With the Government’s hated carbon tax now less than three weeks from taking effect, the ALP has promised to do everything it can in opposition — after the next election — to prevent the repeal of the tax. Such a stand is breathtaking in its arrogance, and sets a very dangerous precedent.
An article by Greg Sheridan in yesterday’s edition of The Australian — quoting Climate Change minister Greg Combet from ABC Radio — nails Combet firmly to the mast in highlighting what can only be described as a worryingly belligerent philosophy on Combet’s part that, if implemented, would amount to a flagrant disregard for democracy by the Labor Party as a whole.
Before we rip into it — and, for the record, into Combet — I should point out that there have been hints of this approach to the carbon tax from Labor and from for some months. The fact Combet now appears to be doing interviews, presenting this proposed course cogently and from an apparent position of organisational readiness, heralds a new phase in the ALP’s planning for opposition.
Which, if this is any indication, is exactly where Labor is headed.
Combet’s grand plan on the carbon tax in opposition — which he has as good as formally committed the Labor to, given the breadth of the strategy he has been outlining and the wide public means by which he has done so — is that if the ALP loses the next election, it will combine with the Communist Party Greens in the Senate to ensure the carbon tax is never repealed.
In other words, to hell with an election result.
To hell with the mandate of a new, popularly elected government.
And to hell with the legitimate wishes of the Australian voting public.
Shanahan reports that it wouldn’t matter what mandate a Coalition government might have to repeal the tax; Combet has committed Labor to whatever obstruction it can provide in the Senate, up to and including forcing a double-dissolution election on the issue.
Claiming that an election loss would not alter Labor’s “principled position on a carbon price,” Combet is quoted from his interview on ABC Radio, saying “In politics you’ve got to stand up for what you believe in. And this has been Labor policy for years now. Having a price on carbon, through an emissions trading scheme arrangement. That’s what we’re implementing.”
Just as readers should not be surprised — after all, the most dishonest government in Australia’s history may as well continue on to become its most disreputable opposition for good measure — nor should people feel threatened, bullied, or disempowered.
We all know the story; 89% of Australians cast their votes in 2010 for parties (including Labor) that were not offering “carbon pricing” as a policy; indeed, the ALP and its contemptible leader explicitly promised that no such tax would be implemented.
And having prostituted her government to a few Commies to hold onto office, Gillard reneged: not only would there be a carbon tax, but the Australian public — having voted against such a measure once — would be given no further say by Labor on the issue.
The Liberal Party has promised to give people a say, and to abolish the tax if elected. And should the Liberals under Abbott win — and win in the landslide that seems to be coming — no political figure in the country could credibly make the claim that a mandate to remove the tax did not exist.
(Never mind about any alleged difficulties in doing so; that is a matter for another discussion on policy in the future).
Now, the ALP seeks to nullify that too, and to say to people, in effect, that they can vote for whoever or whatever they like, but they — the MPs from the Labor Party, in conjunction with those fruit cakes over at the Communist Party Greens — would decide what they were given in return, irrespective of who formed the government to public had voted for.
This is dangerous ground, on so many levels.
Firstly — and most obviously — for the ALP to make this sort of stand over an issue it lied about so flagrantly, after losing an election over it as seems certain, betrays a complete contempt for democratic process.
Secondly, it sets a dangerous precedent: whilst the numbers in the Senate may be exercised in any way those who hold them see fit, even governments that have faced hostile Senate majorities in recent years — Howard from 1996 to 2004, Hawke and Keating for 13 years, Fraser in his last term, even Whitlam — have been permitted to pass the bulk of their legislative agendas, and certainly those aspects of them that were key to the platforms upon which they were elected.
What happens if a Labor opposition decides to block every bill introduced into the Senate by an Abbott government? Who is the legitimate arbiter of what is acceptable if the judgement of the people is unilaterally discarded, as Combet proposes to do?
But thirdly — and most importantly — what Combet has committed the ALP to bears no semblance whatsoever to the way government in this country runs; it is also, perversely, a twist of the knife in the backs of the unionists and battlers Labor claims to represent, trashing as it does such basic tenets of representative government for which the ALP fought as hard as anyone to establish in the first place.
Some of us in the blue corner of Australian politics half-wish the ALP implements such half-baked strategies when it makes its deserved return to opposition next year, as the self-inflicted damage on the Labor Party would be diabolical; by the same token, we also half-wish they don’t, because the potential for chaos and instability such moves would unleash in Australian society is unacceptable, and not something that should be inflicted on Australians in any circumstances.
Especially not by an aggrieved, humiliated band of democracy-smashing thugs masquerading as a parliamentary opposition, which is the status to which Labor apparently now aspires.
There is a relatively straightforward solution: if Queensland and Western Australia return the Coalition four of the six available Senate spots next year as seems increasingly possible, and if the Coalition retrieves the third Senator it dropped in each of SA and Tasmania in 2007, then it will hold 38 of the 76 Senate positions heading into government — 39, and a majority, if the DLP Senator opts to support the Coalition in government.
It remains to be seen whether Labor in opposition would carry out Combet’s threat.
But I certainly wouldn’t put it past them and, frankly, I wouldn’t expect them to try anything less.
Whether they do or not, the point remains that Combet’s remarks and his endorsement of them as Labor policy signal an ominous shift in the ALP’s political outlook, and it should alarm any interested person, be they to the Left or the Right, that a philosophy of political doctrine that would sit well under the leadership of Brezhnev and Andropov in the USSR is now being adopted by the Australian Labor Party.
The fact it sits well, and always has, with the Greens needs no further comment.
If the end result of Combet’s posturing on behalf of the ALP over the carbon tax is a double-dissolution election, the consequences for his party will be dire to the point of devastating.
But I think the real question this entire issue raises concerns the Senate, the way it is elected and is constituted, and the manner in which it discharges its constitutional brief.
And it’s an issue we will revisit in the next few days.
In the meantime, keep an eye out for that “principled policy” of the ALP, as articulated by Greg Combet; the Labor Party of 2012 and principles of anything other than the self-serving variety, uttered in the same sentence, are an oxymoron indeed.
Then again, the sun may rise in the west tomorrow…who’s to know?
Reblogged this on Iain Hall's SANDPIT and commented:
Yale you have done very well here to point out the villainous nature of the left leaning parties when it comes to this most pernicious tax and spend regime. Further the fact that he has even said this should be retold every-time that the Labor party claims that it believes the next election is winnable by Gillard because thsi sort of thinking is absolute evidence that they are lying (again) about their election prospects.
Cheers Comrade
Labor? Undemocratic thuggery? Oh! I see, its the NO Coalition pot calling the Labor kettle black! We have the most venal, and self-serving bunch of non-entity politicians in Federal Parliament today and you are saying that those in the NO Coalition are better than the others. I’d like our democracy (word used advisedly) to be better than this!
I have to admit my first thought on this was that this is another misguided attempt by the Gillard camp to be clever. In this case it is an attempt to neutralise the carbon tax by saying it will stay in place no matter who wins the next election. Of course it won’t work, but it smells of the sort of ham-fisted attempt at political jujitsu we’ve seen again and again.
Regardless of why they are doing this now, predicting whether they will cling to the carbon tax requires putting yourself in their shoes after the election. If Labor is crushed, as it will be if the results are anything like the polling has been, they will follow the same pattern every party does after a devastating loss: act contrite, soul search, and blather about “listening” to people. It is hard to imagine Labor not having a “rethink” that would allow a repeal to pass the Senate. If nothing else, the Senate members of the caucus, who will desperately want to avoid a second bloodletting at the next half-Senate election (or, God forbid, a double dissolution) will be a large enough proportion of the whole caucus that they won’t need much support from ALP MPs to prevent the disastrous decision to block repeal at all costs.
deknarf, when over 4,000 submissions on the Carbon Tax were redefined by the government as “correspondence” so that they could be ignored, there is no pot/kettle. If you can find any example of the coallition doing a similar thing to derail democratic processes, I’d love to know of it, but until you do the “Undemocratic Thuggery” is on the left hand side. This is the most dishonest and contemptable government the nation has had in living memory.
Rich does make a good point. Combets comments could simply be trying to be smart. By saying that the ALP would fight a repeal is trying to muddy the waters. Maybe if people think that Abbot won’t be able to get rid of the tax they will be less likely to vote for him, thus preserving some votes for the ALP.
But it is empty posturing. If the ALP gets the expected drubbing at the next election, there is no way that the ALP Senators would put their jobs on the line for a double dissolution. If you’ve just lost a lot of seats that were up for election, you simply don’t put the rest of them up for a second round.
While I’ve often thought that many pollies from the ALP are morons, they are not setting out for political suicide.
“if the ALP loses the next election, it will combine with the Communist Party Greens in the Senate to ensure the carbon tax is never repealed.
In other words, to hell with an election result. To hell with the mandate of a new, popularly elected government. And to hell with the legitimate wishes of the Australian voting public.”
What are you talking about? If the election result leaves Labor and the Greens with the ability to block the Coalition, and the Coalition without enough votes to get it through both houses, then that’s exactly what “the Australian voting public” wanted. That’s democracy.
We don’t have a “winner takes all” system. We have a parliament. And each MP in that parliament has a mandate to do what they said they would do before the election. They do not have a mandate to roll over and do the bidding of the government.
The Coalition has no more obligation to vote for ALP legislation when it “wins” an election than the ALP does to vote for Coalition legislation when they do.
But of course if you’re calling the Greens “communists” then it’s obvious that you’re not even attempting to be a rational political observer. Carry on.
All right, Jeremy, here are the substantive reasons I either disagree with you and/or you are simply wrong.
Whilst it’s a discussion for another post, the voting system used in the Senate is not reflective of the democratic wishes of the Australian voting public (and I would question its worth as a “democratic” entity); for one thing, half the Senators were elected three years before the other half were; for another, proportional voting means that some candidates or tickets can be elected with barely any votes (like Steve Fielding in 2004, with his 1.9% of the vote here in Victoria). The Liberal Party at present, having due regard to all relevant political considerations, is the only party for which it is even possible to win the Senate outright — and I still think the system that elects it stinks.
Your second paragraph is as contradictory as it is ridiculous; by your reasoning, the Coalition would indeed have a mandate for its repeal of the carbon tax. This sits in direct contradiction to your assertion that the Senate should not roll over and “do the bidding of the government.” It is the position of the Liberal/National Coalition, prior to a likely election win, to rescind an Act of Parliament (a position you suggest is a valid “mandate”) that the ALP/Greens propose to prevent them from doing if numbers permit (a position you also suggest is valid despite the “mandate” your logic ascribes to the aforesaid Coalition agenda). Surely the flawed contradiction in such a preposterous statement is obvious.
Broadly speaking, you are correct that neither party is “obliged” to pass the legislation of the other from opposition. But if you look through parliamentary history you will see that — broadly — the government of the day in this country usually is able to implement its platform through legislation. Often there are amendments, and often opposition Senators abstain from votes, and sometimes there are impasses. But usually, the government prevails in one way or another.
And when it doesn’t, there is constitutional recourse: a double dissolution followed by a joint sitting of the Houses of Parliament to enable a government, if so re-elected, to bypass the Senate deadlock. It is a path of recourse an Abbott government will certainly utilise if necessary, and it is at that subsequent election that the ALP and the Greens will be very heavily punished.
Finally, your remarks about my view of the Greens as Communists are not only wrong but ill-informed, and there is nothing irrational in my branding them as such. If you read the platform of the Greens and some of their policies, you will quickly find that they are indeed of the Marxist-socialist variety. Some of the Greens themselves openly identify as a party of the hard left, and Bob Brown himself was the first of them to cook up the idea that irrespective of the next election result the Greens would block abolishing a carbon tax — if you want to talk about democracy, then you really need to consider that sort of thing a little more carefully. Oh, and did you know that one of the present Greens Senators was once a propagandist writing Communist material for the USSR government in the 1980s? I’ll bet you didn’t.
I could say more on these points, but in the interests of some degree of concision, I’ll leave it there.
Jeremy, whilst I am very open about my political views and about the fact this blog is an expression of conservative commentary, I am by no means blinkered; alternative views are welcome here (provided those offering them accept they may come in for challenge), and a growing number of reasonable left-wing types read this column regularly.
However, accusations of irrationality (or implied suggestions of blind doctrinaire bias) are so wide of the mark it’s not worth measuring the width of the gap. I’m quite happy for — and encourage — debate on these articles, but I really think you should get your facts straight first.