Politics changed while Labor wasn’t looking

I am writing this sitting in a coffee shop in Narellan, a booming centre near Camden in south-western Sydney. It's in the federal seat of Macarthur, which, like most on the fringe, is held by the Liberals. I have just met some people who I think help explain why John Howard is still Prime Minister.

Harrington Park is one of the best of the new housing estates. About 2500 homes have been built in the past decade on what was once the farm of Sir Warwick Fairfax. Yakou Marcus is a businessman who came to Australia from Egypt and lived in Bosley Park, near Liverpool, for 20 years. He says Harrington Park is "a very quiet area, very good for peace. Better than Bosley Park because there aren't too many problems. In Bosley Park Chinese, Arabs, Assyrians, but here they're all special people." He likes his house so much he bought two more blocks in the suburb, one for his son and one as an investment.

Poppy and Bill Prezios and their children moved to Harrington Park from Eastlakes. Bill says their old suburb was "too busy … and it's not that friendly. Everyone keeps to themselves. There's no competition out here, everyone's equal. My brother-in-law bought at Sans Souci for $1.3 [million] but I wouldn't live there."

The couple stayed with their in-laws for two years while their house was being built. "It's not really family-oriented there," Poppy says. "The kids would go to the beach at Brighton-le-Sands to play and it was scary - a lot of violence, a lot of angry people." At Harrington Park they have many friends in their street and leave the doors open when they go visiting. For this, Poppy leaves home at 6.30am to drive to her job at Sydney University.

Frank is a retired Italian carpenter and waiter who moved from Green Valley to Harrington Park last year. "I like this area because it's more comfortable, more quiet," he says. "Around Green Valley, a lot of Arabs moved in, there was a mosque not far from me. I didn't have any trouble, but who knows in the future, because at Punchbowl you get a lot of problem people."

He says he likes Harrington Park because it has "real quality people. I'm very concerned about these things." His neighbours are Indian but "they're good, they're not the Indians with turbans on their heads … We're happy here."

These comments were provided spontaneously in response to my general questions about why these people had moved house. I know some of them will make readers wince and start to have dark thoughts about the innate racism of the Australian people. But I would disagree with such an interpretation. I believe they simply reflect the fears and experiences of ordinary, decent people, exposed to some of the pressures and uncertainties of large-scale immigration involving record numbers of people from non-European backgrounds. There is a concern about physical security, the most basic of human needs, entirely valid if you look at the relevant crime figures.

They also reflect a common way of understanding and dealing with the world through rule-of-thumb stereotypes about strangers. These people are not symbolic analysts, they do not search the internet for sophisticated theory about racism and its causes. They just want to do their jobs and make sure their children are safe when they're walking home from school. Their needs are, if you like, simple, and they want leaders who respect those needs.

They also want to feel the security of belonging to a community, which Harrington Park gives them. There's nothing elitist about this: we're talking about a normal desire to live with others who are also polite, clean and non-violent. There's a political dimension to this too: I don't know how they vote, but I suspect they want leaders who will allow them to assimilate and not keep treating them - or anyone else - as an ethnic category.

John Howard gets this. Labor doesn't.

A related thing Labor doesn't get is the implications of the prosperity of recent decades. Prosperity changes people and therefore changes politics. People look to politicians more to manage solutions than to talk up problems. Of course it's hard for Labor to be positive from Opposition. But a bigger problem is that the party was set up to represent one side in a class war that (like the union movement) hardly exists any more. Labor lacks a theory relevant to modern life, which means it lacks insight and purpose.

This week we've heard a lot about how the factions are destroying Labor. But it has long had factions, even fractions. What's more recent is the loss of a passionate view of the world, which used to make factionalism on a good day a strength, a way of testing ideas.

After 10 years in Opposition last time round, the Coalition was defeated in 1993 but it still had intellectual credibility (it had pushed industrial relations reform and there was Fightback) and a sense of purpose and direction. Today, after 10 years, Labor is a directionless rabble run by squabbling old men. Maybe, as Mark Latham said in his diaries, the party has no future.

This would not be the end of the world. In 1944 the floundering United Australia Party, our main conservative party, accepted its irrelevance and dissolved itself. It was replaced by a fresh political force, the Liberal Party. The rest is history.

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