Labor’s Left has won the party. So what happened to the Left?

Labor’s Left has the prime minister, the numbers and formidable control of the party machinery. What it lacks is a program for changing Australia. After decades spent accumulating power, the bigger question is what that power is now for.

Australian Labor has arrived at one of the strangest moments in its history. The Left has finally captured the commanding heights of the party, yet appears less capable than ever of explaining what it wants to do with them.

Anthony Albanese is a lifelong creature of the NSW Left. The federal parliamentary caucus now has a narrow Left majority. The Left also holds a narrow majority at Labor’s National Conference. Albanese dominates the parliamentary party, faces no serious internal challenger and presides over a remarkably disciplined government.

By the old arithmetic of Labor politics, this ought to be the high-water mark of the Labor Left.

Yet where is the corresponding high-water mark of Left policy?

That is the fascinating question raised by Jason Koutsoukis in the Saturday Paper in his article on Albanese’s factional dominance. The colourful stories of enemies dispatched, scores remembered and rivals marginalised make entertaining political journalism. Albanese has clearly become extraordinarily powerful. However, it is also the factions over which he exercises that power that have changed.

Once, Labor’s factions represented competing conceptions of political economy as well as competing networks of unions, politicians and party officials. They certainly distributed preselections and jobs. They certainly engaged in brutal machine politics. But behind the machinery were arguments about what Labor was for.

Public ownership mattered. Economic planning mattered. Industrial democracy mattered. Redistribution mattered. Union power mattered. The relationship between capital and labour mattered. Australian independence in foreign policy mattered.

Those debates were never as pure as subsequent nostalgia suggests. Nevertheless, they represented competing conceptions of society.

What has survived most successfully is the machinery.

The contemporary faction can determine who gets a safe seat, who becomes a minister, who sits on a committee and eventually who might become leader. What is much less clear is what distinctive political economy follows from belonging to the Left rather than the Right.

Former senator and union leader Doug Cameron puts this in characteristically uncompromising language. He says the Left has not merely been “defanged” but “lobotomised”.

The language is Cameron’s. The underlying paradox is difficult to dismiss.

The Left has the numbers. It has the prime minister. It has substantial organisational power. Yet Australia has not consequently embarked upon a great experiment in social democracy.

This does not mean the Albanese Government has done nothing progressive. It has strengthened workplace protections, expanded Medicare initiatives, increased public spending in important areas and pursued changes in taxation, superannuation and social policy. These are real changes whose effects should be assessed on their merits.

But they largely operate inside the existing political economy.

That distinction matters.

There is a difference between making housing markets work somewhat better and asking whether housing should continue to be organised predominantly around private property accumulation.

There is a difference between subsidising selected industries and developing a national strategy for rebuilding productive capability and public ownership.

There is a difference between improving wages within corporations and democratising workplaces.

There is a difference between redistributing some of the income generated by capitalism and democratising the ownership of capital itself.

The older social-democratic imagination, at its strongest, was prepared to ask such questions.

Consider the distance travelled since Whitlam and Dunstan.

The social democracy of the 1970s was intellectually expansive. It sought to enlarge citizenship beyond periodically casting a vote. It opened universities, expanded public services, challenged inherited privilege, strengthened cultural democracy and contemplated industrial democracy. Dunstan’s South Australia even became an international centre for discussion about democratising the workplace.

The ambition was incomplete, sometimes contradictory and ultimately vulnerable to the economic crises that transformed the following decade. But its political imagination was broad.

Hawke and Keating subsequently reconstructed Labor around economic liberalisation, competition, financial deregulation, privatisation and integration into global markets, while retaining important social-democratic institutions and pursuing substantial social reforms.

That settlement eventually changed Labor itself.

The great questions increasingly became how markets should be regulated, how their proceeds should be distributed and how those damaged by economic change might be compensated. Less attention was given to the ownership and organisation of economic power.

Over several decades, the boundaries of imaginable policy narrowed.

This may explain Albanese better than theories of personal ideological betrayal.

Perhaps Albanese has not simply travelled from Left to Right. Perhaps the political territory itself has shifted beneath him.

The NSW Left survived. Its personnel survived. Its networks survived. Its factional identity survived. It became extraordinarily successful at accumulating power within the Labor Party.

But the economic system it once sought substantially to transform became more powerful outside it.

Finance expanded. Property became an enormous mechanism of wealth accumulation. Universities became increasingly commercialised and dependent upon international education markets. Infrastructure was privatised. Consulting firms penetrated government. Corporate lobbying expanded. Union density declined. Manufacturing shrank. Household debt soared.

Capital broadened its reach while social democracy narrowed its ambition.

That is the real historical asymmetry.

The consequence is something approaching a hollowing out of factional politics.

Instead of ideological organisations using power to achieve political purposes, factions risk becoming organisations whose principal political purpose is acquiring and retaining power.

Preselection replaces political economy. Personnel replaces philosophy. Succession replaces transformation.

This is why speculation about whether Mark Butler, Jim Chalmers, Richard Marles, Tanya Plibersek or Tony Burke eventually succeeds Albanese is less interesting than it appears.

The important question is not which faction supplies the next prime minister.

It is what substantially different Australia any of the factions proposes to create.

That question becomes urgent because the problems confronting government are becoming larger as its political imagination becomes smaller.

Climate change requires transformations of energy, transport, cities, production and consumption. Housing unaffordability raises fundamental questions about land, taxation and ownership. Artificial intelligence raises questions about who owns technology and captures productivity gains. Inequality raises questions about wealth as well as income. A changing geopolitical order raises questions about Australian sovereignty. Ecological limits challenge an economic system still organised around perpetual expansion.

These are structural problems.

Incrementalism has its place in democratic government. But structural problems eventually require structural thinking.

And here lies Labor’s extraordinary paradox.

The Left spent half a century struggling for control of the party and has finally achieved something close to it.

But during those same decades, the meaning of ‘Left’ steadily contracted.

The most revealing question about contemporary Labor therefore is not whether Anthony Albanese has betrayed the Left.

It is whether there remains a sufficiently developed Labor Left for him to betray.

The tragedy would be exquisite: after decades climbing towards the commanding heights of the Labor Party, the Left finally reached the summit only to discover that somewhere along the journey it had forgotten why it wanted to get there.