Australian Labor Party

[Steve Painter and Rose McCann <spainter@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

A partial defeat in a significant skirmish in a very long war. The Labor
Party rules conference

Bob Gould

The Australian Labor Party's rules revision conference last Saturday and
Sunday in Canberra reveals a lot about the current state of Australian
politics, and deserves study because of that. Some of the events also touch
on matters raised by Ben Courtice in his latest post.

The conference agreed to the biggest structural change in the ALP since the
federal conferences of the early 1970s, at which the party's structure was
standardised nationally. The conference took place in the context of a
critical examination by the ALP of its federal election defeat last year,
and followed a protracted process of national discussion.

A fair amount of pressure was whipped up by the bourgeois media attacking
the trade union links of the ALP, and models of substantial "Blairisation"
were put forward by a number of important figures in ALP politics, mainly
figures associated with the leadership of the "left" faction.

Most pernicious and dangerous was a proposal that delegates to the peak body
in the ALP structure, the federal conference, should be elected in a
so-called rank and file postal ballot, rather than the present arrangement,
which is that they are elected at state conferences composed of 60 per cent
union delegates and 40 per cent branch delegates by a system of proportional
representation, which allows for election of members of different factions
and even small minorities.

The key Blairite proposal championed by some leaders of the left was a
plebiscitary election for federal conference by individual branch members
alone. A second, more moderate, proposal was to marginally reduce the 60:40
arrangement, which gave a slight preponderance to union representatives, to
50:50.

The rather lacklustre federal ALP leader, Simon Crean, formerly a key
bureaucrat of the Australian Council of Trade Unions during the period of
the Prices and Incomes Accord, which effectively hamstrung trade unions, had
virtually staked his leadership on the 50:50 proposition.

In the lead up to the rules revision conference and in the long process of
reappraising the election -- the review process led by former NSW Premier
Neville Wran and former Prime Minister Bob Hawke - three main issues
emerged:
1. the already mentioned push, mainly from the right of a parliamentary
leadership, to reduce 60:40 to 50:50.
2. the, also already mentioned, intense Blairite push from one wing of the
left for the so-called rank-and-file plebiscite for conference delegates
without PR.
3. the near-universal revolt of ALP branch and trade union activists against
the mandatory detention of refugees.

During the review process, about 100 mass meetings of ALP members took place
around the country. These were attended by about 10,000 ALP members, who
almost all rejected mandatory detention of refugees despite the dogged
support of the parliamentary leadership for retaining the policy. On the
structural matters very few speakers at those meetings supported changing
60:40 to 50:50 and there were quite a few speakers defending 60:40. A
few speakers, prompted by the Blairite wing of the left, proposed so-called
rank and file postal ballots for federal conference delegates.

A couple of months ago, the national left delegates to this conference met
in Canberra for a preliminary discussion. At that meeting the left union
delegates from Queensland and Victoria indicated their strong opposition to
the 50:50 proposal and their solidarity with the more militant group of NSW
unions, located factionally in the right-wing caucus, that were vigorously
defending 60:40.

This bloc of left and right unions presented a problem to the Blairite
section of the left leadership, which is trying to position itself as the
strongest supporter of Simon Crean, the federal parliamentary leader. This
attempt of a significant cave of left parliamentary leaders, to be the most
slavish supporters of the parliamentary leader is an old tactic of
opportunist left ALP MPs, and in the short term it has proved quite a
successful tactic, because quite a few of them have been able to leapfrog
quickly into the shadow ministry.

The widespread cross-factional surge against mandatory detention that gave
birth to the equally cross-factional Labor for Refugees movement in all
states and territories presented a rather big problem for both the
parliamentary leadership, and particularly the left MPs trying to curry
favour with Simon Crean.

The consistent and forceful support for Labor for Refugees by John
Robertson, the NSW Labor Council secretary, factionally located in the right
wing of the ALP, made the predicament of the left "leaders" even worse. Over
the past nine months, the five out of eight state and territory ALP branches
that have held conferences have all called for the removal of mandatory
detention from ALP policy. At the crucial 800-delegate NSW ALP annual
conference, the heartland of the ALP right faction, rejection of mandatory
detention went through unanimously on the voices, mainly because it was
moved by Labor Council secretary John Robertson.

In all states a new generation of young trade union functionaries, and even
some staffers of ALP politicians, have emerged as activists in the Labor for
Refugees agitation. Quite a number of these have been in the orbit either of
the right faction or in NSW of the two sub-factions of the left.
Characteristic of these young, slightly rebellious lower rank functionaries,
is their universal commitment to the refugee agitation, a moral commitment
that they feel strongly. The ones who don't feel like that have not involved
themselves in Labor for Refugees.

This layer partly reflects the regeneration of the trade union movement
after the defeats and demoralisation of the Accord years, and includes many
of the militants in Victoria and WA who have excited the attention of the
DSP and others on the far left in recent times.

These younger functionaries have obviously enjoyed the cross-factional
camaraderie involved in supporting the refugee cause. They are young movers
and shakers just setting out in the jungle of ALP and trade union politics,
and of course they aren't entirely free of human career motivations, but in
my estimate the ones who have become active in the refugee cause, left or
right, are the better types, and often the ones who work hardest in their
jobs as trade union functionaries, organising the union members that they
service and seriously attempting to represent the interests of those union
members. These militant young trade union functionaries in the refugee
movement are the ones whose natural desire to advance in the structure are
tempered by and in balance with some interest in, and commitment to,
righteous causes.

In four states and territories the convenors of Labor for Refugees are
talented young lower-rank functionaries of this committed sort.

Well, this old rebel, who is quite ready to find fault where fault exists,
can't fault the agitation conducted by these young convenors of Labor for
Refugees over the last week, in particular, in the tense build-up to the
conference.

I also can't fault the principled behaviour of John Robertson and a number
of his colleagues in the militant section of the right faction of the NSW
trade unions, on this issue. These pro-refugee functionaries of the right
have to take into account that in their own faction, particularly its
parliamentary wing, there's a lot of opposition to the Labor for Refugees
cause because of perceived electoral Realpolitik, which seems to suggest to
a lot of Labor politicians that a pro-refugee policy is dangerous
electorally, particularly in outer-suburban seats.

The week before the conference, and the conference itself, was a most
educational process, carried out in the public and private way
characteristic of the ALP. The office of Simon Crean exerted enormous
pressure on the NSW right faction to buckle on both 60:40 and the refugees,
but, by and large, the NSW trade union right refused to cave in on either
question, stiffened up somewhat by the unusual fact that the trade union
wings of both factions of the NSW right, which have been divided for a year
or so over a leadership conflict of interest and battle, stood together on
both issues.

On the left, the pressure on both questions was also enormous. On the
refugee question the leadership of the dominant left faction in the
parliamentary caucus exerted tremendous pressure all through the week on the
young leaders of Labor for Refugees not to raise the refugee question at
the conference.

The usual sorts of pressure were used on these young rebels in the lower
ranks of the bureaucracy -- the kind of pressure summed up in the title of
the book about Hollywood: "You'll never eat in this town again", etc, etc.

The young Labor for Refugees leaders quite shrewdly deflected some of this
pressure by relying on the support of Robertson and the NSW Labor Council,
which was maintained throughout the week of tense negotiations.

Because of the constitutional difficulty of getting the two-thirds majority
necessary to raise the refugee issue, at what had been convened only as  a
rules conference, the convenors of Labor for Refugees adopted a fall-back
position, with Robertson's support, of demanding that if refugees didn't
come up on the agenda at this rules conference, there should be a through,
public, ALP policy discussion, with Labor for Refugees represented on the
committee overseeing the discussion, and that the final refugee policy
should not be announced until it had been discussed and decided on at a
federal policy conference in the new year.

During the course of the week, this fall-back position was initially
accepted by Crean and then rejected the next day on the urging of the
Blairite left, then accepted again later in the week under pressure from the
NSW trade union right, then ditched by Crean again and then finally accepted
at the Federal Executive meeting on the Friday before the conference. All
factions went into the conference on the Saturday believing that the above
was the broad outline of the deal that had been endorsed at the Federal
Executive meeting.

ALP federal conferences are strange political animals. The delegates pour in
at 9am, and ALP non-delegate observers and the media are admitted at 11am,
but the conference doesn't actually start until about 3pm because the first
business, of course, is the meetings of the right, left and centre factions.
In this case these meetings ran from 9am to about 3pm with a few very short
coffee breaks.

The left meeting convened in a tense and bitter atmosphere. The first two
hours were taken up with an embittered exchange over refugee policy. Several
convenors of Labor for Refugees launched a bitter attack on the devious
behaviour of the Blairite left leaders who had tried to save Crean on the
refugee question. After this bitter, protracted debate, the left caucus
endorsed the policy of Labor for Refugees, including the abolition of
mandatory detention.

The next business was 60:40. The Queensland and Victorian left unions fought
for three hours in the caucus in defence of 60:40, led particularly by
Michelle O'Neill Victorian secretary of the clothing and textile union and
Peter Tighe, federal secretary of the electrical trades union.

The very big guns of the national trade union left bureaucracy were wheeled
in against them, spearheaded by Doug Camer0n, the authoritarian and
bureaucratic leader of the highly centralised metalworkers union, who is
currently trying to purge the elected Workers First group of militant
full-time officials in the Victorian branch of the metalworkers. Michelle O'
Neill is a close friend and ally of many of the Victorian Workers First
militants, and owes a debt of gratitude to them because they have lent
industrial support to the battles of her superexploited members, so her
clash with Camer0n had a sharp personal subtext, for all who knew the
situation, and was extremely intense.

Camer0n and Co argued two points: the need to support the federal leader,
and the dubious proposition that the reduction in union influence would
assist the left in the NSW ALP, which is hard to sustain when you look at
the real numerical breakdowns involved. Marginally strengthening the vote
for the NSW left was a figleaf for the first and more important question to
them, positioning themselves as loyalist watercarriers for the federal
parliamentary leader.

In the event, the 50:50 forces carried the day in the left caucus by the
narrow margin of 42 to 37. That vote was the end of the story on 60:40
versus 50:50 because the narrow 50:50 majority group in the left insisted on
making the vote on that issue binding (the vote to make it binding was
carried by the same 42 to 37 margin). The 60:40 left forces, being less
prominent trade union figures than the big guns, didn't feel confident
enough to defy the caucus, but were left with a very bitter taste in their
mouths.

The right caucus was also a complex affair. It became clear early that most
of the Victorian right unions would support Crean because he comes from
Victoria, and the factional leaders of the right in Victoria are his close
associates.

The Queensland right unions supported the NSW right and so did, in a formal
way, the powerful shop assistants union, which meant that the right was
split roughly 60:40 on the 60:40 question, with the majority supporting
60:40. The right faction is not traditionally as authoritarian as the left
faction and doesn't have a "democratic centralist" tradition, and divisions
in the right faction are more accepted, so the right faction delegates were
not bound.

The combination of the 40 per cent of the right delegates who were in
support of Crean's leadership and the binding left caucus vote gave Crean
the necessary majority.

After the battle of the caucuses, the discussion on the conference floor,
while intense, had a preordained quality. The final vote on 60:40 was a
little closer than the results that were announced. I counted the 60:40 vote
fairly carefully from the gallery and by my estimate there were 80 in
support of 60:40 and there were a few reluctant Victorian and Queensland
leftists outside the conference when the vote was taken, which suggests to
me the vote was something like 100 to 80, but the president, Greg Sword,
announced a vote of 121 to 69 - the exact number of delegates registered for
the conference. Tidying up the vote a bit to emphasise your victory is an
old custom of ALP conference chairpersons.

Other aspects of the conference produced better results. The federal
conference was doubled in size and the Blairite plebiscitary proposals were
thrown out, so federal conference delegates are now elected in the usual way
by proportional representation at 50:50 state conferences.

As there are now about 90 federal conference delegates from NSW, the quota
(or number of votes a delegates needs  under PR) to be elected to the
federal conference will be about 15 votes, which has opened up the
unexpected
possibility that a few more rebels and mavericks may be elected.

The Marxist left should be seriously interested in this new layer of
militant middle-rank and lower-rank trade union activists. Their emergence
reflects something more broadly happening in Australian society. These days,
hundreds of thousands of Australians of working class origin go through
universities. These are the more talented layer of the working
class. The better types among them, from a socialist point of view, often
the ones with old family connections in the labour movement, and these days
many who are drawn from migrant groups, gravitate to labour movement
politics in the Labor left and even the Labor right, at universities.  Then,
when they leave university, a small minority of students - the minority with
a bit of idealism and labour movement connections - are often drawn into the
less well-paid world of trade union industrial activity and politics. It has
to be remembered in this context that a much larger proportion of students
go directly into the more lucarative bourgeois world of finance, the
professions, etc.

Usually, these days, the transmission belt into the labour movement is
through the Organising Works program of the trade unions, which has existed
now for about 10 years. When these types of more dedicated and less
money-oriented university graduates get jobs in unions they tend to be
initially reasonably careful and loyal to the elected officials of the
unions they go to work for. That's part of the deal. There are probably 1000
young trade union functionaries like this across Australia.

Rather than being an undifferentiated group of careerists, as
self-interested, simple-minded far leftists often characterise them, they
are a diverse and complex group of people. Unquestionably the pressures of
the bureaucracy bear down on them, but their occupational location at the
coal face of the trade union end of the class struggle constantly brings
other forces to work on them as well. This is why it is pure nonsense for
the ridiculously isolated far left to attempt to excommunicate this fairly
large social layer in the workers movement, from the left, by a kind of
verbal legerdemain, as Ben Courtice, Phil Ferguson and Jose Perez do on this
Marxism list.

The principled struggle conducted by a number of people of this type at the
ALP federal conference demonstrates this point and I will return to it in my
sociological analysis of the Australian labour movement, which is still
brewing in my teapot. It goes without saying that the 40 or 50 youngish
comrades of this social grouping and layer, who were involved in the battles
leading up to and at the federal ALP conference got a brutal education in
the nature of bureaucracies, and the worse aspects of the political
traditions of Social Democracy and Stalinism, much more powerful than the
frequent verbal lectures they get from Bob Gould or the far left, and these
practical lessons and experiences will remain with a number of them for
quite a long time, independently of anything that happens to them in the
future.

These  people are getting a grounding in politics that most members of left
groups could never even dream about. They went head to head with the
alternative prime minister and his supporters and they conducted an
honourable and intelligent struggle. In my book the left trade unionists
from Queensland and Victoria might have gone a little further and broken the
caucus on 60:40, but they have to take those tactical decisions, not me.
Their day-to-day political and trade union existence is much more directly
affected than mine is, so I defer to their tactical decision.

Until the Marxist left pays serious attention to the practical questions in
the workers movement faced by this layer in their day to day political and
industrial lives, the Marxist left will not win this layer's respect, and
the support and involvement of a large part of this layer will be essential
for building a mass socialist movement, or any mass social movements, in
this country.

Any strategic model of future political development put forward by the far
left that excludes this social layer in the Labor Party and trade union
continuum, is a form of political mysticism, a kind of voodoo.

At the start of the federal rules conference there was a very effective
demonstration cum lobby of the conference held outside the convention hall.
It was jointly called by Canberra Refugee Action Collective and Sydney Labor
for Refugees. The rally was chaired by Phil Griffiths of Canberra RAC and
speakers included the Catholic bishop of Canberra-Goulburn Pat Power, the
Sydney convenor of Labor for Refugees, Amanda Tattersall - who moved between
the left caucus inside and the rally outside - Ian Rintoul of the Sydney RAC
and myself as a member of the Sydney Labor for Refugees and a rank and file
ALP member of long standing. This rally had quite a considerable impact on
the delegates and the Labor for Refugees stall inside the foyer of the
conference sold about 40 Labor for Refugees T-shirts, many of them to burly
trade union delegates to the conference, and quite a few to members of the
NSW right faction.

BALANCE SHEET ON THE FEDERAL CONFERENCE

The dilution of trade union influence was a setback, but it did not
decisively change the character of the ALP as a mass workers' organisation,
sociologically speaking, resting heavily on the involvement of the trade
unions.

The proportional representation element was preserved and the worst Blairite
proposals for so-called structural reform were decisively defeated. The
expansion of federal conference and the expansion of the state conferences
actually allows a little more scope for future rebel groupings to stake out
some territory.

The failure to Blairise the ALP structurally is a defeat for the Blairite
"modernisers" and for the half-dozen mini-Blairite parliamentary Bonapartes,
hawking their leadership wares in the wings of the ALP, to the Australian
media and bourgeoisie, with their little field marshalls' batons in their
knapsacks. This structural settlement in the ALP will tend to remain the
structural set-up for quite a long time. That's the way things go in the
ALP.

The moment of extreme Blairism, structurally speaking, has probably passed
in the ALP. It remains a bureaucratised workers' party, described by Lenin
as a bourgeois workers party, with the additional factor being that a new,
serious left is beginning to revive, located in the Labor for Refugees
movement, in the left trade unions in Victoria and Queensland, and even to
some extent in the industrially militant unions in NSW led by the Labor
Council, and factionally located in the NSW ALP right faction.


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