posted on 2024-11-18, 09:13authored byShawn Sherlock
The debate surrounding the ideological underpinning of the Australian Labor Party (ALP) has been a constant companion to the development of policy both in government and in opposition since the Parties origins in the 1890s. The privatisation debate ofthe 1980s saw the Hawke governments come under sustained criticism for the shifting of the Party to the right and for the betrayal of the Labor tradition. This paper will examine the privatisation debate in the light ofthis concept of tradition, and its usefulness to historians in trying to gain an insight into the motivations of the protagonists of the time. The fundamental nature of the privatisation debate to the understanding of what the ALP actually stands for makes it an important and controversial subject for labour historians. Much previous work in this area, due not least to the closeness ofthe era to current writing, has been of a highly politicised and partisan nature. A more sober overview of this crucial debate within the Labor Party, focussing less on whether Hawke was right, and more on the impact of the debate on the positioning of 1980s Labor in relation to its past is necessary. This paper will argue that an awareness of the complexities and contradictions of the concept of tradition is essential to the study of this debate, and that an understanding of the evolutionary nature of this tradition is needed to link the Hawke governments of this era to Labor governments of the past.