By Andrew West
IT took the former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher almost a decade to gain preselection for a winnable Conservative constituency in parliament. She made five bids for Tory endorsement before snaring the safe seat of Finchley in north London.
Say what you will about Thatcher's agenda - her love of the Chilean tyrant Augusto Pinochet, her attacks on the rights of employees, her policies that spread poverty and unemployment - the woman knew what she believed in and pursued it, even to the point of her own destruction.
Margaret Thatcher and Edward Heath.
''To those waiting with bated breath for that favourite media catchphrase, the U-turn, I have only one thing to say,'' she told the Tory conference in 1980. ''You turn if you want to. The lady's not for turning!''
John Howard had similar fortitude. In 1987, faced with a challenge from the Queensland premier, Joh Bjelke-Petersen, Howard declared himself ''the most conservative leader the Liberal Party has ever had''.
Jesse Jackson.
I quote Thatcher and Howard approvingly not to praise - or bury - them but to pose some blunt, but necessary, questions to the group of self-styled ''progressives'' assembling at the University of Sydney this weekend for a conference on a ''Progressive Australia''.
When was the last time you heard a Labor leader declare him or herself ''the most progressive leader the ALP has ever had''? When was the last time you could be confident that a Labor leader would challenge powerful interests - especially economic and corporate power - and not back down? When was the last time you could be sure of what a Labor leader stood for, and be proud of him or her?
In 2003 Kevin Rudd told The Australian Financial Review he was ''an old-fashioned Christian socialist'', until he became an ''economic conservative'' during the 2007 election campaign. As deputy prime minister, Julia Gillard supported the Rudd government's morally justifiable 40 per cent tax on the mega-profits of mining companies. As Prime Minister, she wilted in the face of the miners' self-interested campaign and lowered the tax to a level that they deigned to pay.
As you can see, the lady's not for turning. She might have called it consultation; for most, it is capitulation.
A poll earlier this week by Essential Research drives home the point, finding
72 per cent of people thought Labor ''will promise to do anything to win votes'', 61 per cent thought it ''out of touch with ordinary people'', 46 per cent believed it ''too close to the big corporate and financial interests'', and only 28 per cent believed Labor was ''clear about what it stands for''.
Instead of squaring up to the corporate and money power - as genuine and successful progressives, such as Franklin Roosevelt, did - Gillard has decided her next quarry will be the unemployed over 55, with few prospects of re-employment, living on the bones of their arses.
We now have a ''Labor'' leader whose sole vision for Australia is of ''hard work'' and ''setting the alarm clock early''. When the US civil rights leader Jesse Jackson spoke in his 1984 and 1988 presidential campaigns for the people ''who catch the early bus'' - janitors, hotel porters, ''people who raise other people's children'' - he was protesting against the economic inequality in Ronald Reagan's America that made such servitude necessary. Unlike Gillard, he was not celebrating work as an end in itself.
The great irony is that the political class that Gillard leads and exemplifies - the ex-political staffers and union bureaucrats who have never been on tools - is the most pampered group in Australian politics. Their sense of entitlement to seats in parliament, and the undemocratic political machines that ensure they succeed, means Labor will never get its version of a Margaret Thatcher: persistent, principled and, ultimately, rewarded by the voters with big victories.
It's not just that the gene pool of potential Labor candidates has narrowed, it's that Labor does not attract people of strong character. Because their political careers have been so seamless, so absent of struggle, they cannot deal with setbacks.
The most telling sign is their fixation with polls. Ever since the 1980s, Australian Labor leaders, British Labour leaders and US Democratic presidents have been obsessed with winning the approbation of people who have never voted for them and never will.
When Bob Hawke, Kevin Rudd, Tony Blair and Bill Clinton climbed to 70 per cent-plus approval ratings, they were not emboldened to take on their enemies - admittedly, this was hard when they never knew whose side they were on - but were paralysed by popularity. And yet, when did this popularity ever translate into actual votes?
In 2008 Barack Obama won the biggest victory for a Democrat since Lyndon Johnson in 1964, and his coat-tails gave Democrats solid majorities in the Congress. He won convincingly, having promised to raise taxes on the super rich and ''spread the wealth around''. He had a mandate for progressive change but arrived in Washington on a naive quest for bipartisanship. The Republicans spurned him. It was bound to happen.
When the right wins, it doesn't compromise or ''reach out'', let alone roll over. Modern conservatives are tough. When they win, they accept the mandate. They don't care about woolly concepts of ''national unity'' and ''healing'' - and for 40 years their policies have prevailed, even when they have lost office.
Richard Nixon was a scoundrel, and a war criminal, but he had a blunt political dictum that progressives would do well to emulate: divide the country, take the biggest part.
Andrew West is a Herald journalist and author of two books on Australian politics and culture. He was a member of the Labor Party between 1985 and 1996. Lenore Taylor is on leave.