Labor fuzzy to the core

Mark Latham | AFR | 9 February 2012

Recently The Australian newspaper has had a lot of fun with Labor’s fuzzy embrace of the concept of social inclusion. In particular, it has highlighted the haplessness of the new Minister for Social Inclusion, Mark Butler. When asked what the concept meant, Butler fell back on the cliché of “social inclusion meaning different things to different people”.

When pressed for greater detail, the best he could say was: “Social inclusion is about government delivering services and supports to people experiencing social exclusion in different ways.”

Behind the Monty Pythonesque humour of a minister defining social inclusion as the opposite of social exclusion, rests a sad political truth.

Labour-leaning parties no longer have anything worthwhile to contribute to the egalitarianism of society. The class war has ended. People who grew up working class now aspire to the ownership of capital. After two decades of robust economic growth, Australia has entered an age of affluence and social mobility.

The losers left behind in this process, however, are forever falling further behind. They are part of an entrenched underclass, just 5 per cent of the population – easily ignored by the political system. The Liberal Party assumes they vote Labor, while the ALP takes them for granted. Their closest contact with Labor politicians is through ethnic branch-stacking.

In no part of the Western world have left-of-centre parties found a solution to the problems of the underclass. Their fallback position has been to establish publicly funded committees such as social inclusion boards, thereby giving the appearance of caring about the disadvantaged, while in practice achieving very little. This is the modern version of the warm inner glow.