an active and progressive agenda for 2025 and beyond

In normal times, the progressive left would be holding its noses about the 2025 election; making do with the ALP with or without some leavening from the Greens. But these are hardly normal times and the Liberal-National Coalition is bidding for government by mimicking some of the Trump lines including cutting the Federal public service and creating kerfuffles about working from home, diversity and even the function of the Federal Department of Education. Like Trump, the Coalition blames immigration for many things including the housing crisis; it plays the race card as it did in the Voice referendum; wants to remove the Indigenous Flag from Federal Government events and promises a Musk-like ‘Department of Efficiency’.  

A progressive majority in the House and the Senate is the only acceptable outcome of the 2025 election. The actual composition of the Government is less of an issue so long as it “is not right” and has majority support in both houses. Even if the ALP gets a majority in the House of Representatives and thus forms government in its own right it will still require support from the Greens and independents in the Senate. It would be preferable that the terms and conditions for such support, and for a minority ALP Government if that is the election outcome, were explicit and transparent.

Ideas not fear

There is plenty of material from the US and elsewhere as to why a Trump-light coalition government ought to be inconceivable. But the election needs to be won on ideas not on fear. The winning ideas must show how to reverse the still-expanding inequality of income, wealth and life chances and the grossly unfair tax system. A majority must believe that solidarity and collectivism across the entire society offer more than scapegoating immigrants, berating foreigners  and marginalising those on pensions and benefits.

The ALP Government has been under-whelming. Solid progress has been made in some areas - wage fixation and industrial relations including protection for labour hire workers, casuals and gig/platform workers, reduced gender pay inequalities, better and cheaper access to child care though not necessarily to aged care. Real spending increases have been made or promised in health, NDIS, child care and aged care. TAFE places will be effectively free and part of the HECS debt has been written-off.

Some improvements, compared to the previous Coalition governments, have been made in climate change and renewable energy but partially negated by reliance on carbon credits and the approval of mining extensions. The Government has been extremely disappointing in regard to environmental protection and repair. Likewise, despite much noise, the housing crisis intensifies.

Worst of all, the Government continues to support the AUKUS agreement with its objective to ‘promote a free and open Indo-Pacific that is secure and stable'. China describes AUKUS as‘severely damaging regional peace’ and ‘having a cold-war mentality’ which seems a much clearer view. Pillar 1 of AUKUS is the nuclear-powered attack submarine at a predicted cost to Australia of up to $368 billion over 30 years. Pillar 2 of AUKUS commits Australia to collaboration in a wide range of advanced military technology including undersea capabilities and electronic warfare. The obvious questions are why and for what?

Even the good policies are still to give results

Greg Jericho writes, that ‘the changes to industrial relations show that bold policy delivers good outcomes’. This is reinforced by studies of the increase in permanent jobs and of the ‘Same Job Same Pay legislation.

Even though the ALP changes to industrial relations are beginning to deliver, wage earners in Australia, as a whole, are still behind. John Buchanan writes that up to mid-2024, ‘Australia’s real wages were 4.8% lower than pre-pandemic levels while across the OECD real wages over the same period have, on average, risen 1.5%’.  Bill Mitchell, shows that wages across the entire work-force continue to lag cost of living.

Real wages have fallen in Australia because of the move from awards and centralised wage fixation to enterprise bargaining followed by legislative and structural shifts that increased employer power. Both Labor and the Coalition share responsibility for the changes. In addition, the Rudd-Gillard Labor Governments did not do enough to reverse the impact of ‘Work Choices’.

Reductions in real wages make profits a higher share of GDP with bigger rewards to capital. As Bill Mitchell puts it, corporations are failing to invest the massive profits they have been earning and are also taking advantage of the current situation to push up profit mark-ups. John Buchanan sagely says that ‘We need a mature debate on how this legacy can be overcome in a sustainable way’.

Where Labor has not been bold

The housing crisis continues to intensify. The 2024-25 Budget Paper on Housing shows the portion of income needed to service a new loan jumped from an average of 29 per cent in 2020 to 46 per cent in 2023. And, the median house price has gone from  4.9 times the median gross disposable household income in 2002 to 8.6 times in 2024.

The People’s Commission into Australia’s Housing Crisis reports in 2024 that over 640,000 households need social housing but cannot get it, and 122,000 people experience homelessness on any given night. Daily life is extremely dour for many:

People are being forced to spend record amounts to keep a roof over their heads, live with the constant threat of eviction, navigate life on a waiting list for housing, or in the very worst cases, deal with the bleak reality of homelessness.

Some efforts have been made to increase housing supply by ‘liberalising’ land-use and urban planning. Other measures seek to assist first-time buyers into housing but risk pushing up house prices. These take the housing market as a given. There are two strong arguments against this.  One is the extent of speculation; as a University of Queensland report says ‘there has been a lot done at the policy level to ensure housing is a commodity to be speculated’. This includes the vast tax concessions to the rich through negative gearing and capital gains. Speculation is stark; , in the December quarter of 2024, loans to investors accounted for 37% of all residential property loans.

The second argument against relying on the market is that Australia has disinvested in social housing and other forms of affordable housing. This is argued cogently by Alan Morris calling for ‘a legislated national housing strategy with the long-term aim of getting the whole population into housing that is adequate and affordable. A key part of that strategy would be to build 950,000 social and affordable rental dwellings by 2041.’

The global right

Opposing the Coalition means confronting the directions in which politics are moving across the world. As explained in the recent SEARCH Committee statement about Trump and Project 2025, wealthy ideologues in the US, Europe and Asia have spent decades building and funding political infrastructure  projects and campaigns aimed at overturning the democratic norms, rights and freedoms that were won in decades of activism from the left, trade unions and social movements.

Across India, Turkey, continental Europe, Latin America and the Anglo countries, a network of political parties, media outlets, think tanks, campaign groups, educational institutions and online influencers have successfully utilised a Gramscian strategy - ‘sans-Communism’- to build popular support for their authoritarian, chauvinist politics.

Parties aligned to this ‘Reactionary International’ now govern or are a major opposition party in more than 20 countries. They are rife in Australia as shown by the prominent advertising of Clive Palmer’s and his Trumpet of Patriots including concern at ‘erosion of our Australian values and identity’ and a promise to ‘prioritise migration from nations with compatible values’.

The ascendant right

Ferenc Laczó uses the term ‘illiberalism’ to denote the most potent forces in the great ‘moving right show’ where ‘many democratically elected governments across the globe have sought to accomplish an illiberal transformation’. There is also a large number of parties of the right professing nativism and nationalism. One can also add the number of left-of-centre parties and governments which have adopted some illiberal policies whether withdrawal of citizenship from immigrants or curtailing of rights to speak out. In consequence, illiberalism is well entrenched beyond the core of Hungary, India, Israel, Turkey or USA and into many  labour and social-democratic parties and polities.

Illiberalism is a political, economic and cultural backlash against multilateralism and globalisation. This includes a strong critique of the neo-liberal agendas of the Regan-Thatcher period though not of capitalism and private property. The critique of neo-liberalism is combined with attacks on ‘woke’ and so-called progressive cultural and moral causes. But the most vehemence goes to immigration and immigrants and claims about national purity. These are put as demands for “cultural stability” and “shared values” often dressed in narrow social and religious mores with strong racist and misogynist tones.

Neo-liberalism destroyed the socio-democractic consensus which included the Roosevelt New Deal, Australian, British and New Zealand ‘labourism’ of the 1940s, the Nordic social partnership from the mid-1930s to the late 2000s and even Germanic ordo-liberalism of the 1970s. To a greater or lesser extent, depending on the particular regime, the socio-democratic consensus increased equality and reduced the disparities in material living standards, health and life expectancy. 

Illiberalism is not about rebuilding that consensus. It offers nationalism - ‘my country first’ and nativism - ‘our people first before immigrants’. Nativism means preference for ‘our people’ in all areas of the economy including employment and housing, public benefits and services. Nativism also means defending and promoting the cultural heritage of the dominant part of the society. This is better described as a ‘supposed’ cultural heritage. In Australia it includes ‘whiteness’, ‘masculinity’, ‘ heterosexuality and racial stereotyping such as described in the 2024 Senate Committee on Right-Wing Extremist Movements.

The overtly right-wing ideas of illiberalism are gaining political and electoral support from what were once traditional areas of left-of-centre parties, unions and social movements. One example is the collapse of the ALP vote in mining and resource areas of North Queensland. Another is the divisions in what George Megalogenis describes as a ‘more fractured electorate, with new fault-lines opening within the cities which overlap the old rifts of identity between city and country, between women and men, and between young and old.’

The fracturing of the electorate and the rise of illiberalism can be understood as an active process of the detachment of sectors of society from the left and their attachment to the right.

The process started with the marginalisation of sections of the work-force via neo-liberal  deregulation of product and labour markets. Put plainly, the naked pursuit of profits through lower costs and financial speculation expelled many people from the world of permanent and decent work. The deindustrialisation of the global north was very much part of this.

Marginalisation was reinforced as governments adopted austerity and knowingly failed to provide adequate support for the unemployed, those entering the work-force and those with precarious work. Universal safety nets were removed and replaced with ‘mutual obligation’ that turned people into supplicants. This was transmitted into the next generation with public policies which created and accentuated socio-geographic divisions. Low income, poor prospects, inadequate health and education are compounded in some localities. On the converse, affluence, privilege and ‘opportunity’ are grouped in other places.

Once people have been marginalised and segregated, they can be injected with anger and resentment which is directed at unspecified ‘elites’ and those labelled as ‘other’. Immigrants are the prime examples of ‘other’ - they take our jobs, under-cut our conditions and so on. In Australia, ‘ other’ includes First Nations people, non-white and non-anglophone citizens and, at least for some men, successful women and feminists.

This directs the resentment and anger away from the structures and operation of free-market capitalism. Thus, it can be argued, and believed, that rents are high and housing inadequate because of the pressure of immigration and immigrants and not because the system has made housing a speculative commodity and abandoned the principle of providing decent housing as a universal standard. Similarly, there are not enough jobs because wages are pushed too high by militant unions. Employment is precarious because of the onerous conditions forced on employers by unions and legislation. The commitment to full employment and decent jobs for all who wanted them is simply put aside.

Making old answers new again

The ‘old’ socio-democractic arrangements still have purchase in the economic and material sphere. The most important are full employment and universal social security which provides a livable income at replacement levels. Increasing productivity - the ratio of outputs to inputs - should be applied not for increasing profits but to reduce the length of the working week and working life. Keynes, hardly a socialist, wrote to his grandchildren about the prospect of a 15 hour week. Increased productivity facilitates and expands the scope, range and level of health, education, housing, culture and recreation. And properly managed it reduces the human impact on nature and the environment.

Better public policies for employment and social security need to be backed by appropriate tax policies to raise sufficient public expenditure and to reduce the rich-poor gulf. ‘From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs’ remains a wise proposition. It can still provide the necessary elements of what might be termed a new citizenship and a new equality.

Active measures are also needed to combat the support for illiberalism among those who have been marginalised and segregated . The antidote to the anger and resentment injected by the authoritarian right has two parts. One is material equality. The other is a culture of universal respect and rights. The principles for this are long-standing and stated in two United Nations Covenants.  First the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights,

recognition of the inherent dignity the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.

 And, second, the 1976 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights,

the ideal of free human beings enjoying freedom from fear and want can only be achieved if conditions are created whereby everyone may enjoy their economic, social and cultural rights, as well as their civil and political rights,

 The task of the progressive left in Australia is to put the ‘old’ ideas back on the political agenda. It starts with the 2025 election but will continue after, irrespective of the result. Regulating precarious work is one step to this. So too is removing all instances of different treatment, prejudice, racism and stigmatisation of First Nations’ peoples, immigrants and those who are labeled as ‘other’. A formidable struggle is needed to rebut the right. Pursuing a society where there is  dignity and respect for all from all, must be fundamental. It requires practical left action to build and maintain collectivism and solidarity for the 2020s and beyond.