Labor of Love

By Terri Butler

Why would you get involved in politics when you could be spending time drinking cocktails, going to the beach or hanging out with family and friends?
People view politicians and politics with suspicion, if not downright hostility. Every other day someone declares that politics is broken and reform is dead.
Most of us just rock up for a sausage and a moment at the ballot box every few years. But in that way the decisions that affect all of us become the preserve of those few who care enough, those who have vested interests, motivated extremists and insiders.
However, the decisions made in our parliaments affect everyday life. They also affect our future. So, politics matters. Deciding whether to get involved or leaving it to other people, matters too.

After almost two decades as Labor party member, Terri Butler remembers the cocktails foregone and kids' school concerts missed and argues that yes, it is worth it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Aug 28, 2017
• ISBN: 9780522872262

Book preview

it.

1

Not turning up means leaving big decisions to those who do

I get asked ‘What made you go into politics?’ a lot. Sometimes, the people asking sound a bit baffled. It’s as though, having met me, I seem like a perfectly nice, sane person, which makes my wanting to become an MP completely inexplicable. I also hear ‘What’s it like?’, along with ‘Do you enjoy it?’ and—mostly from parents—‘How on earth do you manage it with kids?’

The answer to the last of these is very easy. My husband, Troy Spence, and I manage our demanding jobs by relentless discussion of household logistics, and by relying on an army of people to help us. There are my parents, who we live with on a shared block of land, and Troy’s parents. There’s also Kate, who we pay to look after our kids and who we love like family. I earn a good salary, and a lump of it goes to making it possible for me to do my job in the first place. If you’re in a dual-income household with kids, you know exactly how hard it is to keep all the balls in the air. If you’re managing your household with less help than we have, it should be me asking how you manage it.

The other questions, though—about what politics is like, and why anyone would do it—require longer and more thoughtful answers. Politics is like anything worthwhile. It can be frustrating, and also rewarding. It’s a way to be part of something bigger, while, at the same time, being part of your local community. It’s a way to get and use power, for a purpose, and to avoid ceding power to other people who may not have your best interests at heart.

Too, if you don’t take an interest in politics, you’re leaving it to other people to do so. They may not be much like you, and the decisions they make might have nasty consequences for you and yours. Don’t leave politics to the elites. Don’t just expect others to do the heavy lifting of politics. If you accept that politics matters, to your household, and to the nation, it’s clear you shouldn’t ignore it.

Having the moderate majority participate in democratic institutions, making decisions about the creation of rules and the allocation of resources, is crucial. If those of us who are community-minded, and those of us who care about inequality, vacate the practice of politics, that leaves a vacuum. It will quickly be filled and the question is, by whom? The answer is pretty simple—when the moderates go out, the extremes come in.

If people of good will decide that politics is just pointless, and distasteful, they are in danger of leaving politics to the passionate, extremist few.

Imagine what Australia could look like if that happened. We’d have extremist free-market policies. Wages would go down as a consequence, while company profits would continue to take an even greater share of the national income. Inequality would rise even more sharply and life would get more restrictive. Forget marriage equality: we’d be going back to the days before no-fault divorce. There would be more police crackdowns on public activity. In short, 1980s Queensland would seem progressive by comparison.

It’s up to all of us to make sure that doesn’t happen. It’s up to all of us to make sure our voices—of people who are tired, stressed and busy, juggling dropping kids at school with making it to work on time, paying the phone bill, and worrying about whether interest rates will go up, and planning a six year old’s birthday party, and remembering to call our parents, and Oh my god, why would anyone join a political party? I barely have time to wash my hair.—where was I? Oh yes. It’s up to all of us to make sure our voices, of people who are just trying to hold it all together and live a good life, are heard in politics. That’s how you get a government that shares your values, and policies that reflect your priorities.

This book also tries to give some kind of answer to the most important question posed above: why would anyone get involved in politics? Or, ‘Why on earth would someone apparently sane spend their time in the notorious cesspit of politics, bickering with opponents, going from boring meeting to boring meeting, all the while spending time away from their family? Why would anyone spend an afternoon knocking on strangers’ doors when they could be mixing a negroni, and watching Netflix/reading a book/camping … anything but politics?’

Here’s why: the world has a bunch of big problems. And the future is created by the decisions made now.

If we don’t get our act together, there’s a real risk that, in a few generations’ time, people will (between fires, floods and famines) be spending all their time paying rent to their feudal overlords. But, seriously, there are monstrously big changes happening, as you would know. None of us is immune from them, so we’d best all pay attention.

From seeking to prevent climate change, we’re now trying to limit its damage, while struggling with how to address the consequences that are already being felt. Technological change is continuing to make certain callings redundant. My grandfather was a fireman on a steam train. For all practical purposes, that job no longer exists. Bank tellers, stevedores and checkout assistants can tell you how that feels. Those who drive cars, trucks and trains will also soon find their jobs becoming redundant. It’s not just that things we needed humans to do are becoming automated; machine learning is being developed. If you’ve never worried about the plot of Terminator 2 coming true, now might be a good time for that particular nightmare.

Technological change makes the future of work, and the future full stop, hard to predict. So, too, do changes in the way that work itself works.

Over the past couple of decades, the idea that work happens in full-time, permanent-employment relationships has been crumbling. Hours of work are changing: greater or fewer than forty, over greater spans than nine to five, and on days other than Monday through Friday. It no longer goes without saying that your job is permanent. It is so common as to be unremarkable that many people are employed as temps, on short-term contracts, or as casuals. Work is organised via other relationships than the ‘vanilla version’, of employer and employee. People are getting Australian Business Numbers and setting themselves up as sole proprietors, even if they have only one ‘client’, are employed by a labour-hire firm that rents them out to other businesses, or are freelancing from project to project.

Unless you’ve received a massive inheritance, or you’re an international jewel thief, or you’ve managed to get filthy rich by some other means, work matters because your income matters. If we end up in a society where, for almost everyone, incomes are not reliable because work isn’t reliable, that’s going to mean trouble. We don’t know for sure how work is going to work in the future. Some argue that it should be decoupled from income: for example, by establishing a universal basic income. That would bring its own challenges. For instance, if we got to a point where the majority of people had neither substantial capital nor could offer valuable labour, they could be left powerless and vulnerable. Imagining a change as radical as a universal basic income that isn’t tied to work would require thought about not just the distribution of income but the dispersion of power, which would have to mean, among other things, coming to grips with strengthening democracy and facing up to the fact that inequality is getting more extreme.

The signs, right now, are troubling. Those who have wealth are generating large incomes from it, and using them to buy more income-generating assets. Those on high incomes are making many, many more times that of those on average earnings. The poor are becoming poorer. Decreasing unionisation and the changes to the nature of work are making working people less and less powerful, and that means they’re less and less able to insist upon wage increases. That’s entrenching inequality even further. We are at risk of replacing the middle class with a yawning gap between a handful of wealthy people and the rest of us—much poorer people, paying rents to those that own assets, whether in the form of houses or tech platforms.

These challenges will not be overcome by luck alone. Crossing our fingers and hoping for the best is not going to work. Not this time. Not ever.

The best hope we have of facing these problems and creating the best possible future is those of us with community-minded values joining to promote our collective interests. The best means by which we can have a powerful impact on the world is through using our collective power to make decisions about rules and resources. The mechanisms through which that is done are the institutions of democracy, parliament and government.

In other words: politics is the practice of making things better than they otherwise would be. Or, if you want to get grandiose about it, politics is pretty much about saving the world.

Making the future fair, and facing down the forces that divide us, will take effort. It will also take power. We will need to have it, and we will need to use it. Using power to make things better for people is the point.

For me, that’s one answer why any normal person would get more involved in politics. Because you care. Because it’s a way to do something. And because, in a lot of ways, politics, for all its flaws, is our best hope for a better future.

Fortunately, Australia’s democracy is structured to encourage, if not compel, participation.

There are both formal requirements and cultural expectations that everyone will vote at election times. In practice, that can mean almost annual voting, and yet most of us turn up, buy a sausage, stand in a queue and cast a ballot.

In most jurisdictions, the requirement to turn up is supplemented by the necessity to number every square in order for your vote to be valid. This effectively forces you to choose not just which candidate you support most but to rank all the other candidates in order of your preference as to whom would be best suited to the office for which the election is being held.

This is the next step in democratic participation—being willing to rank candidates, so that the one ultimately elected is the person who best represents a compromise among all the many people (in federal electorates, around 110 000) entitled to vote. Thus, the election result is the closest approximation you can get to the majority view, not just the largest minority view.

Both of these mechanisms lead to more people, from more diverse backgrounds, influencing the political process than would otherwise be the case. Choosing MPs is not just left to those passionate enough to make politics a priority: it is something everyone does, even if politics is somewhere between a long-put-off trip to the dentist and returning overdue library books on their hierarchy of priorities.

It is possible, though, to extend your involvement in politics beyond casting the occasional ballot. A lot of Australians, all sorts of people from all sorts of backgrounds, join political parties all the time. The practice of politics alongside day-to-day life is possible. And to go beyond the minimum standard of political involvement, of voting occasionally, you have to believe that this is both possible and something that normal people do. That can be a little difficult when there are those whose interests are served by making politics seem mysterious, labyrinthine and deeply unpleasant.

Politics is not always a walk in the park, but nor is it impossible or exclusive. It’s also not, regardless of stereotypes, pointless, or full of people who act like petulant kids or with their snouts in the trough.

There is a pressing urgency to restore faith in institutions, particularly democratic institutions. I want you to know that you can get involved in those institutions, and have an impact on them. Though that can be hard, and can take a long time, the act of involvement is, of itself, worthwhile, and contributes both to building the community and creating the conditions to foster democratic decision-making that serves the national interests, not just those of the elites.

Of the questions I get from people who want to know what politics is like and why I do it, my favourite is probably ‘Is it worth it?’ Someone who asks that has thought about giving politics a go. They have wondered whether the downsides outweigh the positives. They have thought about the challenges, and the opportunities it offers for their community, the nation, the world. ‘Is it worth it?’ means ‘Should I do it too?’

I’m not going to pretend that there are no downsides. Politics is often difficult, for all sorts of reasons. Despite that, the answer is yes. It is worth it.

2

The only show in town

New members of the ALP want to have an impact on policy, and on how Labor governments implement it. You learn quickly that getting good people elected, and then having an impact on a government’s priorities in a world of competing interests and diverse challenges, is not always easy. As I’ve said, you can make a difference as part of a collective, but getting your pet issue to catch on can be hard. Sometimes, people find this frustrating.

I remember a Labor conference where Matt Foley, the then member for Yeronga, and a minister in the state government, was a guest speaker. At the end of his speech, I asked him, bluntly, ‘Why would anyone be a member of the Labor Party?’ and he said, ‘Because it’s the only show in town.’

In the years since, Matt and I have become close. We share a love of lunch, the law and Judith Wright’s poetry. Before entering parliament, he was a civil libertarian, and a lawyer at an Aboriginal legal service. Post parliament, he went back to the bar, and it’s now my pleasure to drink red wine—other than during Lent—with Matt at the beautiful building for which he, as former arts minister, is largely responsible: the Gallery of Modern Art, in my electorate of Griffith, in Brisbane.

Nearly twenty years after my initial impertinence, I asked Matt the same question. His answer hadn’t changed in the intervening time, but he did elaborate. He told me, ‘Labor is the only progressive party of government in Australia devoted to the interests of the Australian people. The sole, consistent principle of the Tories is adamant opposition to organised labour. The Greens et al may lay a flattering unction on the soul but lack the will and discipline to seize the treasury benches. Labor remains the only show in town.’

This is as true today as it’s always been. Some parties can claim to be purer, but even if they were (which is dubious), then, as Gough Whitlam said, ‘Only the impotent are pure.’ I’d rather get shit done.

That means being prepared to take power, and deploy it to defend the interests of working people, and to make progressive change, like supporting policies that will spur the economy in tough times, so that people don’t lose their jobs. Then prime minister Kevin Rudd and treasurer Wayne Swan did that during the global financial crisis. They took measures to keep the nation out of recession, and to stop hundreds of thousands of people losing their jobs. That’s something you can only do in government. Intervening that way requires the sort of power you can’t get by being a purist protest party. Is it worth the pragmatism, the fact that you have to be willing to compromise, to have the power to make a real, positive difference in people’s lives? You bet it is.

Unwillingness to compromise does not show strength but weakness. It shows you’ve been unprepared to listen and try to find common ground. Of course, this doesn’t mean selling out your principles or agreeing to abhorrent things for mere expedience. As an MP, you’re not supposed to be interested in voting for things that don’t accord with your values: for people elected to be Labor MPs, whether a given bill or measure, taken as a whole, accords with Labor values is important. That’s one of the ways to keep faith with the people who decided to send you to Canberra on their behalf: by acting how they would expect, given the values you and your party profess.

MPs are human, so we don’t always get it right. Like my colleagues, though, I always try.

One of the biggest challenges in my early days as a parliamentarian was the federal government’s data retention legislation. By 2014, there were hundreds of thousands of incidents each year of everyone from the police to city councils getting access to people’s metadata without a warrant. There were 500 000 incidents of warrantless access to metadata in 2013–14 alone.

The law allowed the head of an agency to authorise it to require telecommunications companies to hand over the metadata they were keeping. That meant the police were routinely, with a few preconditions, able to get information about who someone called, who called them, how long they spoke, and where they were at the time. Hundreds of thousands of times each year. Without any warrant. This concerned data going back years, because companies were routinely keeping it for that long, so it was available. There were other problems, too, such as ambiguity about whether the Privacy Act applied to the metadata that telecommunications companies were keeping. There was very limited scrutiny of this whole regime.

The Coalition government wanted to introduce laws to expand the type of metadata that was kept: to enlarge the dataset, to require firms to keep more types of metadata. The bill it wanted was unbackable in its original form.

We had two choices. Vote against the bill or negotiate.

If we’d decided to vote against the bill, there might have been some backslapping about having stayed pure, but the best possible outcome of refusing to negotiate and voting against the bill was that nothing would change. The worst outcome was that the Tories would put the weights on the crossbenches and we’d end up with something even worse than their opening position. So, if we refused to negotiate, things would remain the same, which was bad enough, or get worse.

We negotiated. Because of great and thorough work by Labor members of the intelligence and security committee, the parliament ended up making more than thirty changes to the Tories’ original plans. The legislation, in its final form, reduced the number of agencies that could get access to metadata. At the same time, we made