In the ballot to elect the Australian Labor Party leader that concluded on October 9, 74% of the membership voted — 30,426 of the party’s 43,823 members — apparently energised by the novel prospect of having a say in the leadership.
Although the two aspirants, Bill Shorten and Anthony Albanese, are leaders of the party’s right and left factions respectively, both avoided controversy by saying next to nothing about policy.
The contest was a thoroughly civil affair. The two were so polite to each other as to invite the conclusion that each voted for his opponent in a commendable and gentlemanly spirit of fair play.
In the end Albanese won the vote easily, 18,261 to 12,251 votes, but the winner was Shorten because the vote of 86 ALP MP’s were given the same weight as the vote of 43,823 members.
With the number of votes cast in this ballot, each MP’s vote was worth about 354 members’ votes. Shorten won the caucus vote 55 to 31, so 24 parliamentary votes trumped the 6010 vote margin cast by ALP members for Albanese.
Big business groups congratulated Shorten on his victory and confidently expected that his good relationship with industry would continue. For his part, Shorten promised to “reach out” to ALP members and win back the trust of all those voters that had deserted Labor in the last two elections.
Louise Tarrant, national secretary of the United Voice union said on October 12: “I think a lot of our members feel that governments generally, and the Labor Party in particular, don’t really understand what’s going on in their lives,” the Australian reported.
She berated Labor for failing to acknowledge concerns about the rising cost of living.
“What people kept being told was economic growth was going well, and incomes were rising, and why are you complaining?” she said.
“What our members were saying was when you are up to your eyeballs in debt trying to pay your mortgage or your rent and your electricity bill has gone up 80% in the last five years, you then got these killer bills come in on top. They were not having these issues addressed in any meaningful way… I think a lot of our members … are worried increasingly that there is not a political voice on their side in parliament.”
The present purpose of the ALP’s factional system, born of policy division between a definable left and right that now exists in name only, is to facilitate a career path that, post-politics, extends to lobbyist and company director.
Barry Jones, ex-ALP politician and past national president, offers an analogy with factionalism and the party’s predilection for selling-off public assets. In his book Coming to the Party he said: “The ALP has been privatised and factions are majority and minority stakeholders, run by professional managers, some now in the third generation …Ideas? Policies? They are of minor significance.”
In the leadership race, the right showed that they at least know how to count. With 47 members of caucus to the left’s 36 (three MP’s are non-aligned) their candidate was always favourite to win.
After promoting the idea of voting for the party leader on merit alone, they enforced strict factional discipline in the caucus where half of the say was to be had.
Following Shorten’s victory it was back to business as usual. According to the former speaker, Anna Burke, Shorten’s frontbench was delivered by “a couple of blokes sitting round a room carving up the spoils and then telling everybody else what the outcome’s going to be.” A process she said “reflects an immediate reversion to the ‘faceless men’ being firmly in control.”
She is only half-right — they have never relinquished control.
Seven years ago, luminary of the left, John Faulkner, was warning that the shared venality and exclusionary politics of the ALP’s factions had in fact taken them beyond factionalism. “It is feudalism, and it is killing the ALP,” he said.
Two days after the leadership ballot, Michael Williamson, former ALP national president and general secretary of the Health Services Union, showed us a thing or two about venality. He pleaded guilty to corruptly funnelling almost $1 million of his members’ money into his own pocket. Perhaps he was unhappy that his salary had only increased from $290,000 in 2005 to $513,000 in 2011.
The likely winner from all of this is Tony Abbott. What are the odds he will launch an inquiry into financial affairs of the union movement and their links with the ALP?