The Australian Labor Party is continuing to debate questions of how it should define itself and how it should portray itself to the voting public. Most recently, frontbencher Joel Fitzgibbon, the spokesman on resources, called for a scrapping of the rule forcing ALP members to belong to a union.
Mr Fitzgibbon says the rule encouraged branch stacking and alienated middle Australia. He is right on both counts. He argues that if only members of a union can join the party, political aspirants facing a rank and file pre-selection process are forced to stack branches with trade unionists and pensioners (who are exempt from the union-membership rule). He called for wider reform than just the reform of the 60-40 rule under which union delegations get 60 per cent of the seats at party conferences.
The whole relationship between the party and the union movement is now open for debate. And about time, too. Union membership has declined to less than 25 per cent of the workforce, and less than 20 per cent of the private-sector workforce. It seems many people think union membership is irrelevant to their lives. And with Labor’s primary vote the lowest it has been in 70 years, more people are seeing the Labor party as irrelevant to their lives. The nature of the Australian economy and society have changed and the Labor Party has not moved with it. The party retained its influence beyond its support base from 1983 to 1996 because the preferential, single-member system of voting in the House of Representatives delivered it seat numbers far greater than its support. The position in the Senate reveals labor’s true support base – just 37 per cent of the seats.
Labor will have to reform if it wants to be relevant. As it does so, tensions will arise between those who see the party as the representative of workers’ interests against the interests of capital and those who see the party as a vehicle to promote a just society within the context of a by-and-large privately owned economy. That just society, is not just a fight to get a bigger slice of the cake for those in employment, but runs across the whole range of individual rights, effective safety-net welfare and sustainable environmental policies with a recognition that the incentive of private ownership and capital and labour working together can help in those goals.
The former – the industrial element — will want to keep strong union links. The latter – the intellectual element — will want to see them abandoned. Indeed, the intellectual element’s concern for individual rights would find compulsory unionism offensive.
If Labor wants to attract a broader range of people to party membership, which in turn will lead to the pre-selection of people with wider appeal in the community who have a better chance of being elected, then it should axe the union-membership rule.
If it does not, it will lose indefinitely those seats – like the belt of seats around Sydney – that used to be steady Labor. And accordingly, it will not attain national office.
Reform of Labor is essential for Australian democracy. Without an effective alternative, the Coalition will be able to do as it pleases. It is already showing signs of the very arrogance, unaccountability and jobs-for-the-boys attitude that so many found offensive about the later years of Labor’s incumbency.
Labor must change its rules so that the party is open to all and that its deliberative bodies are chosen according to democratic principles.