Frontbencher says Australia increasingly divided and party cannot just play to its supporters

Labor frontbencher Clare O’Neil will challenge her colleagues to move beyond election postmortems centred on whether the ALP needs to shift to the right or left, arguing more resonant fault lines are emerging at the ballot box.

O’Neil will use a speech to a Labor thinktank on Thursday to argue Labor needs to rethink its economic program, consider how it engages with voters on cultural issues, recalibrate how it campaigns to change minds rather than confirm pre-existing biases, and think about how it projects political leadership in an era of strongmen and reactionary populism.

Joining Bill Shorten, Jim Chalmers, Joel Fitzgibbon, Mark Butler, Michelle Rowland and other frontbench players ruminating publicly on the consequences of May’s election defeat, O’Neil will argue left and right are no longer defining political divisions.

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“I see a bunch of new faultlines emerging which are increasingly important at the ballot box,” O’Neil will say. “I see a faultline between winners and losers in a digital economy which provides vastly more economic rewards to people who live in our cities. I see a faultline dividing Australians who want the community to look more like it did in the past, and those who love and value change.

“A faultline dividing people who are worried about global interdependence, and those who see opportunity for global influence. A faultline between those who relish economic change and those who resist it.

“Between young people who feel locked out of a life enjoyed by older generations, and those who think that kids have never had it better. Between open and closed, authoritarian and decentralised, the elites and the masses.

“Political allegiances aren’t static. We don’t have a Brexit to smash open old loyalties. But slowly and surely, tectonic plates are on the move. In these moments, the parties that survive look alive.”

O’Neil will argue that confusion, anxiety and complexity are critical to understanding the public mood in 2019, because technological disruption has upended the way people get and process information, form judgments about it, and share those judgments with others – and that revolution has played out in only 10 years.

She says that disruption makes forming and holding on to stable majorities more challenging. O’Neil says cultural issues, rather than more complex economic ones, have become “the preferred shorthand for who speaks for voters and not to them”.

The Labor frontbencher says rather than playing to populist or strongman models of leadership, which are flourishing in a fractured political climate, Australian Labor can look across the Tasman to Jacinda Ardern, who models “irrepressible likeability and [a] vivid, genuine commitment to her country”.

She will say Labor is well placed to project leadership predicated on common values post-election because “there is no more authentic person in Australian politics than Anthony Albanese”.

O’Neil will say Labor needs a new narrative on the economy, because the model Labor has pursued since the 1980s of growing the economy by opening it up is broken. She will say the evidence for new approaches is national wealth increasing but families going backwards, business investment at record lows and stalling productivity growth.

“We have not told a sufficiently compelling story to Australia’s 2 million small businesses, or to our friends in digital,” she will say. “Technology is another issue where every political party is underdone. How families are coping with technological change may be the barbecue stopper of the teenies. Yet it is largely peripheral to what we talk about in politics.”

She argues that there is a strait jacket culture developing in progressive circles “where membership is granted with a box of ideas, and if you don’t accept one of the ideas in the box, you do not merely have a different opinion, you are obviously wrong, probably stupid and possibly subhuman”.

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O’Neil says while she supports most ideas in the progressive box, Labor also needs to engage in the conversation about political correctness.

“Not everyone with a concern about the immigration rate is a bigot,” she will say. “Not everyone with a hesitation about changing gender roles is sexist. Not every social change is inarguably a good one.”

She says Labor will not be able to implement social change without a mandate “and if Australians feel they can’t question assumptions and positions in conversation with us, they will find someone else to talk to about it. The current environment can see political discourse descend to a form of tribal performance art.”

Nothing is gained, she says, when everyone plays to their audience, no one learns anything, no one listens and no minds are changed.

O’Neil’s speech on Thursday follows the first major speech of Albanese’s leadership. On Tuesday, the Labor leader outlined his approach to jobs and the future of work, and began the task of presenting climate change as opportunity for blue collar workers.