Julia Gillard and Simon Crean have both had good things to say about factions in the ALP lately. As Gillard observes, it’s no longer factions but fractions.
This would be a good time for Gillard in particular to put her arguments into practice by proposing the dissolution of the Left faction in the Parliamentary party and, failing that, withdrawing from the group. It’s been at least a decade since the “Left” has had any distinct policy position, and unlike the Right, the faction doesn’t justify its existence by delivering the top jobs to its members. Far from providing effective opposition to the Right machine, the Left justifies the existence of the Right.
If, say, 40 per cent of the Parliamentary Party were independent of any faction, and agreed to vote against candidates generated by intra-party factions, it wouldn’t be hard to peel off enough members of the Right to bring the whole corrupt system to an end at the Parliamentary level. And if the Parliamentary leadership was anti-factional, their votes would control the National Executive and permit intervention to break the factions in the state branches.
John Quiggin 
You are suggesting the formation of a new ALP faction than is anti-faction.
I’d argue that the factional system has in the past served the ALP well back when each faction had enough oomph to get the best of its members into place; it’s not a gimme that a free-for-all would have yielded less disruption or better candidates. But the demise of the Centre-Left has destroyed the balance of power and, combined with the ‘permanent opposition’ syndrome (people are more interested in consolidating their place within the opposition than in getting into government) this has led to disaster.
God knows, though, that the ALP now needs to clean out deadwood and select better candidates (as I’ve said before, one of the less obvious secrets of the Lib’s success federally in recent years is that it has simply selected much more attractive local candidates in marginal seats).
John’s observations are timely as are Derrida’s. Labor has to move into the twenty-first century. The dinosaurs have to be put out to pasture. Union hacks must be eradicated or pushed back to the shop floor where they belong.
Labor has to re-invent itself or suffer complete irrelevance. The calls of Crean and Gillard are a good beginning.
Bill Shorten is from the union movement but I like his rhetoric on taxes. The ALP has got to be a workers party not a welfare party. And it needs to adopt a broad definition of the term worker to include small business owners and anybody that expends time and effort making a living (ie most people).
The ALP could make a start by getting behind the IR reforms and stop carping about the loss of union power.
There is a role for factions as we argued on our blog, in terms of aggregating and presenting coalitions of ideas. And for all their current faults, they can be useful when they are based on ideology rather than personality.
Setting up an ‘independents faction’ won’t work. Its been recently tried in Victoria with Evan Thornley setting up his own DIY faction Labor First. And it has run out of puff. Anyone care to remember the Centre Left.
I know it might seem a silly question but why do the factions work so well at State level and so poorly at Federal level?
“If, say, 40 per cent of the Parliamentary party were independent of any faction, and agreed to vote against candidates generated by intra-party factions…” Do you want world peace and a pony as well?
‘Bothered’ commented:
“Union hacks must be eradicated or pushed back to the shop floor where they belong”.
The only problem with that is that they wouldn’t know where to find a shop floor! They would probably look for one in a latte palace.
“I know it might seem a silly question but why do the factions work so well at State level and so poorly at Federal level?”
Factions work well where Labor is in government and there are jobs to go around. When Labor is in opposition, it’s very much like the Mafia without profitable illicit enterprises to dole out to the capos.
Terge urges us to get behind the IR ‘Reforms’.
People I know have already been told by their employer they can be sacked instantly if they don’t toe the line. The same people (working in retail outlets) have no toilets (they have to use public toilets), no lunch room (they have to sit on public benches) and are told when they can go to the toilet. And they can’t protest because there are no other jobs to go to!
Sorry, Terge. Employers love IR reforms. Non-unionised workers are being exploited!
Trackback.
The ALP would do well to put a ban on formalised factions, as most political parties have. But the fact that the majority of Labor MPs made it into parliament on their loyalty to a faction (and not on their obvious lack of ability) makes this seem unlikely.
I think the question of union affiliation (or rather, the union bloc vote at conference) needs to be addressed also. Another interesting idea is that proposed some time ago for internal party voting procedures to be made accountable to the public, like trade union or employer association votes are, by making registered political parties body corporates.
The structure of the ALP suited well enough the politics of universal blue-collar unionism, town-hall meeting politics and reflexive electoral class identifications. That world collapsed in the late 1960s.
Now we have a vestigial blue-collar industrial sector, media-driven presidential politics and aspirational individualism. The institutional arrangements of the ALP are at odds with this world.
1. The Unions have too much organisational power. Union hacks represent no one but their own interests.
2. Factionalism determines preselection and it determines the make-up of the ALP front bench. Necessarily, the power of the factions is perceived to challenge the presidential claims of the leader of the Parliamentary Party. This is not a good look for voters who are attracted to the outward manifestations of power.
3. Australian voters don’t want to be reminded of their dingy blue-collar roots. They want to be flattered for their quest for a shiny future. The ALP represents for many a reminder of straitened personal circumstances.
These perceptions inhere in the structural arraingements of the ALP. They make commitment to the ALP difficult and slightly embarrassing for many marginally engaged Australians.
Katz,
1. The largest union in terms of overall numbers affiliated with the ALP is a white-collar union (the SDA) whose members, I’m sure, aren’t exactly at the top end–or for that matter the middle–of the income scale;
2. Quite a number of Labor MPs are from white-collar union backgrounds such as the teachers’, services and public sector unions;
3. Only a handful of Labor MPs have ever worked in a blue-collar job–the vast majority, including among blue-collar union officials, are university-trained;
4. The overall composition of ALP local branches is professional, middle-class and university-educated–your image of a grey, dingy blue-collar ALP doesn’t hold up;
I forgot to mention,
5. Some Labor figures are surprisingly wealthy (NSW MLC Eddie Obeid is a millionaire, AWU Secretary Bill Shorten married into one of the wealthiest families in Victoria)–again, your image of proletarian ALP doesn’t hold up, and probably hasn’t for at least half a century.
In several respects the interplay between the affiliated unions and the ALP factional system is detrimental to the unions’ capacity to do their priority job of looking after the interests of their members:
1. Strongly factional union leaders devote an inordinate amount of their time to issues which are doubtless of interest to themselves and their faction, but peripheral to their members’ interests (e.g. the Shoppies’ leaders’ obsession with opposing embryonic stem cell research doesn’t do much for the pay and conditions of the checkout staff at Woolies). I am indebted to Mark Latham for this point.
2. Union recruitment and organising tends to be skewed towards workplaces and localities where large numbers of more or less passive members can be signed up (often entailing sweetheart deals with employers) to bolster factional numbers within the ALP, rather than attending to workers who may be more difficult to organise (e.g. in small enterprises) yet whose need for union services and representation may well be greater. I am indebted to former Senator John Black for this point.
3. Unions in industry sectors where restructuring may be both desirable on public interest grounds, and likely to result in net gains in overall employment and in the wages, conditions, skills and career paths of the affected workers, may oppose such restructuring (to the long-run detriment of their members) because at the end of it their members may become members of a different union, with consequences for factional numbers in the ALP. I can’t help wondering out loud whether this is part of the explanation for the bloody-minded “hang on to what we’ve got” conservatism of the forestry unions.
MB, I’m talking about the perceptions of quite disengaged voters, those prejudices that propel the pencil in the voting booth.
I don’t dispute the facts you present, but they aren’t facts that are electorally important.
Fred and MB are dead right
The majority of union leaders wouldnt have worked in a blue collar job in their lives and would have trouble finding the sites where the members that they represent are. I can only think of one union where all the officers come from off the job (MUA) and even this policy has not done a lot of good for their members.
How to fix this mess?
Buggered if i know!
All Ill say is it appears to be bye bye Beazley as Bill roars into Maribyrnong
The most telling fact to come out of the Hotham preselection was that there were only 200 ALP members eligible to vote. With 87,400 enroled voters that represents 0.22% of the elctorate. How much harder would it be for the factions to control preselections if we could double party membership? Here’s a few suggestions:
1/ for a nominal fee allow any enrolled voter to register as a labor supporter with voting rights
2/ set up internet-based branches
3/ remove the requirement to be a union member (only 25% of workforce are now in unions)
Julia in the lion’s den…
As Simon Crean’s victory ignites calls for Beazley to take a stand against factionalism and resuscitate the decaying democracy of the Labor Party, Julia Gillard has given a speech to The Sydney Institute describing factionalism as a cancer. Gillard ca…
Paul, I think points two and three on your list are unfairly attributed to affiliation to the ALP.
Focussing on the “easy” workers is a pragmatic decision made by any union that has to work with finite resources. Finding the balance between servicing members and organising workers is difficult. Unfortunately it is impossible to go after the hard-to-organise workers without a relatively large and stable membership base, which means devoting significant time and resources to “soft” sites and servicing existing members (to keep them!). At times this might involve sweetheart deals with certain employers, but to the extent that this allows organisers to work harder at other sites, it may have a net beneficial impact. I note that it is only by expanding membership into weaker areas that unions can increase their influence within the ALP. Therefore the real problem here is that some unions might do sweetheart deals and use those resources and time to pursue factional goals instead of new members — which strikes me as being already covered by your point 1.
And as to your third point, whether or not they are affiliated to the ALP, these unions would work to protect their turf. I don’t see that as a problem that comes from affiliation.
I was suprised as any posters on this site who know my RWDB proclivities to be approached to join my local ALP Branch and gently sounded out for future pre-selection. The biggest things that turned me off were the requirement to belong to a union and the lecture I received from a well meaning women that I shouldn’t have private health insurance or consider sending my children to private schools because both of those meant the standards of government services fell as the affluent funded what they desired and the less wealthy were unable to effectively lobby to get the resources to equal the private sector – therefore my family should also suffer. I think I ‘d make a crap politician anyway. I declined the invitation.
Oh, and all the bloody raffles etc drives me batty.
Razor,
Your unwillingness to put party before family is to be commended. It is obscene that anybody would expect you to do otherwise.
Regards,
Terje.
I heard Warren Mundine on the 7.30 report tonight. What a great advertisement of the Labor Party he is, sounding as he does like some brickies’ labourer.
The Labor Party is a shambles and Kim Beazely has all the leadership qualities of an earth worm!
I just remember the talk in the 1980s and early 1990s, about how the structure of the Liberal Party made it unfit for government, the union association gave the Labor Party a good stable funding base, the factions reduced the scope for damaging internal rifts in the Party all of which made it the natural party of government etc. etc. etc. All rubbish. Both parties have some time servers on the back bench and some dross on the front.
The difference is that the ALP parliametary party does not seem to believe it can win the next election, therefore the fighting is over the spoils in opposition; whereas the government members know they can win, so the incentive is to be loyal to the leader for a plum post in government.
The ALP leadership is the problem – and there does not seem to be a viable alternative to the current one. They are condemned to ineffective opposition until either JWH gets caught in bed with a naked economic crisis or the ALP starts to think they can win – probably through finding a leadership team they can believe in.
But can you really expect a charismatic leader to emerge from a mess like that? It’s become a cliche to say that in today’s ALP Curtin, Chifley and Whitlam would not have been preselected, but I suspect even Hawke and Keating would have struggled to win a seat.
I am interested to see that according to some there is a requirement to be a member of a union before eligibility to join the ALP.
I joined the ALP as a member in Qld several years ago (two days after Paul Keating’s defeat), and was not a member of a union at the time (there tends not to be a union for stay-at-home parents…).
I have since moved interstate and was able to join a branch here as well without the need to be a member of any union.
I have since chosen to join a union as a result of the changes to the IR laws. But never has it been suggested to me that it was a requirement…
🙂
DD said:
‘…the factional system has in the past served the ALP well back when each faction had enough oomph to get the best of its members into place.’
Are you saying that a given talented person is more likely to get the ministerial spot he deserves in the presence of factions? How does this work; or how have I misunderstood?
The Gnome Says:
Link to the forms or instructions to join each of the state branches can be found here.
The NSW membership application form states: “*NOTE: Membership applicants, if eligible, must be members of a trade union and must remain a union member during their ALP membership.”
The Victorian form states: “NOTE: Membership Applicants must be a member of an affiliated union if eligible.”
The WA form asks for union membership details, and offers discounted fees for members of affilitaed unions, but doesn’t appear to require union membership.
The NT form does not require union membership.
Queensland gives a “404 Not Found” error.
The ACT form is not available online, so I don’t know what it says.
The SA form is not available online.
If the Tas website is any guide, there’s no way for anyone at all to join that branch.
Gnome,
To join the ALP there may be no union membership requirement. However last time I checked (admitedly before the last election) you could not be an ALP candidate for election to parliament if:-
a) You were not a member of a union or
b) You employed non union labour.
Specifically Peter Garrett had to join a union before he could sit as an ALP candidate for election.
Regards,
Terje.
OK, I found the Qld form via Google. Like the NT, Queensland does not require union membership.
Terje: You’re wrong, as usual. Garrett had to join a union in order to become a member of the branch in the state where he lived, i.e. NSW.
The NSW ALP Constitution and rules is available in PDF format here:-
Click to access 2003_rules_book_webver.pdf
The following extract is taken from the section about candidates for public office:-
Whilst the ALP may have different rules in other states it is clear from the above that ALP Candidates for public office are expected to be members of a union.
In the last paragraph “ALP Candidates” should read “NSW ALP Candidates”.
Terje says:
“The ALP could make a start by getting behind the IR reforms and stop carping about the loss of union power”
If Labor does what you propose it might as well merge with Coalition. The IR “reforms” are all about screwing the least powerful workers and delivering higher profits to exploiters.
The unions and the ALP need to severe their electoral ties now. The two will be more effective if they are separate than they currently are together. The argument for this is similar to the arguments for the separation of church and state. It’s not simply that the state (the ALP) is corrupted by its linkage with the church (the unions) but also vice versa: the unions have been sunk by completely self-interested hacks.
Union members need to kick out their so-called leaders. As discussed by others here, these people ceased being workers generations ago. Almost all have law or similar high-class degrees (of course, these were subsidized by stipends from student union fees). Most have fathers with such degrees … and a fair share of them have grandfathers with such degrees. Their contempt for union members can be seen in the fact that somewhere close to 100% of their time is spent plotting and planning their own electoral future with a coterie of similar elites.
In fact, union members might not even need to actively kick these users out: cut the electoral link between the unions and the ALP and their ‘deeply committed leaders’ will desert the unions in less time than it takes to yell “RATS�.
The Labor Party, currently, is an irrelevance. It hasn’t worked out yet that the age of Chifley has long gone.
Blair demonstrated how to change but the pre-historic figures in the ALP cling to the past, perhaps foolishly hoping it will return.
Instead of navel-gazing and looking backwards, Labor must change before it completely self-destructs and leaves Australians at the mercy of Winston!
P.S. Surely the name Winston being attached to Howard is one of the great ironies of history
It’s a pity that Reith’s career stalled after the Dubais and Telecards fiascos. As I remember it, his union-busting intention was to have AEC-supervised ballots for election of union officials, strike decisions, union donations to the ALP, etc.
From a Labor reformist point of view, this need not be bad news. If the AEC held a data base on union members (which included electoral residencies), and ALP preselection dates were formalised and uniform, could not the AEC notify union members of their right to vote for the ALP candidate in their electorate? It would mean, of course, that local ALP branch members who were also union members would effectively have two votes. But it still sounds a lot fairer than giving union officials a number of votes because their union has 10,000 members.
What have union officials done to deserve extra vote weighting? Brought important money to the ALP, yes, but it is after all members’ money, not their own. This proposal would eventually destroy the factional system because there would no longer be the blocs controlled by particular factional alliances. e.g. an area like Port Adelaide would have members of various unions. The members would be more likely to vote for their own local interests rather than those of union secretaries. Ditto for delegates to ALP conferences.
I believe that ALP members and supporters are not necessarily in sympathy with the factional heavies. The most obvious example is that when the ALP National Presidency was thrown open to a rank-and-file ballot, Carmen Lawrence and Barry Jones trounced the factional nominee.
It’s a bit utopian, but the ALP cannot afford to keep sweeping these issues under the carpet. Branch membership is appallingly low. As somebody else mentioned, having a bit over 200 eligible voters in Hotham, an electorate of 85,000, is woeful. So, too, is a primary vote of 37 or 38%. No wonder they only ever talk about the two-party-preferred vote. Think of it this way: 63% of the voters would rather have someone else running the country.
When Whitlam was sacked and trounced at the following election he became an electoral pariah that nobody talks about. But from memory I think he still managed a primary vote of around 43%. If Labor could have managed that any time in the last few years, they’d be back in office.
“What have union officials done to deserve extra vote weighting?”
Oh, I don’t know… founded the Labor Party?
True, Robert, but what have they done for us lately?
Robert,
They must be very old union officials by now. You may want to honour those who founded a party that my grandfather used to support and be an MLA for, and it has a great past, but to say that the current crop of union leaders deserve to have a vote because of what happened a century or so ago is to be a little bit too conservative, IMHO.
If business was as blatant about the money and influence injected into the Liberals as the Union movement is with the ALP imagine the outcry. I understand the historical and even current arguments for unions, however the question of whether it is appropriate that they have such direct influence politics needs to be addressed. I think it is time for a change.
Party primaries would destroy the factions in an instant.
Look, there is some tiny progress in the right direction:
– Quite a few of the old “Trade Halls”, etc. are changing their approach and a few are going even further by changing their name, ie: UNIONS NSW… that’s a begining.
– A few Unions (way too few so far!) are witholding their $$$ contributions to the ALP, and putting the money into fighting funds for the upcoming fight to send them broke, picking them off one by one. Together with the new found focus on “activism” and “active” members” and increasing the industry coverage this can deliver more than lobbying a business focused state gov. ever did. Just ask Macquarie Bank’s Bob Carr
– The lessons learned in NZ and the USA are starting to being put into practice, just! The fight for a shrinking pie is a losing battle. And they know it is not so hard to grow (and get more $!) when you actually focus on what you should’ve been doing anyway…
– The CFMEU lovefest with hoWARd just before the election and troubles with Latham in Tassie taught many hardcore unionists a tough lesson. And the payola Lennon is giving (and getting) from GUNNS, his brother and PBL are scaring the crap out of everyone. Not much different to NSW’s Macq Bank or tunnel deals…
Who’s really calling the shots I wonder? Definitely not the Unions and not the braches that’s for sure! (hint: follow the money!)
I’ve said it many times before: differentiation!
What Oz really needs is a real workers’ party, maybe what the ALP once was. At the moment Beazley and the ALP only stand for: Another Liberal Party.
Add a few good independents (well on their way), maybe the Democrats finally getting their shite together (maybe) and the growing Greens (maybe), and before you know hoWARd is gone! A good progressive alliance anyone?
But it will also mean factions get sweetFA and the real hard work and Democracy we’ve been missing so much can be center stage again.
(just add world peace, real economic analysis, scientific development & understanding -not BS
oh, & a pony! 🙂
Julia wants to decry factional influencein ALP preselections. If she’s to be taken as anything more than an opportunist spiv, she needs to come clean about her own preselection in Lalor in 1997, which she won as the benificiary of a deal between Martin Ferguson from the Ferguson Left and Stephen Conroy from Labor Unity, without any real local support. She then needs to resign her seat and contest a new preselection and actually gain rank-and-file support.
May she never be leader.
Interesting topic. I have to say I don’t actually know how these factions work. Can someone spell it out please?
What unions would MP’s such as Beazley belong to? Does anyone know if he is a member, current and financial?
Clearly many union officials abandon their union work to promote themselves as political candidates. This is the same for MP’s who seem to spend most of their time in party politics instead of working for their electorates. I count time spent in Parliament under today’s conditions as party political only as well as the rest of the time they spend on it.
I really don’t like the idea of the leader of the party making all the decisions. That has nothing to do with democracy as I see it. How to deal with that issue of course is tough as either way there is opportunity for favouritism, corruption etc.