Critiquing Labor "Heroes": Bob Hawke, Jack Lang and Kevin Rudd + Why Reformists Can't Be Trusted

Critiquing Labor “Heroes”: Bob Hawke, Jack Lang and Kevin Rudd + Why Reformists Can't Be Trusted

May 19, 2021

This is probably going to be a big one. In this piece, I'm going to talk about:

A critique of Bob Hawke,
A critique of Jack Lang,
A critique of Kevin Rudd and Labor optimism,
Why you can't trust reformists!

There's gonna be some scrolling in this one.

Bob Hawke, Union Smasher

Bob Hawke. Usually when he's mentioned, you think of nice things such as Medicare, the Sex Discrimination Act of 1984, “opening up Australia's economy”, and so on. All great things, I'm sure. But what needs to be said, because it isn't said enough, is that when Bob Hawke “opened up the economy to the world”, what he did was introduce a series of neoliberal corporatist economic reforms that amongst other things, gutted union power in this country. So-called “union man” Bob Hawke's Accords not only restricted the circumstances in which unions could “lawfully” engage in industrial action (i.e go on strike), but introduced severe, draconian punishments for unions that didn't play ball.

Hawke was a tough man. He was tough on unions, tough on workers, and tough on anyone who didn't follow the ALP line at the time. He entered the Prime Ministership in 1983, serving until 1991, having come after Fraser, who himself replaced the unrightfully deposed Whitlam, which is a discussion for later in this article. Even though Hawke was backed by the “leftwing” of the Labor Party, which in those days included the Communist Party of Australia (CPA), Hawke himself was far from what you would call a “leftist”, unless your definition of “leftist” is vague enough to encompass literally anyone who isn't in the avowed Conservative Party.

Hawke (later Keating) was the pioneer of Australian Neoliberalism: pushing in industrial relations reforms that tipped the scales in favor of the employers, at the expense of the workers. Labor's general neoliberalism is something I will address later. People loved “accords” back then. “Accords” were essentially deals between the government and the unions, in this case, the ALP-ACTU Accord of 1983 was a deal between the Australian Council of Trade Unions, at the time led by Cliff Dolan, and Prime Minister Bob Hawke (who had just entered the spot), alongside his Treasurer Paul Keating (keep that name pinned in your head for now).

The ALP-ACTU accord came with several amendments over the years, but the basic plan was this: The ACTU and its affiliated unions would stop pushing for wage increases for workers, and in return, the government would minimize inflation, which in theory would've made it easier for the government to implement sweeping social reforms such as Medicare. However, there were a few problems: for starters, the ACTU essentially signed away any chance the workers of Australia had to real wages increases for the next, well, forever, because today in 2021 we are still seeing a stagnation and decline in real wages. Wage growth in this country is the worst in the so-called Developed World, and many of the causes of this stagnation and later decline of wages stems back from the ACTU-ALP Accord in 1983. Simply put: it was a bunk deal.

I would say that Hawke “betrayed” Australia's workers, but to say that is to say that Hawke at any time in his life ever had allegiance to the workers. In the later years of his government's reign, he abandoned the workers entirely, opting instead to befriend billionaire owners such as Kerry Packer and Alan Bond. By “opening the country's economy”, Hawke essentially opened the floodgates for the criminal business practices that plague this country today: the rorts, the dodgy land deals... To workers, Hawke should be seen as nothing less than a snake, as are all reformists at the end of the day.

I will accept that Hawke did some good things. Medicare, for example was good, although it built off the Medibank program implemented by Whitlam, and at the time (and even today) falls short of the National Health Service which is a staple of British healthcare. Was this worth killing union power? Of course not. Workers deserve better than this.

Hawke's Accords shaped Australia's economy and created the landscape we see today. His accords laid the groundwork for Howard's atrocious WorkChoices program, which was scrapped in favor of Rudd's FairWork system, which was only a slight improvement from Howard's openly anti-worker and anti-union program. The Accords were the product of a misguided belief by the unionists of the day that collaboration with the government could lead to better outcomes for workers. While this happened occasionally, more often than not, the government would use its position of power to strong-arm the unions into cooperation, effectively forcing the unions into compliance, by threat of deregistration.

“The concept is we would provide improvements, particularly in health and education, which they [the unions] would regard as an offset to increase in money wages, so they wouldn't look for the same degree of increase. That meant they were protected, employers didn't have to pay as much, so it increased their competitive position. That was the overall concept of justice all round.” -Hawke, on the Accords source.

The ACTU of the day was basically hoping that Hawke's economic reforms would offset the need for wage increases. After all, if the cost of living isn't pushed up by inflation, what need would the workers have for increased wages? Oh, if only they could see into the future, I'm sure they would have had second thoughts. Hawke had turned the Labor Party away from even pretending to be on the worker's side, and instead aligned them with the interests of the bosses, something which remains a tendency of the ALP to this day. The ACTU, in those key moments, were turned into an ALP lapdog, more so than before.

As I keep saying time and time again, Labor is not a viable alternative to the Liberal-National Coalition.

JACK LANG WAS A WHITE SUPREMACIST

As was stated in a previous piece of mine, I have some serious problems with what appears to be outright historical revisionism about figure Jack Lang. If you were to take what professional Labor defenders such as Jordan Shanks say about Lang at face value, you would have the impression that Jack Lang was just a standard Labor politician: a working man's hero in the time of great economic turmoil.

Jack Lang was, well, to put it kindly, a bit of a racist. Actually, to say he was a “bit” of a racist is a severe understatement. He was an avid supporter of the White Australia Policy (Immigration Restriction Bill 1901), and continued to show his support for this bill, even when doing so was politically taboo (in the 70s, when the Whitlam government all but tore it to pieces). I mean, come on, an entire chapter of his autobiography (“I Remember” by Jack Lang) is called “White Australia Saved Australia”. Get real.

shittest australian of all time “The greatest Australian of all time”. If Jack Lang is the “greatest Australian” of all time, then I think we should all reconsider this whole “Australia” thing. Source: Youtube/Friendlyjordies

Jack Lang should not be defended. His smug, smirking face shouldn't even adorn the t-shirts of nonethewiser Jordan Shanks viewers. It's honestly disgusting how much revisionist history Laborites eat up about Lang. They're only further proving that Labor was the party of White Australia. Between the draconian anti-refugee policies and the Jack Lang worship, I'm starting to think that Labor never stopped being the party of White Australia.

Jack Lang was forced, and I mean forced, into adopting most of his economically progressive policies by the NSW caucus of the ALP, and at most he was only interested in withholding debt payments from the government. Did he hire men with sticks to guard the treasury money? Probably, but even if it's not true, it's still a funny story. Did he care about the working class? As a real estate agent, probably not, to even call Lang “working class” is pushing the boundaries of what “working class” even means.

I'll keep this section short, because I already wrote about Jack Lang, but the too-long-didn't-read of this is that Jack Lang was a cruel white supremacist, and if you can't critically analyze Lang's legacy, or even, god forbid, wear his face on a t-shirt, then I have some serious concerns about your own leanings.

KEVIN '07 and Laborite Optimism

kevin o seven Photo: Lukas Koch/Getty Images

John Howard beat out Paul Keating in the 1996 election, and served for the next eleven consecutive years. The Howard government was awful, cruel, draconian in its punishment of unions and refugees, heavy-handed in its dismissal of the plight of Indigenous Australians, and thoroughly homophobic. By 2007, when Kevin Rudd positioned himself as an alternative to the darkness of the Howard regime, Australians seemed to buy into the bright bloomer optimism of the Labor Party, and Rudd won.

Rudd's primary challenge as Prime Minister was to address the global financial crisis of 2008. Kevin Rudd ignored calls for austerity and tightened spending, using a sizable stimulus to pump life back into the Australian economy which, against all odds, seemed to have worked in the moment. This success was in spite of being dragged through the mud by the right-wing press, which would have preferred if Rudd adopted the cruel austerity policies of the US and UK. Unlike in the US, to my greater knowledge, very few Australians had their savings entirely wiped out by the crisis. The careful economic management of the Rudd government not only sheltered Australia's economy from the worst effects of the GFC, but also proved that government management of the economy can work, and is not always just the top-down command economies of the old socialist projects.

My grievances with Rudd are unrelated for the most part to his GFC activity. I'm speaking of the baseless way he tried to portray himself as some morally upstanding Christian “socialist”, in which Rudd used his religious faith to pander to the Christian voting base of the Labor Party. Rudd's faith was not a mystery during his time as Prime Minister, although unlike the other Christian conservatives of his time, he did not use his faith as a bludgeon to attack LGBTQ+ Australians, even though at best the most he could bother to give them were kind words on an episode of Q&A, as opposed to the legalization of same-sex marriage, which would not come until 2016.

Rudd also continued Howard's draconian strong-arming of refugees and asylum seekers. Even though the Rudd government dismantled the Pacific Solution plans in 2008, he would back-peddle on this decision in 2013, showing support for Gillard's renewed plans to ramp up funding for the Nauru and Manus Island “detention centers” (internment camps). Why he back-peddled on this, I cannot say, but I can only assume that Rudd was cynically trying to win back the support of the now more conservative Labor voting base, which ultimately failed.

Rudd, then, comes off as an opportunist. He exploited his faith to pander to Christian voters, he exploited racist hatred against asylum seekers to try and secure his prime ministership in 2013, his wife even exploited the working poor of the UK to make serious bank to the tune of $198mil through the privatization of the UK's welfare system. Labor politicians have a bit of a habit for harboring opportunist tendencies, don't they?

Rudd made Labor supporters optimistic for the future. His GFC stimulus sparked some new life in Australian economy, even though since Hawke's days real wages had stagnated and were later in decline. Everything seemed to be going on the up-and-up. Then Rudd was gone. Rudd, their special little hero, had left, and with him left their hopes and dreams for some utopian Australia where the middle class could exist comfortably (what they leave out, however, is that the working class of not just Australia, but of the global south, would be working hard to subsidize this luxury) and where The Bad Things didn't happen. It was essentially Liberals and reformists getting high on the drug of electoralism, which, as always, proves to be a disappointment every single time. The last fifty years of Labor policy has been empty promises, all the time.

As an aside: Van Rudd, old boy Kevin's nephew, is a very interesting person.

Why you CAN'T trust reformists!

Reform or Revolution is a question socialists have been tackling since the old days of Karl Marx. Reformists would have us believe that we can implement the positive social changes that we want simply through the electoral process. Just vote for the candidate/party you want, and eventually you will win these changes. What this leaves out is that the entire system itself is built to preclude us from winning. Do you think the capitalist nation-state would actually allow socialists to win huge concessions and, god forbid, take over the government? Of course not! The best you can hope for is a never ending cycle of big election campaigns, elections, minor concessions, and the sadness that comes with watching all of your hard earned concessions be rolled back by the next government.

Some would say that's democracy, but the thing is: it never was. Why should working people have to put the effort in to fight hard for concessions, just for them to be taken away soon after? This is why ultimately, revolution is not only necessary, but inevitable if you truly do want to abandon the capitalist mode of production. Socialists who win elections either lose them, or get the Salvador Allende Medal for Electoral Prowess, or in other words, a bullet to the head. Just look at the history of the Labor Party: it was formed by the old unions to try and win concessions for the workers in parliament, and look how great it worked out for us.

The Labor Party abandoned its working class roots, instead opting to play coy with the bosses, outright ignoring the interests of the workers most of the time. The unions themselves became overrun with conservative bureaucrats, trained by universities to operate within the restrictive and limited framework of the government-approved industrial relations system, and abandoned any ideas of worker power.

Reformists “social-democrats” are infatuated with the system we live under, despite the constant cries of “inequality” and “unfairness”. At the end of the day, they want to preserve the system that creates these unequal and exploitative outcomes, but want to give it a human face, with flowery language of mateship and a fair shake of the sauce bottle. Don't be fooled – social democrats and liberals have been nothing more than snakes, trying to co-opt the working class movement to keep it passive and prevent the boat from being shaken. They are cowards who hide behind the lies of the Ruling of Law or Due Process, and don't want the working class to be free, instead, they want to be the ones in charge.

Professional Labor Defenders similarly don't care about the working class, or if they do, it's only the white working class, as they seem to care more about middle class suburbanites than they do about Indigenous Australians, or even working class whites, who are often insulted and degraded by being branded with the disgusting title of “bogan”, who despite popular media is seen as a laughing stock, an animal to laugh at, and not a funny, quirky national icon.

I could write article after article about the shortcomings, failings and cruelty of the LNP, but then I would just be harping on about the exact same thing over and over again, and the ALP would be getting off scot-free, so no thanks.

mostly edge, mostly no point