Julia Gillard has pretended to support reforming the Labor Party by supporting a series of measures that change nothing about a party controlled lock, stock and dividend stream by affiliated unions.
Yet to reverse the decline, members must enjoy power over policy-making and candidate selection intended by the party’s founders. And to give power to the membership you have to take it from trade union officials and parliamentary parties.
The most recent figures show 92 per cent of the electorate do not belong to an affiliated union. In March the majority of NSW workers and unionists voted for the Coalition. Indeed, it has been a long time since a majority of workers voted Labor. The ALP is controlled by auxiliaries whose own members do not vote Labor.
The Prime Minister talks of the union link. There is no need to break it but there is an urgent need to reduce the union proportion at ALP conferences to their place in modern society: about 10 per cent.
Gillard does not support that. She cannot imagine a Labor Party similar to the one forged in the 1890s with a broadly democratic structure. Yet a leader who supports union control of the ALP does not trust her own party membership.
The ranks of Labor are below a critical mass. The party doesn’t have the troops on the ground to run a local campaign. Credible local efforts depend on concentrating the salaried employees of the political class in selected seats. What the party lacks, like any species falling below numbers for replenishment, is diversity. The result is an inability to generate ideas and energy. Even policy-making is outsourced. The party played no role in the election of the Rudd government or in the governments of Rudd and Gillard since.
The national executive has presided over the destruction of internal democracy. They behave like the Tudor court, seeking to know the wishes of the leader so that they, craven toadies, may deliver them.
They pay homage to the leader as if he or she was a godhead, beyond criticism up to the moment of assassination, after which a new godhead emerges who is equally beyond criticism.
The national executive has sanctioned a culture of entitlement in which positions are parcelled to a tiny coterie based on family and connection. Whereas Gough Whitlam led a party in which tens of thousands could aspire to preselection, that number is now a few hundred. Having deduced that members of the ALP will play no role in formulating policy or candidate selection, the members have walked.
And many have stopped voting Labor because they found the party rancid.
It was not always this way. Whitlam was an unlikely winner of preselection for a safe seat in southwest Sydney. Outstanding though his performance was, he never forgot his career depended on keeping on-side the disparate elements in the ALP branches in Werriwa. He crossed Australia to be present at meetings of his electorate council where he was often subject to brutal questioning by members who wanted nothing less than his elimination. Protection was not available to him from on high; the rules did not avail such a course. MPs survived by dint of their own efforts.
The practice of imposing candidates and protecting them from challenge is an invention of the 1990s. Local branches don’t matter.
“Our greatest politicians were trained and sometimes humbled in branch and league debates, on conference floor, in lounge rooms and back yards,” John Faulkner has observed. “Our members questioned and they argued, and in those discussions sometimes minds were changed and sometimes policies were.” All such checks and balances are shot to shreds.
Left and Right have no meaning in modern Labor. When proportional representation was introduced in Victoria and NSW in 1970-71, it was seen as a huge step forward, which would compel people to work together. In fact, ALP machines became joint enterprises in which the faction leaderships carved up all spoils on offer and cut out the membership below.
In Victoria, the collusion has reached a formalised agreement: the large factions divide the spoils with arithmetical precision to eliminate dissidence and independence. The ALP has become private property in which factions hold all the equity. To make their investment work, each side delivers well-paid jobs to liegemen whose loyalty is thus secured. Placing people in parliament is about securing an investment. The NSW parliamentary caucus in March this year was a graphic illustration of the consequences.
The only party culture that the leadership group has known is the set-piece of manoeuvring, flanking, salients gained, calculated retreat, alliances of convenience and betrayal, as circumstances dictate. Such a party is without a moral compass, its members but spectators to the games played by a full-time political class.
Australians understood something was terribly awry long before the media. A party sitting on 27 per cent is down a hole for a reason.
Electors have worked out that the narrow base from which Labor draws its MPs has created governments lacking in basic competence and authenticity.
Labor has advocated, for example, four positions on dealing with climate change without so much as a murmur from the ranks of the Stepford wives who make up caucus. In the absence of a values system or respect for the party platform, is it any wonder the electorate reckons Labor will do anything to remain in power? For which the punishment is unprecedented and so much worse because the electorate has to wait so long for its moment.
The great myth is that Labor’s crisis is cyclical. But this is not like anything we have seen before. The Labor Party has not polled in the 20s since the founding years. Young people decline to join unless they want paid employment. Stalwarts have passed from our ranks, a working knowledge of our history passes from the few remaining branches. Graham Freudenberg once described the ranks of the party as “a living memory”. Not now. Labor, formed to fight for the powerless, has become a coterie of and for party insiders.
Gillard made much of a target of an extra 8000 new members. Yet this will not take membership back to where it was when Kevin Rudd was elected. So that the target is not just hot air, let the national secretariat state national membership numbers and commit to its annual publication. This is standard procedure for community organisations.
Not for the ALP, however, whose membership numbers are the darkest of secrets because they map its terminal decline.
In NSW, thanks to Luke Foley, party leader in the Legislative Council who burrowed in ratholes where he was not supposed to go, we know membership had fallen to 15,389 in 2009. The whispered number this year is 8500. In 1911 it was 92,000. In the 1970s it was about 22,000.
Not to publish the present number of members will attest the reform announcements are bunkum. Which, of course, they are.
Rodney Cavalier is a former NSW Labor minister.
