Kevin Rudd has dipped into the shopping trolley and promised to keep a check on the rising prices of bread, eggs, petrol and housing. As Dennis Shanahan writes:
The latest idea may be populist but it’s also popular, Rudd is shifting the argument from the abstract of the economy and economic management – the Government’s undoubted strength – to the details of everyday life. And, he’s putting a proposition everyone is going to agree with. Who doesn’t say their old school isn’t as good as it once was, who doesn’t say crime is getting worse and who doesn’t think food prices are rising?
The policy has received encouraging responses from the media and voters but it strikes me as worryingly similar to the kind of consumer politics first introduced by Bill Clinton. Back in 1996, on the advise of campaign strategist Dick Morris, Clinton shifted his re-election campaign away from the big issues – tax and health and welfare – to concentrate on the comparatively tiny concerns of key marginal focus groups. Clinton then shaped his whole campaign around bite-sized pieces of legislation, most famously a digital device that would screen out pornography on the TV, appealing to the public’s individual desires and feelings and, as a consequence, winning an election he was set to lose.
This kind of consumer politics always seems less about liberating people or encouraging their participation than about developing new ways of satiating and controlling them. Political leaders end up as little more than economic managers, utilising focus group techniques that were previously the sole interest of business. (See more in Adam Curtis’ brilliant documentary The Century of Self).
Since the rise of the New Left in Britain and the US, Australian Labor has yet to have its moment in power, so it’s still unclear what side of the fence it sits. I doubt Rudd will descend to the cloying depths of Clinton and Blair but his latest proposal could be a telling sign as to how Labor thinks it should address economic issues: bite-sized, personal politics that show Kevin Cares but in the end change little.
