James Button writes why Labor’s branch-stacking scandal is an opportunity for reinvention, a watershed moment for us all. Here is an edited version.
For full version read Labor’s branch-stacking scandal – an opportunity for reinvention – by James Button, The Guardian, 21 June 2020 [external link]
If we can lift our heads from the mesmerising, miserable examination of Victorian Labor – we might see that the current crisis also presents the ALP with a rare chance to reinvent itself.
The party has appointed Jenny Macklin and Steve Bracks to run the Victorian branch for seven months. It has promised to remove every member who is not genuine. But Labor faces a bigger threat. The gap between inner city progressives and working and low-income people is becoming a gulf.
In western countries, people with high education levels have been moving steadily to the left, while people with less education have been moving to the right.
Former Labor speechwriter Nick Dyrenfurth proposed last year that Labor set a 20% quota of all MPs to come from working-class backgrounds. This was an interesting proposal, but there was no debate.
This is bound up with the current fiasco. In Victoria, both Left and Right factions have stacked branches over the years but the right does it more. Victorian Senator Kimberley Kitching says she opposes giving rank-and-file members as it could drive the party too far to the left and make it unelectable.
Kitching is right that the party will be unelectable if it swings too far left. But she is dead wrong that the way to do this is to deprive ordinary members of a voice in the operation of their own party. Crucial debates about striking a balance between principle and the need to win power must happen openly.
The ALP faces two key questions
- How much say should ordinary members and trade unionists have in ALP decisions?
2. How can the exercise of power in the party be debated in a way that makes it rewarding to be an ALP member?
In my opinion, both sides have to give: members should get more say in selecting candidates, in return for accepting the parliamentary party’s right to have the final say on policy. The party has to commit to a new culture of transparency.
This week some senior figures suggested they were shocked to learn about the work of a few rogue individuals. This is insulting. As an ordinary member of the ALP, I can say that Somyurek’s name is a byword in the party for branch stacking. And he’s not alone.
Principles of transparency are unknown. Obscurity is very useful when the ideological divide between right and left has largely disappeared, replaced in the main by the pursuit of power. Nowhere is this more obvious than in a shadowy document through which, until recently, the factions ran the Victorian branch.
The Stability Pact divided almost every winnable seat and party post between the two factions, making a mockery of internal elections. While ordinary members in theory get half the votes to select their candidate for lower house seats, in effect they had no power, since the other half of votes was controlled by the two factions working together on the party’s Public Office Selection Committee (POSC).
If the factions believed this was a fair way to run the party, they should have published the Stability Pact on an official website, with an explanation of why it was needed.
This cloak-and-dagger stuff makes the party weaker. One day a lucky few get their reward and are bumped into parliament, often through a murky process. Then they have to argue a case before the public, but they have not taken part in big policy debates at party conferences. So they serve out their days sitting quietly on the back bench, preserving factional strength but doing not much else.
This is an acute problem in the Senate. Yet the Senate should be home to the party’s finest policy minds.
In Victoria, the left and the non-aligned group have campaigned for years to give ordinary members 50% of the vote for Senate candidates. This vote, being statewide, could not be stacked. It would force candidates to campaign publicly on their principles and positions.
But at the 2019 Victorian state conference, the right, supported by a left breakaway group, shut down debate on this issue – one faction held onto power and the party lost.
Labor supporters look at the party, sometimes join, but then see no way to play a role. They walk away.
In a parliamentary democracy, the main political parties hold the fate of the country in their hands. It is astonishing that they devote so little time to improving their own operation. If Labor is serious about internal reform, it will need sustained, and at times brutal, leadership from the top.
Fifty years ago, the party undertook a highly successful transformation of the culture of its Victorian branch because the then leader, Gough Whitlam, backed it.
An opportunity for reinvention
This is a watershed moment. The ALP could be a party of factions that embody a creative tension between genuine left and right ideas, with a non-aligned, independently-minded group holding the balance of power.
Change the party and you change the country.
Related readings
The ALP must repair trust between leadership & members – by James Button, Open Labor, Oct 2020
Labor has a significant problem, Premier Daniel Andrews says following branch-stacking scandal – ABC News 17 Jun 2020
A review of all the ALP reviews – 50 years of soul searching – by David Barda, Open Labor, Oct 2020
A pox on both your houses – Andrew Charlton & Lachlan Harris, The Monthly, Dec 2016 – Jan 2017
How Victoria’s rotten Stability Pact keeps Labor undemocratic – by Steve Gibbons, Crikey 24 Oct 2016
Did Adem Somyurek just opened the door to Labor Party reform? – David Feeney & Eric Locke, Socially Democratic 26 June 2020 podcast
Locking out the Left: the emergence of national factions in Labor – edited from an article by Osmond Chiu, Jacobin Magazine, 27 July 2020
James Button is a founding participant and the convenor of Open Labor. He worked in 2009 as a speechwriter to the the PM Kevin Rudd. He was previously Europe Correspondent for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. He is a former deputy editor and opinion editor of The Age, and has won two Walkley Awards for feature writing, is the author of Speechless: A Year in My Father’s Business and Comeback: The Fall and Rise of Geelong.
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