The moniker “true believer” could almost have been invented for Kim Carr. Indeed, he began his almost 30-year Senate career at the very election, 1993, that Paul Keating claimed had been a “victory for the true believers”.
His career was devoted to the proposition that if Australia embraced new technologies and developed the right skill base, it could still make things – an idea that seems to be fashionable in federal Labor government circles again.
It, therefore, matters that he has joined the growing number of former senior Labor politicians who have become increasingly critical of the direction of the Albanese government.
Carr is critical of the small target strategy that Anthony Albanese used to get into office, his policies being “more like running repairs than substantial reforms”. The party, says Carr, has become alienated from low-income voters, leaning in to an “identity politics” that has caused it to lose touch with its traditional support base – whose welfare was really Labor’s raison d’être.
Carr could fairly be described as “old school Labor”. His memoir, A Long March, published this month by Monash University Publishing, does nothing to dispel that impression.
Carr, the product of a working-class family – his father was a boilermaker – joined the Labor party in 1975 amid the outrage over the dismissal of the Whitlam government. He was a senior minister in the Rudd and Gillard governments, as minister for innovation, industry, science and research. He played an important role in forming the Rudd-Gillard “dream team” in 2006. He was a victim of its later disintegration, which resulted in Julia Gillard’s demotion of him.
Carr cannot be dismissed as a lone voice, for he is among several former Labor heavyweights deeply worried about the government’s direction. Others include former New South Wales premier Bob Carr, former foreign minister Gareth Evans and – the hardest critic of all – former prime minister Paul Keating, all mostly concerned with Aukus. Bill Kelty, an architect of Labor’s Accord of the 1980s and 1990s and former Australian Council of Trade Unions leader of deep influence in that era, has described the government as “mired in mediocrity”.
Recent media commentary suggests that some present government members, including Albanese, are finding this running commentary frustrating. But it is not new for former leaders to criticise aspects of government policy from the sidelines after they have ceased to be active politicians. Gough Whitlam had some hard things to say about the government run by Bob Hawke and Keating on occasion, such as the reintroduction of university fees. Keating was critical of the Whitlam government’s economic performance. Whitlam responded in kind, calling him “a smart-arse”. No one seemed unduly worried on either side.
It seems different now. While getting re-elected was no doddle in the 1980s and 1990s, governments seem to have an even more precarious existence these days. If they are more sensitive to the criticism of party elders, it possibly reflects a stronger sense of the fragility of their hold on power.
There is also the question of whether the critics are imagining a past that was better than it actually was. Carr can sometimes seem nostalgic for a Labor party able to rely on a large base of blue-collar workers and their families for support in an economy that still employed large numbers of workers in manufacturing, mining and transport. Senior Labor figures of the 1980s on the right of the party, such as Keating or Bob Carr, who were notably pro-American when in office, can seem inconsistent or even hypocritical when offering meaty criticism of the government for positioning itself too closely to the United States today.
It is, however, alarming to learn from Carr’s memoir of the lack of debate within the opposition under Albanese when Scott Morrison presented it with the fait accompli of Aukus in 2021. There was no caucus vote on its acceptance. And, since Labor came to office, it has been hard to discern in the party’s internal affairs since then the kind of robust debate and disagreement that has previously been a feature of the Labor party when it contemplates foreign and defence policy. As we are often reminded by those who look back to “better” times, Hawke was overruled by his own party in the mid-1980s after he agreed to allow America to test MX missiles off the Australian coast.
Every federal Labor government since Andrew Fisher’s in 1910 – the first to win a national election – has been criticised by people on its side of politics for not going far enough or fast enough. The Albanese government is no different in that respect. But the word “timidity” is increasingly being thrown about when the government is mentioned, and it does not have the positive spin of the “caution” or “moderation” heard earlier in the government’s life.
Carr’s A Long March is, in some respects, an elegy for an older kind of Labor politics. Only time will tell if it turns out to be an elegy for the Labor project itself.
• Frank Bongiorno is Professor of History at the Australian National University and is in conversation with Kim Carr at the Canberra Writers festival on 27 October
