From The Economist
In an episode of “The Sopranos”, a popular television series which started airing in the 1990s, a gangster tells Tony, from the titular family, that he wants to retire. “What are you, a hockey player?” Tony snaps back. Non-fictional non-criminals who are considering an end to their working lives need not worry about broken fingers or other bodily harm. But they must still contend with other potentially painful losses: of income, purpose or, most poignantly, relevance.
Some simply won’t quit. Giorgio Armani refuses to relinquish his role as chief executive of his fashion house at the age of 89. Being Italy’s second-richest man has not dampened his work ethic. Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s sidekick at Berkshire Hathaway, worked for the investment powerhouse until he died late last year at the age of 99. Mr Buffett himself is going strong at 93.
People like Messrs Armani, Buffett or Munger are exceptional. But in remaining professionally active into what would historically be considered dotage, they are not unique. One poll this year found that almost one in three Americans say they may never retire. The majority of the nevers said they could not afford to give up a full-time job, especially when inflation was eating into an already measly Social Security cheque. But suppose you are one of the lucky ones who can choose to step aside. Should you do it?
The arc of corporate life used to be predictable. You made your way up the career ladder, acquiring more prestige and bigger salaries at every step. Then, in your early 60s, there was a Friday-afternoon retirement party, maybe a gold watch, and that was that. The next day the world of meetings, objectives, tasks and other busyness faded. If you were moderately restless, you could play bridge or help out with the grandchildren. If you weren’t, there were crossword puzzles, tv and a blanket.
Although intellectual stimulation tends to keep depression and cognitive impairment at bay, many professionals in the technology sector retire at the earliest recommended date to make space for the younger generation, conceding it would be unrealistic to maintain their edge in the field. Still, to step down means to leave centre stage—leisure gives you all the time in the world but tends to marginalise you as you are no longer in the game.
Things have changed. Lifespans are getting longer. It is true that although the post-retirement, twilight years are stretching, they do not have to lead to boredom or to a life devoid of meaning. Once you retire after 32 years as a lawyer at the World Bank, you can begin to split your time between photography and scrounging flea markets for a collection of Americana. You don’t have to miss your job or suffer from a lack of purpose. If you are no longer head of the hospital, you can join Médecins Sans Frontières for occasional stints, teach or help out at your local clinic. Self-worth and personal growth can derive from many places, including non-profit work or mentoring others on how to set up a business.
But can anything truly replace the framework and buzz of being part of the action? You can have a packed diary devoid of deadlines, meetings and spreadsheets and flourish as a consumer of theatre matinees, art exhibitions and badminton lessons. Hobbies are all well and good for many. But for the extremely driven, they can feel pointless and even slightly embarrassing.
That is because there is depth in being useful. And excitement, even in significantly lower doses than are typical earlier in a career, can act as an anti-ageing serum. Whenever Mr Armani is told to retire and enjoy the fruits of his labour, he replies “absolutely not”. Instead he is clearly energised by being involved in the running of the business day to day, signing off on every design, document and figure.
In “Seinfeld”, another television show of the 1990s, Jerry goes to visit his parents, middle-class Americans who moved to Florida when they retired, having dinner in the afternoon. “I’m not force-feeding myself a steak at 4.30 just to save a couple of bucks!” Jerry protests. When this guest Bartleby entered the job market, she assumed that when the day came she too would be a pensioner in a pastel-coloured shirt opting for the “early-bird special”. A quarter of a century on, your 48-year-old columnist hopes to be writing for The Economist decades from now, even if she trundles to her interviews supported by a Zimmer frame; Mr Seinfeld is still going strong at 69, after all. But ask her again in 21 years.
Showing posts with label purpose. Show all posts
Showing posts with label purpose. Show all posts
Wednesday, 31 January 2024
Why You Should Never Retire
Friday, 5 January 2024
Saturday, 16 December 2023
Friday, 15 September 2023
Sunday, 18 July 2021
Monday, 1 June 2020
Coronavirus is our chance to completely rethink what the economy is for
The pandemic has revealed the danger of prizing ‘efficiency’ above all else. The recent slowdown in our lives points to another way of doing things. Malcolm Bull in The Guardian
Illustration: Matt Kenyon/The Guardian
There’s been a lot of argument about how best to handle the coronavirus pandemic, but if there are two things on which most people currently agree, it’s that governments should have been better prepared, and that everyone should get back to work as soon as it is safe to do so. After all, it seems more or less self-evident that you need to be ready for unexpected contingencies – and that it is better for the economy to function at full capacity. More PPE would have saved doctors’ and nurses’ lives; more work means less unemployment and more growth.
But there is a catch to this, and it has been at the heart of political debate since Machiavelli. It is impossible to achieve both goals at once. Contingency planning requires unused capacity, whereas exploiting every opportunity to the full means losing the flexibility needed to respond to sudden changes of fortune.
It wasn’t until the mid-20th century that economists started to realise that it might be better to leave a bit of slack in the economy to help cope with exogenous shocks. In the years after the Great Depression, governments saw the problem as “idle men, idle land, idle machines and idle money”. But there were also economists, such as the Englishman William Hutt, who went against the Keynesian consensus and pointed out that there were some things – fire extinguishers, for example – that were valuable precisely because they were never used. Having large stocks of PPE, underemployed nurses, or a lot of spare capacity in ICUs, falls into the same category. Idle resources are what you need in a crisis, so some degree of inefficiency isn’t necessarily a bad idea.
Trying to manage a pandemic in a world of just-in-time production lines and precarious labour brings these issues into sharper focus. On the one hand, there weren’t enough idle resources for most countries to cope adequately with the spread of the virus. On the other, the enforced idleness of the lockdown leads to calls to get the economy moving again.
For Donald Trump, the prospect of a prolonged shutdown is particularly alarming because it threatens to undermine the competitiveness of the US economy relative to other nations (notably China) that have dealt with the crisis more efficiently. That’s an argument Machiavelli would have understood very well. One of his constant refrains was that idleness could lead to what he called corruption (the diversion of resources from the public good, which Trump equates with the Dow Jones Industrial Average) – and that corruption leads inevitably to defeat at the hands of your rivals.
For Machiavelli, the contagion of corruption was spread above all by Christianity, a “religion of idleness”. And it is true that the Judeo-Christian tradition, with its sabbaths, jubilees, feast days, and religious specialists devoted to a life of prayer and contemplation rather than martial virtue, built a lot of slack into the system. Machiavelli thought it should be squeezed out through laws that would prevent surplus becoming the pretext for idleness, rather in the way that later economists looked to the pressure mechanism of competition to do the same.
But there’s a contradiction in Machiavelli’s thinking here, because he also acknowledged that one of the things every polity needed was periodic renewal and reform, and that corruption was what preceded it. So you’re in a double bind: either you can squeeze out the slack and never experience renewal, or you can court corruption and create an opportunity to start over and make things better.
With hindsight it looks like that’s one of the problems the religions of idleness tried to address, by incorporating idleness into the calendar. In ancient Hebrew tradition, there were weekly sabbaths, and every seventh year was meant to be a year of release in which the land was left to lie fallow, debts were forgiven and slaves emancipated. The idea was picked up by the Chartist William Benbow, who in 1832 used it as the model for what he called a Grand National Holiday, in effect a month-long general strike that would allow a National Congress to reform society “to obtain for all at the least expense to all, the largest sum of happiness for all”.
Benbow’s plan came to nothing, but it provides an alternative model for how the lockdown might be viewed. The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has complained that the lockdown is a state of exception with an increase in executive powers and a partial abrogation of the rule of law; but the flipside is that it is the closest thing to a Grand National Holiday that most of us have ever experienced. Despite all the suffering the pandemic has caused, for many it has also meant no work, debt relief, empty roads and a rare opportunity to live on free money from the government.
Generally speaking, exogenous threats like wars or natural disasters act as pressure mechanisms forcing us to redouble our efforts to combat them together. The benefit of contagion is that the only way to combat it is to do less rather than more. That has some demonstrable advantages. There has been a dramatic global fall in carbon emissions. The only comparable reduction in greenhouse gases during the past 30 years came as the result of the decline of industrial production in eastern Europe after the fall of communism. That was managed exceptionally badly because neoliberal economists thought that what post-communist states needed was the pressure of free market competition. Shock therapy would galvanise the economy.
The pandemic has been a shock alright, but its effect has been the opposite of galvanising. People everywhere had to stop whatever they were doing or planning to do in the future. That provides an altogether different model of political change. The philosopher Walter Benjamin once noted that while Karl Marx claimed that revolutions were the locomotives of world history, things might actually turn out to be rather different: “Perhaps revolutions are the human race … travelling in this train, reaching for the emergency brake.”
Everyone keeps saying that we are living through strange times, but what is strange about it is that because everything has come to a stop, it is as though we are living out of time. The emergency brake has been pulled and time is standing still. It feels uncanny, and there’s more slack in the world economy than there ever has been before. And that means, as both Benjamin and Machiavelli would have recognised, that there is also a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for change and renewal.
For some, this might mean a shorter working week, or less air travel. For others, it might suggest the opportunity for a more fundamental remaking of our political system. A space of possibility has unexpectedly opened up, so although the lockdown may be coming to an end, perhaps the standstill should continue.
There’s been a lot of argument about how best to handle the coronavirus pandemic, but if there are two things on which most people currently agree, it’s that governments should have been better prepared, and that everyone should get back to work as soon as it is safe to do so. After all, it seems more or less self-evident that you need to be ready for unexpected contingencies – and that it is better for the economy to function at full capacity. More PPE would have saved doctors’ and nurses’ lives; more work means less unemployment and more growth.
But there is a catch to this, and it has been at the heart of political debate since Machiavelli. It is impossible to achieve both goals at once. Contingency planning requires unused capacity, whereas exploiting every opportunity to the full means losing the flexibility needed to respond to sudden changes of fortune.
It wasn’t until the mid-20th century that economists started to realise that it might be better to leave a bit of slack in the economy to help cope with exogenous shocks. In the years after the Great Depression, governments saw the problem as “idle men, idle land, idle machines and idle money”. But there were also economists, such as the Englishman William Hutt, who went against the Keynesian consensus and pointed out that there were some things – fire extinguishers, for example – that were valuable precisely because they were never used. Having large stocks of PPE, underemployed nurses, or a lot of spare capacity in ICUs, falls into the same category. Idle resources are what you need in a crisis, so some degree of inefficiency isn’t necessarily a bad idea.
Trying to manage a pandemic in a world of just-in-time production lines and precarious labour brings these issues into sharper focus. On the one hand, there weren’t enough idle resources for most countries to cope adequately with the spread of the virus. On the other, the enforced idleness of the lockdown leads to calls to get the economy moving again.
For Donald Trump, the prospect of a prolonged shutdown is particularly alarming because it threatens to undermine the competitiveness of the US economy relative to other nations (notably China) that have dealt with the crisis more efficiently. That’s an argument Machiavelli would have understood very well. One of his constant refrains was that idleness could lead to what he called corruption (the diversion of resources from the public good, which Trump equates with the Dow Jones Industrial Average) – and that corruption leads inevitably to defeat at the hands of your rivals.
For Machiavelli, the contagion of corruption was spread above all by Christianity, a “religion of idleness”. And it is true that the Judeo-Christian tradition, with its sabbaths, jubilees, feast days, and religious specialists devoted to a life of prayer and contemplation rather than martial virtue, built a lot of slack into the system. Machiavelli thought it should be squeezed out through laws that would prevent surplus becoming the pretext for idleness, rather in the way that later economists looked to the pressure mechanism of competition to do the same.
But there’s a contradiction in Machiavelli’s thinking here, because he also acknowledged that one of the things every polity needed was periodic renewal and reform, and that corruption was what preceded it. So you’re in a double bind: either you can squeeze out the slack and never experience renewal, or you can court corruption and create an opportunity to start over and make things better.
With hindsight it looks like that’s one of the problems the religions of idleness tried to address, by incorporating idleness into the calendar. In ancient Hebrew tradition, there were weekly sabbaths, and every seventh year was meant to be a year of release in which the land was left to lie fallow, debts were forgiven and slaves emancipated. The idea was picked up by the Chartist William Benbow, who in 1832 used it as the model for what he called a Grand National Holiday, in effect a month-long general strike that would allow a National Congress to reform society “to obtain for all at the least expense to all, the largest sum of happiness for all”.
Benbow’s plan came to nothing, but it provides an alternative model for how the lockdown might be viewed. The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has complained that the lockdown is a state of exception with an increase in executive powers and a partial abrogation of the rule of law; but the flipside is that it is the closest thing to a Grand National Holiday that most of us have ever experienced. Despite all the suffering the pandemic has caused, for many it has also meant no work, debt relief, empty roads and a rare opportunity to live on free money from the government.
Generally speaking, exogenous threats like wars or natural disasters act as pressure mechanisms forcing us to redouble our efforts to combat them together. The benefit of contagion is that the only way to combat it is to do less rather than more. That has some demonstrable advantages. There has been a dramatic global fall in carbon emissions. The only comparable reduction in greenhouse gases during the past 30 years came as the result of the decline of industrial production in eastern Europe after the fall of communism. That was managed exceptionally badly because neoliberal economists thought that what post-communist states needed was the pressure of free market competition. Shock therapy would galvanise the economy.
The pandemic has been a shock alright, but its effect has been the opposite of galvanising. People everywhere had to stop whatever they were doing or planning to do in the future. That provides an altogether different model of political change. The philosopher Walter Benjamin once noted that while Karl Marx claimed that revolutions were the locomotives of world history, things might actually turn out to be rather different: “Perhaps revolutions are the human race … travelling in this train, reaching for the emergency brake.”
Everyone keeps saying that we are living through strange times, but what is strange about it is that because everything has come to a stop, it is as though we are living out of time. The emergency brake has been pulled and time is standing still. It feels uncanny, and there’s more slack in the world economy than there ever has been before. And that means, as both Benjamin and Machiavelli would have recognised, that there is also a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for change and renewal.
For some, this might mean a shorter working week, or less air travel. For others, it might suggest the opportunity for a more fundamental remaking of our political system. A space of possibility has unexpectedly opened up, so although the lockdown may be coming to an end, perhaps the standstill should continue.
Sunday, 20 May 2018
Wednesday, 26 October 2016
How do batsmen cope with the intensity of their lonely skill?
Digging the pitch, repetitive body movements, talking to themselves, superstitious behaviour, visualisation - different ways that batsmen deal with the pressure of their profession
Michael Bond in Cricinfo
All sportspeople like to imagine that their discipline is the most mentally challenging, that winning or losing comes from within. But batsmen have a stronger claim than most. What other sport demands such intense concentration, affords participants so little control over their situation and penalises mistakes so cruelly and with such dramatic ritual?
Batting is a game of life and death like no other. Success - a century, a match-saving last stand - can live with you forever. But getting out feels like the end of everything: you are dismissed not just from the field of play, but from your own dreams of hopefulness and redemption.
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THE MASKS WE WEAR
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Dismissed batsmen are like mourners at their own funerals. The dressing room falls silent as they return, "in respect for the dead", as Mike Brearley puts it in The Art of Captaincy (1985).
"There aren't many situations in sport where you have this challenge of one tiny mistake and that's it, finished, the rest of the day you're watching from the sidelines," says sports psychologist Steve Bull, who worked with the England cricket team for 17 years. "It creates a particular type of pressure which I don't think other athletes experience."
Given the intensity of the mental drama, it is little wonder that a batsman's struggles are with himself as much as with the bowler he faces, and that a lack of confidence can invite negative thinking and a fear of failure. For top-level batsmen with near-perfect technical skills, protecting themselves from such tendencies is critical. The methods they use to reduce anxiety, stay positive and maintain focus are idiosyncratic, often eccentric and tell us as much about the quirks of the human mind as the nuances of cricket.
If you watched England's three-match Test series against Sri Lanka this summer, you will have spotted a graphic example of one of these methods. Before each ball, the Sri Lankan opener Kaushal Silva performs what psychologists call a "pre-performance routine". He adjusts the velcro on his gloves, moves his bat from his left to his right hand and holds it up in front of him, moves his left elbow back and forth eight times (fewer if he's facing a spinner) as if pulling on an imaginary rope, then, gripping his bat with both hands, arches his back before settling into his crease.
The repetition looks neurotic, but Silva has developed it to help him feel settled. "I don't really count the exact number of times I do it, it just comes from my body," he says. "I do it until I have calmed my nerves and I feel OK and I'm really focused. These small things help me to be myself and to just concentrate on the next ball."
It seems to be working. Sri Lanka lost 0-2, but Silva won his team's Player-of-the-Series award for his 193 runs.
Most batsmen have pre-performance routines, though few as elaborate as Silva's. They might wander a few steps towards square leg, tap the bat on the ground a particular way or pull at their shirt. What psychological purpose does this serve? Brearley thinks it's "a way of clearing the mind of the last ball, getting on with the next one, making clear to oneself that a line needs to be drawn under the last one".
In Jonathan Trott's case this is literally true. He marks his guard with a shallow trench, which he reinforces before each delivery, as if to bury everything that's gone before, a habit he repeats whether he's batting in the nets or in a county or international game.
Such repetition is critical to why routines work, says Bull. "It has to be 100% consistent, every ball always the same. You need to get your routines habitualised to the point where you don't think about them, to practise them so that when you're in the middle you go into automatic pilot."
In other words, batsmen should tune their mental routines alongside their physical ones so that the two coalesce. Consider Kevin Pietersen's advice to a 12-year-old budding cricketer who asked him on Twitter how to stop "second-guessing" himself when playing a shot, a common mental error among cricketers still developing their technique. "Practise, practise, practise, and trust your practise," Pietersen replied. "Hardest thing to do but when you do it changes your game."
Perhaps the most tangible function of routines is that they give the batsman a sense of control over a situation which, for the most part, is out of their hands. The state of the wicket, the weather, the path of the ball through the air and off the pitch are beyond his reckoning; his pre-ball ritual is all his own. This need for control amid so much uncertainty may explain why batsmen are particularly prone to superstitions. Unlike a pre-performance routine, a superstition - essentially an irrational belief in implausible causality - is unlikely to improve performance. Yet cricket is full of them.
The Glamorgan opener Steve James avoided eating duck meat until he retired, and he wouldn't allow his daughter to have plastic ducks in her bath. Mike Atherton had to be first on to the field at the start of an innings, even if it meant barging past his opening partner on the way down the pavilion steps. The South African batsman Neil McKenzie used to tape his bat to the dressing-room ceiling because his team-mates had once done this as a practical joke prior to him scoring a century. Steve Waugh batted with a red rag in his pocket for similar reasons.
Derek Randall, like many batsmen, hated being on 13. "I couldn't wait to get off it," he says. "Sometimes I'd get out because I was trying too hard to get off the blooming thing."
Ed Smith, one of the most notoriously superstitious cricketers, had a habit of asking the umpire, mid-over, how many balls were left. For the first part of his career he did this always after the fourth ball, then switched to asking after the third ball. Since he batted for around 15,000 overs in his career, he must have asked this question of the umpire around 15,000 times.
"It was silly and I knew it," he writes in Luck: A Fresh Look at Fortune (2012). "It was unintelligent and I knew it. It was a source of mirth and I knew it. But I did it anyway. Superstition was a dependency I found hard to give up."
Many batsmens' superstitions revolve around an obsession with their kit. Trott is scrupulous about how he arranges his bats. Atherton always followed the same padding-up routine: box, chest guard, inside thigh-pad, outside thigh-pad, left pad, right pad, arm guard, gloves, helmet. This kind of fastidiousness is not too surprising since batting is much about organisation, repetition and structure.
Yet rigorously adhering to a ritual is unlikely to put you in the runs and could make things worse. "If the superstition is something you might not have control over, like wearing your lucky socks, what happens when you lose your lucky socks or they fall apart," says sports psychologist Stewart Cotterill. "It will have the opposite effect: you'll feel you're not ready."
Once all the fussing and the rituals and the routines are done and the batsman is settled at the crease, he can then focus on the bowling. This is where the real test begins. Unless you are an expert meditator, paying close sustained attention to something for long periods can be mentally draining. To deal with this, coaches encourage batsmen to "dial up" their focus when the bowler is running in and "dial down" between balls.
Atherton says switching on and off like this is "absolutely vital" and came easily to him, a naturally relaxed character. "All studies show you can't concentrate for lengthy periods without a break. The ball is 'live' for maybe six to ten seconds, so that is all you have to concentrate for."
Silva pares down the window of concentration even further, to three or four seconds, switching on only when the bowler is halfway through his run-up. He calculates that this way, if he sets out to score a century in, say, 180 to 200 balls, he will have to concentrate deeply for just ten to 15 minutes. "So it's 15 minutes to get 100 runs. If you cut it down like this then it will be easier. You don't worry about the long term, you just focus on the particular ball."
"Mental skills are like physical skills. You have to work at them relentlessly. You have to challenge your brain to get better at blocking out the negatives and replacing them with positives"
STEVE BULL, SPORTS PSYCHOLOGIST
The thought of surviving hours at the crease can seem overwhelming if you don't break it down.
Tammy Beaumont, who this summer became the first woman to hit back-to-back ODI centuriesfor England, during the series against Pakistan, worries only about the next five runs. "I'll tell myself: get to five, once I get to five get to ten, keep it like that, keep it all about the next ball."
Another approach is to segment time. Brearley and Randall did this during the Centenary Testbetween England and Australia in Melbourne in 1977. Needing 463 to win with a wicket down, they decided to take it in 15-minute sections. "Stick at it, Skip. In ten minutes there'll only be 15 minutes to tea," Brearley recalls Randall saying, in The Art of Captaincy. They lost by 45 runs; Randall scored 174.
You don't have to be an international or even a professional cricketer to benefit from these mental heuristics. Bull says the key difference between elite and "Sunday afternoon batsmen" is that "Sunday afternoon batsmen tend to overcomplicate things. They're standing there tapping the ground as the bowler runs in, thinking about where the fields are, thinking about their left-hand grip, where their shoulders are. The best players in the world are just standing there saying: watch the ball."
Mental routines are a way to simplify things, to shut out technical thoughts, memories of mistimed shots and other internal distractions, and to help the batsman settle into a state of readiness that Bull calls "relaxed alertness". But routines alone may not be enough, especially in international games where the pressures can be immense. To settle nerves and maintain confidence through an innings, many batsmen engage in what used to be considered a symptom of mental illness but is now recognised as fully functional: talking to yourself.
In a 2013 study at an English first-class cricket club, psychologists at Cardiff Metropolitan University found that batsmen used self-talk regularly, either to motivate themselves in challenging situations - when walking out to bat, for example, or after a poor shot - or to deliver instructional cues that focus attention, such as "Watch the ball!"
In fact, "Watch the ball" seems to be the default cue for most batsmen. Ricky Ponting used it. You can sometimes see Eoin Morgan mouthing it before a ball. Beaumont, after watching one of Ponting's masterclasses, adopted it then adapted it - her current cue is "Time the ball, play straight". Easy if you know how.
One of the most notorious self-talkers in cricket history is Randall. He did it constantly and out loud. "It was spontaneous, it was a natural thing to do. When I'm nervous I start talking. It would help me concentrate. It annoyed everybody, including the people who played with me."
During the fourth Test of the 1978-79 Ashes, when Randall scored 150 during the second innings and turned the series in England's favour, his monologue continued throughout the nine hours and 42 minutes he spent at the crease. Here's a snatch of it, as related to Sunday Times journalist Dudley Doust by his opponents and team-mates: "Come on, Rags," he says. "Get stuck in. Don't take any chances. Get forward, get forward. Get behind the ball. Take your time, slow and easy. You idiot, Rags. Come on, come. Come on, England."
Younis Khan, who averages 53.72 in Test cricket and is Pakistan's highest-ever run scorer, also talks to himself all the time when he's at the wicket. But he has a slightly different approach to most, conducting his conversations with an alter ego that he conjures up as he goes out to bat.
"I imagine there is a guy standing in front of me and he is Younis Khan, and just talk with him. It's like there are two Younis Khans standing face to face like a boxer, and they are talking and looking each other in the eyes. Come on, Younis Khan, you can do this, you can do that."
Self-talk can keep you focused, and it can also help maintain confidence, without which batting can feel like Russian roulette. Mark Ramprakash, the England men's batting coach, says confidence and self-belief are "absolutely paramount. They can work wonders: they can make up for a less-than-perfect technique. The thing with cricket is that you have a lot of bad days. You make one wrong decision, or someone takes a great catch. The best players, like Alastair Cook, are incredibly resilient to those bad days. They maintain a belief in their own ability."
Ramprakash himself suffered a crisis of belief early on in his England career when he failed to make a big score and began to question whether he belonged at Test level. Then in 1998 he started working with Bull, brought in by England as team psychologist.
"He gave me a very simple framework of coping with all the scrambled thoughts that were going on in my head," says Ramprakash.
Silva pares down the window of concentration to three or four seconds, switching on only when the bowler is halfway through his run-up. "So it's 15 minutes to get 100 runs. If you cut it down like this then it will be easier"
It proved pivotal. Soon after meeting Bull he scored 154 against West Indies in Barbados - his first Test century - and then topped the averages the following winter in Australia. His team-mate Atherton, writing in his autobiography, said he sensed at the time that Ramprakash was "a totally different person, and consequently, player".
Today the mental side of batting and the pressures that come with playing at international level are taken very seriously by England's management, due in no small part to Ramprakash's influence. Yet confidence is a fickle trait. Sometimes it's necessary to fake it to make it, so to speak. Psychologists have known for decades that feelings and emotions stem from changes in the body, rather than the other way round - a phenomenon known as embodied cognition - which means it's possible to generate confidence simply by acting it out.
"Shadow batting" - practising sublime strokes between balls - or walking out to bat with head held high, can have a positive effect on the way you play. The sports psychologist Jamie Barker, who works with Nottinghamshire Cricket Club and the ECB's performance programme, makes a point of getting players to focus on their body language as they leave the pavilion, to appear confident even if they don't feel it: "If you're assertive, your brain will pick up on that."
Another way of "faking" confidence is to visualise the way you want to play in your mind's eye before the game begins. In 1974, early in his career, Randall suffered four first-class innings in a row without scoring a run. "It was a nightmare," he says. "The pressure just builds on you." So on the morning of his fifth innings he got up early and arrived at the ground while it was still deserted, strapped on his pads, walked out to the middle, played a cover drive and took a run, "just to remember what it was like". He scored 93 that day.
Ramprakash encourages England's batsmen to use this kind of visualisation, which serves as a cognitive rehearsal for the main event. There is much evidence that it works. One problem with all these approaches is that worrying too much about your own performance can easily make things worse. Steven Sylvester, Middlesex's psychologist and author of the recent book Detox Your Ego(2016), thinks that for players at the top of their game what really matters is "where your heart is, why am I here?"
The important thing, he says, is to believe at an emotional level that you are playing not for yourself but for your team or your country, or some other ideal that transcends you. "When players start to think about their performance as serving the group it increases their self-esteem, their belief goes up and they become a bit freer in their skills. It gives them a little bit extra."
In 2013, Sylvester helped Australia and Middlesex batsman Chris Rogers after he was called up to the Ashes squad more than five years after his previous Test. "It became blindingly obvious that his fear of representing his country in the Ashes as an opening batsman was stopping him from moving forward," he says. "Through a deep discussion of how to serve his country he came up with a more compelling reason to doing well than if it was just about him."
Sylvester coached Moeen Ali through a similar process, helping him put his cricket in the context of his faith and his desire to be a role model. The Pakistan batsman Asad Shafiq, who has scored eight Test centuries at No. 6 - a world record - gives an equally compelling reason for his own success: "To bat at No. 6 you have to be patient, as most of the time the tailenders are with you. You have to give them confidence and support."
Shafiq is batting not just for himself, but for Nos. 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11 as well. He epitomises CLR James' portrait in his classic Beyond a Boundary (1963) of the batsman as the ultimate team player. When facing the ball, writes James, he "does not merely represent his side. For that moment, to all intents and purposes, he is his side."
Without doubt, all batsmen can improve their confidence, resilience and other mental attributes if they're willing to practise. "Mental skills are like physical skills," says Bull. "You have to work at them relentlessly. You have to challenge your brain to get better at blocking out the negatives and replacing them with positives."
Yet it also seems clear that some people are inherently better at this than others. In 2005, Bull carried out a psychological analysis of 12 English cricketers from the previous two decades whom county coaches had identified as the toughest mentally in the country. Among them were Atherton, Graham Gooch and Alec Stewart. Bull found them all to be highly competitive and motivated, full of self-confidence and with a never-say-die attitude, some of which derived from their upbringing, some from the teams they had played with and some from their personality.
For the rest of us, it is comforting to know that we can learn such skills - and that even the greats can struggle at times. Even Don Bradman called batting "a nerve-racking business". In The Art of Cricket (1958), he implores us to give a thought to the batsman's travails as he wends his way to the wicket: "He is human like you, and desperately anxious to do well."
Michael Bond in Cricinfo
All sportspeople like to imagine that their discipline is the most mentally challenging, that winning or losing comes from within. But batsmen have a stronger claim than most. What other sport demands such intense concentration, affords participants so little control over their situation and penalises mistakes so cruelly and with such dramatic ritual?
Batting is a game of life and death like no other. Success - a century, a match-saving last stand - can live with you forever. But getting out feels like the end of everything: you are dismissed not just from the field of play, but from your own dreams of hopefulness and redemption.
---Also read
THE MASKS WE WEAR
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Dismissed batsmen are like mourners at their own funerals. The dressing room falls silent as they return, "in respect for the dead", as Mike Brearley puts it in The Art of Captaincy (1985).
"There aren't many situations in sport where you have this challenge of one tiny mistake and that's it, finished, the rest of the day you're watching from the sidelines," says sports psychologist Steve Bull, who worked with the England cricket team for 17 years. "It creates a particular type of pressure which I don't think other athletes experience."
Given the intensity of the mental drama, it is little wonder that a batsman's struggles are with himself as much as with the bowler he faces, and that a lack of confidence can invite negative thinking and a fear of failure. For top-level batsmen with near-perfect technical skills, protecting themselves from such tendencies is critical. The methods they use to reduce anxiety, stay positive and maintain focus are idiosyncratic, often eccentric and tell us as much about the quirks of the human mind as the nuances of cricket.
If you watched England's three-match Test series against Sri Lanka this summer, you will have spotted a graphic example of one of these methods. Before each ball, the Sri Lankan opener Kaushal Silva performs what psychologists call a "pre-performance routine". He adjusts the velcro on his gloves, moves his bat from his left to his right hand and holds it up in front of him, moves his left elbow back and forth eight times (fewer if he's facing a spinner) as if pulling on an imaginary rope, then, gripping his bat with both hands, arches his back before settling into his crease.
The repetition looks neurotic, but Silva has developed it to help him feel settled. "I don't really count the exact number of times I do it, it just comes from my body," he says. "I do it until I have calmed my nerves and I feel OK and I'm really focused. These small things help me to be myself and to just concentrate on the next ball."
It seems to be working. Sri Lanka lost 0-2, but Silva won his team's Player-of-the-Series award for his 193 runs.
Most batsmen have pre-performance routines, though few as elaborate as Silva's. They might wander a few steps towards square leg, tap the bat on the ground a particular way or pull at their shirt. What psychological purpose does this serve? Brearley thinks it's "a way of clearing the mind of the last ball, getting on with the next one, making clear to oneself that a line needs to be drawn under the last one".
In Jonathan Trott's case this is literally true. He marks his guard with a shallow trench, which he reinforces before each delivery, as if to bury everything that's gone before, a habit he repeats whether he's batting in the nets or in a county or international game.
Such repetition is critical to why routines work, says Bull. "It has to be 100% consistent, every ball always the same. You need to get your routines habitualised to the point where you don't think about them, to practise them so that when you're in the middle you go into automatic pilot."
In other words, batsmen should tune their mental routines alongside their physical ones so that the two coalesce. Consider Kevin Pietersen's advice to a 12-year-old budding cricketer who asked him on Twitter how to stop "second-guessing" himself when playing a shot, a common mental error among cricketers still developing their technique. "Practise, practise, practise, and trust your practise," Pietersen replied. "Hardest thing to do but when you do it changes your game."
Perhaps the most tangible function of routines is that they give the batsman a sense of control over a situation which, for the most part, is out of their hands. The state of the wicket, the weather, the path of the ball through the air and off the pitch are beyond his reckoning; his pre-ball ritual is all his own. This need for control amid so much uncertainty may explain why batsmen are particularly prone to superstitions. Unlike a pre-performance routine, a superstition - essentially an irrational belief in implausible causality - is unlikely to improve performance. Yet cricket is full of them.
The Glamorgan opener Steve James avoided eating duck meat until he retired, and he wouldn't allow his daughter to have plastic ducks in her bath. Mike Atherton had to be first on to the field at the start of an innings, even if it meant barging past his opening partner on the way down the pavilion steps. The South African batsman Neil McKenzie used to tape his bat to the dressing-room ceiling because his team-mates had once done this as a practical joke prior to him scoring a century. Steve Waugh batted with a red rag in his pocket for similar reasons.
Derek Randall, like many batsmen, hated being on 13. "I couldn't wait to get off it," he says. "Sometimes I'd get out because I was trying too hard to get off the blooming thing."
Ed Smith, one of the most notoriously superstitious cricketers, had a habit of asking the umpire, mid-over, how many balls were left. For the first part of his career he did this always after the fourth ball, then switched to asking after the third ball. Since he batted for around 15,000 overs in his career, he must have asked this question of the umpire around 15,000 times.
"It was silly and I knew it," he writes in Luck: A Fresh Look at Fortune (2012). "It was unintelligent and I knew it. It was a source of mirth and I knew it. But I did it anyway. Superstition was a dependency I found hard to give up."
Many batsmens' superstitions revolve around an obsession with their kit. Trott is scrupulous about how he arranges his bats. Atherton always followed the same padding-up routine: box, chest guard, inside thigh-pad, outside thigh-pad, left pad, right pad, arm guard, gloves, helmet. This kind of fastidiousness is not too surprising since batting is much about organisation, repetition and structure.
Yet rigorously adhering to a ritual is unlikely to put you in the runs and could make things worse. "If the superstition is something you might not have control over, like wearing your lucky socks, what happens when you lose your lucky socks or they fall apart," says sports psychologist Stewart Cotterill. "It will have the opposite effect: you'll feel you're not ready."
Once all the fussing and the rituals and the routines are done and the batsman is settled at the crease, he can then focus on the bowling. This is where the real test begins. Unless you are an expert meditator, paying close sustained attention to something for long periods can be mentally draining. To deal with this, coaches encourage batsmen to "dial up" their focus when the bowler is running in and "dial down" between balls.
Atherton says switching on and off like this is "absolutely vital" and came easily to him, a naturally relaxed character. "All studies show you can't concentrate for lengthy periods without a break. The ball is 'live' for maybe six to ten seconds, so that is all you have to concentrate for."
Silva pares down the window of concentration even further, to three or four seconds, switching on only when the bowler is halfway through his run-up. He calculates that this way, if he sets out to score a century in, say, 180 to 200 balls, he will have to concentrate deeply for just ten to 15 minutes. "So it's 15 minutes to get 100 runs. If you cut it down like this then it will be easier. You don't worry about the long term, you just focus on the particular ball."
"Mental skills are like physical skills. You have to work at them relentlessly. You have to challenge your brain to get better at blocking out the negatives and replacing them with positives"
STEVE BULL, SPORTS PSYCHOLOGIST
The thought of surviving hours at the crease can seem overwhelming if you don't break it down.
Tammy Beaumont, who this summer became the first woman to hit back-to-back ODI centuriesfor England, during the series against Pakistan, worries only about the next five runs. "I'll tell myself: get to five, once I get to five get to ten, keep it like that, keep it all about the next ball."
Another approach is to segment time. Brearley and Randall did this during the Centenary Testbetween England and Australia in Melbourne in 1977. Needing 463 to win with a wicket down, they decided to take it in 15-minute sections. "Stick at it, Skip. In ten minutes there'll only be 15 minutes to tea," Brearley recalls Randall saying, in The Art of Captaincy. They lost by 45 runs; Randall scored 174.
You don't have to be an international or even a professional cricketer to benefit from these mental heuristics. Bull says the key difference between elite and "Sunday afternoon batsmen" is that "Sunday afternoon batsmen tend to overcomplicate things. They're standing there tapping the ground as the bowler runs in, thinking about where the fields are, thinking about their left-hand grip, where their shoulders are. The best players in the world are just standing there saying: watch the ball."
Mental routines are a way to simplify things, to shut out technical thoughts, memories of mistimed shots and other internal distractions, and to help the batsman settle into a state of readiness that Bull calls "relaxed alertness". But routines alone may not be enough, especially in international games where the pressures can be immense. To settle nerves and maintain confidence through an innings, many batsmen engage in what used to be considered a symptom of mental illness but is now recognised as fully functional: talking to yourself.
In a 2013 study at an English first-class cricket club, psychologists at Cardiff Metropolitan University found that batsmen used self-talk regularly, either to motivate themselves in challenging situations - when walking out to bat, for example, or after a poor shot - or to deliver instructional cues that focus attention, such as "Watch the ball!"
In fact, "Watch the ball" seems to be the default cue for most batsmen. Ricky Ponting used it. You can sometimes see Eoin Morgan mouthing it before a ball. Beaumont, after watching one of Ponting's masterclasses, adopted it then adapted it - her current cue is "Time the ball, play straight". Easy if you know how.
One of the most notorious self-talkers in cricket history is Randall. He did it constantly and out loud. "It was spontaneous, it was a natural thing to do. When I'm nervous I start talking. It would help me concentrate. It annoyed everybody, including the people who played with me."
During the fourth Test of the 1978-79 Ashes, when Randall scored 150 during the second innings and turned the series in England's favour, his monologue continued throughout the nine hours and 42 minutes he spent at the crease. Here's a snatch of it, as related to Sunday Times journalist Dudley Doust by his opponents and team-mates: "Come on, Rags," he says. "Get stuck in. Don't take any chances. Get forward, get forward. Get behind the ball. Take your time, slow and easy. You idiot, Rags. Come on, come. Come on, England."
Younis Khan, who averages 53.72 in Test cricket and is Pakistan's highest-ever run scorer, also talks to himself all the time when he's at the wicket. But he has a slightly different approach to most, conducting his conversations with an alter ego that he conjures up as he goes out to bat.
"I imagine there is a guy standing in front of me and he is Younis Khan, and just talk with him. It's like there are two Younis Khans standing face to face like a boxer, and they are talking and looking each other in the eyes. Come on, Younis Khan, you can do this, you can do that."
Self-talk can keep you focused, and it can also help maintain confidence, without which batting can feel like Russian roulette. Mark Ramprakash, the England men's batting coach, says confidence and self-belief are "absolutely paramount. They can work wonders: they can make up for a less-than-perfect technique. The thing with cricket is that you have a lot of bad days. You make one wrong decision, or someone takes a great catch. The best players, like Alastair Cook, are incredibly resilient to those bad days. They maintain a belief in their own ability."
Ramprakash himself suffered a crisis of belief early on in his England career when he failed to make a big score and began to question whether he belonged at Test level. Then in 1998 he started working with Bull, brought in by England as team psychologist.
"He gave me a very simple framework of coping with all the scrambled thoughts that were going on in my head," says Ramprakash.
Silva pares down the window of concentration to three or four seconds, switching on only when the bowler is halfway through his run-up. "So it's 15 minutes to get 100 runs. If you cut it down like this then it will be easier"
It proved pivotal. Soon after meeting Bull he scored 154 against West Indies in Barbados - his first Test century - and then topped the averages the following winter in Australia. His team-mate Atherton, writing in his autobiography, said he sensed at the time that Ramprakash was "a totally different person, and consequently, player".
Today the mental side of batting and the pressures that come with playing at international level are taken very seriously by England's management, due in no small part to Ramprakash's influence. Yet confidence is a fickle trait. Sometimes it's necessary to fake it to make it, so to speak. Psychologists have known for decades that feelings and emotions stem from changes in the body, rather than the other way round - a phenomenon known as embodied cognition - which means it's possible to generate confidence simply by acting it out.
"Shadow batting" - practising sublime strokes between balls - or walking out to bat with head held high, can have a positive effect on the way you play. The sports psychologist Jamie Barker, who works with Nottinghamshire Cricket Club and the ECB's performance programme, makes a point of getting players to focus on their body language as they leave the pavilion, to appear confident even if they don't feel it: "If you're assertive, your brain will pick up on that."
Another way of "faking" confidence is to visualise the way you want to play in your mind's eye before the game begins. In 1974, early in his career, Randall suffered four first-class innings in a row without scoring a run. "It was a nightmare," he says. "The pressure just builds on you." So on the morning of his fifth innings he got up early and arrived at the ground while it was still deserted, strapped on his pads, walked out to the middle, played a cover drive and took a run, "just to remember what it was like". He scored 93 that day.
Ramprakash encourages England's batsmen to use this kind of visualisation, which serves as a cognitive rehearsal for the main event. There is much evidence that it works. One problem with all these approaches is that worrying too much about your own performance can easily make things worse. Steven Sylvester, Middlesex's psychologist and author of the recent book Detox Your Ego(2016), thinks that for players at the top of their game what really matters is "where your heart is, why am I here?"
The important thing, he says, is to believe at an emotional level that you are playing not for yourself but for your team or your country, or some other ideal that transcends you. "When players start to think about their performance as serving the group it increases their self-esteem, their belief goes up and they become a bit freer in their skills. It gives them a little bit extra."
In 2013, Sylvester helped Australia and Middlesex batsman Chris Rogers after he was called up to the Ashes squad more than five years after his previous Test. "It became blindingly obvious that his fear of representing his country in the Ashes as an opening batsman was stopping him from moving forward," he says. "Through a deep discussion of how to serve his country he came up with a more compelling reason to doing well than if it was just about him."
Sylvester coached Moeen Ali through a similar process, helping him put his cricket in the context of his faith and his desire to be a role model. The Pakistan batsman Asad Shafiq, who has scored eight Test centuries at No. 6 - a world record - gives an equally compelling reason for his own success: "To bat at No. 6 you have to be patient, as most of the time the tailenders are with you. You have to give them confidence and support."
Shafiq is batting not just for himself, but for Nos. 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11 as well. He epitomises CLR James' portrait in his classic Beyond a Boundary (1963) of the batsman as the ultimate team player. When facing the ball, writes James, he "does not merely represent his side. For that moment, to all intents and purposes, he is his side."
Without doubt, all batsmen can improve their confidence, resilience and other mental attributes if they're willing to practise. "Mental skills are like physical skills," says Bull. "You have to work at them relentlessly. You have to challenge your brain to get better at blocking out the negatives and replacing them with positives."
Yet it also seems clear that some people are inherently better at this than others. In 2005, Bull carried out a psychological analysis of 12 English cricketers from the previous two decades whom county coaches had identified as the toughest mentally in the country. Among them were Atherton, Graham Gooch and Alec Stewart. Bull found them all to be highly competitive and motivated, full of self-confidence and with a never-say-die attitude, some of which derived from their upbringing, some from the teams they had played with and some from their personality.
For the rest of us, it is comforting to know that we can learn such skills - and that even the greats can struggle at times. Even Don Bradman called batting "a nerve-racking business". In The Art of Cricket (1958), he implores us to give a thought to the batsman's travails as he wends his way to the wicket: "He is human like you, and desperately anxious to do well."
Sunday, 15 September 2013
Julia Gillard on Power
.jpg "Contributor picture")
During the election campaign, an elderly lady in Melbourne’s west grips my arm with surprising force. Next day I have light bruises to remind me of the moment. She looks at me with anxiety in her eyes and says that while she reads and watches all the news she just can’t understand what the election campaign is about. She wants to know, is this her fault or the fault of the campaign?
After a resounding Labor loss, that word “fault” is now everywhere. Exhaustion and emotion have been on sad display in the last few days. But though it is so painful and so hard, now is a time for cool analysis.
It is a time to carefully plan Labor’s future and its next contribution to the nation.
The purpose of power
Are election victories the only measure of political success? Inevitably this seems a silly, self-serving question to ask after a defeat.
But surely our national story is written in more than the statistics of election night. Our national story is shaped by what endures from a government as well as what is rejected.
It is impossible to imagine modern Australia without Medicare, our universal healthcare scheme, which was introduced by the Whitlam government, repealed by the Coalition and then introduced by Labor again. This reform has become so significant a part of our national story that the political contest which surrounded its birth is now over. No serious candidate for public office runs on a platform opposing Medicare. Today's Australia is not home to the kind of conservatives who would be ideological enough or dumb enough to contemplate such a political campaign. If anything, the national mood around Medicare is one of smug complacency. How much smarter are we than the Americans, still struggling with health reform, we think to ourselves.
Despite the shattering defeat of the Whitlam government, despite Bob Hawke being toppled as prime minister by his Labor colleagues, despite the savage loss of the Keating Government, Medicare is there. Labor shaped the national consensus and bettered our nation.
Even in the midst of today’s despair, Labor must not surrender its sense of self as defined by its dominance over so much of what is our national consensus. Indeed, a truly striking feature of Tony Abbott’s election campaign is how little he was prepared to challenge Labor’s hold over our national consensus.
Think first of that historic conservative touchstone, workplace relations.
Labor, working with the trade union movement, has won the battle on workplace relations so profoundly that it is impossible in modern Australia to find an advocate for the Howard government's Work Choices laws.
Certainly not prime minister Abbott, who has spent two election campaigns with his hand on his heart denying any belief in or attachment to those laws. Indeed, so desperate was his desire to distance himself from Work Choices that he had it leaked that he was a voice of opposition to it even in the Howard cabinet.
At the same time, every business leader and advocate now feels the need to start any conversation about workplace relations with the words, “I don’t support a return to Work Choices”.
That in an open, developed economy Labor should have been able to win this battle so profoundly is truly remarkable. In neither of the nations that we look to first for our political and cultural comparisons – the United States or the United Kingdom – has the same pro-worker national consensus been forged.
Labor’s dominance of the national consensus is not limited to workplace relations. Prime minister Abbott, having lost the argument, spectacularly abandoned his opposition to my school funding reforms.
Every day in office the Howard government played the divisive politics of non-government schools versus government schools. Then, for sport, it played education culture wars. History wars, reading wars, wars for adults to fight as quality and equity in education languished.
Tony Abbott resorted to playing these games too, like the foray into the history wars in the last week of the campaign.
But he came to realise that the old approach would not work for school funding policy. My carefully crafted education reforms – transparency, quality, national curriculum, national standards, funding reform – had destroyed the utility of the Coalition’s political approach. Its business model was broken. No stakeholder stood with them. Those who really cared about education no longer wanted to be pitted against each other. I also doubt they want to be caught up in a continuing dumb conservative curriculum “war” to generate headlines.
So the humiliating backdown came. Now the need for and the structure of Labor's education funding reform is essentially bipartisan politics. Indeed, the Coalition has no profound agenda for change in any aspect of education: early childhood, vocational, university or research. It has not only lost the fight, it has effectively abandoned the field.
As Labor leader, nothing was more important to me than winning this education fight and creating opportunity for all our children. It is a source of pride to me, and it should be a source of pride to all in Labor, that we have prevailed so decisively and written this next chapter of our national story.
The same is true of disability care, a revolution in the way our nation treats those with disability. The Coalition has never proposed a social institution of this scale and in government it would never have committed to a national disability insurance scheme. It would have stymied the national conversation and prevented the nation getting to the moment of change.
Its inability to contribute to social reform was also laid bare by its lack of initiatives of any imagination in health or aged care. The final debate between the leaders had Tony Abbott quick with a “me too” on health, “me too” on Medicare Locals.
All of these are Labor reforms through and through. Life-changing and nation-changing. Part of our national consensus – now part of us.
Tony Abbott did not seek to contest the vision Labor defined for our nation’s future as outlined in the Australia in the Asian Century white paper. While inevitably what success demands of us in this century will continue to be debated, the white paper published by the government I led will continue its role as the foundation stone of that discussion.
So, given all this, as a political party of purpose, one capable of writing our nation’s story, why was Labor
repudiated by the people?
The power of purpose
Above all else, in politics, in government and in opposition, purpose matters.
Voters do not reject political parties because they believe they do not know how to read polls or hold focus groups or come up with slogans.
Purpose matters. Being able to answer the question what are you going to do for me, for my family, for our nation, matters.
Believing in a purpose larger than yourself and your immediate political interests matters.
Labor comes to opposition having sent the Australian community a very cynical and shallow message about its sense of purpose.
The decision by Labor caucus to change leaders in June this year was not done on the basis of embracing a new policy agenda; it was not done because caucus now believed Kevin Rudd had the greater talent for governing. Caucus's verdict of 2010 on that was not being revoked.
It was only done - indeed expressly done - on the basis that Labor might do better at the election.
Labor unambiguously sent a very clear message that it cared about nothing other than the prospects of survival of its members of parliament at the polls.
No alternate purpose was articulated during the election campaign that made sense to the Australian people. Kevin clearly felt constrained in running on those policies where Labor had won the national conversation, because those policies were associated with me. Yet there was not one truly original new idea to substitute as the lifeblood of the campaign.
So Labor in opposition faces this as its first task: re-embracing purpose. To do that, Labor must ask and answer three questions. First, what of Labor’s record in government does it seek to own and how much does Labor reject? Second, what is kept and what is junked of the promises and attitudes exhibited in the election campaign? Third, how in opposition is purpose refreshed?
Today’s federal parliamentary Labor party, in consultation with the broader movement, must answer these questions. It is absolutely right for Labor to want to move beyond what is described in snapshot as the Rudd-Gillard era. It would be wrong of me to seek to be a continuing voice in these debates and I will not be one.
But I am too passionate about the future of Labor and the achievements of the government I led to not state my views once, for the record, on how the first two questions should be answered.
On the third question, how purpose is refreshed, no one should try to answer it definitively in the coming days, weeks or even months. Opposition gives political parties time to think and reflect. It gives time for the next generation to mature. And of the time available in opposition, much of it can and should be used for holding the government to account. That means doing the time-consuming work of forensic scrutiny and sowing doubts through hard-hitting critique.
As Tony Abbott has proved, being relentlessly negative can pay huge political dividends. But at some point in the political cycle, the public will want to know the genuinely new way in which you describe your purpose, not just your critique of the other side. For social democratic parties, the historic deliverers of the big reforms, this moment comes earlier and with more force than for conservatives. Indeed, for Tony Abbott and his team this moment never came at all.
But the first two of these questions require quicker, more contemporaneous answers. Rebuilding cannot start until they are resolved. Decisions about Labor’s posture in opposition towards government proposals cannot be made until they are answered.
Last time Labor moved from government to opposition and was called on to decide what of the past to own and what to discard, Labor made a hash of it. Labor in opposition, after the devastating defeat of 1996, threw overboard all of the work of the Keating government in a desperate attempt to distance itself from high interest rates, high unemployment, budget “black holes” and perceptions of arrogance. The net result was that Labor was remembered for all these negatives but lost the high ground of being associated with the positives of modernising the economy, turning our nation towards Asia and appropriately and fairly responding to the native title decisions of Mabo and Wik.
Labor must not make this error again. First and foremost it must claim and explain those legacy policies that have so profoundly shaped modern Australia, and that Tony Abbott, despite healthy and continuing poll leads, was too afraid to contest: fair work, education reform, disability care, health and aged care reform, the demands of the Asian century. These policies speak of our values and of our role as a social democratic party in the modern world. They show how we believe in sharing opportunity and sharing risk, how we are prepared to actively shape our future. They show we are a political party of purpose.
But secondly, and in a political task that will require bravery, Labor must continue to stand behind the significant policies which are right but are currently outside the national political consensus. Clearly, carbon pricing is the political giant of this class.
Without doubt, Tony Abbott won this public opinion war and dominated this political conversation. The times suited him. For most Australians the last long drought was perceived to be the result of climate change, and when the drought broke their concerns about climate change receded. The circus in Copenhagen and “climategate” fed scepticism. Then, at the worst time, the structure of the Australian electricity market delivered huge rises to the electricity bills of families. While cost of living pressures were easing in other parts of the family budget, the pain of these big lumpy bills was acute and remembered.
Labor’s failure to embrace Malcolm Turnbull’s bipartisanship when it was on offer, to campaign vigorously and go to an election early on carbon pricing in late 2009 or early 2010, and the twists and turns of Labor policy since have all fuelled this fire of opposition.
I erred by not contesting the label “tax” for the fixed price period of the emissions trading scheme I introduced. I feared the media would end up playing constant silly word games with me, trying to get me to say the word “tax”. I wanted to be on the substance of the policy, not playing “gotcha”. But I made the wrong choice and, politically, it hurt me terribly.
Hindsight can give you insights about what went wrong. But only faith, reason and bravery can propel you forward.
Labor should not in opposition abandon our carbon pricing scheme. Climate change is real. Carbon should be priced. Community concern about carbon pricing did abate after its introduction. Tony Abbott does not have a viable alternative.
While it will be uncomfortable in the short term to be seen to be denying the mandate of the people, the higher cost would be appearing as, indeed becoming, a party unable to defend its own policy and legislation: a party without belief, fortitude or purpose.
Labor is on the right side of history on carbon pricing and must hold its course. Kevin Rudd was both right and brave to say this in the dying days of the campaign.
The same is true about Labor’s economic record. Governing during the global financial crisis and through the harsh structural adjustment being driven by the high Australian dollar was not easy. The continued writedowns to revenue were a source of despair as we worked to manage government finances.
In such challenging times no government would have got everything right, but Labor did get the big economic calls right. Yes, a surplus was not achieved in 2013. But yes, the economy and jobs grew, the AAA rating was conferred and maintained, inflation was tamed, interest rates hit 60 year lows, debt is completely manageable, and Australia remained, throughout the past six years, the envy of the advanced Western economies. Labor should not succumb to the 2013 equivalent of the 1996 “Kim Beazley black hole”. In opposition, Labor should fight for its economic reputation.
Inevitably, in the coming twelve months, this will seem like a hopeless battle. The incoming government will be the holder of the megaphone and will be broadcasting for its own callow political purposes a continuous diatribe about Labor economic and budgeting incompetence. But every effort must be made to put the counter argument.
Specifically, the Government should be continuously reminded about its effective embrace of Labor's budget strategy. After all the venom spruiked about debt, deficit and the so-called “budget emergency”, Joe Hockey and Andrew Robb produced a four-year budget which was only $6bn different from Labor’s. Their fevered pursuit of Labor on fiscal policy came down to a derisory 0.4% difference in approach.
In addition, Labor must defend its economic credentials by continuing to argue that a profits-based tax on minerals is the right policy at this point of our nation’s economic development, and that the national broadband network is vital for the future.
But there are things that must be quickly thrown overboard. The bizarre flirtation in the campaign with “economic nationalism” and the cheap populism of appearing anti-foreign investment must be chucked out now. Poor policies like the different corporate tax rate for the Northern Territory and the hugely expensive move of naval assets from Garden Island should be ditched.
Then, while it will be hugely complex and painful, Labor has to work through immigration and asylum policies and settle its outlook.
When I was shadow immigration minister and was writing Labor’s refugee and asylum seeker policy, I used to say I was in search of a policy that we would feel comfortable defending on the day a boat sank and public sympathy was with the surviving asylum seekers, as well as on the day a riot broke out in a detention centre and public sentiment was white hot against asylum seekers. I wanted Labor no longer to be a hostage to fortune but to have a policy that could last.
I thought in opposition that I had written that policy, one viewed as “tough” within our political party. Clearly, I was wrong. Matters were made worse by the fact that by the time we came to government the policy had been softened. Events like the Oceanic Viking incident were poorly handled, the adverse High Court decision on the government's agreement with Malaysia was a blow and policy had to be shaped and reshaped in the face of rising arrival numbers. Even when we tried to draw on the wisdom of three deeply experienced men who proffered policies that would put the issue beyond ugly politics, that too failed.
In reviewing all this, Labor needs to be clear-eyed about what failed and what worked. The new approach of resettling refugees in a country other than Australia is working. It had been canvassed internally for some time and Kevin did well to so rapidly reach agreement with Papua New Guinea. Having instituted this arrangement, Labor should be publicly clear about its effectiveness otherwise the Coalition will claim credit for the fact fewer boats are now arriving.
But, despite this success, there is still much thinking to be done within Labor. Indeed, given the slipshod nature of their policies, the new government has thinking to do as well.
Being a party of purpose is not just about being a party of values and policy choices that demonstrate those values in action. It is also about being a party that has a culture which internally rewards actions and conduct that speak of purpose, not self-interest.
It is to Labor’s culture, its spirit, that the most damage has been done. To refresh Labor’s purpose, to answer the third question, requires the most and hardest work. It will take time and it starts with renewing the things of the spirit, Labor’s cultural norms.
Inevitably, in opposition there will be a debate about party reform and that is a debate to be welcomed. But structural solutions only get you so far.
While debating political structures – membership, policy development, campaign, pre-selections – we need to think deeply on the cultural factors within Labor that have enabled leaking and destabilising to be so richly rewarded.
I make no attempt to provide settled answers. This is for the current Labor generation to do, taking enough time to get it right.
But it is clear that some new cultural norms need to be thought about and deliberately set.
Ultimately organisations tell you what they are all about and what they value, by what they reward. A great sales company rewards sales with performance bonuses. A great manufacturing business rewards those who generate fault-free products for it. A company with an overriding concern for safety constantly renews it protocols and issues rewards when no one gets hurt at work. This is all commonplace and common sense.
But how does it work for a progressive political party? Unfortunately, internally we have not rewarded Labor purpose. In order to renew purpose in opposition new cultural norms are needed, norms that reward the contributions that are truly the most valuable.
How does Labor refresh purpose and demonstrate that is exactly what it is doing? How does Labor set a cultural norm that ensures those who put in most for the collective effort are recognised for the work done?
Or put another way, how does Labor make visible and valued what is currently hidden and undervalued?
In a world where the views of your colleagues about your merits matter so much to your chance of promotion, it is not at all surprising a great deal of effort goes into media work no one but political insiders ever see.
At the same time, countless hours of work can go on behind closed doors on policy development. These efforts are generally never seen by the public and can even be close to invisible to colleagues.
Real efforts need to be made to change this method of functioning, to show purpose to the public and to ensure the best contributors to the collective work of the opposition are clearly identified to their colleagues.
Perhaps policy contests could be held in the open rather than behind closed doors. Rather than having the shadow ministry debate difficult policy questions, parliamentary party policy seminars should discuss them, open to the media and live on 24-hour television. Policy contests could then be taken out of the back rooms into the light. To the extent policy contests have leaked out from back rooms, they are inevitably reported through the prism of division. By being open from the start, the debate can be put in the prism of purpose. A norm would be set that ideas matter and those with the best ideas are the most valued.
Currently, working hard in your office on a new policy, being a key contributor to shadow ministry discussions, coming up with an innovative way of attracting new people to join the ALP – none of these valuable contributions is as visible to your Labor colleagues as performances on Sky television.
Perhaps there should be a deliberate broadening of view through a council of elders, people trusted by all like Jenny Macklin, who could report regularly and publicly on their assessment of the contributions of shadow ministers and caucus colleagues to the collective work of the opposition. A process to make visible and valued, what is currently invisible and under-appreciated.
And so, importantly, how does Labor ensure leadership with purpose? A real debate needs to be had about what sort of leaders the Labor party wants to have and what short of selection methods would maximise the ability to get that kind of leader.
The answer to the question, “Why do I support this Labor leader?” should not be because he or she polls well or because the rules say I am stuck with them. The answer has to be found in actual and informed consent that this person represents what I believe in and has the leadership capacity to pursue it.
How does Labor get to that position, to a culture of leadership for a purpose?
First, the rules adopted about the Labor leadership immediately prior to the election on removing the Leader should be changed. These rules literally mean that a person could hang on as Labor leader and as prime minister even if every member of cabinet, the body that should be the most powerful and collegiate in the country, has decided that person was no longer capable of functioning as prime minister. A person could hang on even if well over half of their parliamentary colleagues thought the same.
Ironically, I argue against these rules, even though under them I would have unseated Kevin Rudd in 2010, given colleagues would have signed up in sufficient numbers to have him gone, but he could never have defeated me in 2013.
I argue against them because they are a clumsy attempt to hold power; they are not rules about leadership for purpose.
Indeed, the new rules represent exactly the wrong approach to address the so-called “revolving door” of the Labor leadership. These rules protect an unsupported, poorly performing, incumbent rather than ensuring that the best person gets chosen and supported for the best reasons: specifically the attachment of the Labor party to the leader’s defined sense of purpose and vice versa.
Labor now faces a leadership contest and a debate about the right rules for selecting the leader.
Inevitably rules drafted in extreme haste will require revision. But ultimately the mix of who votes for the Labor leader is less important than why they vote. Whatever mix of caucus members and party membership happens in the future, real thought has to be given to how to make any leadership contest one in which candidates have to articulate why they want to lead Labor and the nation.
Imagine candidates’ policy papers, not leaks. Candidates’ debates, not poisonous backgrounding. The identification of the top new ideas – not just who is top of the opinion polls.
As for the contest now between Bill Shorten and Anthony Albanese, it is not only one between two worthy candidates. It is an opportunity to start this demonstration of purpose.
Caucus and party members should use this contest to show that Labor has moved on from its leadership being determined on the basis of opinion polls, or the number of positive media profiles, or the amount of time spent schmoozing media owners and editors, or the frippery of selfies and content-less social media. Rather, choosing a leader will now be done on the basis of the clearly articulated manifestos of the candidates, the quality of their engagement with caucus and party processes and their contributions to the collective efforts of the parliamentary party.
I hope whoever is the victor in the current leadership contest serves as Labor leader for a long time, and the next time Labor needs to choose a new leader is after the next period of Labor government.
Achieving that requires much more than a ballot. It requires a true acceptance by all of the result of the ballot. Solidarity, not destabilisation. This is where Labor has failed.
Clearly more options are open for the timing of leadership contests and the way such ballots are conducted in opposition than in Government. But if there is a thorough process to define purpose in opposition then it will assist with stability in government.
In addition, thought has to be given to the costs and consequences of poor conduct. What can and should be done when caucus colleagues dedicate themselves to destabilising others and bringing the party in to disrepute? This was a question incapable of being answered during a minority government when every member had the ability to blow the government up, but it is a question that should be answered now.
There are many difficult, indeed uncomfortable questions about Labor’s culture and regenerating it for the future.
But Labor cannot avoid answering them even though it will be painful.
Because, imagine the alternative. Business as usual. Australians snorting with derision every time they hear a Labor colleague swear allegiance to the leader. Leaks, backgrounding. A new group of “cardinals”. Too many eyes on the opinion polls and too few on the nation’s future.
Labor must be better than this and it can be. I have every confidence today's generation of Labor members will find a way to ensure it is.
Relief, Regret, Rebuilding
I sat alone on election night as the results came in. I wanted it that way. I wanted to just let myself be swept up in it.
Losing power is felt physically, emotionally, in waves of sensation, in moments of acute distress.
I know now that there are the odd moments of relief as the stress ekes away and the hard weight that felt like it was sitting uncomfortably between your shoulder blades slips off. It actually takes you some time to work out what your neck and shoulders are supposed to feel like.
I know too that you can feel you are fine but then suddenly someone’s words of comfort, or finding a memento at the back of the cupboard as you pack up, or even cracking jokes about old times, can bring forth a pain that hits you like a fist, pain so strong you feel it in your guts, your nerve endings.
I know that late at night or at quiet moments in the day feelings of regret, memories that make you shine with pride, a sense of being unfulfilled can overwhelm you. Hours slip by.
I know that my colleagues are feeling all this now. Those who lost, those who remain.
We have some grieving to do together.
But ultimately it has to be grieving for the biggest thing lost, the power to change our nation for the better. To protect those who need us to shield them. To empower through opportunity. To decide what future we want for all our nation’s children and then build it.
And when the grieving is done, that’s our purpose.
Labor - a party of purpose. Now. Always.
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