ABOUT THE NEW CITY

The New City has attracted a variety of labels from the deepest recesses of the blogosphere, so perhaps we should start by explaining what we are not. We are not ‘Labor’s New Right fifth column online’. We are not ‘Coalition-lite’. We are not ‘mercenary swine’. We are not ‘right-wing nutcases’. We are not ‘doing it out of repressed self-loathing’. We are not ‘paid for, and run by, the Liberal Party’. We don’t believe we are ‘half-wit pseudo-intellectual dilettantes’. Our web journal is not ‘astroturf’. Nor are we ‘intellectual servants of the powerful’.

We are longtime Labor Party members who believe the urban progressive-left has turned its back on ordinary working people: the 70 per cent of the workforce who hold blue-collar and routine white-collar ‘jobs’, as distinct from the 30 per cent who enjoy professional ‘careers’.

While one of us has worked for Labor politicians, and both of us are past or present local branch office-holders, we do not depend on any branch of the labour movement for our living, so we are free to speak our minds. We have diverse private and public sector work histories: currently one of us is a bureaucrat and one a lawyer.

Since we also live in Sydney’s inner-suburbs, there have naturally been accusations of double standards. But if Labor really is about idealism rather than self-interest, it is people like us who should speak out for the interests, preferences and priorities of workers who are now spatially concentrated in the growing middle to outer suburbs. Few inner suburban professionals understand or care about the new city.

Idealism means arguing against one’s own interests. And yet we have observed at close quarters that despite pretensions to the contrary, progressive inner-city activists, both inside and outside the ALP, are all too short on true idealism while long on self-interest.

We are proud to have collaborated with our colleague Michael Thompson in the writing of his ground-breaking book Labor without class: the gentrification of the ALP (Pluto Press, 1999). While Michael was subjected to a round of vilification from guardians of the progressive party line, his warnings about the consequences of Labor’s wrong turn were vindicated. One progressive commentator dismissed Labor without class as a ‘manifesto for Howard’, but the party’s failure to heed Michael’s warnings delivered the Coalition another eight years in office.

Like Michael, and unlike most Labor progressives, we are more inspired by the best days of Hawke than by the false promises of Whitlam. In particular, we draw inspiration from one of the Hawke government’s greatest figures, Peter Walsh, whose rare integrity and intellectual rigour earns him the title ‘Australia’s best ever finance minister’. Peter’s uncompromising demands that government spending and taxing policies produce real benefits for ordinary workers, rather than lurks for the privileged, whether conservative or progressive, define Labor’s ‘light on the hill’.

Michael Thompson’s Labor without class and Peter Walsh’s stringent principles join a distinguishable school of Labor thought. The New City aims to carry this school into Australia’s ongoing urban and social  debates.

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