Two weekends ago, I was privileged enough to attend progressive Australia’s triennial festival of self-congratulatory compromise, and self-satisfied corridor-power-walking – also known as the ALP National Conference. Within the walls of the Melbourne Convention Centre, a ritualised theatre of debate and decision-making was played out by the delegates for an audience of old party faithful and overzealous young hacks. A few speakers would be wrangled up to recite Labor values and endorse the party’s policy platform, whilst the persuasion and the decisions that really mattered were conducted elsewhere.
The delegates, almost all of them factional, will vote as their patrons and masters tell them, or as their faction decides. Much like our federal parliament, the convention centre was the site for a performance of oppositionality, whilst the deals, compromises, and policy outcomes remain essentially predetermined. This begs an important democratic question: if the decisions made by parliament are essentially determined internally by political parties – to which only a negligible fraction of Australian citizens have access – and the decisions of internal political parties are themselves determined internally by factions, where then do the real decisions take place? Where are the policy platforms and party configurations, with which voters are confronted every three years, determined if not at an internal party conference? More fundamental than that, where do these delegates even come from?
Decisions are not being made on the ground, but rather with powerbrokers weeks in advance. The speeches are delivered for the PR capital they deliver, not the ‘delegates’ they are addressed to. And thus the whole point of the flashy, painstakingly stage-managed open conference is nullified. Progressive voters will be left puzzled as to where the compromises come from – such as why the party will not be introducing a binding vote on gay marriage until 2020 or the next appearance of Haley’s Comet. Why could turnbacks not be ruled out, compelling MPs to potentially vote for turnbacks and not for same-sex marriage? Why is the climate policy so vague, going little beyond their general aims? And why does Labor still persist in complaining about the Greens snatching their inner city seats, telling progressives to put their faith in established lefties and trust their left faction to push for idealism behind the closed doors of caucus?
But all this will remain the case, until the dominance of the factions over the ALP can be broken, until the block vote given to the trade union leadership that solidifies, indeed creates, the position of the factions is given over in favour of the voices of membership, even of the general community. Until then you will still have ministers like Tanya and Penny getting proxies to vote for Bill’s asylum seeker policy, balancing their loyalty to Bill with avoiding any conference floor snaps that might not go down too well in the People’s Republics of Brunswick or Newtown.
Photo credit: Reid Parker.
We’ve all heard about how boat turnbacks failed to be ruled out, despite the best efforts of Albo and other members of the left faction. We’ve heard of how, despite the gathering momentum of the proposals for a binding vote on gay marriage – which incidentally your correspondent doesn’t support, though nor do they support binding votes on anything else, recognizing them as the tools of sub-student politician bullies and mediocrities – we saw Penny and Tanya assent on stage to a ridiculous compromise.
However the mainstream press rarely reports on the mooted changes to the party’s constitution in the rules section of the conference, most of which are bound to fail before they are ever put up. It is here that the future of the party is truly at stake – everything else is performance. The undemocratic fashion in which conference delegates are determined; the way handpicked union delegates dominate the conference, selected for loyalty above all else (including a job in the industry); the membership rules that aid and abet branch-stacking, and so forth.
Despite the recent changes to the election of the federal party leader, these practices continue to hold the party back from the modernising processes embraced by social democratic parties throughout the Western world. These are the rotten features of the organisation that have to go if the party is to have a hope in becoming more than a shell of its former self, a venal graduate school for the hapless halfwits and empty-headed tribalists of student politics. Upon attempts at the reform of these features that preserve the power of the warlords, the factions will by and large close ranks. Better to have the numbers in conference, in the house and in the senate sewn up, guaranteed by an internal stability agreement and overseen by a Byzantine Sussex Street executive, than open things up to the uncertainty of internal party democracy.
The reform to membership rules, making branch stacking that bit harder, was unaccountably struck down. A measure to increase the role of branch members in selecting their local candidates vis-à-vis the party’s state executives was debated then passed to a far less democratic and more unaccountable committee – probably to avoid the embarrassment of actually voting down on camera a proposal as reasonable as party members selecting their local candidates. On this measure the left were particularly vocal, arguing that to vote for the proposal would be to vote against the union movement and the union activists who do so much to help out the ALP. A ridiculous claim that requires significant leaps of logic, but essentially it goes as follows: union officials and leaders select delegates to state conferences, most of whom don’t work in the industries their union covers, many of whom you would recognise wearing ill-fitting t-shirts in student union election week. The delegates at the state conference then must surrender their ballot papers, used to elect various official positions in the party, to their factional masters. These fellows then get another bunch of young labour hacks – those unlucky enough not to be chosen to represent the amalgamated ironworkers, or associated fitters and turners – to number the delegate’s ballot papers as has been preordained, one of which is for the election of the Public Office Selection Committee. Thus selected, this group of factional loyalists and leaders meet to oversee and overturn the preselection decisions of branches, and carve up the seats of a state between themselves. By now of course you’re probably confused and have forgotten how this all relates to trade unions. You wouldn’t be the only one. A vote to open up only 50 per cent of the selection of Senate candidates to membership rather than another special committee was of course voted down – because how else would charismatic and rounded human beings like Sam Dastyari and Mark Arbib get shafted into the Senate? Again, we were self-righteously told to reject democratisation to protect the voices of our friends in the union movement.
The only significant reform proposal to get through was that least likely to seriously change the face of the party – namely introducing a very moderate amount of delegates into conference who were directly elected, and thence responsible, to their branch members. Hardly enough to really make much of a difference, and certainly not enough to drown out the mass staffers and student politicians handpicked by union officials to represent abattoir workers or firemen on conference floor, or the factional appointees pledged to show fealty. Even this modest proposal was faced with considerable opposition from the left, who tried to argue that despite the universality of principles of democratisation, and the inherent ridiculousness that the national conference had no delegates who were directly elected by the membership, Victoria and Western Australia should be granted an exemption from this rules change, allowing them to preserve the factional balance as it stood, and continue to select delegates via the incomprehensible and oligarchic processes already in place.
Amidst the fuss over boat turnbacks and binding votes, it is easy to lose sight of the way decisions are actually determined within the bloated beast that is the ALP. The losing battle to transform the way the ALP works, the way policies and candidates are decided, is often forgotten. In a very real way, the internal decisions of our major political parties are more important than most deliberations of Parliament, particularly in the lower house. Such is the hold that institutionalised parties have over our political system. However, more important than their internal deliberations are the frameworks in which these are carried out, that enable them to remain oligarchic, and essentially closed discussions. The frameworks that enabled the poll-driven operatives and senior right-faction ministers to win out on asylum seeker turnbacks over the voice of their more progressive membership. The frameworks that result in bizarre voting procedures for same-sex marriage, which rely upon the opposing party extending a conscience vote to pass a key element of their party platform. The framework that results in an ‘open deliberation’, that is really a stage-managed exercise in balancing the right amount of debate with the right amount of solidarity, whilst failing to make Bill Shorten look any better.
If Albo, Plibersek and Wong really cared about the fate of progressive policy in the party, they could start by embracing the party reform that would end the dominance of the ‘Joe-Catholics’ (De Bruyn and Bullock), and the much-maligned ‘NSW Right’. Sure, their own factional power bases may take a hit in the process, but if they were serious about creating a modern progressive movement this wouldn’t matter too much. If this conference were to have seen serious change for the party, rather than half-hearted standing ovations for sell-out statements, then we could have expected the debates at the next conference to be a different spectacle altogether – we would see how chaotic and colourful things must be when you’re really observing the decision-making in action. As things are, we can wait for another three years, see Penny Wong endorse a binding vote on same-sex marriage in time for the next transit of Venus, find the leader agreeing with a few more Coalition policies, and watch as the red-clad party faithful pat themselves on the back and wonder incredulously why people seem to keep voting Green.
Joseph Moore is a regular contributor to Centrethought and a History and Politics student at the University of Melbourne, as well as a member of the ALP and a self-described ‘conservative radical’. Find out more about him here.