Labor foes are in furious agreement, and that’s infuriating

The 2021 conference to debate the national policies of the Labor Party was especially drab: it took place on Zoom. The one before, in 2018, was only slightly better. It was scheduled in the political dead zone of mid-December. Nobody was paying attention, which was fine, because there was nothing much to pay attention to.

With only months until the next election, a Labor victory seemingly guaranteed, it was in nobody’s interests to ruffle feathers. Disunity, after all, is death. But Labor lost that election anyway. This probably should have prompted some doubts, not just in Labor but across the political class. Was unity as worthwhile as it seemed? Was the appearance of absolute agreement across an entire political party really a useful step towards victory? Was the decision of individuals not to stand up for principles actually all that helpful to the party they were trying to serve?

Illustration: Jim PavlidisCredit: Fairfax Media

This Thursday, the latest ALP National Conference kicks off. To most voters, national conferences seem irrelevant: tedious events stranded somewhere between bureaucracy and pageantry. In terms of the way the Labor Party has historically operated, their importance is hard to overstate.

One hundred years ago, in 1923, Vere Gordon Childe, an archaeologist who spent time in the Labor trenches, described “labour’s novel theory of democracy”. As his biographer, Terry Irving, has explained it, workers’ parties were created to represent workers. To keep their MPs honest – to make sure they kept working for the labour movement that had put them there – policy had to be decided by those in the movement, not just the handful of MPs.

That is the purpose of a national conference: the movement votes on policy, and that is what Labor MPs then work to deliver. If Labor leaders want to change policy, they must convince the movement – as John Curtin did on the issue of conscription during World War II.

Technically, this is still the way things work. In practice, conferences have changed over time. This week, there may be some disagreements – including around AUKUS – but fierce debates have become rarer. Deals are done between the factions so that positions are stitched up beforehand, often in partnership with Labor MPs who want to avoid public fireworks. Gordon Childe didn’t think practice matched the theory even in 1923 – what on earth would he think now?

In a speech last month, Labor MP Andrew Leigh – who is not a member of a faction, and as a result has never risen as far as he should have – criticised the current situation: “today’s factions are less likely to broker ideological debates than to try and find a way of avoiding the debate altogether… If we stifle internal debate, we miss the chance to test our policies among ourselves, and to train new generations of thinkers.” This amounts, he warned, to “calling a truce in the battle of ideas”.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese are from different factions but they present a united front.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

This year, there is an additional complication. Often, those internal debates were a contest between Left and Right. The Right led the party: the Left did its best to make sure those leaders did not drift too far to the right. Now, Labor has a prime minister from the (hard) Left of the Labor Party, which as a result may be more reluctant to disagree with the government’s stance. If that is, in fact, the case, it raises important questions: who will provoke debate and challenge the status quo? Where will new ideas come from?

Interestingly, there is a second important meeting of Labor figures this week. National cabinet – which meets on the subject of housing this Wednesday – is only de facto Labor. It just happens that most state and territory leaders are currently from the same party.

That was then: Bill Shorten was party leader at the last face-to-face Labor conference in 2018.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

There are some disagreements about what to do. The topic is immense. On rent, NSW has made clear it will not back caps, which exist in the ACT and in which Victoria has shown some interest. But the fact we are talking about rent caps as much as we are, of course, is largely down to the Greens.

The specific idea has problems. Reserve Bank Governor Philip Lowe said on Friday it might help in the short term but created issues in the long run. On one level, it can seem like cheap politics. But what the Greens are doing is a little more sophisticated than that.

Anthony Albanese recently seized on an article Greens spokesman Max Chandler-Mather wrote in which the MP defended blocking Labor’s housing fund because this “helps create the space for a broader campaign”. The Greens were interested in campaigning, not doing, Albanese said. This is a fair critique – if you come at things from the perspective of a Labor prime minister. Arguably, though, this is exactly what the Greens are there to do: provoke debate, challenge assumptions and drag the weight of politics in their direction. A role, one might say, that has traditionally been filled by the left-wing of the Labor Party.

Dilemmas about disagreement are not exclusive to the left. In parliament last week, Liberal MP Keith Wolahan made an important intervention, saying his party had to learn from the mistakes of robo-debt. The program, he said, offended Liberal values like “the sanctity of the individual, due process and the presumption of innocence”. Opposition was “a time to reflect on how you can do better if your party is given the honour of being in government again”.

It is easy to miss what is striking about that phrase. Most politicians believe the role of an opposition is to win government. Much more important than that, Wolahan suggests, is learning how to be a better government. And sometimes – his actions imply – that means having honest discussions right now.

We talk a lot in this country about the triviality of our partisan contests, the lack of constructive debate. We don’t talk enough about the ways these might be a product of the assumptions, often flawed, that dominate our politics: about the role of governments, the role of oppositions, of factions, of minor parties. Yes, disunity can be death. And yes, disagreement – within parties or between parties – can sometimes stop things getting done. But too much agreement can stop things from happening, too.

Sean Kelly is a regular columnist. He is a former adviser to Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd.

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