Labor Back To The Future?

Sydney Morning Herald

Saturday August 10, 2002

Thirty-nine years ago, a news photograph captured the then Labor leadership Arthur Calwell and his deputy, Gough Whitlam in all their humiliation outside Canberra's Kingston Hotel while the 36-strong ALP national conference met inside to decide policies that would bind their federal MPs. Robert Menzies ridiculed Labor as beholden to ``faceless men". It suited his short-term election goals but, in time, it would arm the Whitlam drive to reform party structures and, eventually, place elected representatives at the policy-making helm in Labor's most successful electoral and policy reform era.

This historical backdrop should (but probably will not) serve as an important reminder to those now doing battle over Simon Crean's push to ``modernise" the ALP. It is tempting to embrace demands for greater democratisation of Australia's oldest political party by giving more voice to its 52,000 members. But there are traps, identified in history, in assuming that any move intended to amplify the noise of the many (by inference, lessening the authority of the elected few) is in the best policy interests of the ALP and, hence, serves the national good.

It is one thing to advocate inclusive democracy for a nation. As Winston Churchill observed, it is the worst government system apart from all the others. It can be an entirely different matter to argue that a political party, with little demonstrated effectiveness at protecting itself from dominance by minority views, reflects a more representative mood if its MPs must disregard the will of constituents and obey the sometimes wacky command of what, in the greater scheme of Australian opinion, amounts to an activist handful. On a small scale, the Democrats' troubles are a timely reminder of that folly.

The reform program outlined by party elders Bob Hawke and Neville Wran in close consultation with Mr Crean urges the ALP to embrace greater rank and file opinion in its national conference decisions, stage-managed as they have become in generally sensible compliance with leadership will. But it is not at all clear that expanding this representation of branch members would have the stated effect of weakening union influence, for all that movement's loud complaints. In part, this is because branches and unions are not the mutually exclusive ALP zones portrayed by the debate. Branch members holding jobs must be members of the relevant union, and in branch affairs union activists play influential roles.

Labor cannot sit on its hands, however. Mr Crean's ACTU background makes him an easy target to be marked a captive of a union movement representing just one in five Australian workers. And much of the resistance to reform is engineered by Labor blocs determined to retain control over party outcomes, from preselections to policies, and to deny the genuinely aggrieved access to just internal appeal. Such motives, evident in the NSW Right machine, should be outed. But Labor must tread warily. Its challenge is to retrieve political relevancy. If it wrong-foots itself, democracy will be the loser because transparent and sound government needs a vigorous political contest.