Bill Shorten's live Q&A was a showcase of Labor's terrible me-tooism disease
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Version 0 of 1. Last night, the Labor party’s Bill Shorten, leader of the opposition, took to social media for a livestreamed “meet the peeps” session. It was not Labor’s finest hour. Billed through ALP social media as “a great opportunity to discuss how we can rebuild Labor for the future”, the dialogue between Shorten and the invisible, presumably pro-Labor community beyond him identified not so much how much the party can be rebuilt, but precisely where relations have completely broken down. Over a cringeworthy hour, Shorten spoke like a tired accountant trying to liven up a stock report; facilitator Julie Collins, the member for Franklin, looked out of her depth and uncomfortable; the sound didn’t work, the lighting was low and Twitter was less than kind. You really couldn’t get a more apt metaphor for everything that is going wrong with the marketing of the contemporary Labor party. It should be going so right. As an opposition leader, Shorten has been handed a political gift in the form of a prime minister like Abbott. Abbott’s adamant and explicit pre-election policy commitments of “no cuts” to education, pensions, health, the ABC or SBS has marked him as a liar. The plans to deregulate higher education, charge a copayment for health and deny unemployed young people any income for six months make Abbott’s government look mean and cruel and out of touch. The stumbling and bumbling of Abbott over everything from stupid verbal gaffes to the winking incident makes him look like a buffoon. The people hate the budget, and decisions made by the PUP alternative make that party look increasingly like those of a dedicated LNP clown unit. And while Julie Bishop is the sole cabinet member to retain any shred of popularity, one imagines it’s because she’s just not here that much. Unsurprisingly, Shorten is at present ahead in the polls – even with the cynical attempts by the Coalition to beat up home soil threats from a convenient foreign war. But ask anyone who’s going to actually win the next election, and only the most zealot Abbott-hater believes aloud that it could be Labor. The reason why has a lot to do with the fact made obvious in the “#billqanda” last night: that Shorten himself isn’t speaking to an immediate, impassioned campaign for election. And neither is Labor policy. Bill’s weary patter last night on the subjects of working families, and something something community-and-something-something-renewable-energy targets may be carefully constructed verbiage to target we-share-your-concerns to swinging voters, but Labor’s present strategy wholly avoids speaking to those that Labor crucially needs to deliver both an election win and a majority large enough to ensure space for policy implementation and future planning. That would be campaigners. That would be the kind of supporters who are willing to fundraise, doorknock, spruik on social media and take the personal time to convince their friends, relatives and neighbours that Labor have a political vision worth voting for. In a media environment where Labor faced 30 aggressively pro-Abbott front-page tabloid headlines in the last election, Labor is disarming a necessary arsenal for a true electoral fight by clinging to policy positions that appear to speak to mainstream interests but which powerfully disengage a huge number of people who could, would and truthfully want to argue the Labor alternative. The tens of thousands of organic campaigners that have sprung up around the March movement and who participate in anti-government twitter hashtags in equal numbers are the communication infrastructure that Labor should be harnessing to a strategy to overcome the political obstacle of an LNP-aligned mass media filter. The decline of print and broadcasting will not actually benefit the Labor party if the potential of social media in party campaign-building is not realised. With the party’s membership haemorrhaging and its indirect base of union membership also in decline, Labor has to expand the base prepared to fight the Labor cause – and that cause is only going to be fought if Labor re-evaluates the policies that presently keep potential campaigners away. Those are: Labor’s me-tooism on asylum-seekers that offend a moral conscience of idealistic campaigners, me-tooism on mass surveillance that infuriates an entire digital community of potential communicators, and employing the language of uninspiring bureaucracy around the progressive policy opportunity which is climate action. Ran the promotion for last night: “Together we can win in 2016 — but only if we Rebuild Labor and develop policy for the future together”. Yes, this statement is true. It’s whether the Labor party will realise in time that the challenge is to bring the party towards its people, not the people to its party that will make the only meaningful difference. |