It’s Time
It’s time for Labor to come out swinging. It’s fine for Tanya
Plibersek to say that Labor needn’t comment on Liberal leadership
tensions because the Liberals are doing it for them. But Labor can’t
just hope that the Liberals will free fall, and allow Labor to coast
into office in 2016 on a wave of anti-Liberal sentiment. The Liberals
may be doing their best to lose the election, but Labor still has to win
it.
With that in mind, it’s time Labor started pushing a consistent
narrative. And that narrative needs to be reducible to a three word
slogan. Sorry, but there it is. The party machine will come up with
something for the election campaign; how much better to have a shorthand
way of indicating Labor’s holistic approach now, up to and including
the campaign. I for one don’t want to be stuck with ‘moving forward’
ever again.
With this in mind, I’m suggesting a competition to come up with the
best three word slogan for Labor. It could be four words, I suppose. But
no more; it needs to fit on car stickers, banners, coreflutes,
pamphlets etc. Your friendly bloggers and tweeps Vic and Cat Rollison
and I will be the judges. The only prize will be glory – though I’ll buy
you a beer if you’re in Adelaide. The winner and two runners up will be
submitted to the federal executive of the Labor Party.
And now of course I’ve got some suggestions of my own. But none of them is quite right.
‘Labor for a fair go’ (five words.
Oh well) This is an appealing slogan because progressives can see that
the Liberals are only interested in the big end of town, even though a
fair go is supposed to be part of our national ethos. So what’s wrong
with it as a slogan? The problem I see is that Liberals can claim that
their policies are fair – they just mean something different by ‘fair’. For them, it’s not fair
for hardworking taxpayers to have to foot the welfare bill for all
those dole bludgers etc – the lifters and leaners argument. While the
economic narrative remains tied to the neo-liberal surplus = good,
deficit = bad, the Liberals will frame Labor spending on welfare as
waste and extravagance, unfair to working families etc. It isn’t a strong enough slogan to withstand this onslaught.
‘Fight inequality. Vote Labor.’ It
is pleasing to see that the destructive effects of inequality on the
social fabric – to say nothing of its economically dire results for
business and consumers – are becoming part of mainstream liberal/social
democratic political discussion. ‘Will we accept an economy where only a
few of us do spectacularly well?’ President Obama asked in his State of
the Union address. ‘Or will we commit ourselves to an economy that
generates rising incomes and chances for everyone who makes the effort?’
Labor politicians such as Wayne Swan, Andrew Leigh and Jim Chalmers are
now talking about the ways in which inequality flows from the LNP
government’s neo-liberal trickle-down economics and its concomitant
austerity policies. And there will be more of this; the fates of the
minimum wage and penalty rates come to mind. But I think that it’s too
negative as a slogan. The swinging voters that Labor needs to attract
don’t care about inequality as a concept relating to them or anyone
else; they care about things like house prices, wages and inflation.
So how about we make it positive? ‘Labor for Equality’.
(Three words. Finally.) Many of Labor’s policies, such as those on
education and health, would make society more equal, or at least stop it
from becoming less equal than it is. You can imagine the conservative
response. Socialism! Class War! Lifters and Leaners! Should this matter?
But there’s also the same problem as with using inequality in a slogan:
it’s a concept that doesn’t have a concrete meaning for most voters.
Here’s one from left field. Though you might think ‘right field’ is more appropriate. ‘Conserve Australia. Vote Labor’.
This one appeals to me in some ways (even though it won’t do) because
it draws attention to the wrecking ball policies of the Abbott
government. We need to conserve Medicare. We need to conserve the
minimum wage. We need to conserve affordable higher education. We need
to conserve the ABC. We need to conserve the environment. Many of the
institutions we have developed over the years are under ferocious attack
by the Abbott government. Labor has to promise to save them. This is
not a traditional progressive view point, which usually encompasses
change to existing ways of doing things. But with so much right-wing
‘reform’ going on, maybe Labor should emphasise continuity? This idea
doesn’t work for two reasons. One is that there will have to be some
changes to what is under attack in order to save it. Labor can’t just go
back to what there was before. Its whole narrative has to be about
improvement. The second is that progressives won’t support it, but
neither will conservatives, who would never vote Labor. Even changing
‘conserve’ to ‘protect’ doesn’t fix the problem. Just think of the field
day the LNP would have. ‘We stopped the boats. We protected Australia.’
It doesn’t work. Pity.
How about ‘Stop the Lies. Vote Labor’?
Tempting, given the number of them –budget emergency, unsustainable
Medicare, wages breakout, unstainable welfare system ete etc etc. But
even I can see the problems with that one.
I’d really like to see a Labor slogan that focusses on jobs. ‘Labor means jobs’.
Full employment means higher tax revenue – both income and consumption –
and lower expenditure, in terms of welfare payments in both the short
and long term, to say nothing of the dignity of labour. We already know
that Abbott says his government will now concentrate on jobs and
families – by which he no doubt means ‘freeing up’ the labour market
through some newly resurrected version of Work Choices. We also know
that there are already five unemployed people for every available job.
And this is where things get really tough. A successful slogan has to
encapsulate the Labor narrative. How can a slogan about jobs be
meaningful under current circumstances? It can’t, unless Labor changes
its narrative on debt and deficit. It’s only by being prepared actively
to advocate running a deficit that Labor can create jobs. It’s only if
the economy is re-visualised as a series of cooperative rather than
competing interactions between the public and the private sectors, that
Labor can argue for government stimulus and a deficit budget. And even
if Labor accepted this, what would it take to turn around the public
perception of debt and deficit?
So you can see why the Labor slogan is so elusive. But if you can
crack it, I promise to deliver your gem personally into the hands of
Labor’s National Secretary. Good sloganeering!
