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Labor in Crisis

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Labor in Crisis Background Briefing Radio National Sundays at 9.10am, repeated Tuesdays at 7.10pm Labor in Crisis Sunday 5 February 2006 James Carleton: This is Background Briefing on ABC Radio National. Next month it’ll be ten years since the Labor Party went into opposition. Ten years since John Howard became Prime Minister, and Kim Beazley leader of the opposition. Labor voters might think things couldn’t get any worse. But some Labor insiders say their troubles are just beginning. They say Labor is suffering a crisis of faith so profound and intractable it’s turning the party into an irrelevancy. The music you’re listening to is ‘Jupiter’ by Gustav Holst, from The Planets. It stirs the Anglican faithful in the form of a hymn, ‘I vow to thee my country’. But it also stirs the Labor faithful because it’s the music Paul Keating used 13 years ago to launch his successful election campaign. Labor hasn’t won a Federal election ever since. Hi, I’m James Carleton, and I should declare more than a passing interest in the topic. Eight years ago, my membership of the Labor Party was suspended following allegations of wrongdoing in a preselection involving a member of my family. I chose not to return to the party and I’ve remained outside ever since. Not so Rodney Cavalier. It’s been 20 years since he was a Minister in Neville Wran’s New South Wales government, but he has stayed active ever since, as President of his local branch in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales. And he tells a sad story for anyone who has even the slightest affection for the Labour Movement. He says the Labor Party’s membership base has collapsed and the party’s been left in the hands of factional warlords. As a result, Labor politicians are now introverted apparatchiks, afraid of ideas, handpicked only for their obedience to factional superiors, and totally out of touch with the electorate. It’s a remarkable claim. Let’s put it to the test, and visit Rodney Cavalier. Every couple of years he throws a party, a big one, to raise funds and to keep his branch alive. We got our invitation courtesy of Rodney’s friend, Fairfax journalist Andrew West. Andrew West: All right, so this is it up here on the left. Hundreds of bloody cars, you see, very big popular event, probably one of the last few genuine rank and file events that the Labor party can (park here) that the Labor party actually stages. Most of the Labor party fundraisers these days, from what I can gather, having reported on them for many years, is that (down this way) they’re all $500 a plate, 1 $15,000 a table corporate events. Most of the people who go to them don’t actually vote Labor. This would be one of the few places where you’ll probably meet some Labor votes, attending a Labor fundraiser. But more to the point, I mean if you look at the people who go to those big corporate fundraisers, two-thirds of the people in the room are just business lobbyists, they’re not in any sense True Believers, they’re just people who are there to buy influence and access with the government of the day. And in fact the fundraiser that Bob Carr had, a $15,000 a table fundraiser to celebrate Carr becoming the longest Premier of New South Wales, and there was a table full of people who’d been Chiefs of Staff to various Liberal leaders in New South Wales, all applauding in a very muted, unenthusiastic way during Carr’s speech. So that really is in some ways, the face of modern Labor. This might be in the Southern Highlands, which is not exactly Labor heartland, but people come from all over the metropolitan area, because it’s one of the last genuine rank and file gatherings And how are you, mate? You had a heart thing a few years ago didn’t you? Mate: No, I had a back thing. James Carleton: Let’s leave the garden party and go inside with Rodney Cavalier. It’s a beautiful big country house, it’s actually named ‘Chifley’, there’s a sign on the top of the door, obviously Rodney’s favourite Prime Minister. The first thing I want to know is are things really that bad for Labor? I mean Labor’s no strange to opposition historically, they were out for 23 years before Gough Whitlam won in ’72. Won’t Labor bounce back like they’ve always done before? Rodney Cavalier: All the causes for optimism of the past I don’t think are available to us now. There is no alcove into which we retreat that can find us cause for self- delusion, because in every other crisis of identity, when things have gone real bad, we’ve been able to note that the Labor party is magnificent in adversity, and we’re resilient. And we have been; Neville Wran’s victory in 1976 followed just six months, less than six months after the destruction of the Whitlam government. The party was on the ropes after the scandals of the late 1980s in South Australia and Western Australia, it came back. Hawke delivered victory eight years after the dismissal. But is there any cause for such comfort now? Where do we draw from? What are the ranks that are going to provide the people who are going to transform the electoral situation across the nation? James Carleton: And finding the answer to that question is critical for Labor. Where can they find the candidates that genuinely make a connection with the Australian people? Rodney Cavalier says the places where Labor used to find them are no longer available. Rodney Cavalier: We used to be able to draw it from all the factories in Australia and all the mines and the railways and the ships and the trucks, the waterfront, the gangs working in the open air. And then you supplemented that gene pool with a growing army in the 1960s and ‘70s of adherence in the liberal arts, teaching, the law and other professions. You could and did go into branch meetings, and find a rich social mix. Because essentially in those times, we had people, if not everyone who 2 mattered, who could be characterised as progressive or left-wing in a whole range of social issues, foreign policy, nationalism, civil liberties. And then we had the ranks of union officials who came exclusively from those who work for a living. So they had worked on the wharves, and they had worked as shearers, and they enriched the Parliaments. But each of those sources of supply has dried up, and I mean totally dried up, because the union officials don’t come from the floor for the most part any more, and we’ve lost the great left wing coalition that thought about those things, and of course ordinary workers don’t have a show. James Carleton: But on this very day we’re at a very healthy Labor Party function. There’s hundreds of people here. Rodney Cavalier: Yes, and this is an isolated, very isolated, exception. If you had a simple rule: if it was a crime, if it was an offence against the law for Members of Parliament to issue postage stamps and to organise the mail-out for notices to their branches and their electorate councils, I assert to you by no later than next month, 400 to 450 of the alleged 500 branches in New South Wales would fold. You don’t even have the intellectual energy or the organisational efficiency to issue branch notices in most of New South Wales, it is done by the staff of a Member of Parliament. James Carleton: Rodney Cavalier. What he’s talking about is the disappearance of the iconic Labor party volunteer. For over a century, Labor supporters have joined the party, formed local branches, debated policy, organised campaigns, and selected candidates to run for parliament. There were 75,000 members of the Labor party in the 1950s, and back then our adult population was only 6-million. So how many members dooes the Labor party have today? Rodney Cavalier: I’ve done the research, depending on who’s saying it in New South Wales I’m talking about, there’s 22,000 members on the books, something like that, but the real number of active members, if you define activity by a really lowest common denominator, consideration of those who come to a branch meeting on a regular basis, then it’s about 1,000, and if it’s people who put their shoulders to the wheel and take on representative office and move correspondence, and are devoted in the way that was characteristic from the 1890s until about the 1980s, it’s about 500, and of the 500, something like 200 to 300, are what in political science are called the nomenclature. James Carleton: So you’re saying 500 active members left in the New South Wales branch, 300 of whom are on the payroll, leaving 200 ALP branch members in the entire State of New South Wales, who are both at once extremely active and selflessly motivated? Rodney Cavalier: Yes, 200 and an overlap into the final figure of 1,000, which would give you 200 to 700, yes. James Carleton: It’s a remarkable state of affairs when you think Labor was the 3 closest thing this country had to a mass political party.
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