By Tom Flanagan and Steve Painter
In eclipse throughout the Hawke years, the Labor Party left is showing signs of re-emerging as an important force, both in the party and in national politics. For many, the first indication of the left's resurgence was its central role in fighting off Paul Keating's challenge to Bob Hawke for the party leadership. Then, at the mid-June national conference of the party in Hobart, the left was the largest faction, though it was about six votes short of a majority.
Undoubtedly the main factor in the left's revival is the shock dealt to the Hawke government by the recession. Above all, the economic crash has condemned the ALP-ACTU accord to a lingering but inevitable death, freeing sections of the left to pursue more of its traditional agenda.
During the national conference, Green Left Weekly spoke to two prominent delegates from the Victorian Socialist Left faction, Federated Clerks' Union state secretary Lindsay Tanner and academic staff association state secretary Ted Murphy.
Economy
Both thought the left had made important ground in economic debates at the conference, though within a limited framework. "It may not seem like socialism in our time", said Tanner, "but the left is a composite creature. It is a weird mixture of different interests and perspectives. But it has had a quite worthwhile conference."
Despite rejection of the left's push for job creation through increased government spending on infrastructure projects, Murphy thought there had been "a shift towards greater recognition of the importance of unemployment, though I don't think that shift is decisive enough.
"The government response has been along the lines of a fight-inflation-first strategy. Within that framework, the left has managed to draw more attention and give greater weight to unemployment, but it has not fundamentally shifted the government's economic policy."
According to Tanner, "We've achieved some success, though the government is not going to move dramatically from its central economic platform. But it is realising that the unemployment situation is untenable. The sort of things people from unions, from the left, are putting forward really are pretty essential."
Tanner acknowledges that the left didn't present a comprehensive
alternative to the monetarist policies pursued by Keating and taken over by Kerin, but he thought there were signs such an alternative is developing "organically".
"It's important to recognise that the Keating framework, which we fought against, was a product of boom times. Anybody who continues to support the framework that applied a few years ago, as if nothing has altered, is really adopting a Thatcher style no-turning-back approach.
"Now, the type of line that the left has run for a long time is more directly relevant for the sort of pragmatic and electoral considerations that usually motivate people on the right. So the two positions are starting to come together, although clearly there are significant policy differences.
"But the consequences of earlier decisions, which we fought against, can't simply be undone overnight. We're now stuck with a different reality than, say, in '84 or '86, and it's very difficult to turn around a lot of those things."
Tanner thinks it's "extremely unfortunate" that the conference didn't make reducing unemployment a higher priority. "As far as I'm concerned, with members being retrenched all over the place, it should be the number one priority of the government. But they feel themselves in a position of having to maintain a particular impression within the financial markets.
"I think increasingly the government will be trying to take some active steps to reduce unemployment while at the same time maintaining the public line on inflation and things like that."
Ted Murphy thinks further progress depends on "the extent to which the left actually gets its own act together on framing alternative economic policies. To a large extent the left has been unable to formulate radical and viable alternatives to the Hawke government's economic policies, and has tended to accept the parameters of economic policy laid down by Keating with some arguments about the edges. Over recent years, the left's position on economic policy has improved, but still it's very much on the back foot in this area."
Public sector
At the conference the left did raise some economic issues, including the question of government restrictions on public sector borrowing. Murphy and others are concerned about private penetration of the public sector caused by the fact that "the government has wrongly imposed artificial borrowing limits on commercially oriented public sector trading enterprises.
"Now we're in this absurd situation where the public sector
enterprises have been restricted in their borrowings, while the private sector has never had any such restrictions. Yet the macro-economic effect of public and private sector borrowings is identical.
"Because of the restrictions on public sector borrowings, we're asking the private sector to make greater demands on community savings to invest in public sector infrastructure. There's an essential absurdity about the whole development."
The left took this up because it affects the whole question of funding infrastructure projects. Under the present policy, the government is going to "make taxation concessions to attract private sector funding into infrastructure projects because the long-term rate of return is not attractive enough to the private sector. But those taxation concessions will be revenue foregone, and as well as that, the public sector will be paying rent or other charges for the use, potentially over decades, of infrastructure built by the private sector. If you add up those economic costs, I think you will find that we would have been better off raising the borrowing limits in the first place."
Murphy thinks the left won this debate at the conference. "One of the resolutions that was carried was that commercialised public sector enterprises should be freed from those restraints. But I don't believe the government is going to implement that resolution. We won the fight in a quiet sort of way, but the government in my view will continue to ignore conference decisions."
Partly this is due to the government's oversensitivity to the financial markets. Murphy thinks the government should have the courage to make it clear that it won't accept the markets treating every decision as a test of confidence in economic policy. "Only when they do that will we actually win this one in the real sense, as distinct from winning it in the formal sense at conference."
Prospects
While the left is now stronger, neither Tanner nor Murphy thinks it's about to take over the ALP. "This has actually been the left's best conference in terms of the number of delegates we've had. We're usually in the low 40s, we're now in the mid-40s, but until we crack that crucial 50% plus one of conference, then the alliance between the right and the centre-left will continue to prevail."
Of course, if the left did get a majority, the right would probably try to change the rules. "But then, from my point of view, the value of political intervention in the Labor Party has never been contingent on the notion that the left will ever get a majority of the ALP and transform it into some left-wing socialist party.
This is an important arena of political struggle in respect of the role of Labor governments and the role of the labour movement generally."
Tanner thinks it's possible for the left to become the dominant faction in the medium term, although the importance of this year's increased numbers at conference shouldn't be overestimated: "The increase in our vote is partly due to increased strength within the party, but partly also to a bit of good luck in certain areas in the ballots.
"The national conference really is not genuinely representative of the party rank and file and its affiliated unions. For example, if you put privatisation issues to the party's affiliated unions and to the rank and file membership, they would be overwhelmingly defeated. But that doesn't mean 80% of the party supports the left. There are other things that we might get slaughtered on.
"It has been a good national conference for the left if you accept that you are not going to have governments suddenly changing course and we are stuck with a direction that is not going to change overnight regardless of what this conference decides.
"In the short term all we can achieve is important adjustments in approaches. From that point of view, I think this has been a good conference. What occurs after the ALP is no longer in government, I don't know."
Liberal threat
At this conference there was a less heated tone in most of the policy discussions, though organisational questions had the head-kickers pulling on their heavy boots as usual. Tanner says the calmer tone is partly due to the growing threat from the Liberals.
At previous conferences in the Hawke era, "the Liberals have not been much of a threat. We've been sitting there with the luxury of being able to have some fairly major internal fights about critical issues, whereas now we're facing serious prospects of consumption taxes, of substantially reduced wages and conditions. So, for the people I represent, there are some pretty critical issues at stake.
"The other point is that you can only have dogfights about the same issues so many times. There's not much point getting up there and having a debate about what we should or shouldn't have done in '83 or '84. The fact is it has been done and we have to debate what we do now. A lot of the steam has gone out of those internal fights because those fights have been lost. We lost, and it's pointless to keep refighting old fights.
"There's more agreement on the issues that are surfacing now, like consumption tax. And if you look at taxation, that is an area
where the left has been enormously successful because our agenda of the early '80s is basically the government's agenda now. The one thing missing is wealth and inheritance taxes, but even on that, the signs are reasonably good, although it was knocked off at this conference.
"The capital gains tax, which was opposed by the right in the early '80s because of their paranoia about the 1980 election result, is now firmly embedded in the system and strongly supported by the party universally. Consumption tax, which the right supported in the early and mid-'80s, which we managed to knock off then, now the right are the ones leading the charge to prevent it."
Tanner thinks it's important to maintain union involvement in the ALP. "There are a lot of tensions in the question of union affiliation, and the Liberals will probably try to attack it legislatively if they get the chance.
"As a union official, my perspective is to try to move towards a position where the widest possible spread of unions are affiliated to the Labor Party and affiliated on behalf of members who support the idea. That's what the critical objective must be, otherwise we'll be vulnerable to things like legislation or imposed ballots for disaffiliation.
"I think there's a real failure in the union movement too. A lot of people in the union movement, particularly on the left, tend to see the nexus as something that the ALP gets everything out of and the unions get nothing out of, and they have this sort of grudging inertia, and say, 'You bastards, you politicians, you sell us out all the time. We don't know why we should be affiliated.'
"In spite of all those sell-outs, if you look at things that are of direct interest to union members — things like unfair dismissal legislation, occupational health and safety legislation, half-decent workers' comp — if you had a political system with no direct mainstream involvement of the union movement, like you've got in the USA, stuff like that wouldn't get a guernsey.
"You'd have middle-class professionals dominating whatever the two political parties were, and although they might have some sort of soft understanding of those issues, they wouldn't be important to them. They wouldn't understand what it's like to be intimidated by an employer, or to be sacked unfairly or to have a worker's comp claim that gets mucked around.
"So one of the things that the unions have got to recognise is that their members have a lot of bread and butter things out of ALP affiliation. These are the types of things that unions in the narrow sense exist to deliver. And unions should be saying this
is under threat and we had better try to work out how we're going to protect it."
Tanner thinks there's a time lag in getting policy adopted in the Labor Party. Although he knew there was no chance of winning a vote against resource security legislation, he got up and spoke against it "to put the point on record and so that a reasonable position didn't disappear.
"I suppose the obvious question is, even if you got a motion through saying resource security is a bad thing, what happens after that? The government is going to do exactly what it is doing anyway. Where does that lead us? The period of history that shaped this government is really the mid-'70s. It consists of a lot of people who were second XI people during the Whitlam years, who learned a whole lot of things out of that experience, a lot of which I don't agree with.
"That's shaped their whole political approach in the current environment, and once they get their hands on the levers of power, then you can influence them a bit and you can fight a few specific battles and sometimes win, but in terms of the broad thrust, you have very limited ability to overturn that in the short term.
"You will never get a majority within the party prepared to destroy a government and create a 1955-type situation, where the whole thing falls apart, unless it's something extraordinarily extreme."
Today the left is a minority, says Tanner, but "that's a particular phase. It hasn't always been the case and it won't always be the case. I believe that in the next phase, whenever that might be, the left will be in the ascendancy. Partly that's because we'll be facing a very hardline Thatcherite opposition.
"I think we're already starting to head to that sort of situation. In certain policy areas like the environment and taxation, although it's not quite the left agenda that's been adopted, it's very substantially the left's agenda that the government is now running with, although there are deficiencies. That sort of situation will continue to develop."