‘Maximum AUKUS’: Labor gets its war on, as social democracy slips beneath the waves

Well, the rousing songs have been sung, there was a stomping, exciting Welcome to Country, and we hear that someone from the NSW right left their Crumpler satchel behind the desk of the Grosvenor gentlemen’s club in the Valley…

The Brisbane national conference of the mighty Australian Labor Party has concluded. And we are now in a very different country from the one we were when the lanyards — rainbow? Dot painting? Both? — were being handed out.

With a few skirmishes and objections, easily batted away, in the city that hosted General Douglas MacArthur’s Pacific WWII Pacific leadership, Labor has put its full force behind the AUKUS alliance and the $368 billion program of submarine and requisites buying and building, intended to take place over decades. Delegates were greeted with a 1300-word “amendment” to be voted into the program — really a take-it-or-leave-it manifesto for the wholesale reorientation of the party, the labour movement and the country.

That much was understood, and has been widely understood for some months now — although the expression of such has been largely through the medium of incomprehension, a la Doug Cameron’s online cry that the Labor Left was once the party of anti-militarism and “WTF Happened?” Cameron spoke for many, and especially for Labor grandees, the remnant big beasts, pedigrees trailing back to the Whitlam era, and foot soldiers alike, the middle level.

That Labor has aligned itself with the US alliance is nothing new, of course, nor that it is selling such an alliance with the John Curtin branding, the big sepia fedora staring out to the future. What marks a crucial shift is that Albanese Labor has abandoned any notion of being a social democratic country that adds on a defence force and alliance because the society we have created is worth fighting to defend. In its place, it has substituted a society in which the core that was once social is being militarised, with the social and national community functions rendered as a byproduct of the military effort, rather than as institutions and national capacities to be developed in their own right. That is an epochal reversal of the Labor, and labour, project — and needs to be understood as such.

Rex Patrick has filleted the Marles manifesto par-by-par at Michael West Media. In Arena, Clinton Fernandes has shown that the AUKUS alliance and the subs deal have nothing to do with a national defence, which could be run — for anything short of global nuclear war, which nothing can defend us against — with a far more modest, affordable and deliverable conventional submarine fleet. Fernandes’ analysis gives the lie to the notion that AUKUS is about Australian national defence in a multipolar world.

The truth is, our role in AUKUS is to be the local agent of extension of US power as “the empire” — the idea of the US as the exceptional world power, with a right to be globally omnipresent but to exclude others from its territorial proximities. And the use of Curtin and the WWII US alliance as a way of selling it is propaganda, a reversal of the true state of play. What Curtin inaugurated, swinging our primary alliance from the British Empire to the US, was the idea of a negotiated alliance, to be handled on a case-by-case basis.

Obviously that was a dead letter under the Coalition, and our resistance to US demands under Ben Chifley, Gough Whitlam and Paul Keating was selective — and practically non-existent under Bob Hawke — but it was not nothing. As Keating has emphasised, this was pretty much what most of the task of Australian foreign policy was: handling American demands. The Marles’ manifesto pays lip service to that, while everything it commits us to in terms of hardware, forces integration, stance on Taiwan, etc, materially undermines it. The further we go down the path of what one might call “maximum AUKUS”, the more difficult it would be to extract ourselves from it.

Thus, in removing a further barrier of national sovereignty in policy terms, the Albanese government opens the way for the steady and relentless surrender of actual sovereignty, piece by piece. Long before these submarines are even a whisper of a whisper in some design studio, our harbours will begin to be conformed to nuclear submarine use. Eventually, with the subs still decades away, the notion that US subs should dock here will be presented as inevitable, any ban on it “silly” or “academic”.

Meanwhile, the personnel rotation bases being established in Darwin and elsewhere will simply become full garrisoning, once again an “inevitable” process, against which there can be, it will be argued, no rational opposition. On it will go. Each separate process of militarisation and integration will enforce and extend all the others. The questions that Labor didn’t put to itself at this conference — What sort of defence do we want? What sort of risks do we want to take? — will be unable to be asked.

The second major part of this is that the social democratic project of Labor — that of building an independent society where, for all, life is worth living — is concluded. The piecemeal efforts to do it aren’t, but they are the periphery of a core. That core is the commitment to an offence strategy, with the nuclear technology of mass death at its centre for the purpose of imperial enforcement.

The idea that you can revive an industry strategy organised around such product and purpose, and preserve a national and political culture of peaceful betterment, is a lie. It is not only that the decades-long AUKUS demand on our resources will drain any possibility of real change in government schools, the health system, better cities and social services. It will also introduce a national military logic into social policy decisions.

With AUKUS and the Marles manifesto, Labor has abandoned its historic role of being a nationalist social democratic party — in which the content of our patriotism resided in what sort of society we were creating — and will now be simply a nationalist one. Social policy will be subordinated and reoriented to nationalist military goals. What is already being sacrificed is the commitment, however limited, to being a state and society with a dynamic capacity for lessening social inequality.

This is especially so as regards the more embedded forms of inequality that we have been trying to address in the past two decades. These are the sort of process inequalities targeted by the Gonski reforms, the idea that what really widens the inequality gulf is what happens in the classroom, minute by minute, and that real change can occur, for individuals and on a class basis, by funding at that level.

With the combination of AUKUS, the Marles manifesto and debt and deficit reduction, one can forget all that. Labor’s vision is no longer the notions of social transformation — differing in form, but not in intent — that ran through Labor governments all the way up to Rudd/Gillard. It is a society in which there will be far more enforcement of acceptance of your class “lot”, of improvement within the narrowed and rigidified bounds of class life. University and professions for those attending state-subsidised private schools; technical training and/or bullshit degrees for bullshit jobs for some of the rest.

Labor will increasingly use national patriotism to sell a society of very limited change, and offer people the consolation that they are part of a greater project.

The more that is used, the more the knot will tighten. Eventually what will pop out is something Labor’s leaders really don’t want, but are collectively too stupid to recognise as a possibility: the re-racialisation of Australia. AUKUS is an alliance based not only on whiteness but on Anglo-Saxon whiteness. It revives the “Great White Fleet” idea that the Anglo-Saxon race is the unique global guardian of a just future. Nothing else can possibly culturally undergird an arrangement between two large nations bordering different sides of the Pacific and a small island off the coast of France. That will have major internal cultural effects, on which more later.

More later, too, on the impasse of anyone within Labor and labour who might want to start a rebellion from within against all this — as evidenced by the near total failure of such forces to get anything at all of any substance — and what they might do next. The first task, as ever, is simply to ensure that one is fully, and without illusions, facing the reality, to ask — in the city where MacArthur threw thousands of Australian soldiers into suicidal Pacific engagements that he wouldn’t expend American troops on — WTF happened?

Did Labor’s national conference leave you deflated? Let us know by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.