LABOR – THE STATE OF THE PARTY

Labor’s loss at the May 2019 federal election sent shock waves through the party that had been predicted to win the unloseable election. Polls over months had predicted a Labor win and the party was hugely confident as commentators assumed they would take the reins of office. On Monday 24 February 2020, The Hon Dr Craig Emerson, former Labor Minister and Co-Chair of the “Review of Labor’s 2019 Federal Election Campaign” and The Hon Dr Meredith Burgmann, former President of the NSW Legislative Council addressed The Sydney Institute to offer some explanations.

LABOR – THE STATE OF THE PARTY

MEREDITH BURGMANN

I’ll begin by acknowledging that we are on the land of the Gadigal and pay tribute to their Elders.

The Labor Party, Australia’s great social democratic project began 130 years ago when the ALP emerged out of the trade union movement and the political truths of the Great Depression. It is the oldest political party in Australia and one of the oldest in the world, so now seems a good time to be auditing its operation and effectiveness – at a time when the gap between rich and poor is widening and Australia is one of only four OECD countries where the minimum wage relative to the average wage is decreasing.

Historically, Labor is the party which gave Australia the widow’s pension, medicare, no fault divorce, OH&S legislation, the Sex Discrimination Act, Medicare, compulsory superannuation, NDIS and the Gonski reforms. The list is endless. Almost all socially progressive legislation in Australia has come from Labor. Other parties could do it but historically it has been Labor.

There are plenty of reasons for being proud of the party but quite a few that make you squirm. Personally, I always maintained that if I didn’t leave the Party after Brian Bourke torpedoed the national Land Rights legislation in 1984, then I would probably never leave. Lethargy and some strange bond has kept me there. But what is that bond? You have to understand the mindset of a true believer to answer that, and for me it is a combination of heart and head. I do not believe that the party is always right but I do believe that it is the only party capable of making things better.

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I think my comments about the state of the party are very different now than they would have been three months ago.

The summer from hell for Scott Morrison has definitely changed the status and the state of the Australian Labor Party. Scott Morrison is no longer the saviour of the Liberal Party who delivered the miracle of the last election. He is no longer ScoMo, the dorky but likeable dad from the Shire, he is now “Scotty from marketing” and if that sticks he’s in big trouble. The change over the last two months in voting intentions and more importantly preferred prime minister has been quite remarkable.

Voters now say that climate change is top of their list of issues that concern them and, after the bush fires, this may actually be true. However, voters in the past, have said that climate change concerns them, and then voted differently to that stated concern on election day.

A January Ipsos Poll revealed that 41 per cent nominated the environment as the top issue for them and 31 per cent nominated cost of living and health care (equal second). Today’s Newspoll also has voters prioritising climate action over energy prices for the first time, if only marginally (43-42). Significantly Albanese is still the preferred PM (41-40) and Labor still the 2pp election winner (51-49).

I will leave in-depth discussion about the election to Craig. I’ve read the Review. It is an excellent document and sober reading.

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However, that said, what effect did the election results have on the party?

I have been in the party 50 years and I know when we’re in trouble. I have been to meetings where people could hardly raise their heads or their voice. A week or so after our election loss, I went to a Left meeting expecting a small and dispirited crowd. The auditorium was packed and there was actual excitement in the air.

The main thing that has come out of the shock election loss for the Labor Party is of course the change of leaders. The issue of Shorten’s unpopularity has been tiptoed around a bit by various reviews, but the take-out is very stark. Shorten was unpopular and our new leader is not.

Albo is to some degree unknown. He is very popular with the rank and file, which gives him a lot of political capital. People in the party, even of the right, trust his integrity and his strategic thinking. The leader of the so-called Otis Group, Joel Fitzgibbon, likes and respects Albo. In fact, to see that restaurant table at the Otis as a separate faction is to misread the tea leaves.

One interesting thing about Albo as leader is that for the last five years he was being promoted by the Murdoch media. This was obviously part of their strategy to unsettle Shorten, but that preference for Albo has not totally disappeared. Even though he is now leader, he is still reasonably popular in the Murdoch media.

What commentators need to know about Albo, and I have known him for almost forty years, is that he is the master of the long game.He is not thinking about the next week or even the next month, he’s thinking about two years time – or perhaps even ten years time.

He is also the best arguer I have ever gone into combat with. He genuinely believes it is important to persuade with facts. He is irritating because he always has a come- back line but he is not bullying.

Albo is absolutely genuine. You do not get the feeling when he is being interviewed or when you are talking with him that he is thinking about what his reply should be. What you see is what you get. The capacity not to look shifty is an invaluable personality trait.

It is true that members are enthused by Albo – but also probably in equal measure by a dislike for Scott Morrison and the actions of this government.

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Don’t underestimate the shock of the loss on the Left of the party. Even my lefty friends now accept that we need to win back seats in Queensland before we can achieve government and DO something about climate change.

There is a lot of discussion going on about how this can occur and still adhere to effective climate policies. The other main policy discussion is how to maintain our commitment to a fairer tax system (especially around housing issues). How do we get what we want without scaring the horses? However, we do recognise that it is difficult in the present times to have consistent policies that will please all parts of the Party

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Coal (symbolising fossil fuels in general) is of course the big problem in Australian political discourse today. However, it’s not as damaging for Labor as it is potentially for the Coalition. Coal is really now the only distinguishing point between the Labor Party and the Greens Party (the distressing issue of refugee policy now being somewhat muted). However, the Greens have nowhere to go at a federal election (with compulsory preferential voting) unless they decide to repeat the practice which has just happened in the Northern Territory where the Greens Party has preferenced a CLP climate denier and a right-wing extremist ahead of the Labor Party candidate. Unless the Greens are prepared to repeat that tactic (which will lose them a huge number of supporters in the long run) their votes really do flow back to the Labor Party with minimal leakage.

Just as an afterthought, in terms of climate change and tactics, what could have been worse than Bob Brown’s convoy to the coal fields of Queensland starting off down south and arriving in Queensland’s north. The optics of that are just terrible. We all know people in the north hate “shit stirrers from down south”. The geography of the convoy was a shocker and the Greens’ sanctimonious preaching about coal is not the way to get change in policy. Even many Greens Party members now see this convoy as a terrible mistake.

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So, looking at the party itself, what do I see as the issues for the party organisation? Obviously, my experience with the party has been New South Wales, but it is the major party branch and also the problems I see are not specific to New South Wales.

The first issue to address is the fall in party membership. I have never regarded that as a particular problem as most mass membership organisations are losing members because society in 2020 is very different from society in 1891 when the party was formed. I could go into all the social changes that have occurred over the last 130 years but that would be boring and we all know what they are. Interestingly, party membership jumped after the last election. Sometimes a loss spurs an increase in membership in the same way wins do.

Second, the party has to accept that the old party organisation based on local branches is probably not the way of the future.

The way citizens in today’s society interact has changed so much because of good transport, social media connectedness, women in the waged workforce, etc – that meeting in your local draughty, uncomfortable community hall to discuss with a dozen other people who happen to live in your area, weighty matters of the day, really isn’t the way forward. In the1930s, the working man (and it was almost exclusively men) had the time to meet at 7.30 or 8pm at night after the wife had cooked him dinner and was now engaged in putting the bairns to bed. That model is over. Yet we insist on continuing that model because it suits the anti-democratic tendencies of some leaders, and the rank and file are terrified to give up what they see as one of their most important remaining rights.

I have always argued that within the Left, we have spent far too much time fighting within the party and not enough time fighting out in the community for our left positions. One of the reasons that the Greens have been popular in inner-city areas is that they are seen in these community forums. Their own party structure is too small to take up much of their time (except recently in NSW where they have been involved in scorched earth factional warfare) whereas we, in the Labor Party, are too busy moving motions at the local branch to be out there fighting the privatisation of our local bus line.

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The Lavarche Report into the New South Wales branch is very interesting and if all his recommendations take place, a change in culture could possibly happen.

For 40 years general secretaries rose up through the ranks which meant that the head office culture became insular and to some degree toxic. The oversight organisation, the Admin Committee, has 42 members which is just crazy. Most of those members are busy with their day jobs and have little time to properly acquaint themselves with possible danger areas.

We need a proper management culture. Lavarche’s recommendation that secretaries and assistant secretaries not be permitted to stand for public office for five years is a very good recommendation. Previously, you knew that “bright young men” were taking those positions expecting to be parachuted into the Senate within a couple of years. They had no particular impetus to do anything other than get the numbers for their future career.

I have just been on a three-person panel which reviewed the election of the party leader in New South Wales. It’s important that we acknowledge that we are the only party in Australia which chooses its leader at the federal level and in some states by way of popular election by the rank-and-file paired with a party room vote. This is very valued by the members.

What really came out of our panel review was how much the rank-and-file membership loved the fact that they got to vote for the leader. I don’t think the party has ever really boasted enough about this advantage that we have over the other parties. Even the so-called democratic Greens don’t elect their leader by rank and file vote. The Labor Party’s new initiatives for internal reform have in fact rendered it the most democratic party in Australia.

The NSW branch has even experimented with “community preselections”. One of these “primaries” achieved a turnout of 5,500 voters which is more than 10 per cent of the entire electorate. However, it was the excitement that the process engendered which surprised me the most. I was actually stopped in the street by little old ladies who wanted to tell me who they had voted for. This doesn’t mean that more reform isn’t needed, it just means that we are way ahead of the pack on membership and community involvement.

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Another thing that we really don’t skite enough about is the fact that our affirmative action policies have worked very well at the representative level and that we now have 48 per cent women in the federal Parliament and something akin to that (or better) in most of the state parliaments. The Coalition is running at approximately half that percentage.

However, I would point out that although we have done well in the representative sphere, women are still not heading the party or even having a proper share in the actual running of the party through the bureaucracies and the state branches.

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Another issue that we need to think seriously about is our relationship with Australia’s ethnic communities. Labor used to be the natural home of immigrant communities. We cannot take this for granted any more. The communities are no longer the left-wing South Americans or the anti-Junta Greeks – or even the impoverished Europeans that came here after the Second World War. Now they are often traditional and conservative communities from Africa and Asia or middle class refugees fleeing communism.

The Chinese community in particular are important in that they are in seats which are being fought over very strenuously by Labor and the Coalition. We recognise that the Chinese community in Australia is very diverse. There are those from Hong Kong, Malaysia, mainland China, the Australian born Chinese and so on. They’re all very different.

But the Chinese Community as a whole has been shaken by the recent terrible Sinophobia of the media and by a number of politicians, particularly from the Coalition. When the recent emphasis on the way Chinese community organisations were being manipulated by scary and shadowy figures with “links” to the Chinese Communist Party, many large and worthwhile community groups went into liquidation. I watched with sadness as joyful and popular organisations went out of existence.

As Jason Yat-sen Li has pointed out, he used to be considered a businessman, now he’s considered a Chinese spy. The Chinese Community has been shaken by this Sinophobia and the party has to work out a way of dealing with that.

The Covid 19 virus has emphasised this Sinophobia in the Australian media and to some degree the Australian Community.

One of the problems is that many of the immigrant communities are quite conservative, particularly on issues of religion and moral values. Some of these views, around family concerns, are in stark opposition to the views of Labor supporters in inner-city, highly educated areas. It is interesting to note that Craig’s review found that we did not lose votes among the faith communities generally, but among some specific Christian communities.

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Finally, I want to address the party’s relationship to the trade union movement. I know there is an element within the party that believes we should cut our ties with the unions. I have no idea why those people are in the party. I am totally supportive of our very strong relationship with the trade union movement. In fact, I believe that the party and the trade union movement are one.

I will lay my cards on the table. I was president of my union, a precursor to the NTEU in the 1980s. I firmly believe that both industrial and political Labor are not just relevant but absolutely crucial for Australian democracy.

Many in the media misunderstand the symbiosis of these two wings. They pontificate that the reason that the Labor Party puts forward pro-union legislation is because of the big donations that unions give the Party. This argument totally misunderstands the relationship between the unions and the Party.

The members of parliament in the caucus who vote for those pieces of legislation vote for them because they totally support the trade union members who will be protected by the legislation. It is it is not to do with donations.

Labor will fight against anti-union legislation such as the so-called “Ensuring Integrity” legislation because they believe it to be wrong and anti-union – and a vicious attack on workers’ rights. When this is depicted as delivering for “their union mates” it is to misunderstand the representative nature of unionism.

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I’m still enough of a Marxist to believe that demography is destiny. Australia is still a class based society, especially in the cities (there are culturally specific factors that mean that low socio-economic areas in rural and regional Australia vote National, or even Green). In the cities, the lower the personal wealth (sometimes different to household income), the more likely the electorate is to vote Labor. You only need to look at the contiguous nature of electoral maps of Sydney and Melbourne to understand this. There is surprisingly little deviation, even when marginals temporarily change hands.

Demography even explains previously Labor inner city seats falling to the déclassé Greens. Gentrification has rendered Melbourne the fifth wealthiest federal electorate in Victoria and the state seat of Balmain has the second highest household income in the state. The Greens have admitted that they target the most affluent and highly educated areas.

Labor voters, in particular newly arrived immigrant communities, need a strong and supportive state. They need a good local public school, a GP who bulk bills, a Centrelink office that does not see their unemployment as a crime. They want available and affordable housing and convenient and safe public transport. Labor voters may not always be PC but they know what they need from the state and which party delivers that.

If Thomas Piketty is right about the fundamental inequality of capitalism, then the marginalised and dispossessed within a capitalist society still need the party that will best protect them. Unless we are prepared to support revolutionary parties, the next best thing we can do about capitalism is support a party that will ameliorate the inequality. That road will be bumpy and not always clear. The Accord of the Hawke/Keating era appalled me as an active unionist, but it delivered benefits to workers by way of the social wage which would not have occurred without it.

The ALP cannot defeat capitalism, although many of its critics from the Left seem to imagine it can. But it can continue to blunt its worst excesses. What should be expected of the party is the ability to manage well when economic or social disruption occurs. The Keynesian pump priming with which Rudd and Swan averted the worst excesses of the GFC has never been properly appreciated by Australian voters.

Voters expect Labor to be the agent of progressive change. They want Labor governments to DO something. If you move away from my argument about class and look at issues of social justice, then the Party has much to be proud of. It has delivered the Sex Discrimination Act, the Racial Discrimination Act, and almost all homosexual law reform at state and Federal levels. At the electoral level it has produced six out of seven women premiers and the only woman prime minister.

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I’m the first to admit that being an ALP member is sometimes hard going. There are outliers in the party that have their terrible views on women, abortion, refugees, and so on. But every party has their crazy drunken uncles. We had Mark Latham and Joe de Bruyn. The Coalition have Craig Kelly and George Christensen. The Greens have the anti-vaxxers and anti-fluoride flat earthers.

But can you imagine our democracy without the Labor Party?

There is something about the CULTURE of the Labor Party that is so Australian that it is integral to the Australian polity…our heroes and villains, our legends; Doc Evatt’s “crazy brave” decision to defend the Communist Party in the High Court because it was the “right thing to do”; Whitlam and Barnard changing the face of Australia in a fourteen day two-handed whirlwind.

And yes, we have to finish with the great moral and political dilemma of the last fifty years…climate change. This will be the greatest driver of generational inequity imaginable. Labor is the only government that can deliver any sensible policy on carbon emissions because it actually believes that climate change is real.

Yes, Labor is in pretty good shape and is needed in today’s Australia more than ever.