John Cain has recently called on the ALP to stamp out the “alarming” abuses of power revealed in the Labor-dominated Brimbank council. His observations about the culture of the Labor Party in Brimbank and the deadening hand of factionalism should be provoking a positive debate about what sort of a Party we want to shape to ensure that it reflects the hopes and desires of the Australian populace.
It wasn’t always like this.
When I first joined the ALP around 1980, it was a vibrant, energetic and broad-based Party. Hundreds of people of all ages and backgrounds attended branch meetings and the local membership was taken seriously by MPs, unions and the Party leadership. There was an abiding sense of altruism and the greater good in the Party. There was also vigorous debate and branches had a real say in the policy of the Party.
This vibrancy was in part driven by the activism of a number of people who “arrived” in that period, among them some of the bedrock of the Hawke Labor Government and the foundations of the Cain Government.
If you go to a branch meeting these days, it’s likely you will find dozen people huddled around a table in a community hall — most of them of retirement age.
What caused this?
The ongoing reductions in the proportion of representation that affiliated trade unions get at State Conferences of the Party have placed more power in the hands of the membership. This would be ideal if the membership were engaged, informed and had a real and abiding interest in the Labor movement. This is not the case.
As the membership were granted more power at State Conferences, other forces in the Party started to take a hold. By the 1990s, genuine members were being drowned out by another membership. Members who neither paid their memberships or followed closely the fortunes of the Party. I remember a school teacher being asked by a student “Just because my family votes Labor, does that mean they automatically become members?” They had just received membership cards in the mail, without ever attending a meeting or expressing an interest in membership.
Some local activists gave up hope. The branches began to atrophy, while membership grew.
The well publicised figures about membership of the Victorian Branch of the ALP in recent years is indicative of the great malaise in the ALP. It is no longer a Party of community activism, but in Paul Keating’s words about the Liberal Party “a political outfit”. But it is a political outfit which has no longer at its heart decent people striving for Labor ideals, but is a pyramid scheme for membership recruitment.
The changes to the rules that have made them more complex has simply put power in the hands of those who know the rules intimately. They are the beneficiaries of the complexity we have introduced.
What the Party needs is an innovative approach that takes the power out of the hands of few and gives it back to Labor supporters and the wider membership.
The trade union movement has had its difficulties, but in reality, they are in much better shape than the ALP. With its 14,000 members, the ALP has less than .05% penetration in members amongst the Victorian community. Unions who are affiliated to the ALP have more than 300,000 members and yet we continue to have arguments about diminishing the power of trade unions and increasing the power of the membership. Greater involvement of the members of affiliated trade unions could provide a solution.
Offering free or reduced price membership of the ALP to members of trade unions — or even a vote in preselections — would effectively drown out and dilute the power of branch stackers.
To make the ALP a mass Party again will take courage. The traditional wisdom that increasing membership fees and making it harder to join the ALP will discourage branch-stacking is an abject failure. We need a growth strategy instead, because the only way to put the power in the hands of the membership is to make sure there are more genuine members, thereby drowning out current practices.
We need to consider making it easier to join the Party. At the moment the Administrative Committee — a factional body — has to approve every membership, following recommendation from a branch that are also factionally driven. It’s like trying to join a secret society.
Joining the Party shouldn’t cost an arm and a leg. We need to lower costs substantially — after all, we are the Party of the workers. At present lawyers, teachers, MPs and political staffers dominate the non-concessional membership of the Party.
Current branches should be consolidated. We should look at a more relevant model for local activism and perhaps State Electorates are of a size that will make meetings have sufficient volume and dynamism to be interesting. The recommendations by Bob Carr and Bob Hawke in their 2002 ALP review had many good recommendations to increase local activism — such as forums based around ideas and activism including online, policy based and workplace groupings. Unfortunately this report was largely shelved.
None of these ideas will be easy to implement. However, now is the time for courage and systematic overhaul of the ALP. My foundations for a solution are simple: less rules, not more; cheaper fees; and to create a broader and re-invigorated membership.
Let a thousand flowers bloom.
Member for Brunswick Carlo Carli was first elected in 1994 and is to retire in 2010
Maybe Carlo would care to comment on the 10 Labor sponsored candidates for my ward at the last Socialist Republic of Moreland council elections.
Maybe he’d also like to comment on how many of those candidates at the time worked in his electoral office?
Thank goodness he is retiring he’s been a dud local member.
I joined the ALP around the same time as Carlo and do not have the same recollection of a halcyon golden age. In fact, I left after about a year because it was so extraordinarily boring and pointless. The most extraordinary thing, in retrospect, about my membership was that I was in the same branch as a quiet, sleepy-looking young man with the interesting name of John Della Bosca.
His subsequent career has been something of a marvel to me. Apparently, he was hiding a dozen lights under a dozen bushels. His preferred female company is also something of a surprise.
Interesting article. I resigned my local branch membership at that point where I realised that the only interest the governing clique of the party had in me was my capacity for volunteer work at election time. Victory accomplished, my views and those of my fellow branch members (even on local issues) were routinely ignored in favour of the developers and deal-doers.
It eventually felt like working for Lend Lease, for nothing.
I hope you are only talking about a small amount of toxic branches in Victoria. I am Secretary of Wivenhoe branch of the Qld ALP which enjoys a monthly meeting of stimulating discussion on issues important to members. We pass motions and forward them to policy committees, Members of Parliament etc.
We have had a public meeting on Actions on Climate Change, run information stalls at local markets and agricultural shows, and help in election campaigns.
There are awful situations and factional bullying and manipulations in any human organisations. I experience some, but persevered till I found a place I was at home in.
It is in the best interests of the party – especially in Victoria to place rules to avoid this kind of blatant branch stacking which is so corrupt and prevents good Labor people from contributing. Otherwise it has no future.
The current administrators et al are shooting themselves in the foot and elsewhere. I think they ought to be sacked from their roles if they are seen to be creating such a bad situation for the party.
I am so surprised by what’s happening in Victoria as I lived there for many years and so progressive in many ways. I can tell you that in Queensland we are evolving well, attempting to put into practise, valuing of members through participation at local branch, policy committees and conferences, workshops on the party organisation, so I hope that my comrades down South will see how futile and damaging their power plays are and give themselves a good exorcism or whatever it takes to get back a vision of the (solar) light on the hill.
I applaud Julie McNeill’s idealism and wish her well for the future. Her branch was formed by Virginia Clarke as a base for her tilt at the Federal seat of Blair in 1998, at the same time as I was running for the ALP in Joh’s old seat of Barambah, now Nanango.
I joined the Qld ALP in 1989 on my return to Brisbane after 25 years working in the mining and construction industries, at the time the ALp had a Queensland membership of about 12000, I spent the next 19 years trying to get an increasingly factionally controlled ALP government to enforce its own policies on construction safety, and industrial democracy. In this I failed abjectly. When I was expelled from the Left faction and thus the party late last year for nominating for preselection against a sitting member over an industrial safety issue party membership was down under 6000 and still falling. Recent events have shown that the right wing wing Labour Forum (AWU) faction supported by Labor Unity (a tragic misnomer) now have total contorl at all levels of the party and the Left faction leadership have been seduced into playing the factional game by the “Rights” rules.
Factions now “own” seats, for example my local seat of Sandgate is owned by Labour Unity (from now until the end of time) and local members were not given an opportunity to vote in this preselection, where the candidate was “parachuted” in. Most preselections are now done this way.
The ALP policy mission statement has three legs, firstly the objectives, which are very good, secondly the policy platform which also is very good, thirdly Government policy, which is whatever the Premier and the Cabinet decide to do on a particular day. The first two are now completely ignored and breached at every opportunity, eg move on powers, privatisation, social ownership of essential services, etc. The third leg now has complete sway and no one in the party has a clue what the factional leadership through the mouthpiece of the premier will come up with next, quite scary really as none knows what agendas are at work here. The one thing that those of us with a belief in the Labor objectives do know is that we wont like it.
I hope that Julie will come to realise that submissions to party policy committees will only succeed if they accord with the ruling factions view. The policy committees are all run by the right factions who hold sway on a 6:5 proportional basis. Of the 6000 branch members remaining possibly only about 2000 are factional players whether of right or left, the other 4000 are kept out the factional loop and such is the control that many of these 4000 do not even realise that the factions actually exist, let alone their
power. Sadly, there is no longer even a pretence of democracy within the Queensland ALP, and this shows in a range of increasingly “non Labor” decisions being made, such as breaches of International Labour Organisation rules by the Labor government when attacking its own workforce.
With no political opposition to speak of from the LNP and the Queensland Greens merely a non activist armchair debating group, the Socialist Alliance active but very small one may ask what constraints there are on the Bligh Government. The answer, none. Queensland was ever thus.