Exclusive: The ALP president says his side of politics is being ‘outgunned’ when it comes to setting the reform agenda

Labor’s national president, Wayne Swan, is calling for “a Manhattan project for social democracy”, warning that his own side needs to muscle up against rightwing thinktanks and start setting “the wider agenda of the political debate”.

Swan will use a speech to a Labor-aligned thinktank on Thursday night to throw down the gauntlet to his own side, characterising the battle of ideas as an intellectual arms race that the right is winning.

He will call for a rallying of internal effort on the progressive side of politics, saying the immediate imperative is to win intellectual arguments to sell a platform for a fairer society and to neutralise the appeal of resurgent rightwing populism.

According to the speech seen by Guardian Australia, Swan will argue that Labor has a superior campaign machine, better digital strategies, and more unity than the Coalition, but has been “outgunned” when it comes to setting the reform agenda.

“Selling a platform for a better society involves more than winning elections, it involves winning arguments,” the ALP president will say. “Over many years. Despite the best efforts of many, we’ve been outgunned in that area for far too long.”

He says rightwing thinktanks, including the Institute of Public Affairs, “backed up by their friends in the rightwing press” have been successful in framing the policy conversation on inequality, workplace relations, deregulation, corporate tax and regulation.

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“People may not necessarily agree with the IPA’s propositions and those of their fellow travellers. In fact, I’ll wager the vast majority usually don’t.

“But over time, their mental ability to resist such arguments gets broken down by forceful advocacy and repetition.

“When it all boils down to it, the underlying, almost subliminal message that emerges is this: government itself is the problem, and collective action by people to improve their lives is somehow immoral and illegitimate.”

Swan contends the practical effect of that is “madness, making it impossible for our country to have an intelligent debate about the role of government in increasing growth, achieving greater social equality and even tackling climate change”.

He says the right has invested “huge sums of money” to establish dominance in the public debate. The IPA had revenue of $6.1m in 2016-17 and has raised $29.9m since 2009, Swan says. Another right-of-centre thinktank, the Centre for Independent Studies, had revenue of $3.9m in 2016-17 and had raised $25.9m, he says.

“Which means that since the global financial crisis, those two organisations alone have raised over $55m to argue for less government, less financial regulation, less power for working people, less equality and less action to combat climate change,” Swan says.

Progressives need to “hit back and win that wider debate, but for too long our efforts have been piecemeal. Disconnected. Small scale.

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“I want us to fight harder and smarter to set the big picture about what sort of country we want Australia to be, so we need to come together and scale up.”

Labor needs to bring together “our thinktanks, our best thinkers, our best writers to tilt the centre of our political debate back to a sensible place where the problems facing our nation can be addressed and solved”.

There are a number of thinktanks on the left. Labor’s official thinktank is the Chifley Research Centre. There is also the John Curtin Research Centre and other progressive outfits including Per Capita and McKell.

Swan says the imperative is for them to scale up their efforts and work cooperatively. “One of the things I want to achieve as president of the ALP is to turn us into a machine for changing hearts and minds as well as a machine for winning elections,” he says.

“Ultimately, I want Australia to be a place where people understand that by using the power of collective action through their communities, their workplaces, their unions and governments, they can improve their standard of living and build a better society.”

Swan also repeats previous warnings against running an insipid economic agenda. He notes that Labor equivalents overseas – “the once-mighty French Socialist party, Pasok in Greece, the Socialists in Italy, all have been swept away because they had no answer to the economic disruption of our times.

“Overseas many of our fraternal parties have failed to tackle rising inequality – even when it has resulted in the destruction of their own political base and political power.”