The Struggle For The Soul Of The Labor Movement

The Hon Rodney Cavalier AO is a former NSW Minister in the Wran and Unsworth Governments. He is also the author of a powerful critique of contemporary Labor – Power crisis: the self-destruction of a state Labor Party (2010). On Tuesday 19 June, Rodney Cavalier joined Cassandra Wilkinson, author, activist and former senior adviser in the NSW Keneally Government and labour movement icon and dissident Jim Macken in a discussion of the Labor Party and its future.

THE STRUGGLE FOR THE SOUL OF THE LABOR MOVEMENT

RODNEY CAVALIER

I want to congratulate Jim Macken on his splendid book. He has honoured me by allowing me to read it in manuscript. I am agog as I reflect that the most rabid of the Industrial Groupers, the Movement operatives and the founding members of the DLP, were well to the Left of anyone in the ALP Left in 2012. That is how far to the Right our politics has shifted.

Jim has put forward a serious and credible solution on how Labor brings to an end union control of its governance. Unless union control ends, nothing changes. Union control is not going to end – not without legislative intervention – so nothing will change. For that reason, Labor is doomed.

I was so entranced by the homage to Lenin in the title that I overlooked the silliness of the sub-title. If I had noticed, I would have observed to the author the following.

There is no struggle, there is no soul, there is no Movement. Dealing with the three nouns seriatim, I contend that.

(1)    Struggle: the Right has incorporated the “Left”. There is no competition for control of the party administration, no contest for who defines the guiding philosophy. When the Cold War ended, the faction leaderships entered into a collaboration – a grand accommodation – to shut out the membership in favour of a monopoly of spoils going to those who offer liege service. The faction leaderships carve the goodies between themselves and liegemen. The state preselections of 2003 were an especially scurvy moment. Since the death of an ALP Left in the 1990s, there is now not even a pretence that those who wear the label are other than junior partners inside the Right coalition.

(2)    With the consequence that Labor has forfeited a belief system and binding values, there is no position on any issue from one end of the spectrum to the other that Labor cannot occupy. The exemplar is climate change in which Federal Labor has occupied polar extremes and two points in between. That is what happens when a party lacks a soul.

(3)     Movement. How can there be a movement when nothing much is moving? Unions are down to 8 per cent of the electorate. Over 150 branches have folded in NSW, few of the remainder pass a breath on the mirror test. There might be 500 activists remaining in all of NSW.

Labor is not a Movement. It is a Hollow.

The absence of any meaningful involvement by the ALP in the 2007 federal election campaign and since tells you all you need to know that the struggle for soul was resolved by the separation of parliamentary Labor into spaceships that roam the galaxies, touching base only on set-piece occasions, otherwise unconnected with a wider Labor community. A consequence has been the inability to staff polling booths across much of the Australian land mass.

The leader has become a Godhead. To understand Labor’s governance, think beyond Westminster and go back to the Tudors.

The rough, rude democracy of Australian Labor has been supplanted by absolute fealty to the Godhead in the leadership whose word is binding, from whom all authority flows. The Godhead provides all and everything of what Labor stands for. Loyalty is absolute up to the moment the Godhead is assassinated for an alternative Godhead after which the preceding loyalty transfers. Exactly like European monarchy in the Middle Ages.

Jim Macken is a disciple of Fernand Braudel. So was Jack Ferguson. Braudel was the founder of the school of longue durée. He has taught that everything in politics is structure, structure is everything.

Efforts at very limited reform were rejected in public at National Conference for transparently self-interested reasons. The factions (both of the labels) do not pretend that the reason is other than a distrust of democracy.

I wrote in 2001 that the caucus just elected was the weakest in the history of Federation. The degeneration continued in 2004, 2007 and 2010. Labor is incapable of renewal or drawing on the broad talents of the Labor constituency because it has become a closed shop, controlled and managed by a political class. Everything that was wrong in 2001 has become a lot worse. The Labor constituency is a shadow of what it was, in numbers and in quality. The continuing degeneration of Labor in parliament is an actuarial certainty.

By political class, I mean union officials, ministerial and parliamentary staffs, party employees. There are also mercenaries involved in public relations, polling and fundraising. The other side of politics has developed a political class which has equivalents in the think tanks and lobby groups for industry. The aspirants for parliament have become an operative for a faction of Labor or the Liberals. The Greens are developing the same way. Factional operatives are members of the only class which has survived into this century – the political class. They are a coherent grouping which fulfills all of the Marxist definitions of class: consciousness of each other, action in concert, action in self-interest.

The mug punters themselves, the people of Australia, work out the foibles, shortcomings, the strengths of leaders and potential leaders before the media. The people worked out they did not like K.Rudd while the media and a caucus who hated him continued to treat him seriously.

The punters have worked out there is something seriously wrong with the ALP. Party reform may not cut any ice as a coffee table topic or bar talk. The problem is the absence of reform, the transfer of power to below, which has caused the decay in the quality of our representation to be palpable. The punters do not necessarily know why the Labor Party is no longer for them but they do know that the Labor Party is not for them.

New South Wales 2011 is the way of the future. Labor lost office in NSW in 2011 without a tear being shed. No one dared to pretend the people’s verdict was not just. I have lived through the defeats of 1975, 1988 and 1996. Labor gatherings were awash with tears in every electorate in the state. We woke the next morning, if we slept at all, with defiance in our hearts. After 2011, there was only relief that the embarrassment at what was called Labor had departed without trace.

So serious is the decay that I assert as an axiom that Labor cannot produce another Keating or Whitlam. I do not even begin to dream of Curtin and Chifley. Leaders in the past came from below; they had been branch operatives, localists with an assured sense of community. They were not anointed because of connection. They had to appeal to the unwashed and the sparkling who made up the ALP membership in lounge rooms and kitchens and a thousand branch meetings.

Past leaders encountered opposition which did not cease, not even when they were high and mighty. Caucus meetings savaged leaders as appropriate, as did the ALP conferences. Past leaders entered leadership with the qualities of a leader forged by a career based on struggle and intense competition.

Labor produced not only people who were capable of governing but capable of opposing the asinine and the ill-considered, people capable of telling mugs in the leadership that they were mugs.

Not now.

The ALP used to be a perfect training ground for leading the nation. Rough, brutal, racist, misogynist, anti-intellectual, parochial, xenophobic, a culture of limited expectation – all of that and so much else and it produced in each caucus no fewer than six people worthy of Australia.

Not now.

Emerging from all of that was wrong were internationalists, civil libertarians, people of convictions unshakable, leaders profoundly respectful of who put them there and sustained them. Whatever its faults and shortcomings, Labor’s nursery worked in enough electorates for Australian Labor to produce people worthy of the nation’s leadership. Labor produced not only people who were capable of governing but capable of opposing the asinine and the ill-considered, people capable of telling mugs in the leadership that they were mugs.

Not now.

Now Labor has a leadership drawn from the political class, anointed by the political class to act in the interests of the political class. Labor does not enjoy an internal opposition. Parliamentary leadership cannot mask what is not there, as the Rudd experiment showed. Character is what you bring to office. It is not a trait devised in a workshop, an elixir brewed by a focus group. Such people, such narrowness, most certainly may win elections but they cannot provide good government.

Fewer than 500 people, denizens of the political class, have any chance of getting preselected for anything winnable. The 500 are connected to each other. It is easier for a person of humble background to use education and hard work to enter the leadership of the ASX200 companies than it is to crack a safe Labor seat. That is one reason that safe seats are becoming scarcer and less safe. In the old BHP culture, connection was everything. Now it scarcely matters. Connections of blood, marriage and friendship are everything in the modern ALP.

For contemporary Labor to produce a leader worthy of Australia is about as likely as Bermuda winning Olympic gold.

The impulse to panic that envelops parliamentary Labor periodically is the consequence of a parliamentary grouping living inside a spaceship. There is no anchor, no reference point, nothing to cling to. Certainly not the notion of loyalty. Loyalty to what? Not to the leader, a disposable entity whose survival depends on a perception he or she can win the next election. Not to a set of principles or beliefs, since modern Labor is not troubled by such matters. Not to the party membership, of whom there are so few and those few will not determine whether you get preselection again. If the party appears to be directionless it is because it is lacking direction.

Such a party exists to win elections.

The Labor Project has come to an end. I base my view not on the primary vote or seats held but because you cannot be a mainstream party if you cannot put an army in the field. I think that the Labor Project is what Jim has in mind in his writings.

By Labor Project I mean those first, fond hopes at the party’s founding that Labor’s existence would be transformative. Labor was going to be different and better and exist for the advancement of working people and the dispossessed. In one sense, Labor killed itself by reason of its success in education and housing. Labor enriched its support base and housed people who could not afford houses and made possible home ownership and educated their children. The beneficiaries of a century of good Labor decided they did not need Labor. That is the benign explanation. The less kind view is that the party became a machine to deliver jobs and favours, a rotten affair that exists solely to provide careers. The professionalisation of politics gave birth to a political class.

When it is recognised that Labor is entering a long midnight, the ambitious will go elsewhere. That will be a fascinating spectacle to watch. Who will be the first Labor staffer to defect to the Libs?

Labor is already gone. The matter of the death of a party calling itself Labor is not really in dispute. In most of Australia, certainly in rural and regional Australia, Labor does not exist. The collapse has embraced the arc of the party’s birth in Sydney including, incredibly, Glebe and Redfern. Where once there were eight branches in those two suburbs, now there are none.

The ALP does not pass a breath on the mirror test in most of the hundred or so branches with a nominal existence.

Labor has to change its identity and its structure or it is locked into a vote which hits a ceiling of c.35 per cent. While ever parliamentary Labor retains 25 per cent of the primary, it stands in the way of anything worthwhile emerging. Tony Blair spoke in these terms during his run for the UK Labour leadership during a speech in Adelaide of all places.

The Labor Project is over but the worst kind of Labor Party remains. That remainder is capable of electing members of parliament. While ever a brand called Labor can elect members of parliament, the brand will endure, a party without values, reduced to a cameo, playing a charade of tax cuts and budgets in surplus, unwilling to achieve a revenue base for the public sector that will rebuild the nation and fund adequately schools, universities and hospitals. Brand Labor cannot bring itself to defend the role of government as a positive force in the lives of the Australian people. That silence represents the ghost whispers of the Labor Project.

These years will become known to history as the period in which the political parties betrayed Australia. All of them.

Give thanks for the independent culture and vigour of the Reserve Bank, the Australian Taxation Office, the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the Australian Electoral Commission, the National Library and our collecting institutions. Give thanks for an independent judiciary, the rule of law and a military which accepts civilian authority.

Civil society depends on strong institutions with a powerful institutional culture. The political parties of contemporary Australia are not among those institutions.