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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx

ALP -rotten to the core « Previous | |Next »
March 8, 2006

Julia Gillard in her 'Courage, Convictions and the Community' speech given at the Sydney Institute puts her finger on a key problem faced by social democrat parties when they are in opposition:

Before you can persuade Australians of your credentials to run the country, you have to show that you can run your political party. And to do that, we must unshackle our party from factions. It's time to stop mincing words and acknowledge that factionalism in the Labor Party is out of control and destructive. We are no longer talking about factionalism, we are talking about fractionalism.

I would say that the system is still fundamentally rotten, but that's the way the factional warlords want it, as it keeps them in power. So it will stay rotten from some time. Will the Opposition Leader confront rampant factionalism?

SharpeA.jpg
Sharpe

Jack Waterford, wriitng in the Canberra Times succinctly describes how the facitonal rottenness works:

The system is structurally rotten, not only because of the entrenched vote of trade unions in the party's councils, but because ALP rules allow the direction of those bloc votes to be in the hands of union officials, who make them without reference to their union members. That had nothing, as such, to do with the Crean victory, which was among eligible registered party members - but it could well have had, except for the fact that the Crean challenger faced up to his devastating branch-level defeat and withdrew from the contest. Otherwise there was still a possibility that a Crean endorsed by his branch members could still have been knocked off by the party's state central committee, which is essentially the creature of union heavyweights.

Waterford goes onto say that the smallness of the membership base of the ALP suits some factional warlords well:
The smaller the sub-branch, the fewer members are needed for a "stack". The more complete a stack, of course, the less necessary it is to even have the formality of branch meetings, given that a diligent secretary can simply concoct a set of minutes and a roll-call - rather like the overwhelming proportion of board meetings of proprietary companies...The [stack] process now has brokers, and votes are bought and sold.

The factional warlords are not going to want reform the system. That means the factional politics will remain a conflict about personalities, and combinations to share the spoils of politics and not a genuine contest about ideas and the best policies and programs and about how power could be best is exercised for the community good. Gillard concurs to the extent that lshe argues that the labels Left and Right on Labor factions are now without meaning.

Waterford goes to say that the ALP left has long abandoned its old role of being the engine-room of new ideas. He adds that there is a good argument that the true source of ideas in Labor at the moment is from the Liberal side of politics, after being played with by political professionals. That is what it looks like to me.
He then concludes on a future note:

The moribund general membership structure, and the thoroughly corrupted state-branch structures, serve not only to put real powers of patronage and dispensation in the hands of unattractive moral and intellectual vacuums. It also means that the party's kindergarten for its future leaders comes not from argument, debate and involvement in community affairs, but from attachment to faction leaders, demonstrated, of course, by unfailing loyalty. Increasingly Labor representatives are distinguished by having worked all of their lives as paid operatives of political or industrial labour

The task of reform is a big one.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 2:25 PM | | Comments (0)
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