Can we be Labor & undemocratic at the same time?

Can we be Labor & undemocratic at the same time? Friends, we are here tonight, all 150 of us, because we care about the Australian Labor Party. Like our forebears, we want the right to vote with a 50% vote in preselections.

A speech by Janet McCalman 19 July 2021 an online meeting with 150 Labor members organised by Open Labor & Independents. Read more here about the excellent poster.

What does the light on the hill mean?

At Labor’s heart is the belief in human equality: not an equality where everyone is the same; but the equality of respect for people in all their diversity of belief, traditions and being.

That equality of respect and being was celebrated two weeks ago in the opening of the Victorian Pride Centre – that Victoria is a state where you can be yourself and be respected.

Democracy struggles in deeply unequal societies, where the rulers earn their place at the top by choosing their parents wisely; where the trajectory of your life can be predicted at birth; where if you are born poor, you will most likely die poor. Where disability, or illness, or the amount of melanin in your skin, condemn you to poverty and exclusion.

To reverse that is Labor’s great project, and over the past century and a quarter, Labor governments have done much to institutionalise fairness with policies and laws that guarantee a ‘fair go’, not because you’ve already ‘had a go’, but because you are a human being. But we are not there yet.

And so, we join the Labor party, hoping and expecting to be able to DO something, make a contribution, share ideas, work with comrades towards common goals. We see a light on the hill and that light is for social justice, fairness and equality.

Joining the party and reality check

But when we join the Labor Party, we discover that there’s little we can do apart from doing as we are told. We are suddenly disenfranchised. And that’s because within the Labor Party we discover that there are these other parties, or factions, within the party. So we join one of those other parties within the party. And then we discover that the faction expects unquestioning loyalty and may even fill out ballot papers on our behalf. Because further down at the end of the rabbit hole lie the third parties—the power burrows, occupied by powerful individuals with their courtiers who dictate the rules of the game.

A political movement is not an army of obedient troops. It is a living human organism, full of individuals with ideas, emotions, needs, and different experiences. It is a place of solidarity through consensus making, sharing and collaboration. The art of politics is finding consensus and mobilising it. But clogging up the rabbit hole is a seething mass of personal ambition.

Just as a society has to control human passions like anger and violence, greed and corruption with the rule of law, so a political party seeks to manage all that human energy and ambition with rules.

Labor has no shortage of rules, yet somehow, the rabbits in the power burrow manipulate things so that the rules don’t always apply. They manage the snake-pit of ambition by patronage and secret deals. And when it comes to doling out politics’ ultimate prize preselection for a seat in parliament – members are presented with a ‘done deal’ and a solitary candidate, so there’s no need to trouble the masses with a ballot.

Who pulls the strings

The Victorian Labor Party is ruled by factional leaders who have divvied up the seats in what is known as the ‘Stability Pact’ to forestall nasty fights between them.

It makes no allowance for the fact that the majority of branch members, now that the rolls are cleansed, do not belong to any faction. They have joined the Labor Party, not a faction first. But the Melbourne FEA, with over 700 legitimate, independently minded members, few of whom are active in the ruling faction, are apparently not capable of voting responsibly.

The factions, representing a minority of members, are allocated a share of the seats and then they determine within their upper ranks who will be anointed.

Only especially favoured members of the factions are eligible. No-one unaligned, no-one fresh, no-one who has established their credentials in the big wide world or the broader party or a union: only those who have earned their stripes in the protected inner sanctum of the faction.

Under the Victorian branch lockdown – which is to last until 2023 – the safe and winnable seats are now locked up by the faction leaders for the next decade. The parliamentary party in Victoria, state and federal, is frozen with people whose credentials have rarely been tested by party members in an open, democratic process.

Factions in political parties are fine if they mobilise different views for debate; but they are not fine if they operate as power machines to concentrate power in the hands of the few.

Preselections bring out the worst in all political parties. The Coalition, the Greens, the Pauline Hanson One Nation – all are guilty. Indeed, often worse than Labor. The toxic masculinity, the bullying, the sexual harassment, the smearing and backgrounding, the gaslighting and threatened blackmail that defile our parliament, have their roots in the political cultures we tolerate in all our political parties. The only constraint is fear of bad publicity.

Workshops and voluntary sensitivity-training have their place, but real change will not come to our public life until preselection ballots for all registered parties are compulsory and conducted by the Australian Electoral Commission. That is until party democracy is institutionalised by the law.

Candidates would have to campaign, and they would have to disclose their affiliations (factional, community, business etc). They might have to give speeches and answer questions. They would need to be vetted for good character and commitment to the platform. They might need to display whether they have the moral compass, the emotional intelligence, the energy and the ability to listen and learn to be a useful member of parliament. Do they have any winning ‘sparkle’?

Labor can take the lead on this, because we are the party of equality, fairness and democracy. That’s our mission, our light on the hill. We can lead by example first in our own nest, and legislate when in government to advance Australian democracy.

Related readings

Why we need to talk about Labor – by Janet McCalman, Open Labor, Aug 2020

Stop the shadowy preselections: 150 people call for change – Open Labor & Independents, Open Labor, Aug 2021

The battle for Hawke – by Open Labor, June 2021

Organised factions must be outlawed – by Dennis Glover, Open Labor, Oct 2021

The ALP left props up the right – by Harry Stratton, Jacobin, 4 Apr 2021

Janet McCalman first joined Labor in 1969 and has been member in London and Canberra. She is president of the North Melbourne Branch and a state conference delegate. She  is known for her books, Struggletown, Journeyings and Sex and Suffering. She co-edited with Emma Dawson What Happens Next: Reconstructing Australia after Covid-19’ in 2020. For over twenty years she taught and researched interdisciplinary history at the University of Melbourne.