One of the points coming up in discussion of the ALP faction issue is the claim that while factions are destructive in the Federal Party they have worked well at a state level. I think this is the reverse of the truth. The faction system worked reasonably well at the Federal level throughout the Hawke-Keating years. At the state level, the system has been poisonous and destructive ever since it took its current form around the time of the Split in the mid-50s.
Full-scale factionalism has been most dominant in Queensland, NSW and Victoria. In Queensland, the AWU and Old Guard factions kept Peter Beatty and the reformers out for years, promoting instead a succession of hacks and no-hopers, most notably Keith Wright, later convicted of sex offences against young girls.
The NSW Right has been similarly dismal, failing miserably to beat the corrupt Robin Askin and losing horribly whenever it put up one of its own favored sons as a leader or contender for any position of substance (Pat Hills, Barrie Unsworth, Michael Lee and almost certainly Morris Iemma as well). Labor in NSW has only succeeded when outsiders like Wran and Carr (a member of the Right, but not a Sussex St hack) have managed to get the top job.
Victorian factions have been a source of grief and disaster for fifty years, and obviously nothing has changed. From Santamaria & Kennelly[1] to Hartley to Conroy, whatever the ideology, the style hasn’t changed.
Labor’s performance at the state level is, and always has been, inversely proportional to the strength of the factions.
fn1. I always remember my father describing how, as a returned serviceman, he joined the ALP (along with my uncle) in the hope of doing something for the good of the working class, and how Pat Kennelly (the “Kingmaker”) led them to quit in disgust.
John Quiggin 
Perhaps one of the unfortuante truths is that fations work when a party is in government, but not so much when it is in opposition.
In governemnt a formalised faction system becomes a useful means of managing dissent within the party and the fruits of government means there are enough patronage goodies to keep everyone mollified.
In opposition, with the little or no patronage goodies, the factions become bitter tribes fighting over the rapidly reduced stakes.
Unsworth and Iemma provide counterexamples. Labor was in government when the Right imposed these guys as leaders. I can’t recall who else was available when Wran quit, but Refshauge would have been the obvious choice this time around if it weren’t for the faction system.
My dictionary defines a TRIBE as ‘An ethnic or ancestral division of ancient cultures’.
That tribes still exist in 2006 suggests that humans have made little progress. We are, as the imminent invasion of Iran will further demonstrate, little better than primitive beasts.
John, I was living in Sydney when Wran quit in 1986, and the Right had the option of backing Carr for the leadership (not to mention Laurie Brereton and one or two others), yet still chose Unsworth.
One of the baleful medium-term consequences of the subsequent electoral debacle in 1988 was that the NSW Right, to avoid blame for its own role in installing an unelectable Premier, confected the ludicrous argument that the election had been lost over the State Government’s plans for tighter regulation of gun ownership, which had antagonised the supposedly powerful gun lobby. This myth of the ability of the Australian gun lobby to make or break governments took hold in the ALP across Australia, leading to years of inaction on the issue despite a string of shooting tragedies like the Hoddle Street massacre in Melbourne.
In the 1995 State election the Queensland ALP was so terrified of the gun lobby that it spent $22,500 in party funds to compensate them for the money they spent on the newspaper ads they were going to run before the Goss government backed down on its gun control plans. This was the same election in which Queensland Labor went down in flames confronting urban environmentalists over its mad Eastern Tollway proposal.
The bitter fruits of the Labor Right’s mythology about the gun lobby were harvested with the deaths of dozens of people at Port Arthur in 1996, and the subsequent boost to Howard’s standing when he introduced strong gun control measures in response, and showed the gun lobby to be the paper tiger which it always was outside of the NSW Labor Right’s blame-avoiding mythology.
And yet much as the gun lobby predicted we now have more gun related crime.
I was wondering about this comparison between Federal and State Labour. I spent the morning working out the percentage of days since 1/1/1946 that labour has been in power at each level and state. (I hope i have not made a mistake.)
70% NSW
69% Tasmania
46% South Australia
42% Queensland
42% Western Australia
35% Victoria
33% Federal
As you can see Federal Labour has done worse than any state labour party. What’s more, the highly factionalised NSW party has been the most successful.
I think this supports the argument that factions per se are not an obstacle to winning government (although they probably are an obstacle to good government). I am sticking with Latham’s view that the fundamental problem is that it has too many factions at the federal level.
John, my argument was that the conflict management benefits of factionalism are higher in government than in opposition. I did not for a moment deny that factionalism factionalism will has costs and clearly one of those costs is that factions may often result in sub-optimal leadership choices.
The querstion is whether, and under what circumstances, the costs outweigh the benefits. I think its clear that the costs usually outweigh the benefits in oppostion, where it’s harder to keep the factions all pulling in the same general direction. John Brogden’s political demise, for example, is a terrible example of factional rivalry damaging the party as a whole. OTOH, if anything, my understanding is that the factional system acted as a brake on Paul Keating’s destabilaation of Bob Hawke. The difference? Being in government.
I’m neither adovocating nor condemning formal factionalism. I think its a conflict management tool that works well or badly, depending on the circumstances.
However, if I’m right and, on balance, factionalism generally “works” in government but not in opposition, then ther is still teh question of how you can arrange things so you have it in government and not in opposition. And I’m not sure you can…
SWIO,
By going back to 1946 you get the wrong answer. In the 50s and 60s NSW was less factionalised than Queensland, Vic and Federal Labor, mainly because the Catholic hierarchy there didn’t back the Groupers or the Split. And Labor in SA was kept out until the late 60s by the Playford gerrymander, even though it regularly won majorities of the vote. It would be better to do the comparison starting with the Federal interventions of the late 60s, which stablised the factional system.
I can’t let Terje Petersen’s suggestion go unchallenged that we have had more gun related crime since the introduction of Howard’s gun laws. This from the Australian Institute of Criminology:
“Between 1 July 1989 and 30 June 2002 there has been a gradual decline in the use of firearms to commit homicide. Firearms were used in 26 per cent of homicides in Australia in 1989-90, compared to 14 per cent in 2001-02.”
http://www.aic.gov.au/publications/cfi/cfi054.html
Off the topic but important.
The faction system as we know it goes back to the split in the 1950’s. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the demise of the rightly derided soviet union, there no longer remains any ideological ‘figleaf’ to cover what is in reality, a system for dealing with ambition and avarice in some sort of orderly way. The ‘defactionalisation’ of the NSW union movement has produced improved ‘capacity’ and imaginative responses to campaigning that would have been impossible under the dead weight of the logs that used to dominate that body. At both State and federal levels of the ALP, the factional system has not only impeded the developement of good leadership, it has mitigated against the development of new ideas and new people who are interested in ideas precisley at a time when new people and new ideas are desperately needed.
I am afraid that the current crop of wannabees at the federal level are capable of little more than waiting to see ‘what turns up’ and in the meantime fiddling with ideas redolent of Blairism, at exactly the historical time as those ideas have been ‘exhausted’. Lindsay Tanner’s speech to the CIS two days ago is an example of the problem. Lindsay Tanner is a bright and articualte MP but his speech was awful. The state concieved as a kind of ‘life coach’, ‘educating and exhorting’, rather than dealing with life risk, is a great metaphor, and seems designed for the times as well as that audience, but as a way of dealing with the real risks piling up for both working families and the economy generally it signals a complete inability to understand the problem, let alone speak to a solution. It also signally fails to deal with the growing imbalance of power in this society, as the wealthy and well connected continue to write the rules to improve their positon relative to the rest of the ‘mob’, whose sullen response in turn, is to resolutely refuse to become engaged in politics and to reject active engagement in a game where the price of admission is beyond their means, and the rules preclude meaningful engagement.
I was in Green at primary School and then Black in high school.
Does that help??
The problem may not necessarily rest with the factions, but rather the limited spread of experience of ALP MPs. About 35 % of current ALP MPs are from a union background; which represents about 20-25% of the laborforce. The chart showing this is at http://weekbyweek7.blogspot.com/
To refute Terje’s statement, you would have to look at all gun-related crime, and take the data from 1996 to the present, rather than 1989-2002.
“The bitter fruits of the Labor Right’s mythology about the gun lobby were harvested with the deaths of dozens of people at Port Arthur…”
Okay, and the bitter fruits of Howard’s gun control mythology were harvested with the rampant shootings of scores of people in the gangland wars of contemporary Victoria.* If owning a gun (or a particular type of gun) makes one a criminal, then it follows that criminals will monopolise the guns.
*Of course, I have no evidence that Howard’s gun laws have made a skerrick of a difference to Melbourne’s gangland wars…but it is no worse of me to say so than it is to blame Port Arthur on the New South Wales Labor Right.
The ALP has become hollowed out from the top-down and white-anted from the bottom-up.
The factional system has always blighted the ALP, mainly because Left politickos only have politics as a trade whereas the Right has business to fall back on as a day job.
Factionalism was manageable in the old days because the factions had solid social bases, in the trade unions, suburban branches, univiersities and churches. Also, the Left tended to take ideology more seriously in those days, and would split or purge on priciple, thereby solving serious factional disputes by extinguishing them.
Nowadays, with the decline in the Broad Left social base, especially factional war lords rule over hollowed-out shells. Lacking a social anchor the factions have become unaccountable and a cause unto themselves alone. That is to say, they have become purely vehicles for personal careerism.
The ethnic lobbies have slipped into the social vacum created by the decline of Labor’s union base. They have white-anted many of the branches and stacked them to get their own way with the factional war lords.
I think Terje has to provide evidence for the claim about gun-related crime. But I do agree that blaming ALP factionalism for Port Arthur is a stretch.
It is not the factions, but majority rule that is the problem (Arrow 1952).
Actually, it was Barrie Unsworth, favoured son of the NSW Right, Premier from 1986 to 1988 who with great precience lamented that it would take a gun massacre in Tasmania before anyone would take gub control seriously.
“you would have to look at all gun-related crime, and take the data from 1996 to the present, rather than 1989-2002.”
Why? Only semi-automatics were outlawed in 1996.