After the ALP caucus deposed Julia Gillard in June this year, her recycled replacement, Kevin Rudd, thanked them by making sure that they wouldn’t get the chance to sack him a second time.
In what many of them saw as an ambush, he proposed to a surprised caucus that, in future, Labor leaders should be elected by ballot of both the caucus and the party’s rank-and-file members. It would not be open to caucus to depose any leader again unless 75% of them decided that he or she had “brought the party into disrepute.”
It was an attempt to avoid the circumstances in which two ALP prime ministers had been removed in the course of a single parliament. Similar moves opening up the leadership vote have also been made in the British and New Zealand Labour parties.
Rudd’s initial proposal was to limit the eligibility of voting members to those who had been in the party for at least two years.
The ALP National Executive changed this provision on September 16 by allowing all those who were members of the party on election day, September 7, to have a vote.
A ballot of members will open on September 24 and close two weeks later. On the following day, a caucus ballot will be held and the winner will be announced on October 13.
In an article for the Guardian, Gillard said: “These rules literally mean that a person could hang on as Labor leader and as prime minister even if every member of cabinet … had decided that person was no longer capable of functioning as prime minister … they are a clumsy attempt to hold power; they are not rules about leadership for purpose.”
This may be true, but it does ignore the voting imbalance. Rank-and-file members, who are said to number 40,000, will get 50% of the vote. A likely 55 members of caucus will also get 50% of the vote.
The turnout will be interesting. The one meaningful vote that all ALP members have received for some years now is in the triennial contest for national president. It was exercised by less than 19,000 in 2003 and 2006. In 2009, the candidate for the position was elected unopposed.
The two candidates so far nominated, Bill Shorten and Anthony Albanese, also happen to represent the two dominant factions in the caucus. As to either of them offering any sort of alternative, Albanese was quoted in the Murdoch media as saying he and Shorten, “were united by having much in common, but the choice between them was a difference of emphasis.”
Whether the chance of having a disproportionately small voice in the election of party leader will rejuvenate the ALP’s active membership remains to be seen. If it does, it will be coming off a low base. Bruce Hawker, senior labor adviser for more than two decades, put the active ALP membership at 7500 in 2011. Other estimates are as low as 1000.
Following Labor’s election defeat, Nick Champion, member for Wakefield in South Australia, wrote of Labor’s identity crisis. He argued for the abolition of the party’s socialist objective on the not unreasonable ground that it is no longer taken seriously.
In its place would be an objective based on “mutualism”. Presumably this is the mutualism of a political consensus initiated by Labor that has transferred $2.7 trillion from wages to profits since the time of the Gough Whitlam government in 1975.
A party that organises in local electoral divisions, yet by the threat of expulsion binds elected MPs to caucus-decisions at odds with constituent’s interests, is a long way from grassroots democracy. If anything, the leadership contest stands as a metaphor for Labor’s last three years in office: an internal leadership election campaign, this time half out in the open, while the neoliberal project proceeds apace.
Things will change in the ALP when there is an emphasis on policy development that does not share a neoliberal vision with the Coalition. Now there’s something novel that the members should be allowed to vote on.