Noel Pearson gives the ALP a serious serve

In September last year, Indigenous leader Noel Pearson gave the annual John Button Address, which I strongly recommend. You can read the full transcript or you can listen to it.

During this talk, Pearson gave a scathing assessment of the Australian Labor Party, and seeing the way that party has grown increasingly directionless and lacking in vision, one can only agree that Pearson's assessment has only grown in relevance with the passing of time.

The failure of the Federal Labor Party to define and to articulate – other than in the most banal terms – its raison detre in national politics, is not good for the cause of those who seek progress in Australia.

Today Labor is more sparing in its deployment of these two words: social justice. Whilst social justice is still part of Labor’s intra-mural pieties – a useful rallying cry for the true believers – in front of the nation at large the concept is muted and liturgical.

On leadership and the ALP:

My first point concerns the difference between natural and structural leadership. Structural leadership depends upon formal political, cultural, economic or religious structures for mandate, authority, power and influence. Natural leadership depends on no institutional power or recognition: it is simply the power of human self-determination and the informal recognition of its inspiration and influence over other humans.

There are many more natural leaders than structural leaders in the world and they will be readily found in families, community groups, and in the full range of informal social, cultural, religious settings. Some structural leaders are also natural leaders, but most natural leaders do not occupy formal structures.

The problem with the parliamentary parties is that they provide pathways to power for structural leaders who may have never exercised natural leadership and may never possess it. They are masters of the structures of power but in the absence of those structures they could not lead men and women. Whilst it is not a problem exclusive to it, it is this preponderance of structural leadership that is a large part of Labor’s problem of parliamentary representation.

On pragmatics:

The highest ideals on earth are realised when leaders strive to secure them through close attention to reality. Lofty idealism without pragmatism is worthless. What is pragmatism without ideals? At best it is management, but not leadership. It takes insight, skill and creativity, careful calculation as well as bold judgment, prudence as well as risk, perseverance as well as preparedness to alter course, belief as well as humility, and great competence as well as the ability to make good from mistakes to bring ideals closer to reality. One must be hard-headed in order never to let go of ideals. Idealism and realism in leadership do not constitute a zero-sum game. This is not about securing a false compromise. The best leadership occurs at the point of highest tension between ideals and reality. This is the radical centre. If the idealism is weaker than the realism, then optimum leadership cannot be achieved and vice versa. The radical centre is achieved when both are strong.

On adversarial politicking:

...both sides prosecute their side with a vehemence and conviction about the correctness of their own side and the folly of the other. There is much tug of war in the world. And tragically too little productive synthesis.

On climate change action:

The gulf between the prescriptions for saving the planet and the behaviour of humans, between their material needs and preferences and their moral anxieties is opening up a massive hypocrisy at the heart of humankind: We want to save the planet but we don’t want to sustain any real pain in the process. In fact we would prefer to shift the costs to other people.

On the Greens:

The Greens are taking over a large part of the tug of war against the liberal conservatives and will continue to do so. Australians have cast them in the role of being the new force of the centre left. 

On the future:

Those who seek social progress cannot be a party of the centre left or the centre right. They must be the leaders who seek the radical centre.