BY ALISON DELLIT
The ALP's current navel-gaze reminds me somewhat of the Time Warp. Not John Howard's back-to-the-1950s time warp, but the Rocky Horror dance: a jump to the "left", a step to the "right", a bit of pelvic thrusting and you end up back where you started.
But the ALP is moving position — and it's further to the right.
The scale of its election defeat last November clearly frightened many within the ALP. Bleeding rightwards to the Coalition and leftwards to the Greens, the ALP's primary vote was the lowest since 1906. The party bosses correctly assessed that the ALP was losing life-long Labor voters by the bucket load.
The subsequent decision to set up two "reviews" into the party — one on policy, headed by deputy federal leader Jenny Macklin, and the other on internal organisation, headed by former prime minister Bob Hawke and former NSW premier Neville Wran — was an attempt to create the impression of doing something as much as it was to actually do something.
As the Hawke-Wran report outlines, the ALP is losing first preference votes primarily because there are fewer and fewer differences between it and the Coalition. In the words of the report: "[ALP] members called for 'something to believe in', a set of principles which unites the ALP and demonstrates our difference from the Coalition."
But the review sidesteps the crucial question of what sort of differentiation. Of course, real differentiation from the Coalition would mean abandoning and reversing the economic rationalist agenda that has dominated the ALP for decades. This is unlikely.
The ALP leadership isn't really worried about how to pitch to the "true believers", or at least it isn't as worried about them as it is about a much more important group of people — the big business owners whose interests dominate the media, and thus play a crucial role in influencing the outcome of parliamentary elections.
During the 1980s and early '90s, the ALP was supported by large Â鶹´«Ã½ of the "business community" because it was able to deliver a mostly pacified union movement through the processes set up under the Prices and Incomes Accord. While the Coalition was prepared to push economic rationalism faster and harder than the ALP, it couldn't guarantee as smooth a transition. By the mid 1990s, the union movement was so weak it failed miserably to mount a real fight against the rapid attacks of the Howard government.
If the Hawke-Wran report is any guide, the ALP is now searching for a new "accord", something which could make it relevant again to big business.
Of course the accord has been throughly discredited. To attack it as a pacifying and demobilising process is more common than not among "left" unionists, even those who supported it at the time. Both ALP leader Simon Crean and ACTU secretary Greg Combet have explicitly ruled out another such process.
Instead, the main effect of the reforms proposed in the review seems aimed at freeing up the party to work more with non-members: academics, business groups and other "supporters".
Despite the report's rhetoric about increasing internal party democracy, most of the proposals will decrease the already limited power of ordinary ALP members. This is most true of candidate preselection, which is of supreme importance in a party which gives its parliamentary caucus significant decision-making power.
Although preselection processes vary from state to state (only in NSW and the ACT is preselection evenly ostensibly carried out by rank-and-file members alone), Hawke and Wran propose that in all seats, the parliamentary leaders be "consulted" prior to preselection beginning. This is explicitly proposed to give the party greater ability to run inactive members or people who have only just joined, but are "star candidates".
The report also proposes limiting voting rights to those who have been ALP members for two years or more and who are registered on the electoral roll, thus excluding youth, refugees and many migrants. On top of this, many of the new "branches" the report proposes setting up — workplace or occupation based, policy and on campus — will not count for preselection purposes.
Even the proposal to double the number of national conference delegates is not as good as it sounds. Federal and state parliamentary leaders will also have delegate status at the conference.
Of course, the delegate structure of the conference is not that important. The national conference has become an increasingly stage-managed PR affair to launch ALP policies, not debate them. Hawke and Wran propose strengthening this by setting up a permanent policy committee, appointed by the national executive, and dominated by "experts" to, in effect, determine what will be showcased at the national conference.
The restructuring of the union-ALP relationship is rumoured to have come from a back-room deal between Crean and Combet. Certainly, the proposal to reduce the voting strength of union delegations at some state conferences, but possibly introduce union delegations to federal conference would suit many top union bureaucrats — giving them the ability to appoint federal ALP delegates directly. It has been provisionally supported by many "left" union officials, such as Australian Manufacturing Workers Union national secretary Doug Cameron.
By offering sweeteners to top union officials, the ALP may be able to repitch itself to big business as the guard-dog against industrial unrest. But it has also made clear its intention of becoming the "smart" capitalist party, capable of winning consensus for pro-big business "reform".
The report's repeated emphasis on reformulated "core Labor values" to fit in the "modern world" is an acknowledgement that the ALP is losing its grip on many progressive-minded people who previously supported the party, despite its right-wing economic agenda.
Thus the proposal to re-fund and develop closer ties with ALP think-tanks, and to recruit academics. Such changes are designed to help the ALP find smarter ways of selling right-wing policy to an increasingly disaffected and outraged electorate. Proposals to set up internal "policy branches" also seem to be an attempt to drag many former supporters now outraged by the party's right-wing social agenda back into internal debate.
In case that isn't enough for the corporate elite, the ALP leadership is attempting to reassure it by developing direct links with business groups, stated explicitly in the 21st recommendation of the report. I suspect this is behind much of the proposed centralisation of control in the national executive, as such a move is likely to be highly unpopular among many ordinary ALP members.
The Hawke-Wran report is, as it is claimed to be, an attempt to make the party more relevant — relevant to the current needs of big business. By consolidating control in the national bodies, buying off the leaderships of unions while not orienting to their rank-and-file and preparing a new ideological assault on those deserting to the Greens, the ALP hopes to sell itself as a safer option than the Coalition for implementing further attacks on the working class.
From Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly, August 21, 2002.
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