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The recent address my Michael Cooney, Director of the Chifley Research Centre has captured a fair bit of media attention, but as far as I can gather little analysis. Cooeny is a former speech writer and adviser high up in the Australian Labor Party. The Chifely Research Centre is the official think tank of the ALP. I thought it would be an interesting exercise to take m y mind of my bronchitis to try a critique. My take outs are taken from the published extract http://www.chifley.org.au/the-work-for-labors-generation-x-leaders/. Cooney begins with a criticism of nostalgia for the Blair era in the UK and the Hawke Keating era in Australia. The clever trick here is that he assures us this nostalgia is “new2” and the adds that it has a “surprising number of activists inside and around Labor parties and progressive politics” in its grip. This “nostalgia for the new” is seemingly “enormously influential“ and one “non-Labor and ex-Labor voices endlessly amplify”. Cooney des not tell us what a surprising number of activists is here. Speaking personally it would be anything in excess of zero. What is the meaning of all this? What is Cooney saying when we strip away the silly trope of calling the past the new? A guess would be that he does not want us to be thinking of the Hawke-Keating era as the Golden age. He thinks UK Labourites need the same message. He seems to be saying something like “Stop crying about Blair being gone, you Labour lot!” So we have to face the future. OK! Got it. The Future (Did someone say “Yes we can!”?) Cooney gives one substantial example of how we can face the future. That is the case of the four submarines. Leaving aside why we need four submarines, the substantial question was where are they to be built. The Government promised to build them in South Australia. Once elected it wriggled out of that promise and now will buy them from Japan. This means destruction for ship building in Australia and will cost thousands of jobs. Cooney knows or sort of knows that no Labor figure could endorse such a move. So he praises the Labor leader, Bill Shorten for criticising the government for awarding the contract to Japan. But then he comes out with some weasel words -“while I don’t agree with the Prime Minister’s approach, there are defensible arguments for it”. We aren’t told what these defensible reasons are, surprisingly – not. We then get a reprise condemnation of the “nostalgia for the new”. Don’t look back. Right! Got it! Next we get an exquisite moment, truly one to savour. If, like Orpheus, we can’t look back what should we do about the future? Well above all he tells us the answer does not “lie in a lurch to the left either” Once more we are not told precisely what a lurch to the left would look like. Better not to ask; it is probably something horrible like beating up pensioners or throwing up after too many beers and prawns. We would never want to do that or lurch to the left would we? But what are we to do? The rhetoric flies fast here. We are to occupy the centre. Right; the centre It is then. Mind you it has to be a new centre. UK readers are told to forget about Clause Four and Australians are told to forget about the dollar float. If we were not watching Cooney’s hands carefully we could miss the obvious comment that these issues are not exactly equivalents. Forgetting about Clause Four means forgetting about Labour’s commitment to bring the economy under democratic control. The dollar float does not match up to that in political weight. We have much to think about instead of looking at the past, Cooney assures us. He mentions “clean energy”, “Asia” “Ageing”, and “the future of growth and of work. As always what is not mentioned is more significant. There is no talk at all of why we do not have a clean energy policy. Did anyone mention the coal lobby? Nor is there any hint from Cooney of how we can boost jobs while de-industrializing Australia. Cooney is not even enough of a thinker to address the Piketty thesis and discuss how it is relevant to the future. Even a Keynesian gesture like that is beyond him. So there we have it. One of the intellectual giants of the Labor Party speaks and he is a living testimony of what happened to Labor intellectuals without a Communist Party to think for them. comradely Gary ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
