Not Dead Yet: What Future for Labor?

After the election, it will be time for a reckoning. Where to now for the Labor Party? This new edition of the acclaimed essay Not Dead Yet is significantly expanded by Mark Latham to take into account the election result. It also includes substantial contributions from several key progressive thinkers on Labor's future direction. Latham astutely reveals an organisation top-heavy with factional bosses protecting their turf. At the same time Labor's traditional working-class base has long been eroding. People who grew up in fibro shacks now live in double-storey affluence. Families once resigned to a lifetime of blue-collar work now expect their children to be well-educated professionals and entrepreneurs. Latham explains how Labor has always succeeded as a grassroots party, and argues for reforms to clear out the apparatchiks and dead wood. Then there are the key policy challenges: what to do about the Keating economic legacy, education, climate change and poverty. This timely symposium on Labor's future also features Jim Chalmers, Andrew Leigh, Guy Rundle, Nicholas Reece and others, setting out bold ideas for reform and renewal. Published in the wake of the election, Not Dead Yet will be an essential contribution to political debate, which addresses the question: how can Labor reinvent itself and speak to a changed Australia? "The grand old party of working-class participation has become a virtual party. In no other part of society ... could an organisation function this way and expect to survive. This is the core delusion of 21st-century democracy, that political parties can fragment and hollow out, yet still win the confidence of the people." -Mark Latham, Not Dead Yet