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June 11, 2011
Senator John Faulkner's recent Wran Lecture points the finger at a the a process of ALP decline. He says:
We have lost a generation of activists from Labor and, if we do not face the challenges and opportunities of reform in both structure and culture, we will risk losing a generation of voters as well.The Party has now become so reliant on focus groups that it listens more to those who don’t belong to it than to those who do. This makes membership a sacrifice of activism, not a part of it.
The history of the recent past indicates that the ALP is unwilling to reform its centralization of power and its culture that has a deep antipathy to democracy. It assumes that politics is just an arena, a profession, rather than a concern for things brought to the attention of the fluid and expansive constituency of the public. The only way it knows how to make things public is through spin and controlled messages.
The factional warlords control the ALP and they give no indication of giving up their power in spite of the ALP's low primary vote in recent elections. We should make that more specific: it is the Right faction that is dominant and it is not interested in reviewing the undemocratic structure of the party that it controls.
Trevor Cooke says that the causes for the ALP spiral downwards are many, each reinforcing each other:
Membership decline solidifies the grip of factionalism; campaign professionalism with its emphasis on messages, safe candidates in neutral tone suits and centralised control all leave little role for individual members and supporters. As more members drift away, factions get more insidious, centralised control gets tighter – so it goes on.
Faulkner highlights the death grip of those who resist reform, but his appeal to reason is likely to fall on deaf ears.
I say to those who resist the opening up of our structures to more participation and more democracy because they see their control over managed and pre-negotiated outcomes slipping away - do not act like the ship's captain steering for an iceberg, refusing to turn over the wheel to a more competent navigator in determination to remain captain, even if only of a lifeboat.
The ALP, under the control of the Right faction, has become increasingly ossified. The Right factional warlords have cut off the ALP's progressive leg--the educated inner city professional. They have reduced the ALP to a political force of the working class, outer-suburban "battler" vote; one that is finding the hard edged conservatism of the Abbott Liberals increasingly attractive.
The writing is on the wall for federal Labor: it will be forced into a coalition with the Greens if it wants to retain or to gain political power.
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Trevor Cook says:
The only way to change the poisonous ALP culture is to dismantle the wall of exclusion that has built up around the ALP over the past quarter of a century.
The ALP has got some serious problems.