Neoliberal economic policy has defined the Australian Labor party as much as it has their opponents for the past few decades, yet now Labor’s once-fiercest neoliberal champions have come to disavow it.

The conspicuous lack of outcry, keening or ceremonial hand-wringing around the end of this era is perhaps attributable to Ben Chifley’s example. “It’s no good crying over spilt milk,” the former Labor prime minister once advised, “all we can do is bail up another cow.”

Spilt milk the neoliberal project is; the whole country has had milk lapping at its ankles for some time. Financial deregulation has seen explosive productivity but real wages are stagnant, there’s been mass casualisation of jobs while so many others have been offshored. Communities are abandoned to the whims of the market. Privatised services may look fancy but they don’t meet social needs.

Australians have always been believers in egalitarianism, and isn’t it obvious to us all, my friends, that this ain’t it.

And while our present rising inequality may indeed be the endgame of the Liberals’ traditionally pro-business, individualist politics, it isn’t Labor’s.

Which is why, faced with the evidence of unequal results around us, former prime minister Paul Keating – the very leader of the neoliberal reforms that defined Labor’s character for 30 years – has himself declared his economic project dead.

Once upon a time, the ACTU secretary Bill Kelty collaborated on the process of economic deregulation with Hawke and Keating. Now, he’s one of many Labor leaders endorsing the rise of new ACTU secretary Sally McManus, who rejects the philosophy she says has “run its course”. Kevin Rudd, Labor’s last prime minister, once declared himself “basically a conservative when it comes to questions of financial management” and as both an individual and an influence, he could not be further estranged from the modern Labor tribe.

It’s a change resonating with voters – the party that championed privatisation in the 1980s has just won a thumping election in Western Australia opposing it. Labor once demanded its members pledge to the “democratic socialisation of industry, production, distribution and exchange to the extent necessary to eliminate exploitation and other antisocial features in these fields”. An activist membership would do well to hunt down some old party cards the pledge is yet printed on, to reconsider just what the ancient words may mean.

Because times oblige some detailed forward thinking. It’s why it was actually refreshing to witness the nature of Chris Bowen’s stoush with his Labor comrades this week.

The shadow treasurer declared to Katharine Murphy that Labor would not pursue a “Buffett rule” as tax policy. His party comrades hit him in the media – they’re attached to this mechanism for redistributing tax from the rich, and why wouldn’t they be? In a country where cuts to the penalty rates of working people is happening at the same time the conservative government is gifting $24bn of tax cuts to business, ideas about tax, fairness, inequality and redistribution are on the mind of everyone – apart from those few who are rolling in dough. Tim Ayres, the NSW secretary of the Australian Manufacturing Workers’ Union, gave the quotes: no redistributive policy should be ruled out of contention.

The disagreement is more significant than it looks, because while Bowen may be from Labor’s right faction, his stated rejection of the Buffett concept isn’t due to ideological opposition to its principle, so much a factional preference for practical caution: his concern is that imposing “blunt instruments” can have perverse consequences. Ayres, from the left faction, acknowledged Bowen had been an advocate for “bold reform” in economic policy and said internal debate on the policy “would be constructive”.

As Labor moves forward with alternative economic policy, the issues raised are more significant than merely charting the inner ideological trends of the party. Working out how left politics can deliver on its values of economic egalitarianism and social justice is more than just an Australian political concern. Let’s not forget that the Hawke-Keating reforms of the 1980s-1990s weren’t the sum of movements elsewhere but actually led the way for centre-left parties around the world. These Labor reforms became a model of influence over British Labour’s embrace of the “Third Way” and the “social market” reforms of the British economy under Tony Blair.

Now, it’s 2017, and the centre-left parties of the west face unique challenges as well as once-in-a-generation opportunities for the crafting of a new social document between government, economy and citizenry. To do so demands the embrace of two realities.

First, that the neoliberal shifts of the centre-left parties from the 1980s onward make historical sense in the context of what was obvious to all in the dust-up of the cold war. The old Soviet model of command-and-control economies may have delivered some level of equality, but did so at the expense of prosperity, sustainability and freedom.

But, second, everyone has to accept that while those centre-left neoliberal shifts did – yes, they did – deliver prosperity, its price was not only sustainability but social equality. The neoliberal groundwork performed by centre-left governments – including Hawke-Keating, Rudd-Gillard, Blair-Brown and Bill Clinton – enabled the neocon governments that followed them to pursue to ever-great levels of inequality that have enforced undeniable economic limits on freedom.

Don’t believe me? Consider what’s socially possible for the one-in-seven American households living in food poverty and compare it to the limitlessness of opportunity enjoyed by Donald Trump’s cabinet of billionaires. These uneven results are fomenting conditions in which the power of the billionaire class depends on the distractions of nationalism, racism and other forms of scapegoating to protect itself. With the election of Donald Trump, the tenets threaten to become structural.

In our richly-resourced, peaceful nation, where compulsory voting elects governments with the stability of truly representative majorities, Australian Labor is uniquely positioned. It’s union base is reinvigorated and victories like Western Australia have both re-consolidated its primary vote and affirmed the heritage economic values of its brand. The party is positioned now to not only resolve its own ideological direction, but establish a new economic path towards the old egalitarian goal.

You could call it the pursuit of the light on the hill. It always was more about facing the hill than reaching the light, after all.