BY PETER BOYLE
Simon Crean has gone, but is his replacement any better? The answer was a foregone conclusion even before the December 2 Labor caucus vote.
The main options delivered by ALP powerbrokers are: Kim "Bomber" Beazley, Mark tax-cuts-for-the-rich Latham or Kevin Get-tougher-on-terrorism Rudd (the favourite of right-wing NSW Labor Premier Bob Carr).
Labor's most left-wing potential contender, Carmen Lawrence, who declared during the last leadership stoush that there was "no difference between Simon and Kim on policy grounds", has accepted the powerless ALP presidency.
In the year where 1 million people marched against the invasion of Iraq, where poll after poll shows a rejection of the Coalition government's attacks on Medicare and public education, all the ALP can offer is a leader who will once again offer no significant political alternative to Prime Minster John Howard at the next election.
The ALP's 2002 Wran-Hawke internal review warned that "the ALP is failing to differentiate itself sufficiently from the Coalition" and that once-loyal supporters were turning to minor parties. Yet the ALP machine spits out more revolting right-wing leaders and tacks its policy close to that of the Howard government.
This is a rightward trajectory shared by the traditional social democratic parties of alternative government in every developed country over the last two-and-a-half decades. When in government, these parties have organised attacks on public services and other social gains. They have brought in anti-union laws and deregulated labour and financial markets.
In Australia, it was the Hawke-Keating Labor federal governments that carried out the reactionary neoliberal "reforms" that Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan carried out in Britain and the USA. ALP state governments do the same today.
In doing so, these right-wing Labor governments have alienated a growing section of their traditional working-class support base.
A member of the NSW Young Labor executive told the Sydney Morning Herald in April that, "NSW membership had already plunged by about 3000 members in the last few years" and that younger people were particularly deserting Labor.
A devastating report by Damian O'Connor for the Evatt Foundation released in March 2002 revealed that:
"Most [NSW] branches have declining attendances and at least 40 are technically defunct. Branch stacking remains un-addressed in several areas of the state. The base of voters in preselections is low, with rarely more than 200 voters in a federal ballot for a seat of 90,000 electors — in the last preselection round, there were 62 voters in Page branch, 91 in Richmond, 112 in Macquarie, 118 in Charlton, 143 in Hughes and 172 in Robertson. Newcastle had 345.
"Despite rumours to the contrary, barely 40% of us are union members, and only 18% are members of affiliate unions. We have about 9000 unionists in a state of about one million (i.e. less than 1%). Only 36% of us are women. Almost two-thirds of us are over 40, making us much older than the state over-14 average. Young Labor is ineffective. It fails to organise the over 2500 members under the age of 27 we already have, let alone attract new members."
Membership decline has also been reported in other states. Crikey.com, the independent internet news service, reported that last year's Queensland ALP conference was told that membership has declined 10% in the previous 12 months (which would put it at around about 6500) and that the membership of Young Labor is down to about 450, half what it was a decade ago.
The Labor federal MP for Melbourne has told the Wran-Hawke review that the state ALP's membership is "chronically low, ageing, only sporadically active and corrupted by branch-stacking in a number of areas".
The July 29 Age reported that the Victorian branch had 11,000 members, but one in 10 were not on the Australian Electoral Commission roll, and were suspected to be part of continuing branch stacking.
Several ALP officials in Queensland have been jailed for forging branch membership and electoral roll registrations and extensive ALP branch-stacking has been exposed in a series of court cases in Queensland, NSW and South Australia.
Now ostensible attempts to clean up branch stacking have been alleged to be manipulated by ALP powerbrokers. Recently ALP right-winger Greg Sword claimed he would use new ALP rule changes he introduced to clean up the Labor Party's membership books by disallowing 2700 members, but his factional opponents say this is just a push to consolidate his power in the branch.
While ALP branches decline, the party has looked increasingly to corporate donors to fund its election campaigns.
In his report on the NSW branch, O'Connor noted that donations from the corporate sector outweighed union donations by a factor of six to one. They took more than $900,000 from developers and construction companies, more than $300,000 from the finance sector and $73,000 from the tobacco industry, to name a few, in a total of over $3 million.
From Green Left Weekly, December 3, 2003.
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