As the party develops, and new injections of ideas occur, you get, laboratory style, almost as many mixtures as it is possible to imagine.

As others have commented, Lang was a product of that movement. Both his populism, his anti-bank rhetoric, and his anti-semitism all have their roots in the melange of ideas in the early ALP.

As for Keating – I think this is best explained by the collapse of progressive politics. The lesson drawn by most Laborites regarding the reform government of Whitlam, was that serious reform is implausible – which knocked the intellectual stuffing out of the idea of Labor Governments as a means to achieve any kind of substantially different world. Once the Accord process renders redundant labour movement activism, since this becomes irrelevant in an era of centralised wage fixation, this severely curtails the renewing influence of working class activists. 1991 and the self-destruction of the CP deal a major blow to non-Labor transformative politics.

So Keating sits against this backdrop – he is able to lead the ALP, primarily because the party has nowhere else to go. He provided *a* program for them (neo-liberal ‘reform’ plus social liberalism) which succeeded in winning support from the party primarily because of the vacuum of all else.

On the Howard-Keating thing – stylistically, sure some similarities. Both can arguably qualify as ’statesmen’ (something we could also say of Menzies and Whitlam, though not K.Rudd). There is a strong continuity between Enterprise Bargaining, WorkChoices and Fair Work – all of which profoundly restrict solidarity. But there the similarity ends – Keating sold a message of ‘accept the pain, in exchange for a modern, broadly progressive political agenda’ – something many of the political inheritors of the new left, who by the 1990s had increasingly jettisoned any concern about class, were only too happy to accept. Howard said to the so-called ‘battlers’: this progressive political agenda by the ex-hippies is *why* you are suffering pain, so let me run the same basic economic framework, with a 50’s derived social agenda instead.

In short what they have in common was an attempt to manage capital in an environment where eroding workers gains of the past was the order of the day.

The exhaustion with the economic package of neo-liberalism is a big reason for K.Rudd’s success, despite his near total failure, either before or since his election, to articulate, let alone act on, *any* kind of distinct program. Its Howard+new pragmatism, that’s it.

– As an aside, I’ve always questioned to what extent Keating learned much at all from Lang, except perhaps how to ‘work the numbers’ in bureaucratic organisations. Lang, for all his failings, was *connected* to the workers movement, addressed himself significantly to the labour movement, and felt compelled to justify himself to the labour movement. There is also little doubt that the Lang Plan was progressive viz a viz the Premiers Plan, and a partial articulation of working class rejection of the capitalist strategy of making workers pay for the depression. Perhaps not ‘the Australian Lenin’ as my namesake once claimed, but unlike Lang, Keating felt no such compunction to justify or address himself to workers, except for the brief moment of raw populism that salvaged the ‘93 election for Labor.

Paul Burns @ 28: The criticisms of Niemeyer were a reflection of Lang’s well-documented anti-semitism, another populist strain, and his criticisms of British bond-holders had implications of a (non-existent) international financial conspiracy, yet another populist strain. (Eddie Ward was still rabbitting on about the latter with his condemnation of the IMF and Bretton Woods in the late 1940s.)

There is much truth in this, though personally I wouldn’t go as far as to say that everbody who spoke of the Premiers Plan being the Niemeyer Plan was influenced by anti-Semitism. The most recent Lang author, Dr Frank Cain, uses the ‘Niemeyer Plan’ formulation. And I don’t think that a tenured UNSW academic is that irresponsible.

I was rather more thinking of how Lang fitted into the early liberal tradition within the ALP, which along with socialism,single-taxers, workers’ utopias etc, all went into the mix of early Labor ideology (so much so, if I remember rightly that they had no problems going into coalition with the Deakinite Liberals in the earliest years of the 20th century).

Isn’t it easier just to use ‘Radical’ in its original 19th century meaning? ‘Liberalism’ is just too awkward, too diverse, particularly for a modern audience.

I think Insiders would do a lot better in trying to rope someone like Michelle Gratten on the show. PK needs to be exposed like the emperor who has no clothes. And that incessant lip sucking…brrrrr…

‘Interview’ with Paul Kelly yet more free ABC advertising for Rupert Murdoch

‘Interview’ with Paul Kelly yet more free ABC advertising for Rupert Murdoch

The Murdoch press promotion of Paul Kelly’s misnamed book The March of Patriots, chronicling the Prime Ministerships of Paul Keating and the early years of John Howard’s, has been supplemented, at taxpayers’ expense, by Brisbane ABC local radio stations Conversations program. …

When Senator Sandy MacDonald started using the classified report authored by Wilkie himself (30 minutes into the video) Wilkie should have made a huge protest about the illegal use of classified information and utterly refused to confirm or deny material protected by the dread provisions of the Crimes Act.

Ratty and the leakers would have been severely embarrassed for endangering Australian national security in pursuit of a personal vendetta.

Geoff Robinson @ 32,
Good to “meet” another historian who has a fascination with J. T. Lang.
My research work on him has been mostly concerned with his post 1930s career – during WW2, especially in relation to the Brisbane Line and his attitudes/non-relationship toward Curtin at that time.
And with his career as an Independent in Federal Parliament 1946-149, on which I based my honours thesis.
Though I have studied and lectured on the Lang Government during the Great Depression.
Will read your book.
Cheers,
PB.

But be quick. It won’t be up for long.

In foreign policy terms, both Hughes and Howard were driven by conviction.

Hughes was prepared to tear his party and the country apart over his failed pursuit of conscription.

Howard, more cleverly, pushed the Iraq/Afghan commitment to the limit, but not beyond, of public toleration.

Hughes used Imperial loyalism as a stalking horse for a prickly and combative, but stunted, nationalism. He was prepared to exploit Australian racism to achieve this vision.

Howard used Australian nationalism as a stalking horse for his surrender of Australian interests and their subsumption under the rubric of Bush’s inchoate and ramshackle “Coalition of the Willing”. He was prepared to exploit Australian racism to achieve this vision.

Rudd still hasn’t worked out what to do with Howard’s legacy.

Anthony Nolan @ 16: …Kelly is as politically and critically uninformed as any other Australian journalistic Alan Bigenuff. In short Kelly is bunkum and dangerously unaware of his inadequacies.

Kelly put himself forward as a serious historian with ‘The End of Certainty’, with his thesis of the Australian Settlement (which is really a thesis began by others, such as John Manning Ward, though AFAIK Kelly is the one who thought to call it the `settlement’.)

Yet in the few historical passages of that book, Kelly (a.) placed an inordinate emphasis on his conception of state economic interventionism, and (b.) was woefully unconcerned with everything else in Australian history. The British Empire? The White Australia policy? The Americans? Communism? Catholics, Aborigines, women? None of these subjects existed in Kellyworld, at least not before he made a documentary for the ABC (with the help of a production team, of course.)

Paul Burns @ 18: One wonders how much of Lang’s liberalism he soaked up

Paul, you’ve written here that Lang was ‘Australia’s FDR’, correct?

I know that’s the argument put forth by Frank Cain in his recent work Jack Lang and the Great Depression.

I disagree with Cain’s view. In fact, I was concerned to read the odd `speaker’s corner’ polemical touches in that book; for instance, the Premiers Plan being only referred to as ‘The Niemeyer Plan’; or the vote to bring down the Scullin government being described as a poor decision… made by Scullin. Perhaps this is the reason for Cain’s book being published by a very minor publishing house—the Louise Adlers and the UQPs like there history a little bit less eccentric.

Anyway, Bede Nairn’s critique in the ‘Big Fella’ suits me fine.

When an editor, he mainly just snivelled to Suharto (Murdoch’s favorite at the time).

He’s just an irrelevant, pompous old bastard.

I’m really really looking forward to the Australian being shut down and the creeps who write there having to get real jobs.

What the likes of Kelly never want to confront is just how inseparable neo-liberalism is frin base and ugly prejudices. The likes of Kelly like to talk about “flexible labor market reform” – as if this wasn’t rooted in age-old Tory class bigotry. All around the world neo-liberalism and xenophobia (some version of Hansonism) seem entwined – either to be used by cynical neo-liberal politicians to distract from the unpopularity of their own policies or as a result of those policies creating unemployment, insecurity and damaging communities (note I’m being generous and not accusing neo-liberals of being Hansonites to begin with). It’s probably true that those countries that have embraced neo-liberalism most enthusiastically have had the highest economic growth rates, but they also have the highest growth in prison populations.

In other words, there’s some deeply ugly stuff that just can’t be disentangled from neo-liberalism – much as the likes of Kelly would like to see it as a bloodless affair.