Social democracy and its demise: the case of the Australian labor party

This article considers the Australian Labor Party’s (ALP’s) antipathy to the economic policy and programmatic feasibility of social democracy. As a re-statement and theoretical expansion of the discontinuity thesis articulated in the early 1990s, the argument deals with some of the effects of neoliberalism and is concerned therefore with some contemporary problems and possibilities. No less than long-held, social democratic ideas, current circumstances indicate that it is not so much the case that social democracy is in crisis as erstwhile ‘social democratic’ parties are no longer vehicles to carry out the social democratic project, and this is certainly no less true of the contemporary Labor Party under the leadership of Anthony Albanese. An accurate reading of the ALP’s neoliberal history is critical in reading the present, and, as the history of the parliamentary ALP since Hawke and Keating shows, the ALP’s embeddedness in the neoliberal project poses a significant obstacle to the realisation of social democratic possibility.