The closing weeks of the election campaign have been haunted by the spectre of Paul Keating.
On the weekend he showed up in Grayndler to denounce the Greens as “a bunch of opportunists and trots”. This was his helping hand to Anthony Albanese, who’s under pressure from the Greens’ candidate Jim Casey.
It’s true that Casey, a former member of the International Socialist Organisation, is some distance to the left of Albanese. But Keating’s use of the old Labor slur for any segment of the left which is not under its umbrella is telling. It betrays a retrograde analysis of the Greens as a whole, and the seemingly intractable problem they pose for Labor.
After all, any au pair could tell you that Greens leader Richard Di Natale is not much of a Trotskyite. Measures like his proposed sugar tax suggest a taste for subjecting the poor to behavioural nudging, that they might better reflect bourgeois sensibilities.
If they really were the fringe actors that Keating portrays them as, they wouldn’t be continuing to eat into the heartland of the Labor party’s left, and Keating’s services would not have been required in Sydney’s inner west. (It’s worth remembering that Keating made his name by slinging similar insults in battles with Albanese’s own faction over who controlled inner city Sydney).
But now, desperate measures are required. A senior shadow minister is in danger. And Keating is wheeled out because no one who succeeded him as Labor leader – including the current incumbent – has the authority to even try calling out the Greens in this way.
The eminence grise of the Labor right reaching out to the lion of the left is one thing. It’s quite another to watch conservatives trying to avail themselves of the Keating aura.
Last week, he had to take the trouble to deny, in writing, that the Coalition’s proposed corporate tax cut was something he would have done as treasurer or prime minister.
Malcolm Turnbull, Mathias Cormann and the Australian Financial Review had all invoked his name in arguing for company tax to be reduced to 25%, pointing out that Keating had reduced the rate from 49% to 33% during his time as treasurer and prime minister.
Ah, Keating retorted, but I would not have done so at the expense of the budget bottom line. The Liberals’ proposal was unfunded, undisciplined and reckless, he said.
And thus in the space of a week, a Labor hero managed to attack both the Greens and the Liberal party from the right.
He has company among the rightwing columnists who use the memory of his prime ministership to do the same to Bill Shorten.
Earlier in the campaign Nikki Savva compared Shorten unfavourably with Keating. Janet Albrechtson did the same last week. (This was a strange turn of events not least because in 2008 Keating wrote of her in a letter to the Australian that “She is simply a blackguard. And an exceptionally dull one at that.”)
Troy Bramston also voiced dissatisfaction with the current leadership vis-a-vis the glory days of reform, but there is mounting evidence that this is the only subject he is capable of writing on.
Still, for a guy who lost his last election 20 years ago, he comes up a lot, more so even than the man who defeated him. Why?
Some of it’s down to simple opportunism here from the right. Making unfavourable comparisons between Labor’s present and its past is the easiest thing in the world, and it deftly avoids the topic of what Malcolm Turnbull has done to deserve to be prime minister.
No matter that Keating was never especially popular during his time in leadership positions – it’s easy to let nostalgia do its work in canonising Keating, and diminishing Shorten.
But that doesn’t explain why Keating gets so much attention, so effortlessly, whenever he makes an intervention.
We could put it down to the overwhelming, bloodless mediocrity of our current national politics. Apart from anything else, the current competitors for the prime ministership just aren’t as interesting as Keating.
Political junkies – a group that perforce includes political journalists – thrill each time he pokes his head up, because unlike each succeeding generation of leaders, he tends towards unvarnished and colourful language. He never paid much heed to the niceties of political communication, and in retirement he has even fewer incentives to be guarded in his remarks.
But this explanation is only half right – it doesn’t account for the tendency to measure policies and leaders from both sides of politics against the Hawke-Keating era, in a way that those men were rarely measured against, say, Gough Whitlam.
Thus we are led to a sad, simple, and difficult truth: Australian politics is still entirely imprisoned within the paradigm of governance that Keating established.
All that John Howard really added to the neoliberal revolution of the 1980s was a little more sadism: a more straitened public sector, a stiffer regime of border protection, a more gung-ho commitment to our role in the world as an adjunct of US foreign policy.
The chaos that has prevailed since Howard lost to Kevin Rudd can be explained by the fact that as the public has become increasingly dissatisfied by everyday life under this political and economic regime, no new ideas, no alternatives to the Australia Keating created, have emerged at the level of national politics.
While the Liberals are franker in their efforts to optimise the system to the benefit of corporate power, Labor has done little more than offer to blunt the sharper edges.
We shouldn’t feel too bad: the centre-left throughout the Anglosphere is caught in a similar time warp. The return of the Clintons, and the post-Brexit Blairite revival are evidence of that.
Keating remains a commanding presence in our politics because he is yet to be superseded, even as the approach he pioneered has less and less traction on a world sunk in crisis.
This strange, listless, and disingenuous campaign is coming to an end, but the politics that have shaped it will continue until the ghost of Paul Keating is finally put to rest.
