Inertia Rules At Peak Of Party

by Alan Ramsey - Sydney Morning Herald

The incredible shrinking Labor Party. The 100-year-old party of the workers now has hardly any left. Its membership, as Australia's oldest political party, is pathetic. Kim Beazley wanders the country seeking electoral salvation, representative of a political rump representing nothing but itself. Beazley is in Cairns today. He'll be at Sydney's Town Hall tomorrow. His itinerary is the ritual round of Queen's Birthday weekend state ALP conferences in NSW and Queensland. But he talks to whom?

Not real people, you can be sure.

Beazley's federal leader's speech is surely as predictable as Mark Latham's absence. He will dump on Labor's opponents, praise the respective premiers, Bob Carr and Peter Beattie, trumpet each state's "crucial significance" in Labor's broader agenda to defeat John Howard, rabbit on about Peter Costello's future, tell each conference what an immense honour it is to lead such enthusiasts, and close with a ringing peroration on forming a Beazley government.

The response will be no less predictable.

Delegates will give him a standing ovation, and mean it. They like Beazley. And why not? Right-wing machines control Queensland and NSW Labor and Kim is largely their creation. Most just don't believe him, however much they'd like to. When the applause has died and Beazley has gone, four in every five - at least - will excuse themselves for "knowing" the Jolly Green Giant from the west is kidding nobody, probably not even himself.

Applauding delegates at political conferences usually have little to do with belief and everything to do with television cameras.

By then, of course, everyone will have seen the latest edition of Challenge, the occasional magazine of the NSW Labor Left, and its striking front page. This shows a diminutive phone booth and the headline, in receding type down the page: "The Incredible Shrinking Party." The accompanying lead story is by Luke Foley, the Left's assistant state secretary to the Right's Mark Arbib at Labor headquarters.

Foley is a thirtysomething Sydney trade union professional who's been in machine politics for 13 years. He is a disciple of the former Labor Senate leader John Faulkner and the twin brother of Dr Bridget Griffen-Foley, a modern-history and politics academic at Macquarie University whose growing list of book titles include two on the Packer family - The House of Packer: The Making of a Media Empire, and Sir Frank Packer, The Young Master, a biography on the family patriarch - and her latest book, Party Games: Australian Politicians and the Media from War to Dismissal.

Luke Foley can write, too.

His scathing article on the NSW ALP begins: "Five years ago, in 2000, the NSW branch of the ALP commissioned a detailed study of the party's membership. The study analysed our membership by age, gender, electorate, branch, category (employed, affiliated trade unionist, concession), payment method and length of membership.

"A report containing the findings was presented to the then general-secretary [Eric Roozendaal, now a member of the NSW upper house] and, in turn, to the [Right-wing-controlled] Administrative Committee. Accompanying the analysis were recommendations to 'open up the party to a wider group of people'. The Administrative Committee, at the behest of [Roozendaal], adopted a formal goal of increasing [NSW] membership to 50,000 by 2005.

"Financial membership at the time - in late 2000 - was 21,585. By 31 March, 2005, the financial membership of the NSW ALP stood at 16,300. The target in 2000 was to increase membership 15 per cent to 20 per cent each year to 2005. In reality it is ageing and diminishing.

"Today there are less than 8000 ALP members in this state who work for a living. There are 3,240,000 people in the NSW workforce. Only one-quarter of 1 per cent have joined the Labor Party. Members of affiliated unions who are themselves members of the ALP [number] around 3000. That is less than 1 per cent of the 393,000 trade union members affiliated to the party through their trade union.

"In turn, understand that the NSW ALP's trade union affiliates represent just 12 per cent of the NSW workforce and the figure is declining. The party of the workers has hardly any workers as members.

"The situation is even bleaker when the detail behind the figures is considered. Recent research for the [NSW trade union] Labor Council demonstrated how poorly unionists regard the ALP. This research was decisive in the council's change of name to Unions NSW. And, as John Howard has demonstrated, many workers - affiliated unionists or not - have decided not to support Labor at the ballot box.

"The ALP needs to renew its democratic legitimacy or face collapse as a membership-based political party."

Even Foley's figure of 16,300 ALP members in NSW can be seen as dubious. Labor likes to pretend its national membership is 45,000. If NSW, easily the most populous state, has only 16,300 financial members, it is absurd to think the rest of Australia contributes almost 30,000 members.

Labor nationally is unlikely to have any more than 35,000 members at most and, possibly, as few as 20,000 to 25,000. Two years ago, when, for the first time, Labor opened the ballot for federal party president to its rank-and-file members, 39,000 ballot papers were distributed but only 19,000 votes were returned. That likely says far more about genuine ALP membership than it does about lack of grassroots interest in the ballot.

While Foley concedes membership of mainstream political parties everywhere is in decline, he asserts: "What is distinctive about the NSW ALP is the absence of any strategic response. Since 1999, 45 NSW branches have collapsed. Scores of others exist on paper only. The result of a weakened and degraded branch structure is the party is more and more vulnerable to the worst and most opportunistic of outside influences.

"The work of the Independent Commission against Corruption at Rockdale, Strathfield and Liverpool shows that unhealthy relationships between ALP representatives and property developers are not, unfortunately, isolated incidents. The investigations of ICAC should make it clear there are real problems in how the NSW ALP operates. There is a dangerous pattern evident, with local ALP branches being infiltrated, stacked and captured by commercial interests…"

Foley concluded: "Some people in the party don't believe there is any need to be concerned. They take the view that party membership in itself is irrelevant and all that is needed is a marketable leader, a good advertising agency and a steady flow of corporate donations. I disagree.

"The ALP's ability to recover from defeat, to maintain its electoral appeal over more than a century in the face of world wars and depressions, to endure at the centre of Australian political life, has always been due to the strength and resources of its membership and the trade union movement. Both these sources of resilience are under stress right now.

"These are the issues we should be contemplating and responding to. The future of the Labor Party is too important to be left on the shelf, along with a report the NSW [party headquarters] has tried to ignore."

Will Labor do so this weekend?

The NSW Left will likely try, only to be assuredly ridiculed and rolled by the majority numbers of the Right. Labor's affiliated unions still control the numbers and it is the union authority of the right-wing battalions which determines the leadership at its Sussex Street head office.

That leadership in turn controls the membership of the NSW ALP administrative committee - its machine cabinet - as well as delegate numbers at state and federal ALP conferences. Even more significant is the head-office leadership, from both Left and Right, which controls local branch "membership" in federal and state parliamentary seats - the real battleground for political power and patronage.

Which is why Kim Beazley will say nothing tomorrow about the issues Foley raises. Beazley does not interfere in what are seen - both by him and by the various state ALP machines - as "internal state matters". Even the most corrupt branch stacking for the most corrupt factional outcome in the two most blatant states - NSW and Victoria - almost always goes ignored.

Nothing will change this weekend.

Beazley has no more spine for challenging the power of the factions than he did when first leader nine years ago.

Nor is this the first time Foley has raised the increasing political irrelevance of the Labor Party and its diminishing rank-and-file membership base. Three years ago, when Bob Hawke and Neville Wran carried out their national "review" of the Labor Party for Simon Crean as leader, Foley made a written submission as NSW secretary of the Australian Services Union.

Foley wrote, in part:

"The ALP, like trade unions, has no automatic right to exist. The ALP is under siege, and its base vote in steady decline, wherever we look. Yet the internal debate about the party's future has been a long time coming.

"There are 637,000 trade union members in NSW, according to the most recent ABS figures. ALP-affiliated unions claim 482,000 of those members. Today union members are cynical at best about [affiliation with] Labor. Many are hostile to the concept. Worryingly, this hostility is voiced by many workplace union leaders, those delegates and activists who are the lifeblood of their unions.

"The ALP's own affairs confirm it as a party of insiders. The ALP displays a startling lack of democratic process. The NSW ALP operates without a viable membership base. ALP branch membership is ageing, inactive and unrepresentative of the wider community. Sixty per cent of party members profess to be retired, unemployed or full-time students. At the same time, the formal ALP-union link is characterised by the dominance of entrenched hierarchies on both sides…"

To repeat, nothing has changed.