Gerard’s Wedges
The use of the term wedge is relatively new in Australian politics. Half a century ago the policy differences between the Coalition and Labor were greater than is now the case. Yet it was never said that Robert Menzies had attempted to wedge Labor by proposing to outlaw the Communist Party. Or that Ben Chifley had tried to wedge the Coalition by advocating the nationalisation of the banks.
What this paragraph reveals is that Gerard doesn’t understand what a “wedge” issue is. Menzies and Chifley were advocating radical policy with a strong ideological base. Neither issue, I would guess, would have been particularly “populist” - both lay more in the sphere of interest that we would today talk about as being “elite”. A wedge issue is, by (my) definition, a populist one, which speaks to the gut reactions of otherwise uninterested voters in marginal electorates, and which has little or no substantive relevance to the actual running of the country. Reading to children, imprisoning boat people, gay marriage, parliamentary superannuation, etc. The nationalising of banks and the banning of communists fall into a very different category.
I think he’s right about one thing, though. That is, “wedge” has become an over-used clich?. I’ve used it, and I’ll probably continue to, but not to describe policy like, for example, Latham’s plans for troop withdrawal from Iraq. It might be a policy that attracts popular support (or popular condemnation), but it’s real policy with real implications for most Australians, so it sits alongside policies like taxation and healthcare (or at least, it will, when Latham releases them) as an important issue that has to be addressed, rather than an unimportant one which is just being raised to drag over the occasional conservative who might be particularly fixated on it.
John Howard is a combination of economic reformer, social conservative and believer in Australia’s links with what Robert Menzies termed Australia’s great and powerful friends - namely the US and Britain. In view of this, it comes as no surprise that he is tough on drugs, opposes gay marriage and supports the George Bush and Tony Blair policy in Iraq. Nor is it in any sense unusual to find the Prime Minister proclaiming the benefits of the proposed Australia-US free trade agreement.
It’s much the same with the Opposition Leader - albeit from a different perspective. Latham is a social democrat who belongs to that tradition in the Labor Party that has an isolationist outlook - in that it regards the defence of Australia as commencing, and ending, at the Australian shoreline. In view of this, it is not surprising that, if elected, he intends to withdraw Australian forces from Iraq by Christmas 2004 while attempting to keep the formal Australian-American alliance intact.
What Gerard is trying to say here is that the ALP and the Coalition are just two political parties who still stand for what they’ve always believed in, so everything’s hunky-dory and the crisis-of-democracy naysayers are all deluded. It’s crap, as revealed by the fact that his summation of their positions steers itself around all but one of the issues that could possibly be described as a wedge issue, that one being gay marriage. All the rest of it is legitimate enough policy, and if that’s all the parties were trying to sell, then I don’t think there’d be any concerns about wedge politics. Think about gay marriage, though. It might be true that John Howard has always opposed it, but why did he deliberately choose to raise the issue at the time he did? Just Gerard really believe that it was just the normal workings of the legislative agenda? Or might Howard, just maybe, have been trying to tweak a few prejudices amongst social conservatives who may otherwise have been tempted by Latham’s bedtime stories? And why does Gerard’s portrait of politics-as-normal omit all the other policy that could be described as wedge policy? My theory: because he doesn’t understand what the term means (a theory which is, perhaps, being charitable).
July 6th, 2004 at 6:42 pm
Undoubtedly