Paul’s argument that there’s a sort of essentialism going on here is demonstrated in a bizarre column in today’s Australian by Angela Shanahan. Shanahan slurs a heap of left Labor figures by association – including, quite bizarrely, Lionel Murphy and Rex Connor. It’s all a piece with a McCarthyist mentality that still seems to prevail among sections of the Australian right – those who are at best careless, and at worst wilfully ignorant of history, and those who are most obsessed with “culture wars”.

In a confused and illogical piece, Shanahan pays tribute to Tony Abbott’s work in the Sydney University Democratic Club (effectively the youth wing of the National Civic Council) and B. A. Santamaria. She also raises the spectre of Communism as a present threat – an enemy within the social body, “something far more subtle, more fluid and, because of its subtlety, more dangerous”.

Surely what we should be asking ourselves now is what happened to all that communist fervour? Did it just disappear into some counter-cultural Trotskyist Never Never land, where all the old ideologies end up?

No, it ended up in feminism and the new “green” movement and the generally renamed “progressive” causes such as the gay lobby (a real favourite, that one): areas quite deliberately and carefully chosen for the amount of havoc they cause to the accepted structures of stable societies.

The problem now is that the contagion they were fighting is not eclipsed. Aarons’s revelations might just seem interesting historical revisionism if it had not been for the eventual morphing of the communist cause into something far more subtle, more fluid and, because of its subtlety, more dangerous.

Australia didn’t succumb to political communism, but the Long March is still going. Its focus is different: it is the most basic structure of society itself. It is the family.

This is bizarre.

Historically, of course, while there was some limited crossover between the CPA and the 60s social movements, most Australian communists of the 1960s and 1970s were decidedly un-hip. To the degree that 60s and 70s progressivism gave impetus to movements for social and cultural liberation (and it’s a limited degree, because social change isn’t cooked up in political party branch meetings), it was part of a raft of cultural shifts which couldn’t have been more inimical to the notion of a vanguard politics. There was also a strong streak of moral puritanism in the Old Left.

How widely on the Australian right, I wonder, is the desire to see social change which they resent as the product of some orchestrated conspiracy? Is communism now a signifier for all that Right-thinking folks, like Shanahan, abhor?

I wonder, given Julia Gillard’s youthful association with the rather bland and supremely reformist Socialist Forum, whether we’re about to see another piece of the conspiracy theory mentality confected in time for an election contested by that Santamaria manqué, Tony Abbott.

The Australian has duly delivered.

I want to enter some further caveats, but I’d like to start by saying that the polling data stands aside from its misinterpretation by Newspoll’s owners (egregious comments from Dennis Shanahan implying that the three marginals surveyed in Queensland could be translated into a state wide swing are just the start). Nor is the conclusion drawn from it implied by the poll itself. We can set aside the questions about Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard’s relative popularity, for instance, as meaningless given their lack of relationship to any probable set of circumstances between now and the election (and Peter Van Onselen must have finally recognised this, segueing into the next media narrative, a series of tedious and tendentious questions about whether Gillard will commit to supporting Rudd’s leadership in the next term).

But what does the polling actually tell us?

(a) As Possum suggests, we can set aside the Lindsay survey as undoubtedly contaminated by the concurrent Penrith campaign and by-election, and observe also that Labor’s primary in the poll of federal voting intentions is higher than that in the by-election;

(b) The 3 Queensland marginals do suggest that the swing against Labor is translating to a swing to the Coalition rather than The Greens in at least those seats (noting that the margin of error is approximately 4%). But, as Possum observes also, seats swing to greater and lesser degrees, as indicated by the result in Page.

(c) If some Labor MPs are right, it may be that the ETS issue is biting in some seats, and issues about asylum seekers in others. Of course, that’s not all that’s going on.

Having said all that, the polling wouldn’t bring any great delight to the government or to Labor supporters. But we should also beware of assuming that the political situation is static, and will remain so until the election. Of interest here is William Bowe’s point about the softness of The Greens’ vote. And Laura Tingle rightly observed in today’s Fin that the government is still the government and can get on with governing. Parental leave and the NBN-Telstra deal are no small matters, and nor is the signing of $10 billion worth of contracts with China, an event which tends to disrupt the narrative about the evils of the RSPT.

And unemployment and interest rates are low. Nor, as Tingle argues, can Tony Abbott continue his disappearing act for much longer. And Coalition supporters really should be asking what sort of leader they have when Abbott has to be hidden to avoid his unpopularity pulling down the party’s vote in the polls. That’s what they’ve been up to.

Nor am I sure that Abbott’s bouts of triumphalism when he does appear are all that helpful to his cause.

Elsewhere: Guy Beres’ take on the Lindsay poll.

Rudd’s climate change reversal was the embodiment of a cynicism of truly monumental proportions; the culmination of a sustained failure to hold a policy conversation with the public, and born of fear of an Abbott fear campaign.

So as May Day dawns, it’s worth posing the question: what has happened to Australian Labor?

I can’t remember who first described Kevin Rudd as ‘Australia’s inaugural Federal premier’, but there’s real truth in that phrase. The risk averse nature of state politics, the obsession with controlling the media cycle, the concentration on bite sized focus grouped ‘announceables’, and the failure to lead public opinion; it’s all there with Rudd.

It’s the triumph of the political pragmatists – a vacuous politics driven by the minutiae of electoral calculus which Paul Keating warned against in the midst of the 2007 Rudd ascendancy. Sure, it might make sense to ‘clear the decks’ and pitch solely to the outer suburban and regional voters Abbott is also appealling to with his unprincipled populism. ‘Keep the conversation on health’, one can imagine Ruddistas intoning with the frequency of a constantly repeated soundbite.

But something more profound is at work here; a failure of political imagination and courage.

Much has been made over the past few days of Kevin Rudd’s lack of a reform agenda. I’m often suspicious of that word. Too often, it means a narrow economism, focused solely on enabling business to compete in a globalised world. Few point to the passage of the Sex Discrimination Act in 1984 by the Hawke Government as a great reform, preferring to laud the deregulation of markets and the floating of the dollar. Yet the former represented a real shift in the possibilities of equality in this nation, and a reconfiguration of social relations for the better. The Rudd government’s record is equally barren on both scores, and a chance has been missed to lead on an issue the PM himself quite correctly identified as the great challenge of our times.

It may be that Paul Norton is right and that the Labor party, reflecting the class and workplace cleavages of another century, finds it difficult to factor sustainability into its political equation. Indeed, that failure, whose consequences are now writ large, opens the political space for The Greens, as opposed to the soft environmentalism and middle class civil liberties agenda of the now departed Democrats. But the intransigence of some Ministers, unions and a recrudescent party culture is no excuse for a Prime Minister whose power within the government has constantly been celebrated.

What’s left for Labor? There are still reasons to re-elect the Rudd Government, and reasons which transcend the horror of the Abbott alternative. There’s something in having Ministers with the right instincts, and with a desire to put right the wreckage John Howard inflicted on all of us. The irony is that some of those Ministers who are most attuned to the demands of the second decade of the new century are now at risk from Rudd’s obsession with a risk-free politics. Labor should have another term, but some time in that term, and the sooner the better, Kevin Rudd should go.

Update: My thoughts on Brisbane Labour Day 2010, and John Quiggin‘s reflections on May Day.