indicates that these issues aren’t as important as they once were or perhaps respondents think Labor will perform here, so no need to pressure them. Refugee policy, uranium mining and media diversity were close to, or at, the bottom. Perhaps for the same reasons.
It may also be that priorities change when your side is in government. Often the issues that are important when you are in opposition are the ones where you can criticise your opponent. They are totemic rather than substantive. Once the heat of the election dies down, you breathe a little more deeply, and some of them don’t seem that important. Labor could probably more easily licence exporting of uranium than the Coalition.
You can read the whole list here. GetUp is well-worth following – their corporate and networked approach to politics is the way I think that it is heading in Australia.