The ALP's Identity Crisis

The Australian Labor Party (ALP) has an identity crisis. Historically, the Party represented disadvantaged workers and their trade unions, organisations continually involved in low-level conflict with capitalism – fighting for improved wages and conditions, job security, and defending worker’s rights.  Unions soon found that they needed to lock-in their hard won gains by legislation, so the Party’s historic task came to be seen as drafting and implementing worker and union-friendly legislation.

To understand how estranged the party has become from this historic role, we need to see the bigger picture. Around the world, after the Great Depression, a raft of stringent banking regulations was put in place. The aim of these reforms was to ensure that the kind of speculative greed that had caused the global collapse in 1929 couldn’t happen again. The reforms worked well for forty years producing unprecedented economic growth and improvements in living standards around the world. But in the mid-1970s the OPEC cartel, upset by the West’s defence of Israel, unilaterally increased oil prices and sent inflation through the roof. Economic growth faltered and inflation skyrocketed producing the infamous period of stagflation – inflation combined with unemployment, Keynesian theory said it couldn’t happen. For a time, in Britain, in the late 1970s something approximating a post Keynesian solution was tried – the Social Contract, a prices and incomes policy, trying to regulate the key variables by a kind of corporatist consensus. It failed, and in 1979 Margaret Thatcher was elected. The Keynesian paradigm was unceremoniously replaced by the monetarist one.

In the 1980s, under Reagan, Thatcher and, in Australia, Hawke and Keating, a massive shift towards the so-called free market occurred. Fixed exchange rates were abolished, floating currencies introduced, and responsibility for interest rates was devolved to newly independent central banks. The three pillars of modern capitalism – deregulation, privatisation and globalisation - frequently referred to as the Washington Consensus were pursued vigorously. Historically the ‘free market’ might have been on tap, but now it was unquestionably on top.

By 1983, when the Hawke Labor Government was elected, monetarism was dominant in both Britain and the US. The Hawke government tried to square the circle, introducing the Prices and Incomes Accord which, on the face of it, was similar to the British Social Contract, a system of central corporatist economic planning, but with an economic agenda ‘free market’ to its core.   

Historically, the ALP had existed uneasily with ‘free markets’ preferring the so-called mixed economy – a balance of public as well as private enterprise. But now Keating vigorously supported the three capitalist pillars on the untested promise that this would produce higher economic growth and better living standards for all. The Labor Government’s planning system put all of its efforts into structural adjustment policies – palliatives such as industry assistance schemes and redundant worker retraining schemes designed to mask union complicity and to ease the pain of transition to the new deregulated, dynamic economy, until such time as the new system could deliver.

Keating was responsible for two major privatisations – The Commonwealth Bank and Qantas – as well as financial deregulation, welcoming foreign investment banks to Australia with disastrous consequences, floating exchange rates, reductions in tariffs and quotas, and the shift from centralised wage bargaining to enterprise agreements. Keating foreshadowed the independence of the Reserve Bank (RBA), but it was left to Costello to formally confirm in a Statement on the Conduct of Monetary Policy issued in 1996. The independence of the RBA was reiterated and strengthened in a subsequent statement issued by Swan in 2010 on behalf of the Labor Government. The RBA is obliged primarily to adopt policies designed to stabilise the currency and secondarily to achieve full employment. Stabilising the currency has invariably been interpreted to mean controlling inflation, and this goal has without exception taken precedence over the employment objective.

Apparently unaware of the global mobility of multinational capital, Keating subscribed strongly to the idea of comparative advantage as a basis for international trade. He saw Australia as the quarry of Asia. In his Brave New World, there was no place for a manufacturing industry which had been the focus of much of Australia’s post-war growth strategy. Ironically, the Asian Tigers – Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and South Korea, not to mention Japan – which were driving Australia’s minerals and energy export growth at the time, had all but collapsed by the early 1990s. Had China not stepped into the breach, Keating’s economic strategy would have been in tatters, as would Australia. Keating also suggested a consumption tax well before the Liberals, one of the rare occasions Keating was voted down by his cabinet colleagues.   

The global financial crisis has almost taken us back to the 1930s. The Washington Consensus is dead. Wall Street is again under fierce pressure to reform. Capitalism like the leopard really doesn’t change its spots. There is an almost universal acknowledgement that markets – especially financial ones – must be regulated.  Yet ‘regulation’ remains a dirty word in Australian political economy. The changing international mood finds no reflection in the forums of the Labor Party.

So, what does the Labor Party stand for? The promises given by Hawke and Keating in the 1980s have spectacularly failed to materialise, but in the intervening period we have lost control of interest rates and exchange rates, we have structurally weakened our economy – especially manufacturing, we have lost many of our skilled workers, we have casualised our workforce, and our unions are materially weaker, household debt has replaced real wages as the primary source of consumers expenditure, we have privatised whilst also enviting capitalist corporations into partnerships with government, forgetting that governments are accountable to the poeple, capitalist corporations aren't, members are deserting the Labor Party in droves, and Party thinking continually bounces from one weird proposal to the next.       

The Whitlam Dimension

One of the weirdest – a system of primaries designed to give ordinary people a say in party affairs – is interesting in light of Labor history. In the 1960s and early 1970s, Gough Whitlam fought and won a protracted battle against the unions and the left for control of the ALP. For years there had been tension between party officers and parliamentarians, especially in Victoria. Party officers and affiliated unions were concerned to ensure that party programs were implemented by the parliamentary wing irrespective of their popularity, the parliamentary wing instead concerned about their standing in the opinion polls.

The media were fond of describing party and union officials as faceless men, bolstering Whitlam’s campaign to break the power of the Party. Whitlam was successful. But the party officials were anything but faceless men, democratically elected by a then vigorously involved branch membership at various party conferences, controlling party resources, recruiting staff, conducting major research programs, organising pre-selections, and controlling renegade MPs who felt constrained by party discipline. After the Whitlam victory this system was completely dismantled. The job of the party officials, henceforth, was fund raising, public opinion polling and focus groups.

The party was set adrift, its anchor chain snapped. No longer would the party membership and executive exercise policy control and discipline over its parliamentarians. Now MPs were free to do whatever the parliamentary caucus and the cabinet decided. Whereas before the change, caucus factions hadn’t mattered very much since all were subject to external party discipline, now they came sharply to the fore. And ministers from the dominant factions were all powerful – almost warlords. Keating was just such a minister and he frequently road roughshod over party policy. It was more than ironic that just prior to the 1983 election, the party renewed its commitment to socialism.

Whitlam might have thought that he was fighting to free the party from rigid control by doctrinaire left wingers not interested in electoral success. In fact he paved the way for Hawke and Keating’s absolute control, and by a fairly linear progression, the woes of the current Gillard government. So now we have a party caught twice in its own trap 1) the major Keating ‘free market’ agenda of the 1980s has failed catastrophically and the parliamentary leadership can’t find a way out because 2) the party has no centre of gravity outside of parliament since the membership and party officials can’t, don’t, and won’t be allowed to do anything except raise funds and hand out how-to-vote cards on election day.

Anti-Aging

Calorie restriction

In the 1930s, biologists conducted calorie restriction (CR) experiments on mice, reducing their food intake by 30%, but leaving the nutrient composition unchanged. The experimental mice were much healthier, living 50% longer on average, increasing lifespan from two to three years, and showing no signs of the diseases that normally plague old mice.

There were other differences, CR mice were smaller than their control counterparts, with fewer offspring, and possibly distressed by their constant hunger. Puzzled by this mysterious increase in longevity, scientists tried but failed to reach any definite conclusions until the advent of a theory of aging that could properly account for it and the advent of gene technology that could confirm it.

In 1977, Tom Kirkwood published his disposable soma theory of species lifespan, an evolutionary theory of longevity, positing that species lifespan is crafted by natural selection, with lifespan depending centrally on the link between soma and germ-line. Soma is the physical body of the organism, configured in turn by its genes - its germ-line. According to Kirkwood, any organism has two primary biological tasks: ensuring the survival of the soma by consuming energy from its environment, and ensuring the survival of the germ-line by reproduction. The survival of the germ-line is dependent on the survival of the soma, but once the germ-line has been passed on via offspring the soma is disposable, the organism is redundant and can be allowed to die.

This theory runs counter to the popular view, with many believing that we inevitably age and die to make room for the next generation, to avoid being a burden, to avoid competition for resources, or possibly to avoid new forms of music. Not so, says Tom Kirkwood, we age and die because our lifespans have evolved that way, in evolutionary terms there is nothing inevitable about aging and death.

According to Kirkwood, indefinite healthy longevity can be achieved – some animals such as the hydra for example are biologically immortal. But longevity is very expensive, demanding continuous error free, protein replication, consuming significant amounts of energy. Therefore, it makes no sense to invest in potential longevity when it’s not needed, if it involves producing expensive potential lifespans that cannot be realised in the wild because of accidents or predators. An organism faces many challenges to its mortality – disease, accidents, predators and famines, very few organisms die of old age in the wild. Consequently an organism’s longevity will be governed by the time needed to reach maturity and the period needed for reproduction; beyond that it’s not expected to survive natural predation and deprivation in any event. So repairs and maintenance are set just to cover the expected lifespan, and the balance of the resources and energy are reallocated to reproduction.           

Firstly, ageing is likely to happen because genes treat organisms as disposable: they invest enough in maintenance to enable the organism to get through its natural expectation of life in the wild environment in good shape, but more than this is a waste. Secondly, there may be design constraints that favour the interests of the organism in its youth at the expense of its long term durability. Finally, natural selection in the wild is not much concerned with late-acting mutations, which may accumulate unchecked in the genome (Kirkwood, T. ‘The Time of Our Lives’, Phoenix 1999, page 79).

Eventually, scientists discovered why their half-starved mice lived longer: semi-starvation switches off the growth and reproduction genes of the mice, but switches on the repair and maintenance genes. Biologists concluded that semi-starvation – the laboratory equivalent of hard times – causes the animal to postpone growth and reproduction, concentrating instead on repairs and maintenance, on keeping itself alive and well until times improve, until there is more food available to support itself and a larger family.

This ability to switch between biological modes depending on environmental circumstances seems to be common across many species – mice, nematode worms, yeast, fruit flies, monkeys, and possibly humans, although none of these informal, long-lived human experiments are yet completed, and nor will they be for many years.

Hence, we seem to face a difficult choice, semi-starving ourselves and living a long healthy, but miserable, half-starved life; or eating, being merry, and having lots of kids but degrading rapidly and dying young. But, possibly not, maybe we can trick our biological system into believing we are living in hard times, allowing us to reap all the benefits of higher repairs and maintenance, enjoying longer healthier lives, while experiencing all of the joys of eating, merriment and procreation along the way. The key to this intriguing possibility is insulin.

Insulin is the metabolic index of feast or famine, high insulin levels signalling feast, low insulin signalling famine. Feast, in turn, signalling growth and reproduction, and famine signalling repairs and maintenance. This biological signalling system evolved over millions of years and is common across many species. As for humans, our paleolithic ancestors evolved over this period eating mostly fatty meats and fruit and edible vegetable matter when available, and insulin is sensitive to the glucogenic proteins in meat and to the carbs in fruit and veg. That’s how we evolved, our metabolic signalling system centred on insulin, hard wired into us.  

However, the idea that aging itself can be regulated by targeting insulin is very recent. Cynthia Kenyon, a US biologist, has made some interesting discoveries:

Inhibiting insulin/IGF-1 signaling extends lifespan and delays age-related disease in species throughout the animal kingdom. This life-extension pathway, the first to be defined, was discovered through genetic studies in the small roundworm C. elegans.

In spite of the fascinating qualities of the aging process, such as its remarkably different pace in different species, until the last few decades aging was not thought to be subject to any active regulation. Now we know that the rate of aging is indeed subject to regulation, by classical signaling pathways. These pathways link the aging rate to environmental and physiological cues, and may even underlie its diversification during evolution. At the heart of these pathways are stress and metabolic sensors such as insulin and IGF-1 hormones, TOR kinase and AMP kinase, whose up- or down-regulation can trigger a variety of cell-protective mechanisms that extend lifespan.

Cynthia Kenyon: The Science Behind Anti-Aging

So there it is: humans and many other organisms have an intrinsic ability to switch between biological modes from growth and reproduction to repairs and maintenance, from disease and short life span to health and long life span using nothing more than a simple signalling system based on insulin ostensibly linked to the organism’s circumstances of feast or famine. And here's the trick: insulin only responds to glucose and other sugars in the diet, so not all foods produce insulin. Carbohydrates, especially refined carbs, produce the most, proteins except leucine and iso-leucine can be metabolised into glucose but rarely are, and fat produces no insulin at all. So the insulin signalling system can be tricked into believing it's in the middle of a famine by consuming a low carb, high fat diet - the ketogenic diet.      

The ketogenic diet

The parallels between CR and the ketogenic diet have been noted and researched:

Both calorie restriction and the ketogenic diet possess broad therapeutic potential in various clinical settings and in various animal models of neurological disease. Following calorie restriction or consumption of a ketogenic diet, there is notable improvement in mitochondrial function, a decrease in the expression of apoptotic and inflammatory mediators and an increase in the activity of neurotrophic factors.

Maalouf, M. ‘The neuroprotective properties of calorie restriction, ketogenic diet and ketone bodies.’ Brain Research 2008.

The effects are summarised in the following table

Maalouf, ibid.  

As Kenyon indicates the actual CR mechanism operates through an evolutionarily conserved signalling mechanism involving a reduction in insulin and related insulin-induced hormones such as Insulin-like growth factors (IGF-1) brought about by a reduction of carbs and protein as a part of the overall reduction in food. As insulin levels fall a whole array of stress genes are increasingly expressed whose function is to conduct repairs and maintenance on the organism, to conserve the organism until better times.

Kenyon quickly became a convert when she found that putting sugar in her experimental worm food shortened the worm’s lifespan. The following is an extract from a New Scientist interview with Kenyon in 2003:

But for now, caloric restriction seems the one proven way to extend lifespan.

Is that why you've virtually given up carbohydrates?

That's not necessarily why I do it. I do it because it makes me feel great and keeps me slender. And I don't feel really tired after a meal. But I think if I wanted to eat in a way that extended lifespan this is how I would do it. In fact, I stopped eating carbohydrates the day we found that putting sugar on the worms' food shortened their lifespans.

How does it work?

I eat a diet that keeps my insulin levels low. So, for example, at breakfast I have bacon and eggs with tomatoes and avocados. It's bit like the Atkins diet. I don't actually know if I eat fewer calories, but I feel great and I weigh what I did in high school. I certainly wouldn't want to be hungry all the time, but I'm not, I'm never hungry. I tried caloric restriction just for two days but I couldn't stand it, being hungry all the time.

Kingsland, J. ‘I Want to Live Forever’ Interview with Cynthia Kenyon, New Scientist, 2003.

Of course, it would be nice if humans could take advantage of this calorie restriction mechanism, living beyond 150 years healthily would be commonplace, but as the Kenyon quote illustrates, the struggle against semi-starvation is just too much for most people – they are beaten almost every time by the agony of hunger.

But CR seems to be an unnecessarily painful way to go about limiting insulin when it is not calories as such that promote insulin, but carbohydrate calories (and, to a lesser extent, protein calories). Hence if you want to increase your healthy lifespan possibly by as much as 50% then move onto the ketogenic diet and lifestyle.

The ketogenic diet dramatically lowers insulin, automatically turning off the hunger switch, allowing individuals to consume their own fat, and often producing a mild state of euphoria, a far from unpleasant experience.