The ALP Conference this week will be carefully managed, but Labor’s deeper problem is a hollowed-out party increasingly driven by factions, polling and caution.
A critical issue for this year’s ALP Conference in Adelaide is the decline in the party’s membership and voter support.
Labor’s membership used to be about 100,000 when I joined the ALP in Adelaide 70 years ago. Wayne Swan tells me that membership is now about 50,000. I thought it was much less. In any event no “official” figure is published. It is a dismal record of membership decline considering that our population has trebled in those 70 years.
To contain the loss of broad membership support, Labor has increasingly committed itself to focus groups and marginal seat strategies. Values and vision have given way to marketing. Money has replaced membership as the driving force of campaigns.
The trade unions remain the most important institutional Labor supporters. They have a proud record, but their influence is out of proportion to their role in the community and the Labor constituency.
The ALP no longer represents the people who vote for it. It is controlled by an unrepresentative coterie of factional heavies and officials. Party members have little influence. Factions control Labor pre-selections. “Captain’s picks” are common. Networks of political professionals, union officials and staffers, rather than membership, are supreme. Internal politics is conducted almost entirely within an elite class.
This has produced a managerial, cautious, poll-driven approach to politics, and timidity. Raising money and the compromises that go with it, including on gambling, have supplanted listening to the party membership. By refusing to take the community seriously, and by hiding from public discussion, Labor has disenfranchised its natural constituencies.
Labor’s primary vote has declined from about 45 per cent 60 years ago to less than 30 per cent today. The party has lost its clear identification with the working class. And the working class has changed. It is now more white than blue collar. It is young, female and migrant.
The division of wealth between rich and poor is greater now than ever. Over two million Australians live in poverty. While income inequality has plateaued, wealth inequality in Australia is at historic highs. Driven by inheritance and surging property and asset values, the net worth of Australia’s wealthiest households is racing away from the rest of the country.
That needs a Labor response in the form of serious tax reform. We have a start in the last budget, but taxation of wealth and on our resources needs urgent attention. If we are to have better services in education, health and disabilities, we must raise more tax.
Various means will be adopted at the Adelaide Conference to manage “debates”:
- Party members who seriously break with their faction in Conference as in Caucus will be denied advancement. Obsequiousness pays.
- Deals will be made in back rooms, before issues come to Conference.
- Members will be allowed to let off some steam but will be ignored on key issues such as AUKUS, the US military colonisation of northern Australia and the genocide in Gaza.
- The elephant in the room will be the Labor National Policy Forum, composed of a group of MPs, unionists and some rank-and-file members. The role of the Forum is to determine the draft platform. There may be a few marginal changes to this draft at the Conference to give the appearance of openness, but the draft will be endorsed by the Conference.
In such a hollowed-out organisation, it is not surprising that ALP supporters are looking elsewhere, even to One Nation, a subsidiary of Hancock Resources and Gina Rinehart. The National Party is also joining the One Nation siren song with the party Senate leader declaring that conservatives are in a war against mass migration, left-wing globalists and woke institutions.
The ALP is the only credible party able to combat this garbage and offer stable and effective government. But that is not enough. It must reflect the values that Labor has traditionally supported.
Few former Labor Prime Ministers would have been complicit in the Gaza genocide, the forfeiture of our sovereignty in US bases and AUKUS.
Gareth Evans has described the AUKUS pact, as “one of the worst defence and foreign policy decisions in Australia’s history…it makes the nation a military target, and serves as a supplementary American fleet”.
The US is not preparing to go to war against China. It is preparing Australia to go to war against China. And the ALP is abetting it.
Fearful of the Zionist lobby the cry for help by Palestinians being murdered in Gaza is ignored.
On the domestic front, First Nations issues are being neglected again. Multiculturalism is taken for granted.
Pauline Hanson’s One Nation is anathema to many people, but it is serving as a useful protest vote against the elitism and timidity of the ALP and the abject failure of Coalition parties.
Wayne Swan described the ALP win in the last election as wide but shallow. The ALP may not have the same electoral luck in future as it had with Morrison and Dutton as opponents.
Social democratic parties around the world – including the ALP – have not seriously addressed the major change in the working class and the polarisation between the have and the have nots. This polarisation is spurred on by legacy media exercising its power on the side of capital and greed. We have seen that in the recent unscrupulous media campaign against the government’s reforms on negative gearing and capital gains. Yet the Albanese government seeks to curry favour with this legacy media instead of breaking up its power.
What is the point of power without purpose!
John Menadue is the Founder of Pearls and Irritations and a board member. He was formerly the Editor-in-Chief. John was the Secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet under Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser, Ambassador to Japan, Secretary of the Department of Immigration and CEO of Qantas.