When I heard the news of Graham Freudenberg’s death last week I wept. Not just for the passing of this generous, passionate, erudite and supremely eloquent man, but for the dreams and hopes that were shared by those of us who worked for Gough Whitlam as Leader of the Opposition from 1967 to 1972. (more…)

Bill Shorten is to be congratulated on telling the Victorian ALP to investigate and eliminate its membership rorts, as exemplified by the latest branch-stacking scandal that has again humiliated the party and exposed it to public ignominy and disrepute.

There may never be a better opportunity to clean up once and for all the morass that has been exposed. The party must not let this opportunity be lost.

Shorten must now insist that the investigation into this disgraceful episode be truly independent.

Nothing short of an arm’s-length and fully transparent inquiry by an external nominee of unimpeachable integrity and stature, such as a retired Supreme Court judge or senior barrister, will ensure that justice is both done and is seen to be done.

To settle for less – to allow the inquiry to remain in factional hands – would be tantamount to entrusting foxes with the security of a hen house.

What is at issue here is fraudulent conduct that in any other sphere would be investigated and prosecuted as a criminal offence. The perpetrators and their protectors must be identified and expelled.

Authority for the appointee to require evidence under oath will be essential in order to expose and uproot the cancerous corruption within the Victorian ALP that for too long has been allowed to flourish unchecked.

Key questions needing to be addressed will include whether party office-holders and officials were aware of what was happening and, if so, when. Was there an involvement by either or both of the party factions and, if so, by whom was it authorised and to what effect?

Terms of reference for the inquiry must also include the rorting for factional advantage of the secret ballots provisions of the party rules that has resulted in the elevation to party office of some by whom a blind eye has been turned to the present abuses.

Factional operatives routinely require conference and pre-selection committee delegates to disclose their completed ballot papers, in order to ensure that they have voted in accordance with factional directives. Alternatively, delegates are required to hand over their blank ballot papers to be completed by the operatives on their behalf.

A familiar sight at the early stages of party conferences is queuing by delegates who attend for the sole purpose of receiving ballot papers, which they then turn over for completion by the operatives, before leaving and taking no further part in the proceedings.

The surrender or disclosure of ballot papers in circumstances where plainly it is not voluntary defeats the whole purpose of the mandated secret ballot, which is to ensure that the person voting can do so without fear of consequences if they vote in a way that is not a agreeable to another person.

Such interference would not be tolerated in the conduct of any parliamentary election. Any federal or state returning officer who failed to prevent it would be sacked.

For the ALP to continue condoning the factional subversion of its commitment to the secret ballot is for it to acquiesce in the lawlessness that the latest branch-stacking scandal exemplifies and thereby to live a lie and betray the trust of its members and supporters.

Race Mathews is an ALP life member, and a former chief of staff to Gough Whitlam, federal MP and Victorian state MP and minister. This article was first published in The Age on November 1, 2015.

The ALP is leading in the federal polls, but internally it is a different story.

The party continues to incur significant reputational damage from the irresponsible and damaging conduct of its factions, and the disgraced appointees on whom in some instances they have conferred advancement.

Hopes that this year would prove to be the most important in the history of ALP reform and renewal since the intervention spearheaded by Gough Whitlam in 1970 that cleared the way for the election of the Whitlam, Hawke and Keating governments have so far largely been disappointed.

Many of the party’s problems and the solutions to them have been identified in the reports of successive post-election reviews. Bill Shorten has committed to specific reforms in the course of the leadership contest and subsequent statements, but the outcome remains in doubt.

In the aftermath of the party’s recent Federal conference, stark choices have still to be faced.

The party may choose to fulfil the hopes and aspirations of members and supporters committed to party democratisation and renewal. Or it may acquiesce in the continued control of its affairs by tiny coteries of self-serving factional bosses, who owe their power to a blatant and shameless disregard for the secret ballot provisions of the party rules that enables them to predetermine the results.

Rampant trashing and subversion of the requirement for secret ballots has become a cancer, rotting the foundations of the party’s democracy and entrenching in its place a resurgent ‘democratic centralism’ reminiscent of that which rendered the party unelectable from the middle 1950s until 1972 federally and until 1982 in Victoria.

A familiar sight at the party’s state and federal conferences is factional operatives requiring delegates to show one another their completed ballot papers in order to ensure that they have voted in accordance with factional instructions.

Alternatively, delegates are required to hand over their blank ballot papers to be completed by the operatives on their behalf.

Also to be seen at the early stages of conferences is queuing up by nominal delegates who attend for the sole purpose of receiving ballot papers, which they then turn over for completion by the operatives before leaving the venue and taking no further part in the proceedings. A common complaint by delegates is that they have been coerced by factions into voting for candidates other than those of their choice.

Behaviours of so abusive a character are compounded by the use of mobile phones, which enable factional bosses absent from voting places to convey instructions to the operatives, and directly constrain members in the exercise of their secret ballot entitlement.

The surrender of ballot papers in circumstances where plainly it is not voluntary defeats the whole point and purpose of a secret ballot, which is to make sure that the person entitled to vote can do so without fear of consequences if they vote in a way which is not agreeable to another person.

Such interference would not be tolerated in the conduct of any parliamentary election. Any parliamentary election Returning Officer shown to have failed to intervene would be sacked.  Likewise it is a flagrant breech of both the letter and intention of requirements such as of the Victorian Branch’s Rule 4.3, which reads: “Election’ means election by secret ballot using the optional preferential system of proportional representation provided in Schedule D”.

No ‘ifs’. No ‘buts’. No ambiguity.

Factions are entitled to seek compliance by their members with their directives through their internal processes. There is no right on their part to do so at the expense of the party’s integrity and adherence to the secrecy requirements to which its balloting rules so plainly give expression.

The party would be ill-advised to sit on its hands collectively, in the hope or expectation that it will be delivered from its present predicament by a new Whitlam, as occurred with the intervention by the Federal Executive in 1970, that paved the way for the election of the Whitlam, Hawke and Keating governments.

The secret ballot is a hard-won right and crowning achievement, secured through untiring and frequently embittered struggle by successive generations of Labour Movement activists. Its adoption in Australia ahead of all but a handful of other countries has caused it to be known widely as ‘the Australian ballot’. It remains for the current generation of ALP members to secure its reinstatement within the party and ensure that it is passed on unimpaired to those who come after us.

Meanwhile, rules changes seeking to target on a case-by-case basis the infringements through which the secrecy of party ballots is rorted and subverted were submitted for debate at the Victorian ALP’s Special Rules Conference on 28 March.

That the item was not reached is a sad commentary on the cynical and self-serving factional ploy of limiting of the conference proceedings to a single day, when at least two and ideally three days were necessary to properly complete the agenda. Half the single day’s proceedings were devoted to matters other than the proposed changes, and the rules debate was cut short prematurely on the grounds that the statutory majority required for the adoption of them was no longer present.

Factions have a legitimate role to play in the Party – so long as they remain ‘on tap but not on top’.

Race Mathews joined the ALP in 1956 and is a life member of fifty-nine years standing, former Chief of Staff to Labor Leaders including Gough Whitlam, municipal councillor, Federal MP, State MP and Minister and academic,

 

 

 

 

 

 

A local Labor journal Grassroots, has been advocating reform of the ALP to ’empower members, branches and communities’. With the ALP Federal Conference on July 24-26 I will be posting three articles on party reform ‘past, present and future’. I will also be re-posting an article on refugee policy.  John Menadue.

The philosopher George Santayana wrote famously ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

A case in point is failure by the Australian Labor Party (ALP) to remain mindful of the circumstances and shortcomings that denied it office from the middle -1950s federally until 1972 and until 1982 in Victoria.

When I joined the ALP in 1956, it was in dire straits – reeling in the aftermath of the failed Santamaria Movement takeover of the Party and the subsequent splitting off of the Democratic Labor Party (DLP), and in the grip already of yet another extremist and in this instance ostensibly Left external body, known variously as ‘The Trade Unionists’ Defence Committee’, ‘the Ticketing Committee’ or simply and succinctly, ‘the Junta’.

As noted by Gough Whitlam in an historic address to the 1967 Victorian State Conference:

The TUDC is not mentioned in the Constitution of the Party. There is no formal link between the TUDC and the handful which selects the Central Executive. It happens, however, that the membership of both bodies is predominantly the same. Thirteen years ago, few delegates at the Conference would have known of the Movement or Mr Santamaria. No one doubts the influence that they had on the Party’s affairs at the time. The Party’s controllers have swung from one extreme to another.

 

The TUDC’s domination of the Party was achieved through a ’democratic centralism’ that enabled it to dictate the composition of the Victorian Central Executive and Victoria’s representation on the Federal Conference and the Federal Executive.

Prior to each Victorian conference, an initial meeting of representatives from thirteen TUDC-dominated unions compiled an ‘Official Ticket’ for all Central Executive, Federal Conference and Federal Executive vacancies.

Subsequently, the ‘Official Ticket’ was endorsed at a further meeting, where representatives of up to twenty-eight more unions were added to the original thirteen.

With the conference delegations from up to fifty unions thus locked in under caucus rules to support the ‘Official Ticket’, the winner-take-all’ voting system of the day delivered all the available vacancies to the TUDC nominees.

Domination of the Party by the TUDC cost it an otherwise certain victory at the 1961 elections, together with a further probable electoral victory two years later.

At the very least, it is likely that if Labor had done less badly at the1958 elections the breakaway DLP would have taken root less successfully and been shorter-lived.

A Labor government elected in 1961 or 1963 would not have involved Australia in the Vietnam war, or failed so dismally as the Liberals to harness up behind programmes and projects of lasting national worth the great economic prosperity which Australian enjoyed between the middle nineteen-sixties and the oil price shock engendered tougher times of the following decade.

Nor was this all. As Whitlam’s 1967 Victorian Conference speech also emphasised, the need for Party reform and renewal was no less acute.

We cannot convincingly oppose the conservatism of our political opponents with a conservatism of our own; we cannot stand as a Party of change when we fear change in our own structure. We cannot expect the people to trust us with the great decision-making processes of this nation, when we parade, by retaining an exclusive and unrepresentative Party structure, our manifest distrust of our own rank and file within the decision-making processes of the Party.

And again:

All organisations, including radical parties, have establishments which resist change; all have vested interests. All the arguments for and against for a national organisation, with a national conference directly representing Federal electorates and unions, boil down to this question: Is the Party to be organised in this last third of the 20^th century on modern national lines representative of the whole membership of the Party, or is it to remain a committee or coterie composed chiefly of State Branch officers, a significant proportion of whom are paid servants of the Party?

 

By the early nineteen-sixties, frustration within the Party over the incompetence and authoritarianism of the TUDC was acute.

The flash point was reached with the decision by the TUDC in 1965 that the provision for the election of three Central Executive members by and from Branch delegates to the Conference as adopted the previous year should be rescinded.

An official Party body of which I was secretary, the Scoresby State Electorate Council, established a ‘Committee of Inquiry into Representation and Decision-making in the ALP’, which addressed to Branches throughout the state a letter seeking information about their memberships and fund-raising, on which a case for the restoration of their representation might be made.

The State Secretary, Bill Hartley, thereupon issued instructions to Branch secretaries requiring that the committee’s letters should be returned to him immediately, without providing the opportunity for members to hear them read. Hartley wrote:

I have consulted on this matter with the state president, Mr W. Brown, and it is to be referred to the Executive Officers next week … Mr Brown has also suggested that all recipients of the correspondence should take no action on it other than endorsing it with the Branch, time and circumstances of receipt, and forwarding it to the Australian Labor Party as soon as possible.

Concurrently with the Scoresby Affair – and perhaps prompted by it – disaffected Party activists including John Cain, John Button, Dick McGarvie, Xavier Connor, Barney Williams, Michael Duffy, and Barney Cooney established ‘The Participants’, as a group seeking Party reform and democratisation through untiring grassroots advocacy and agitation around the widely circulated ‘Labour Comment’ newsletter, as edited by Bob Murray.

Their efforts in conjunction with those of Whitlam and other nationally prominent allies including the National Secretary Mick Young and the Shadow Minister for Industrial Affairs Clyde Cameron succeeded ultimately in bringing about the 1970 Federal Intervention and dismissal of the TUDC dominated Victorian Executive.

The subsequent comprehensive re-writing of the Party Rules and adoption of proportional representation voting for Party office cleared the way for the election of the Whitlam, Hawke and Keating governments.

Internally, the Victorian Party experienced what is remembered by many as ‘a golden age’ of creative policy development and debate, culminating in 1982 with the election of the Cain government.

Even so, the hard-won gains have proved to be ephemeral, and a new hegemony indistinguishable for all practical purposes from that of the TUDC has emerged.

What were in the immediate aftermath of the 1970 Intervention the ideologically differentiated Socialist Left and rightist Labour Unity factions have merged in all but name, through a so-called ‘Stability Pact’ which enables them to divide between themselves the pre-selections for ‘winnable’ parliamentary seats.

Concurrently the need for strict adherence to secret ballot criteria in the selection process is routinely ignored. ‘Democratic centralism’ is again as endemic as under the TUDC. The effect is to all but wholly exclude from pre-selection or party office members other than those who have factional endorsement.Frustrated on rare occasions in the achievement of their preferred outcomes, the factions routinely refer them to the party’s National Executive where their dominance is all but complete and uncontested, and inconvenient decisions can be overturned.

It remains for the current generation of ALP members to secure the reinstatement of democracy and the rule of law within the Party, and ensure that it is passed on unimpaired to those who come after us.

As Whitlam reminds us:

‘Those of us who were there have a duty to educate those who were not’

‘Let us now begin’.

 

Race Mathews is a former Principal Private Secretary to Labor Leaders including Gough Whitlam, local government councillor, Federal MP, Victorian MP and minister and academic. He joined the ALP in 1956, and is a life member of fifty-eight years standing.

 

 

 

 

The philosopher George Santayana wrote famously ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it’.

A case in point is failure by the Australian Labor Party (ALP) to remain mindful of the circumstances and shortcomings that denied it office from the middle -1950s federally until 1972 and until 1982 in Victoria.

When I joined the ALP in 1956, it was in dire straits – reeling in the aftermath of the failed Santamaria Movement takeover of the Party and the subsequent splitting off of the Democratic Labor Party (DLP), and in the grip already of yet another extremist and in this instance ostensibly Left external body, known variously as ‘The Trade Unionists’ Defence Committee’, ‘the Ticketing Committee’ or simply and succinctly, ‘the Junta’

As noted by Gough Whitlam in an historic address to the 1967 Victorian State Conference:

‘The TUDC is not mentioned in the Constitution of the Party. There is no formal link between the TUDC and the handful which selects the Central Executive. It happens, however, that the membership of both bodies is predominantly the same. Thirteen years ago, few delegates at the Conference would have known of the Movement or Mr Santamaria. No one doubts the influence that they had on the Party’s affairs at the time. The Party’s controllers have swung from one extreme to another. ‘

The TUDC’s domination of the Party was achieved through a ’democratic centralism’ that enabled it to dictate the composition of the Victorian Central Executive and Victoria’s representation on the Federal Conference and the Federal Executive.

Prior to each Victorian conference, an initial meeting of representatives from thirteen TUDC-dominated unions compiled an ‘Official Ticket’ for all Central Executive, Federal Conference and Federal Executive vacancies.

Subsequently, the ‘Official Ticket’ was endorsed at a further meeting, where representatives of up to twenty-eight more unions were added to the original thirteen.

With the conference delegations from up to fifty unions thus locked in under caucus rules to support the ‘Official Ticket’, the winner-take-all’ voting system of the day delivered all the available vacancies to the TUDC nominees.

Domination of the Party by the TUDC cost it an otherwise certain victory at the 1961 elections, together with a further probable electoral victory two years later.

At the very least, it is likely that if Labor had done less badly at the1958 elections the breakaway DLP would have taken root less successfully and been shorter-lived.

A Labor government elected in 1961 or 1963 would not have involved Australia in the Vietnam War, or failed so dismally as the Liberals to harness up behind programmes and projects of lasting national worth the great economic prosperity which Australian enjoyed between the middle nineteen-sixties and the oil price shock engendered tougher times of the following decade.

Nor was this all. As Whitlam’s 1967 Victorian Conference speech also emphasised, the need for Party reform and renewal was no less acute.

‘We cannot convincingly oppose the conservatism of our political opponents with a conservatism of our own; we cannot stand as a Party of change when we fear change in our own structure. We cannot expect the people to trust us with the great decision-making processes of this nation, when we parade, by retaining an exclusive and unrepresentative Party structure, our manifest distrust of our own rank and file within the decision-making processes of the Party’.

And again:

‘All organisations, including radical parties, have establishments which resist change; all have vested interests. All the arguments for and against for a national organisation, with a national conference directly representing Federal electorates and unions, boil down to this question: Is the Party to be organised in this last third of the 20^th century on modern national lines representative of the whole membership of the Party, or is it to remain a committee or coterie composed chiefly of State Branch officers, a significant proportion of whom are paid servants of the Party?’

By the early nineteen-sixties, frustration within the Party over the incompetence and authoritarianism of the TUDC was acute.

The flash point was reached with the decision by the TUDC in 1965 that the provision for the election of three Central Executive members by and from Branch delegates to the Conference as adopted the previous year should be rescinded.

An official Party body of which I was secretary, the Scoresby State Electorate Council, established a ‘Committee of Inquiry into Representation and Decision-making in the ALP’, which addressed to Branches throughout the state a letter seeking information about their memberships and fund-raising, on which a case for the restoration of their representation might be made.

The State Secretary, Bill Hartley, thereupon issued instructions to Branch secretaries requiring that the committee’s letters should be returned to him immediately, without providing the opportunity for members to hear them read. Hartley wrote:

‘I have consulted on this matter with the state president, Mr W. Brown, and it is to be referred to the Executive Officers next week … Mr Brown has also suggested that all recipients of the correspondence should take no action on it other than endorsing it with the Branch, time and circumstances of receipt, and forwarding it to the Australian Labor Party as soon as possible.’ 

Concurrently with the Scoresby Affair – and perhaps prompted by it – disaffected Party activists including John Cain, John Button, Dick McGarvie, Xavier Connor, Barney Williams, Michael Duffy, and Barney Cooney established ‘The Participants’, as a group seeking Party reform and democratisation through untiring grassroots advocacy and agitation around the widely circulated ‘Labour Comment’ newsletter, as edited by Bob Murray.

Their efforts in conjunction with those of Whitlam and other nationally prominent allies including the National Secretary Mick Young and the Shadow Minister for Industrial Affairs Clyde Cameron succeeded ultimately in bringing about the 1970 Federal Intervention and dismissal of the TUDC dominated Victorian Executive.

The subsequent comprehensive re-writing of the Party Rules and adoption of proportional representation voting for Party office cleared the way for the election of the Whitlam, Hawke and Keating governments.

Internally, the Victorian Party experienced what is remembered by many as ‘a golden age’ of creative policy development and debate, culminating in 1982 with the election of the Cain government.

Even so, the hard-won gains have proved to be ephemeral, and a new hegemony indistinguishable for all practical purposes from that of the TUDC has emerged.

What were in the immediate aftermath of the 1970 Intervention the ideologically differentiated Socialist Left and rightist Labour Unity factions have merged in all but name, through a so-called ‘Stability Pact’ which enables them to divide between themselves the pre-selections for ‘winnable’ parliamentary seats.

Concurrently the need for strict adherence to secret ballot criteria in the selection process is routinely ignored. ‘Democratic centralism’ is again as endemic as under the TUDC. The effect is to all but wholly exclude from pre-selection or party office members other than those who have factional endorsement.

Frustrated on rare occasions in the achievement of their preferred outcomes, the factions routinely refer them to the party’s National Executive where their dominance is all but complete and uncontested, and inconvenient decisions can be overturned.

It remains for the current generation of ALP members to secure the reinstatement of democracy and the rule of law within the Party, and ensure that it is passed on unimpaired to those who come after us.

As Whitlam reminds us:

‘Those of us who were there have a duty to educate those who were not’

‘Let us now begin’.

 

Race Mathews is a former Principal Private Secretary to Labor Leaders including Gough Whitlam, local government councillor, Federal MP, Victorian MP and minister and academic. He joined the ALP in 1956, and is a life member of fifty-eight years standing.

 

 

 

 

ALP members and supporters in Victoria have cause for alarm about the party’s wellbeing and perhaps long-term survival. While federal leader Bill Shorten has committed to far-reaching party reforms, and other states such as Queensland are already adopting them, the Victorian ALP is lurching back into a troubled past, which threatens its effectiveness and future.

Faced with a comparable crisis in the party’s internal affairs in the mid-1960s, a party body – the ”Scoresby State Electorate Council committee of inquiry into representation and decision making in the ALP” – wrote to local branches, expressing its concern about the dire straits into which the party had fallen.

Issues raised in the ”Scoresby letter” included the ALP’s chronic under-representation in the state and federal parliaments; the dominance of its affairs by an external body, the so-called Trade Unionists Defence Committee; the withdrawal of recently secured rank-and-file representation on the party’s state executive; and a historic low of party membership and involvement. The letter sought membership, governance and finance information, on which a case for change might be developed.

Alerted to the Scoresby initiative, the state ALP president, Bill Brown, and the state secretary, Bill Hartley, instructed branch secretaries that the letter should be returned unopened to the state office. Some may have complied with their directive. Many did not.

Sharing the Scoresby concerns, and frustrated by so arbitrary an assault on the right of members to communicate freely with one another, John Cain and others formed the ”Participants” group, to champion party renewal and reform.

Backed by Gough Whitlam, the Participants paved the way for the 1970 reconstruction and democratisation of the party, and thereby the election of the Whitlam, Hawke and Keating governments.

Fifty years on from the Scoresby letter, new challenges for the Victorian party stem from endemic misconduct by its Right and Left factions, both separately and in collusion with one another. Their monopolisation of the party’s governance and decision-making bodies locks out the majority of members who neither belong to nor support a faction.

The facts speak for themselves. General meetings are used by the factions to lock in their members to decisions arrived at by inner circles behind closed doors. Union delegates to the party’s state conference mostly aren’t elected, but appointed by factionally aligned union officials or management committees, subject to their acceptance of factional direction.

Abuses are exemplified by Victoria’s recent round of preselections for state seats, where a ”stability pact” between the factions enabled them to divide up the winnable seats to their mutual advantage, irrespective of the party’s best interests or the wishes of its local members.

The ALP’s powerful Victorian Administrative Committee – an all but wholly factionally dominated body – pledged initially that, consistent with the party rules, the preselection of upper house candidates would include plebiscites of local members. Subsequently, the plebiscites were cancelled and the allocation of the upper house seats referred to the factionally more amenable ALP national executive on the pretext of ”administrative necessity”.

The executive’s acceptance of the referral was moved by the Left faction’s Kim Carr and seconded by the Right’s Don Farrell, with all but three of the members present voting for the motion despite others being known to have disagreed with it.

The refusal by the party’s national returning officer to announce the outcome of the subsequent ballot for the seats on the grounds of its non-compliance with the ALP’s affirmative action rule was overturned by the executive, and the candidates as specified in the ”stability pact” were declared to have been preselected.

Thus the local members were effectively disenfranchised and denied the say in the process to which the party rules entitle them.

State lower house seats were divided between the factions before the legitimate preselection process, with the Macedon electorate being only the most blatant of instances of disregard for local sentiment or the intentions of the party rules. Despite a highly qualified Macedon resident having received more than 80 per cent of the votes in the local ballot, an external candidate with 19 per cent of the local vote was preselected.

In other electorates, well-qualified preselection candidates reportedly were bullied by factional operatives into withdrawing their nominations, or did so on the promise of factional support at a later date.

So extensive an exercise of irresponsible power for sectional advantage results from a wider subverting of the ALP’s democratic norms and procedures, and in particular of rules requiring all internal elections and preselections to be by secret ballot. State conferences and public office selection committee meetings don’t provide booths to properly protect voter privacy. Delegates are routinely required to disclose their completed ballot papers to factional operatives or surrender them for completion by others on their behalf.

Hand in hand with the rorting of the requirement for secret ballots has gone an all but complete breakdown in accountability by the party’s ruling bodies. Administrative committee agendas are not made available in advance to the branches and members who may wish to have input into them. The committee’s minutes are not released or its decisions otherwise reported. Elected administrative committee members are frequently represented by unaccountable proxies. Their identities, frequency of attendance and relevant qualifications and experience are not disclosed.

Key recommendations for party reform from reviews such as by Mark Dreyfus (1998), Bob Hawke/Neville Wran (2002), John Faulkner/Steve Bracks/Bob Carr (2010) and Alan Griffin (2011) are pigeonholed or swept under carpets in state and national party offices, without explanation or apology.

The ALP deserves better. Factions properly should be ”on tap but not on top”. At Victorian state conference delegate elections to be held shortly, their stranglehold on the party will be challenged. Candidates are being recruited who pledge to back reform and reject factional direction. ALP members should vote for them – a first step towards re-democratisation and the restoration of member rights.

This article was published in The Age on March 3, 2014

Race Mathews is a life member of the ALP and a former federal MP, Victorian minister, and chief of staff to Gough Whitlam and Labor leaders in the Victorian Parliament.