By Ben Ellis
MELBOURNE — Strange things begin to happen as soon as you express an interest in running as an ALP candidate, especially for a National Party safe seat.
For about three or four months, I was the Labor candidate for the Victorian seat of Gippsland East. I later withdrew my preselection because I live in Carlton these days, but also because I've discovered how pointless it is to try to turn the ALP into a social movement.
As soon as I expressed an interest in the party, the organisers in Drummond Street started trying to work out which faction I was in, whether I would deliver them numbers if I joined, and whether I could control the seat's branches in order to get their faction another state conference delegate.
I had nominated because I didn't like what the Victorian Premier Jeff Kennett had done to my home town. But that didn't seem to matter to the head organisers.
Huge wads of "how to campaign" material began flooding into my letterbox. The booklet, Campaigning in the 90s, gave advice like "always wear deodorant and use soap". The Opposition leader's media secretary wrote a press release for me in which I said things I didn't know I'd said — or even thought.
The theme of all the literature was "winning in '96" — and it was stressed that we didn't have any policies at this time. There was no guiding philosophy, just the niggling feeling that factional games were being played following my nomination (and many others').
Being left, I thought that the Socialist Left or the Pledge factions might have an idea of how to go about things. They didn't. They just called themselves socialists and went about everything the same way the Right does.
Stacking branches by playing off ethnic tensions is racist, but the ALP Left will tell you it's all in the cause of social justice. That's how they try to keep you. The Right has never pretended to espouse socialism; they do everything in the name of winning elections.
It's the pretension that is the problem. Socialists in the ALP become alienated from the practice of their beliefs in their personal behaviour because of the urgency to play the games, get the numbers and stack the branches. They want exactly what the Right wants — power: that myth of the executive arm of government.
The Labor Left attracts a few psychotics who want the fame and high-flying political careers in parliament and who parrot the socialist pretension. When will they learn that espousing socialism is not good enough; personal behaviour must express the ethics of one's socialism and political beliefs. A gnashing of teeth and stacking of meetings only expresses juvenile fantasies.
The ALP, as a socialist party, is dead (if ever it was alive). It would be senseless to claim otherwise. No attempt to resuscitate the body is warranted, for the carcass is rotten; better to bury that idea and with it the party.
I say this because what the ALP Socialist Left faction represents is the art of espousal, never of action. Its collective behaviour — the playing off of ethnic tensions to get numbers in branches and so on — compromises its and any stated principles of socialism.
The ALP, once at best the party of middle-class reformists, is now the party of middle-class conservatives who feel little discomfort from mass unemployment as long as it's not visible from the freeway into the city.
The Socialist Left of the ALP leaves the mainstream left in Australia — the 35-50% of the population who believe in basic human rights, education, health, social security and opposes regimes which like to murder others — without any voice or hope.
Maybe the ALP will change. Maybe the people within it will recognise that power is not wholly constituted in the practice of executive government, but by the class and culturally-based practices of a whole social system in which control of information flow is paramount. If the party realised this it would direct its resources into a broad socialist movement focussing on people's lives and life-choices, and supporting all forms of action to create change.
But I'm not rushing down to the Hobart Crown Casino on the off-chance, Comrade.