‘Can’t do it all’: Chris Bowen says ALP must narrow its focus ahead of next federal election
Labor frontbencher Chris Bowen says the federal opposition has to significantly narrow its policy offering ahead of the next election, and reframe climate change as an economic issue, if it wants to convince Australian voters it is time to change the government.
In a frank and wide-ranging interview on Guardian Australia’s politics podcast, Bowen, the senior New South Wales rightwinger and shadow health minister, says Labor failed at the last federal election because it tried to “boil the ocean” from opposition.
“If you try and do it all, if you try and boil the ocean, [have a plan for] every social ill, every environmental problem … you are not going to fix the problems,” Bowen says.
“We’ve got to recognise if we try and do it all, we are going to stuff it up. If we try and do it all at once, we will fail.”
Related: How has polling changed since the election? – Australian politics live podcast
Bowen says Labor’s best chance of articulating a compelling case for government lies with absorbing the major lesson of the coronavirus pandemic, which is that governments can fix problems if they prioritise the issues they want to address.
Bowen says the lived experience of Covid-19 for reformist centre-left political movements is “we shouldn’t accept the crap that things are too hard” to fix. He says Labor should build on that lesson by going into the next election campaign with a “small bunch of national priorities” that can be turned into action through the national cabinet governance structure created during the pandemic.
On climate change policy, which remains a source of internal debate post-election, Bowen says Labor has to reset the national conversation, and resist being drawn into the efforts of the Liberal and National parties to make climate an issue of identity politics, which leads to Labor losing support in coal communities in Queensland.
He says Labor needs to reframe the issue through the lens of a Hawke-Keating-style Labor compact. “I like the way Joe Biden is dealing with this, he has an economic plan that deals with climate change. It has got to be an economic policy at its core, that brings people with you – a compact, a contract, a deal – choose your word [that tells working people] you will not be forgotten.”
Bowen says the climate crisis is real, and the challenge of transitioning to a low-carbon economy cannot be dodged. But echoing recent commentary by the shadow resources minister, Joel Fitzgibbon, he says workers in traditional industries also need to hear a message from Labor that they are respected.
“People need to hear that from us more often,” he says. “We need to be for workers in traditional industries.”
Related: Morrison's election upset forced a reckoning on pollsters. Here's what we've changed | Peter Lewis
The shadow health minister says the global financial crisis ushered in an age of rightwing populism, not a global social democratic moment, so centre-left activists have to be realistic about the best means of making a case for changing the government. He says that in 2019, Labor “had a program so big that quite a lot of it was lost because we had so many issues on the boil”.
Despite this, Bowen says Labor in 2019 came within 5,000 votes of winning government, and he insists the next election is winnable for Labor despite the prevailing atmospherics and the likelihood of the pandemic benefitting incumbent governments at the expense of opposition parties.
He says everyone needs to learn the lessons of the past federal election, including himself. Bowen says he should not, for example, have advised voters during the campaign “don’t vote for us” if they didn’t like Labor’s policies.
Bowen says he did not mean to be arrogant or dismissive with the comment, but that “I allowed a perception of arrogance to be painted on a poor form of words in one interview”.
