HOUSE OVERSIGHT 029674 "I'm happy that Labor took us through this dreadful financial crisis so competently. But they are not in the business of teaching. And governments, to succeed with change, must be in the business of educating the community. "Our Labor governments have failed to conceptualise the changes. We need a framework. "What is the framework? It is 'Australia in Transition' strategically and economically. That's the story we have to present. "I think the Australian people are very conscientious. During the 1980s and 1990s we proved they will respond conscientiously to necessary reforms. They mightn't like them but they'll accept them. But reforms have to be presented in a digestible format. "I know that in the age of the internet, opinion and perpetual static it is difficult to get the message over. I accept that. But the big messages have their own momentum. If we get the story of transition right then other things will find their place. "Our problem is what I call shooting-star policies. We have a policy on carbon pricing, on minerals, on boatpeople, but they are not connected up to the big picture about Australia's direction and its transition." Pressed on whether he thinks the Australian Labor Party is in permanent decline, Keating defends Labor, insists it doesn't have to decline but highlights the problem. "Labor must recognise what it has created," he says, invoking the Hawke-Keating era. "It has a created a new society and it has to be the party of the new society. "It can't be the party of part of the old society. Labor must be the party of those people who gained from the pro-market growth economy that we created. Labor must be open to the influences of this middle class, to people on higher incomes. And I don't think it is." It is, perhaps, the clearest statement of Labor's problem. The party, in an act of strategic folly, abandoned the path of its previous success. It turned inwards on itself, away from the community