Back around 1970, the Labor Party was unelectable because its biggest branches, in NSW and Victoria, were controlled by factional machines of the right and left respectively, who were still refighting the battles of the 1950s Split. The eventual response was Federal intervention to restructure both branches. The intervention was more successful in Victoria than in NSW, but overall the results were good enough to produce a revitalised Labor party. The election of the Whitlam government was one result, as was the strength of the early Hawke ministries, almost any member of which would outperform the great majority of both frontbenches today.
I doubt that an intervention would produce a similar result in NSW today, but the situation is now so dire that it could scarcely make matters worse. It’s hard to imagine a political party with less justification for its continued existence than NSW Labor. It sold out its stated principles with repeated attempts to privatise the electricity industry, then made a botch of the job anyway> It has made itself look stupid with repeated changes of leaders (the only one who tried any resistance to the machine was Nathan Rees, and he was promptly squashed). Its members are enmeshed in every kind of corruption, financial, ethical and sexual, above and beyond the routine corruption of political processes that turned the word “rort” from Sussex Street slang into an Australian byword for sharp practice. Electorally, it’s a disaster area, having gone down to the worst defeat in its modern history, under the sock-puppet leadership of Kristina Keneally. Even though the NSW Libs are, as they always have been, appallingly bad, the O’Farrell government is riding high.
And now, these geniuses have decided that it’s smart politics to make war on the party that’s keeping Federal Labor in office, and with which they will need to deal for the indefinite future if they ever want to pass legislation through the Parliament. Looking at this appalling crew, I can only quote Oliver Cromwell “You have been sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go.”
Update My friends at the Oz take a keen interest in all my thoughts, so I wasn’t too surprised to see this post linked in their “Cut and Paste” section. However, the headline All the Climate Change Authority member would like now is to get rid of the NSW Right seemed both unwieldy and obtuse, in a fish-meets-bicycle kind of way. Why should my (widely shared and longstanding) views on the NSW Labor Right machine be of any more interest by virtue of my membership of the Climate Change Authority? And why should my enthusiasm about the election of the Rudd government (also linked by Cut and Paste) be relevant to either?
The answer, I would imagine, is this post by Sinclair Davidson at Catallaxy who (in a quite strange misreading) took the imprecation “In the name of God, go” to be directed, not at the Sussex Street machine repeatedly criticised in the post, but at the Federal Labor government. Terje Peterson tried to set him straight in comments (thanks, Terje), but I had to spell the point out before he added a correction on Sunday evening, which made the entire post rather pointless. By that time, I imagine, the cutter and paster had already set the story up and gone home, leaving the unfortunate sub-editor to do a salvage job with the headline (not the first time!).
John Quiggin 
How the NSW state ALP faction leaders changed the premier at will mystifies me. What do they have over the rest of caucus to make them bend to their will?
Most of the NSW Labor caucus were going to lose their seats anyway so the only issue was how many. The faction leaders were no help in this regard: savings labor seats .
Richo helped Labor win! The NSW faction leaders do the opposite. The only reason NSW Labor kept 20 seats was that they have more super-safe seats than in Qld.
The country party and the Liberals also took decades to work out their relationship. There were three corner contests and separate Senate tickets for a long time.
The country party were agrarian socialists while the Liberals were pro-business but mercantilist. Both were anti-union.
The country party forced the resignation of Billy Hughes, refused to serve under Menzies, and slowed down McMahon’s ascent to PM. Menzies ended up in Fadden’s cabinet in 1941.
The resurgent WA Nats see themselves as outside the Liberal tent pissing in.
Labour and the Greens have just started down that road of working out their true relationship. The Greens cannot complain that a party that they refuse to always preference seeks to pay them back. Tit-for-tat breeds co-operation.
Loved the ridicule from former WA Labor premier Geoff Gallop over the local NSW Labor heavy claiming that the Greens had “stolen” ALP votes in 2010.
Richo might have helped Labor win an election or two, but his contempt for Labor principles and values was part of the sickness that has destroyed the ALP. An approach based on the philosophy that “it doesn’t matter if they hate us we’ll still get their preferences eventually” was a recipe to cook cynicism and corruption into Labor as core ingredients.
Like John, I just wish they would all go away, fast. Rudd should resign and found a new party that is prepared to work constructively with the Greens, while acknowledging that they will disagree about some important policy issues. At least then progressives will have something positive to engage with.
I find this part curious:
“And now, these geniuses have decided that it’s smart politics to make war on the party that’s keeping Federal Labor in office, and with which they will need to deal for the indefinite future if they ever want to pass legislation through the Parliament.”
I don’t know (apart from checking Hansard for each and every vote in the Senate where a division was called) a simple way to check the exact numbers, but every time I listen to proceedings in the senate it seems like ALP/LNP join together to slam through legislation far more often than it passes by virtue of the Green’s vote.
Does anyone know if there is a simple way to confirm this anecdotal evidence?
E.g.: according to the ‘comlaw’ site 103 Acts have come into law so far in 2012, I’d bet that a minority of these depended on Green votes – glancing down the list I can see a few that I know the Greens opposed.
To listen to the media/commentariat you’d think LNP vote against everything and we only get any laws passed if the Greens agree to it.
Can the Labor party be reformed? If so,would it be worth the effort and would it be the best use of that effort?
Give up on Labor. Support the Greens and International Socialists.
@Megan
Last I recall it’s something like 80% agreement between the coalition and the other coalition.
Which, incidentally, continues to amuse me. The Situation goes on and on about how the minor party in the coalition has disproportionate power and the whole thing just doesn’t work. Because obviously a coalition of any sort has never worked, and can never work, in Australian federal politics.
Professor Quiggin says: “Even though the NSW Libs are, as they always have been, appallingly bad …”
I’m not so sure about “always”. Nick Greiner wasn’t too bad in his first term (1988-91), during which I was living in Sydney. After 12 years of Labor sleaze, Greiner had only to be moderately competent and intelligent in order to shine.
Of course his cabinet went all wobbly after the 1991 election campaign, when Greiner insanely decided – like Tom Dewey in 1948, Harold Wilson in 1970, and Jeff Kennett in 1999 – that he hardly even needed to campaign adequately since he would romp home anyhow. And of course, like Dewey, like Wilson, and like Kennett, Greiner ended up with egg on his face, though unlike them, he did actually cling on to office. His big mistake was not reckoning with that two-cent Savonarola Ian Temby at ICAC.
Megan, you’re right. Still, it’s true, in normal political terms, that the important bills are likely to divide the major parties and for these bills, Labor needs the support of the Greens.
One of the reasons BOF is doing OK is that he isn’t devoting resources into actively feeding the media – I think this started with Wran. This could all change with eventual policy hiccups.
Something has irrevocably changed in Australian politics. The old “two party” system isn’t the main game anymore, even if it never really was only a two party system. It seems much of the media and the libs/labor haven’t woken up to that fact yet. The electoral laws might be written to favour the large parties, but neither of them represent large electoral bases anymore and the voting public is increasingly fickle. This isn’t the 70’s anymore.
The broad left needs another party as well as labor and the greens in order to re-engage with the public. Labor hasn’t got a clue and the Greens are probably a little too narrowly focused.
” these geniuses”
My ironic sentiments exactly. When will be be free of these meddling careerists who think that gaming everything is a substitute for policy and vision?
I’ll no doubt be accused of having a tin foil hat, but…
Keane had a piece in Crikey 9/7/12 about the ALP Right and this whole Greens bashing exercise.
His analysis of the numbers etc.. was quite interesting and appears to bear out the idea that the Greens aren’t stealing ALP votes, rather there is a substantial block of the electorate who are against ALP/LNP (at least as they currently behave).
Keane wrote:
“What halts the Greens are strong swings against governments. The Greens’ federal vote went backwards in NSW in 2007 in the House of Representatives. It only rose by 0.7 percentage points in Victoria. The NSW and Queensland state elections show that the Greens struggle when the electorate is gunning for the incumbent. To amend the cliché, when the swing’s on, it’s on against minor parties. On that score, maybe the Labor Right will achieve its goal of halting the Greens momentum at the next election by handing Tony Abbott a landslide.”
This is where the tin hat comes in: What if there is a large cohort in the ALP Right who are fully aware of this fact and their goal REALLY IS to ‘halt’ any progressive politics in Australia, regardless of whether ALP/LNP wins any particular election?
Seems perfectly plausible to me. You get to sit in Canberra regardless, and you ensure Australia slides further and further to the ‘right’.
The current two party system choice is between worse and worser, with dumb and dumber describing ma incumbents.. When the Greens become less flakey and larger we may have a choice.
Sorry but I do not know how bad Labor has become in NSW, however in SA the Rann Labor government started to change its tendenz with the introduction of ‘superschools’ and cuts to government services. Hopefully there is no epidemic going on here?
P.S. Like in sports, Labor seems to be playing to the level of its opponents, instead of keeping to its ‘own’ system and convictions
Megan @13:
“This is where the tin hat comes in: What if there is a large cohort in the ALP Right who are fully aware of this fact and their goal REALLY IS to ‘halt’ any progressive politics in Australia, regardless of whether ALP/LNP wins any particular election?
“Seems perfectly plausible to me. You get to sit in Canberra regardless, and you ensure Australia slides further and further to the ‘right’.”
There are two such cohorts. There is the Catholic Right such as Don Farrell, John Hogg, Caroline Polley, Joe De Bruyn and John Murphy who are the lineal heirs of the DLP/NCC legacy and who see the Greens as both a manifestation of the general threat of secular modernity and as a new avatar of the communist menace. Then there are the anti-communist social democrats such as Michael Danby who, under the influence of the late Frank Knopfelmacher, see the fundamental conflict in politics as being between the “democrats of all persuasions” (social democrats, liberals and conservatives) and the totalitarians (communists and fascists), and who also regard the Greens as an avatar of communism. Hence the obsession with Senator Lee Rhiannon.
Of course, there are also people who want to live off the cause rather than living for the cause, but who find it convenient to be able to justify their stances in terms of defence of freedom against the Attack of the Killer Watermelons.
@Freelander
One hears this sentiment a fair bit. I’m not so sure. What would you say was the most ‘flaky’ Greens policy position?
Indeed, Nathan. I’ve pulled a couple of people up on this as well recently, and they can never point to an actual flaky Greens policy. (I’ll concede that pushing for an inheritance tax was ill-advised, but I believe we’ve lost that one recently.)
@Nathan
If you haven’t come across an elected green or a green policy that you feel would be fair to describe as flakey, then we will simply have to agree to disagree.
Nathan & David,
Q.E.D., apparently!
Yes. Clearly flakey is not agreed on by all, otherwise they wouldn’t get any votes.
@Freedlander, it’s more that “name one flakey policy” and “I can’t” seem to go together like Abbot and Costello.
Despite or because of the Libs’ and ALP Right’s and Murdoch Press’ hysterical invective against the Greens, it is highly likely that the Greens will get at least 10% of the popular vote for the foreseeable future. Numbers like that give the Greens a powerful role in parliamentary politics.
One interesting outcome is that the Greens induce the ALP and the Tories have begun to co-operate over certain issues against the Greens. This new phenomenon helps to explain the rhetorical violence of both sides against the Greens.
Christopher Pyne has bragged that the Libs destroyed One Nation and that the ALP has failed to do the same to the Greens. Pyne would be loath to admit that the Libs destroyed One Nation by becoming One Nation. The ALP cannot become the Greens because the Greens agenda is inimical to the agenda of large swathes of the ALP. But more significant is that the Greens are a properly constituted party with a viable branch structure led by intelligent, articulate political professionals, not a pack of opportunists attempting to ride the coat-tails of an egocentric publicity addict bereft of insight and expertise.
If the ALP wants to form government they have no choice but to come to an arrangement with the Greens. Meantime, the Greens can play both major parties with promises of preferences in return for policy concessions. Time is on the side of the Greens.
“Pyne would be loath to admit that the Libs destroyed One Nation by becoming One Nation.”
Gold, with Platinum inlay.
Wot Megan says, and Michael.
With #16’s comment, am wondering what significant differences exist between the Catholic right and the Knofflemacher right. Is it that the first category is religious and the second secular and from there, the first soc-con and the second neolib?
I think both would be happy to collude, with the help of offshore interests, to see what remains of “settlement” democracy crashed, down to smashing the Labor party itself to oblivion, beyond recall.
Thirty odd seats in Qld and NSW out of about a hundred and seventy, are all that remain of Labor in the state parliaments there. Victoria and WA have seen once secure ALP governments drummed out also but less severely, while in SA a Labor government that just survived a massive swing against it continues to antagonise voters in much the same way as the former NSW and QLD governments did, with that putrid mix of soc-con and opportunist politics and zombie neolib economics, the later often only portrayed as “economics”only to justify further plunder of the “commons”.
Nor is zombie economics an exclusively local phenomena, the same thing is happening right across the western world, while dire poverty has increased across the developing world.
I’d add the attempt to identify the split between the ALP and Greens as down to asylum seeker policy fails completely for me.
Although it is true that ALL parties argue from rigid positions- no reasonable person is going to tolerate the continuing suffering and deaths of asylum-seekers from war zones selectively denied access to safety; the sado-Abbottist position. Yet the Greens are unrealistic to openly propose “open slather”, for want of a better word, as to numbers. Although you dare say, if the Greens were reported more accurately their ideas on asylum seekers would seem less extreme than tabloid media and politics portrays them, as in most other things. There is a fair way of doing things re population, but it won’t happen because it has become a political football, rationality has been banished and the opportunists and Abbottists won’t back off.
The (almost buried) underlying issue concerns “development”, globalisation, privatisation and dumbing down, following the initial success of the Greens in highlighting scientific concerns from about the late ‘seventies of last century..
Another poster mentioned Richo and it is really from the early nineties and its recession and financial problems, that Labor repudiates environmentalism, starting with forestry.
This speeds up as progressive Laborites become disenchanted, joining progressive small l liberals driven out by the Howard dries in the eighties in voting Democrat or swinging to the Greens, accelerating the neolib, opportunist and parallel soc-con tendencies in the big parties.
But what can you say, given the bad scenario?
The QLD state massacre, six seats left in that parliament and far from being the bitch-slap that got Labor out of its complacency and obstinacy, seems to have had an opposite affect, as the last fortnight has demonstrated.
Much more of this and I will be knocking on the door of the Ecuadorian embassy, unless I can score a ticket to Heard Island beforehand.
paul walter @25:
“With #16?s comment, am wondering what significant differences exist between the Catholic right and the Knofflemacher right. Is it that the first category is religious and the second secular and from there, the first soc-con and the second neolib?”
The first category is Catholic and much more likely to be anti-feminist, anti-queer, anti-abortion and generally socially conservative. The second category is usually either secular or Jewish and in either case much more socially liberal, although not necessarily neo-liberal. Knopfelmacher himself conducted a polemic against the Catholic Right in the mid-1980s in which he argued for the basic justice of feminism and the need for anti-communists to recognise this.
Within the Knopfelmacherian anti-communist social democratic current there is also an important difference between those, like Robert Manne, who think the Cold War ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union and recognise that “new politics” issues championed by the Greens aren’t reducible to Cold War polarities, and those who find it difficult to see the Greens as something other than Killer Watermelons.
More and more I think, “learn Spanish” or “pack long johns.”
@26, how is it both factions miss so easily what Prof Quiggin et al, seem to recognise?
It just seems so contradictory in the light of basic realities as to false oppositions re development and ecology and economics and rational economics/ecology and population policy. There is no reason why helping refugees would damage the economy if the government would only accept its role as points-person and direct capital toward providing a social dividend as well as a dividend for capitalists.
But they’d rather kill the goose that lays the golden egg; society is already pomo dead and the most civilised thing we can do is to hop in to dismember the corpse, because the Wall St dealsters and City bowler hat zombies don’t like even reasonable orderly direction or rational constraint.
Its a very schizoid thing #26 decribes. We have a sense of the old Australia’s good points with the Catholic right, that it shared with the old industrial left, once there was social solidarity and the mission of creating a future for the masses, but its turned “laager”with the banishment of the left critique, the enemy has become asylum seekers, science and rationality, gay people, intellectuals etc, rather than unrestrained and materially destructive capitalism and arbitrary authority.
I think Australia is a suburb not a country and the real masses now reside across the sea, out of sight out of mind. Things haven’t really changed since the time of Dickens and Marx.
@Ikonoclast
I thought the Greens were/are the international socialists.
@sillyoldbugger
We’ve recently beend described as “neoliberals on bikes” by some to our left.
On election night in 2010 Gillard thanked people who had kept faith with the party. I would have thought parties kept faith their electors, not the other way round, but that feeds in to the whole attitude of entitlement that the NSW Right embodies. So does the nonsense about stolen votes.
I don’t think the vat creatures of Sussex St are attacking the greens because of any dark conspiracy. They either blame the Greens or they blame themselves. And they are not capable of understanding that is their own ignorance and incompetence that has put the ALP on the path to electoral oblivion.
Well said, Alan!
I guess what Fran Barlow is trying to tell me is that, effectively, I am disenfranchised.
Capitalists on bikes…
And here was me thinking the Greens were about rationality and seeking to move beyond the bourgeois individuation to egocentric, introspection-free self on behalf of a deeper, decentering vision that has us as stewards for others and fellows engaged in a search for value and meaning beyond consumerism.
Nathan you nailed it on pyne.
As for whether the greens have flaky policies, the real question is how many flaky policies the other major parties have by way of comparison.
The flakey policies are one thing. Flakey people is perhaps more important. To be taken seriously, the greens have to convince that they can do the ordinary stuff of administration. They need to lose the flakey reputation. And the reputation for shallowness, and trendiness.
the greens are a broad church. they have a wide range of policies to avoid platform fights in an organisation ruled by consensus.
anyone know of a policy the greens rejected? I think the boycott and disinvestment policy was a recent inclusion maybe after several tries.
Where does the Greens’ reputation for flakiness come from? Is it flaky to decide that stopping the boats justifies suspending all human rights when the immigration minister deports someone? Is it flaky to decide that the the ALP’s electoral peril comes exclusively from ‘stolen votes’? Is it flaky to answer the UN Human Rights Council’s criticism of the Intervention by stating that Australia ‘respectfully disagrees’? Is it flaky to pay various sects and churches to proselytise in schools?
I think the Greens are considered flaky because they don’t think big money *always* has to be appeased. If they did what they were told, a lot of the people referring to them as flaky would relax. But actually trying to implement policies their members want? Imagine if everyone did that! Quelle horreur!
So a desperate family comes to the front gate seeking help.
Tony wants to blow them away with a shotgun, Julia insists they be dispatched with a rifle.
The Greens say we should bring them inside, see what the problem is and whether we can help.
The Greens are flaky purists who refuse to compromise.
The weirdness about Greenbashing as a political art form is, like a lot of nauseating stuff that bubbles out the Sussex St vats, it is utterly ineffectual. For every former Labor voter ‘stolen’ by the evil Greens roughly 10 have been stolen by the good Coalition. Let us assume that Greenbashing will cause the stolen voters deluded into voting Green to see the error of their ways and go back to Labor begging forgiveness. That would still leave the ALP with a deficit of almost 10% to make up.
The real solution is for Sam Dastyari to make a relatively short speech along the lines of ‘Well, sacking Rudd may not have been a terrific idea. Come to think of it sacking Nathan Rees, where I was a prime mover, was equally stupid. Actually now that you mention it, I don’t really know what we were thinking.
Government by moral panic over the people-smugglers doesn’t seem to be working out. In fact the Greens seem to be doing a lot better than we are at generating ideas.
What we need is a radical rethink and to start listening to our members instead of focus groups and the Murdoch press. The best way to start would be for me to step down as general secretary and ask the party to elect someone with half a brain. I know that qualification will knock out all my friends from the NSW Right, but whatever it takes.’
@Jim Rose
Well we rejected the Carbon Polluter Rewards Scheme (CPRS) of 2009. We also rejected involuntary rendition and punitive detention in Malaysia (otherwise known as Refugee Capture & Storage and Refugee Trading).
FTR, BDS in relation to Israel is not national policy though is it is supported in NSW.
@Megan
Indeed. The Greens are so uncompromising that our MPs
a) supported confidence in the ALP regime
b) voted with the ALP on almost every bill the Liberals opposed and on pretty much every motion, with the result that the ALP got, by its own boast, 336 bills through, which puts every past parliamentary three year period under Howard or even under Rudd in the shade.
We objected to one bill at the same time as the Liberals — one we had never hinted we might support — and now the pragmatic non-purists who lecture us that something is alsways better than nothing are saying the alliance with us was a terrible mistake, and perhaps they should preference Liberals who have sworn to tear down their achievements — ahead of us, who have sworn to defend them. And as we know, this heartfelt angst isn’t even directed at us but at Gillard, whom these spivs are summoning the courage to ditch because she’s not “cutting through”.
Doesn’t this show that junking principles, far from being an advantage, is the road to ruin? Now they have neither integrity nor the poll numbers on their side and if they lose, they won’t even have the intellectual tools to rebuild post-catastrophe.
The Greens threaten to disrupt the habitual lines of patronage and influence so assiduously nurtured by corporate interests (read media, gambling and mining) and their clients in the major parties.
This disruption represents the most serious peril to the political culture of Australia since Whitlam rid Australian politics of religious sectarianism in the early 1970s.
State governments are heavily reliant on gambling taxes for their financial viability. Moreover, employment by the gambling sector is a well trodden road for retired pollies.
The Greens thus threaten to derail some lucrative gravy trains. This is very flaky behaviour by the lights of our established pollies. What pollie in her right mind derails a gravy train?
@Fran Barlow
Of course they have the intellectual tools to rebuild after the catastrophe. They will loudly proclaim: ‘The Greens ate my homework!’ and continue with business as usual.
The greens rejection of the ghg bill that turnbill supported must have been their flakiest hour.
There was no scheme to reward pollution. Currently CO2 emmissions are being rewarded every day much as they have for hundreds of years. The scheme as with the current scheme is to penalize not reward. When it comes to the greens flakey is as flakey does.
Last I heard of that scheme there free permits to “EITEs” and others were up around the $14bn mark. There was no provision even for review of subsidies. There was a tiny target that was based on the success of CC&S — in turn heavily funded by the Commonwealth, largely because the polluters knew that putting their own money in was a waste.
The bottom line of course had nothing to do with the efficacy of the scheme. The ALP deliberately debauched their own scheme so that we would rejectit (and therefore take no credit for it) and that nearly half the Liberals would use it to fatally weaken Turnbull.
The CPRS was designed to fail as a schem but win as a political game. The ALP was almost proven correct, but sadly, almost in this case turned into its opposite — and the Liberals refuted them. Now they want to blame the Greens because their game turned sour.
Laughable really …
The CPRS legislation also locked Australia into rejecting any international agreement for reductions higher than the flakily modest targets set by the legislation.
The wonder is that NSW Right and Julia Gillard, both of whom opposed the CPRS legislation, regarded it as some kind of dangerous experiment in radicalism. I would hope no-one is about to argue that the Greens’ rejection of the CPRS was a moment of supreme flakiness but the Gillard/NSW rejection of the CPRS was a moment of sound and sober non-flakiness.
It is interesting that those who are extremist themselves see extremism in others. The level of idiocy in the NSW right is that it looks like their end game is to change the Prime Minister back to Kevin Rudd as Dastyari decided to shoot his mouth off just as Julia Gillard had performed well for several weeks. It was an old case of “loose lips sink ships” but the ship being sunk is that which carries Labor even if Captain Gillard is in charge. It seems that Dastyari and Howes want Rudd in charge of the lifeboats. It will be a mighty battle to the bottom. Glug glug.
Instead of the scheme the greens stopped there was no scheme. With no scheme business got unlimited free permits. Flakey green policy ; flakey green thinking.
Time will quickly run out for the greens if they don’t shed flakey. The greens are in their post-Don era, and have also to avoid post-Bob errors.