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Sydney: The recently announced intention of Sydney Labor MP Peter Baldwin to leave politics brings to an end a career that personifies the profound swing to the right that has taken place in the ALP over the last 15 years. In the early 1980s Labor's right-wing declared Baldwin was 'so far to the left' he must a member of the Militant tendency - (he never was). A decade and a half later, he was reduced to traipsing round the country arguing that the Labor governments' raising of the female retirement age (and therefore eligibility for a pension) - showed the ALP's commitment to 'equality for men and women'!
From the 1920s to the 1970s the Labor Party left-wing essentially got most of their ideas from the Communist Party. But in the late 1970s a new source of inspiration arose - the British Labour Party Left, particularly Tony Benn. Baldwin was the leading figure in this new trend - (ironically he's a nephew of Denis Healy, Benn's chief right-wing adversary in the British Labour Party).
For his pains in opposing the right-wing Baldwin received one of Australia's most famous beltings - at the hands of the NSW Right, the same crew that now fight elections as the 'law and order' brigade.
Through their newspaper Challenge. Baldwin and his co-thinkers advocated that the ALP start to 'get serious' about socialist change. 'Labor can achieve its goals of redistributing wealth, providing high quality social services, guaranteeing full employment and preserving the environment only by fundamentally changing the existing capitalist system, not trying to "manage" it in its present form', declared the April 1978 issue of Challenge.
Yet within a decade Baldwin and the rest of the Labor parliamentary 'left-wing' were corporatising, privatising, cutting social services and neutering the trade unions every bit as thoroughly as any capitalist government throughout the world.
When someone as right-wing as BA Santamaria can lamentingly pose the question, 'Is there a single member of the Labor Left prepared to oppose the transformation of Labor into the party of Capital?', and silence is the answer, it shows how sadly the Labor Left has degenerated.
Fortunately, the ideas of socialism were far from the exclusive property of the Challenge crew, and their capitulation to the right-wing says far more about them than it does about the cause they were once part of.
Baldwin epitomised the 'Great Surrender' - the 1980s collapse of the 'official Left' - a sad end for someone who started out with such promise.