lessons for the future for the Australian Labor Party

This was published on John Menadue's blog, having been written on 19 May 2019, the day after national elections delivered an unexpected and severe loss for the Australian Labor Party.

DENNIS ARGALL. Lessons and thoughts for Labor’s future

Posted on 21 May 2019

There is a lot of emotion in the wake of disaster for Labor in the federal elections on 18 May 2019. There will be forensic examinations and recriminations. There is good prospect of a Labor Government after the next elections… if…

Labor must go steadily and clearly and must look like a government in brief exile.  

In retrospect the massive plate of reforms on offer from Labor was too big. Not just because it was a big target for Morrison to slander requiring a reverberation of detailed responses, but also because people just don’t cope with a lot of change and new ideas at once. That should have been a lesson from Whitlam, whose fall derived to a significant degree from his creation of visions, plans, programs creating whirlwinds and vortices. There should have been a lesson there from Hawke, who in success nearly always had just three points or three objectives and often enough did not get to the third.

It did not help that Keating, making points of importance about China and the state of China policy and perception in Australia, did not remember that his own electoral failure was in good part contributed to by his love of ad hominem excess. Which obliged Shorten to rebut what Keating said, placing Shorten in a potential difficult situation when in government. It was not Keating’s election.

There was a problem for the supporters in the campaign, at least in NSW, in that an online team in the NSW Labor office was allowed for a time (as throughout the state election in March) to write frequently, impolitely and less than coherently with money demands. Apparatchiks are to be invisible and unheard; and should be polite. Mercifully the leaders took over the message and wrote intelligently and informatively.

There will be much mulled over within Labor. A leader needs to be appointed without rancour and a shadow ministry needs to be a sensible and orderly force. As experience of being in government retreats, potential for disorder grows. It will be important for the new caucus to be orderly and disciplined. Review and refocus will take time. The team must not be baited and tempted by the 24 hour news cycle. Let the Morrison ‘team’ be embroiled in that.

Morrison shares some qualities with Trump, but he does not possess a tyrannical capacity to sack people right and left. Carry this thought into the problems governing in minority, with cross bench people some of whom could eat Morrison for breakfast when Morrison has more to do than bluster. First also, there is a coalition agreement to renegotiate.

I hope that the nation may realise that they did something less than best. A disciplined Labor caucus will surely have more sense than to suggest that Morrison supporters have been a ‘basket of deplorables’, but it will be generally important to leave it to people to review and rue. In 75 years I have come to realise that I have rarely met anyone who thought his or her opinion was wrong. People won’t be badgered not least because they won (Bob Brown may now understand this).

In its sea of policy papers, the Labor party lost identity with community at large, despite opposite intentions. Ours is a many-ways-divided nation. Finding a coherent package of policies going forward is difficult, but there will need to something better than rubbery mumble on the hard stuff.

We can review the calamitous issues in this very recent election, but that has to be put behind; the next war will be different.

As a particular point, there was absent from this election any show of statesmanship and leadership on international issues. Despite dogmas to the contrary, it seems to me that major elections that elect important governments in Australia have had international vision and inspiring leadership woven into them. That was at the core of our period as a positive multicultural society, admired in many places including China. Who would regards us now as an exemplary civil society?

Try to run a better parliament. The adversarial rowdiness is at the core of public disdain and of course is contributory to adversarial rowdiness and violence in society. With Morrison willing to spout irrelevance and distortion, it’s not easy, but standards are essential to be seen as a decent alternative.

There is real possibility, given the velocity of everything these days, that Labor could form government after the next elections. But Labor must go steadily and clearly and must look like a government in brief exile.

Dennis Argall’s career covered domestic departments and foreign service, overseas postings including Washington and as ambassador to China. After the disastrous (for Labor) 1977 elections, Dennis returned from Washington to head the office of the new deputy leader of the Labor Party, Lionel Bowen, who later became Deputy Prime Minister to Hawke.

Shirvan on the geopolitics of the Cold War.

I am impressed by the analyses of Shirvan, the Azeri author of the Caspian Report at YouTube. He writes with independent mind from an unusual perspective, drawing on academic resources. I am alert and watchful for manipulative writing on the web. His work seems genuinely independent. He has written now a paper and oral presentation on the geopolitics of the Cold War, to be found here. I commend it.

I added a comment, which I copy here:

Thank you Shirvan for this elegant report. My background in Australia more in the practical dimensions of the cold war from a western allied perspective. Of the theorists you mention, Mahan clearly the most influential in the US and thus of critical significance; the era of American dominance itself a Mahanian phenomenon. Mahan's vision easier seen from US-Australian oceanic perspective than mid continental Caspian. During the Cold War to 1991 there was tension between concepts of strategic balance on the one hand and on the other the persistent need for force commanders to have forces that would not balance but conquer. In practice balance does not apply to naval thinking preoccupied with staying afloat not sinking. So there was public notion of balance but planning intent for example to eliminate Soviet naval forces in the Pacific in a few hours in a central war. The US doctrine presented the third leg of the nuclear triad, the underwater submarine missile force, undetected, as fundamental to war avoidance because it could reply to any first strike from Moscow with huge prompt megadeaths, from underwater. But in fact the Soviet missile submarines were granted no such status as safe underwater, being monitored by aircraft with dropped sonars, moment to moment, with no capacity to survive. The highly entertaining movie "The Hunt for Red October" muddles all this. In the post 1991 era, the notional and fabled US dominance has meant Mahan realised and applied everywhere. Except that it doesn't work. The tendency in the cold war years for big minds, from Kissinger to Brzezinski to disregard local reality and run puppet wars without need to understand reality, led later, with sense of victory in the cold war, into the enveloping disasters and widening ruin of projected force undertaken without understanding governance, the readiness to turn badly run countries into ungovernable spaces. And in democracies, the inability of leaders so say "we were wrong".So we come through to the present where mahanic fantasies of superior capability, uninhibited power projection, destruction without consequence, Bolton certainty place us in far more jeopardy than did the Cold War... though I did not know life in Azerbaijan in the 1970-80s. In naval thought it's straightforward. You go to the bottom or stay on top. Woven among peoples in a diverse and alive world none of this makes sense. Something I wrote recently mentioning Mahan is out there now as yet unpublished, the next thoughts are shaping here http://cephalophoria.blogspot.com/2019/05/new-perspectives-new-facts-new.html

New perspectives, new facts, new communication

There is an abundance of new opinion everywhere and worth a passing glance, but fact-based new perspectives are the most important to getting a clearer view of the world.

This South Korean article on the supply chains behind smart phone manufacture in China based on IMF data has much wider importance if you apply the anthropological/historical eye. Begin here with this screenshot:

[article dated 16 May 2019, same link as above]

The world has travelled a vast distance since the beginning of reforms in China forty years ago. Such a network of involvement between peoples, people who should be involved together constructively but such involvement come out where before a cold war of opposition to communication at all. While languages in binary and languages of Arabic origin in money are involved, all the communications languages are and have history of power relationships. When we sit in a whitish country blessed or cursed with English language dominance/hubris, we have to shove off a bit to see how complicated it is, how a new world of communication arises with this kind of phone-building, also also belt and road building. As in "excuse me sir, there's something big happening over there and I'm sure it's big" and standard reply "piss off Edric, we're busy" — core of much of Robert Harris's writing and modern Korean and Japanese films about tsunamis etc. [Link][Link]

Consider the history of Korean language. Note the rise of the Hangul script around the time of the arrival of the printing press in Europe and the rise of English with Shakespeare and rise of Italian especially at Ferrara and Ludo Ariosto's great melange of European memes in Orlando Furioso, under the gaze of the wondrous Lucrezia Borgia daughter of Pope Alex 6. Those people over there in East Asia are building ways of communicating that will either profoundly alter English or lead to 'other'. We have only a tiny appreciation of the scale and direction of change this big communication revolution, the biggest since the printing press. 

To add to the melange of freshperspectivism do visit http://americanempireproject.com/ at which I arrived via the American John Feffer's wonderful Foreign Policy in Focus which as I speak headlines the wondrous John Bolton with an appropriate nod to Alexander Haig.

This is just a start. We have to look to ragged edges and the unfinished (the blog is the opposite of the tweet, the tweet being a single final statement and a blog entry a meandering step into can't-define, idea-push). 

Stay wary of people who have the answers. I said this as first principle in a speech in 2004 about the Iraq war:

FIRST: we should be very wary of people of whatever hue who say they have the absolute truth. Not because there is no truth available, but because truth is individual. I hold passionately to my beliefs, you hold passionately to your beliefs. But this is a crowded world now, even here on the [southeast coast of Australia], and if we do not put first an ethic of dealing as community with each other at grass roots level, we will never be able to deal sensibly with international issues. Fundamentalisms, fanaticisms, uncompromising pursuit of whatever absolute belief is what will kill us all. 

I rest my bones, for a moment.

multitasking

We also now have put up a street library in front of the house. ....Someone has to read books still!?

individual contribution in an age of environmental catastrophe

The news is currently full of terrible news about species extinction and climate change and the absurdity of policy of many governments.

Governments must do much more but individuals also can do a lot more than read the news and get depressed. There are glorious stories on YouTube about people doing extraordinary things in faraway places, but much can be, must be done in the cities, not least to get rid of lawns and grow trees and food plants. To get people out of gyms and into fresh air. To improve air quality with trees too. Easiest and most reliable to use seeds from trees in your own street, trees that evidently thrive. With herbal understory running wild.

See what intelligent people can do in very difficult places.







We also create beauty in this kind of step by step project. Here is the most recent news from our gardens.  We did not start with deserts... except, except... that in reality the great dull lawns we started with are worse than deserts, major contributors to global warming.

a big gap in writing

My health has made writing difficult, daily severe headaches and other chronic pain issues.

We did manage to get to Italy in 2018 but that's my last long journey.

A greeat pleasure to have unplanned conversations, chance encounters, with people in Italy far from touristworld including in Arezzo with Pier Ferruccio Rossi who just came up to us to talk in a phone shop. Here is his good humoured articulation of being an eighty year old poet.



I am about to have a week in hospital for ketamine infusion managed by a rheumatologist who has done this for fifteen years. See this too. Dreaming of writing more often afterwards.

Meanwhile I invite your attention to this excellent paper on north Asia by Gavan McCormack, on how well states measure up and have capacity for essential change in these turbulent times.

Gavan is a committed and practical academic, as here, out on prohibited waters at Okinawa, for background see the paper linked from previous paragraph.



or if you prefer terrible recordings by eminent people in Britain of longer account of last year's book...

Not so scary under Korean skies: the things that happen while the world yells.

as published just now at John Menadue's blog

and republished at Crikey, under the title "South Korea seems to be the only country reacting sensibly to Pyongyang."

DENNIS ARGALL. Not so scary under Korean skies

2 October 2017

Australia has had yet another high level former US defence official breeze in, this time to warn that we might be attacked by the DPRK. Whether there is or is not a concerted plan to all this, the visits of the grave and famous and warnings about improbable threat serve a purpose of keeping us from wandering away from Uncle Sam’s skirt in these strange times. It is useful to step away from speculation and look at some things actually happening, taking the last few days as a slice of life. 

On 1 October the US Secretary of State, visiting Beijing, told journalists “…the United States is in direct contact with North Korea and is looking into whether Kim Jong Un is open to talks.” [Washington Post]

I think it’s a perilous business to tell journalists you may have a fish biting. On the same day a DPRK spokesman “called on the United States…to halt what it claimed to be a hostile policy toward Pyongyang, threatening to turn America into a “sea of flames.” [Yonhap, Seoul]. On 28 September Choe Son-hui, director general of the North American department at the DPRK Foreign Ministry, at talks in Moscow, “stressed that it is necessary for the U.S. to stop its hostile policy toward the DPRK in order to defuse tension and ensure peace and security in the Korean Peninsula and the Northeast Asian region.” [KCNA]

If Secretary of State Tillerson claims he’s winning something in this contest, he won’t.           [I wrote that yesterday before Trump told his Secretary of State via Twitter not to waste his time.]

On 28 September on ROK Armed Forces Day, ROK President Moon awarded a “the highest unit-level award given by the ROK government … to all the Sailors of CNFK [US Combined Naval Forces Korea] for “outstanding contribution to the defense of the Republic of Korea” [Stars and Stripes]. Since the Korean War ROK forces have remained under US control in wartime. In his speech on the same occasion President Moon called again for transfer of ‘OPCON’ from the US to the ROK: “It’s only when we regain wartime operational control of our military that North Korea will fear us more and the South Korean public will trust the military more. The goal of this administration is to accelerate the transfer of wartime operational control,” [Hankyoreh]

Then President Moon and Mrs Moon went to have lunch with ordinary seamen on an ROK naval vessel, the Yonhap photo showing happy laughter.

On 1 October, the ROK monthly trade figures showed a year-on-year increase in exports of 35%. In September “outbound shipments came to US$55.1 billion for the month, up from $40.8 billion tallied a year earlier…Imports also rose 21.7 percent on-year to $41.4 billion.” Petrochemical exports in the wake of hurricane damage to the US oil industry were a significant component.

Another round of discussions on the US ROK Free Trade Agreement will take place in Washington on 4 October.

Also on 1 October the Korea Resources Corporation published an estimate of the value of DPRK mineral resources at approximately USD2.8 trillion, fourteen times those of the ROK. Modest joint ROK-DPRK minerals projects have been suspended for some time. Sanctions exist, prospects remain.

Again on 1 October in response to the decision of the ROK government to extend electrical vehicle subsidies to Tesla cars previously excluded because they take more than ten hours to charge, Tesla announced plans to extend its network of charging stations in South Korea.

Also on the same day, President Moon released a video wishing everyone well for travel home over the Chuseok (Harvest Moon) holiday break… and separately congratulated DPRK figure skaters on their qualification for the Winter Olympics in the ROK next year.

Meanwhile in the wake of the trilateral summit between heads of state of the US, ROK and Japan in New York (at the Korean Lotte hotel, not a Trump hotel), “[t]he Blue House and White House have reportedly shared concerns that “distorted” reports from the Japanese press could “cause fissures” in trilateral coordination.”

This report does not implicate Prime Minister Abe in the shaping of the news items attracting concern, but anxious Prime Minister Abe has been using articulation of tension and criticism of the ROK as well as the DPRK and China (plus a USD18 billion education and aged care package, to be paid for by a GST increase of 2% in 2019) in support of his campaign for re-election on 22 October.

On 27 September, at an event to mark the tenth anniversary, on 4 October, of the meeting in 2007 between then ROK President Roh Moo-hyun and the DPRK President Kim Jong-il, President Moon said: “Many of the matters agreed upon in the Oct. 4 summit statement can be implemented even now. I hope that both North and South Korea will declare that the Oct. 4 summit statement remains valid,” He once again called for the restoration of military talks, humanitarian cooperation and the reunions of the families divided by the Korean War. Restoring military talks was particularly urgent, Moon said, “to relax inter-Korean tensions.” [Hankyoreh]

In his address to the UN General Assembly in New York on 21 September, President Moon quoted former US President Ronald Reagan: “Peace is not absence of conflict, it is the ability to handle conflict by peaceful means.”

This ROK Government demonstrates a flexibility and skill in dealing with all sides in the current difficult situation. Many domestic supporters were alarmed by President Moon’s siding with President Trump on issues relating to the DPRK, but had Moon been strident rather than flexible, troubles would abound domestically and perhaps more dramatically in the trade relationship with the US. Nothing would have been gained strategically by antagonism, just as nothing is gained by being joined at the hip with a major power.

Dennis Argall, a former Australian Ambassador to China, has been an observer of North Asian affairs since 1970