So, Abbott won. It’s done, it’s dusted, and there’s nothing else we can do about it. After years of fighting, the left has lost this battle.
So, what to do?
We lost the battle, but that doesn’t mean we’re going to lose the war. We need to pick ourselves up, dust ourselves of, and get going. Here is how I think we should do it.
1.) Get over the depression
The psychologist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross once theorised that people going through grief go through 5 stages; denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.
For the last 2 or so years the left have collectively been going through the first of these stages. Denial that someone as conservative as Abbott could win Government. Anger at the Murdoch press for their actions in the campaign. Bargaining with the ALP over their leadership and the public over Tony Abbott’s gaffes. Now we’ve hit the depression stage. I feel it. I am flat and had to hold back the tears yesterday as I saw the words “Prime Minister Tony Abbott”. And we’ve even got a reference guide for what we can do about it – Ben Pobjie’s 10 ways to survive the Abbott Government. We could blame the stupid voters, or move to New Zealand. There’s plenty of options!
Well this goes against everything I know about how to talk about people who are suffering from depression, but I have four words for all of us; snap out of it.
Tony Abbott will start implementing his agenda straight away. And every day that we are sad about we lose the opportunity to step up and fight back. Being sad wont fix this for us, so we need to dust ourselves of, stop hiding under the covers and start to fight back.
2.) Realise that we’re to blame
One of the easiest things for the left to do over the coming weeks will be to find someone else to blame for Abbott’s victory. The most common I think will be to blame the Murdoch media – the powerful and influential media that duped a populace into voting for their man. This is a mistake. Jeff Sparrow argues this best in his piece in the Overland Journal:
“In the circumstances, the Left can easily fall prey to bitterness, a disdain for the public who voted in such a deeply reactionary figure. That would be a terrible mistake. Denouncing ordinary Australians as fools and halfwits, as slackjawed dupes of Murdoch too dim to grasp the obvious, might make us feel better but hurling abuse at those you want to convince has never been a successful strategy, particularly in a context in which the Left is all too often portrayed as a clique of self-satisfied elitists.
In any case, blaming the populace amounts to a category error. It’s the task of the Left to persuade people. By definition, if we don’t manage it, the problem lies with us – and so rather than analysing the flaws of the voters, we need instead, with some urgency, to commence a discussion of our own failures.”
Here is the thing we all wont want to hear though; we are to blame. And we are all to blame in different ways.
Firstly, whilst this article is from 2010, Piping Shrike is correct in noting that in accepting Abbott’s framing that the issues of climate change, the mining tax and asylum seekers were a problem the ALP immediately made Abbott electable. As I’ve argued in the past, a lack of leadership on the issues that matter have allowed Abbott to frame the debate – leading this election to be fought on conservative terms rather than progressive ones. For some reason many in the left still have this idea that progressive ideals are losing ideals – that the population is inherently conservative. In doing so we cede ground before we even begin – we lose the election before we get started.
But it’s not just that. When we have attacked Abbott the attacks have been weak at best. The left has become focused on symbols over structures in recent years and that has played out in the way we have gone after Abbott. We’ve attacked him for his gaffes and ignored the swathe of right-wing policies that he is about to implement. But it’s not gaffes that were ever, or will ever, defeat Abbott. We need to turn our attention to the structures and the issues – campaigning for a progressive vision over a conservative one. We failed to do that over the past three years.
3.) Outline a left vision
When we acknowledge our blame though, it becomes easier for us to turn towards what we can do next.
I think one of the most disappointing things over the past 6 years has been the loss of a left vision within much of the process of Government. In our desire to keep the ALP in many of us have given up on basic left principles to support the ALP as our preferred Government.
We’ve accepted a new version of the asylum seeker policy that only a few years ago the left would have fought bitterly against (I have seen that fight rise again since the introduction of the PNG solution). We justified cuts to Universities because all they were doing was ‘slowing the growth of spending’. We accepted the Gonski and NDIS as key solutions, without providing the left critique they deserved. Even in the area of climate change we defended to the death a carbon price that had flaws, without outlining what we could do to make it better.
And I think that is why so many of us clung to the National Broadband Network (NBN) as a key policy to fight for. It seemed like the only real bright light on the hill. Whilst many swallowed the attacks in other areas, we were all at least happy with the NBN.
And whilst I like fast Internet, it cannot be the basis, or even the key element in a progressive future for our world. We need more than that – a proper progressive vision for our country.
And here we have a good basis. Polling shows that our community wants money invested in education and people want more action on climate change. In many areas a progressive vision is what people want, and it is up to us to fight for it.
And this is where we can actually learn from the right. Whilst many of us deride the work of the Institute of Public Affairs, there is one thing they are good at – outlining their beliefs (not matter how crazy many think they are) and pursuing them. The left needs to start doing something similar.
And it is not as if we lack the capacity or ideas to do it. There is plenty of work available for us. Go and read Jeff Sparrow and Antony Loewenstein’s book Left Turn for a start. We even have our own think tank in the Australia Institute, which provides ongoing research and policy analysis with a progressive bent. We have a range of resources around how we can fight for these beliefs – for a start we could all read Lakoff’s The Political Brain for some ideas.
Integral to this strategy is for us to believe that left viewpoints can win. We must give up on the idea that people are inherently conservative and that we must appeal to the middle-ground. I don’t believe that. With effective community organising, strong campaigning and strong communications we can shift that debate onto a progressive footing. That is essential for the next three years.
4.) Fight, fight and fight some more
One of the failings of the past three years has been to underestimate Tony Abbott. I think many of us thought he would eventually just slip up and hand the election back to the ALP. In fact you can see that throughout the campaign – we all jumped on his ‘gaffes’ as if that was what was going to change the electorate. That was a clear underestimation of his campaign and and a failure of ours to focus on the issues that matter.
And I fear that we are going to do the same over the next three years. I expect many will think that Abbott will be a disaster and that the public will just turn off him. I am not so confident. Abbott proved to be an effective Opposition Leader and I think he has the capacity to surprise many of us with his competence (even though I will disagree with most of what he does) as Prime Minister.
And that means one thing.
Today we start to fight and we start to fight hard. And that doesn’t mean waiting for him to make a gaffe and to pounce on it. It means that we begin the process of community organising not just against his policies, but for a new and better progressive vision for Australia. It means getting onto the street, knocking on the doors and hitting the media hard. We can do it and if we do it well we could not only end up defeating Abbott but presenting Australia with a much more progressive vision than we’ve even had for the next six years. That is the opportunity Abbott’s win provides us. That is the opportunity we need to take.
Featured image by Bodo Sperling (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons