Labor's dangerous alliance

THE Labor Party is beset by self-doubt as they lose the Left.

ON the eve of the inquiry into Labor's near-death 2010 election experience, party elder John Faulkner says modern Labor now struggles with the perception "we are very long on cunning and very short on courage".

Faulkner admits that Labor's defects are serious and fundamental. At a time when Labor ministers, state or federal, are unable to even mention in public the identity and institutional crisis afflicting Labor, Faulkner's comments are a crack of reality in the ocean of delusion that constitutes Australia's political discussion.

Surreal is the only description for the current circus. Right on cue NSW Premier Kristina Keneally has confirmed this week that her government is nothing more than a broken hostage to the trade unions in what is the latest and openly contemptuous rejection of the NSW public and taxpayer interest.

Meanwhile Victorian Premier John Brumby is appealing to Liberal voters in the coming state poll not to preference the Greens - yes, that's right, those same Greens in a formal working alliance with the Gillard government - because Brumby fears they will only steal more votes and seats from Labor in the deepest heartland of its strongest state.

The "business-as-usual" coverage of national politics utterly mocks the tectonic shifts under way. Faulkner's admission came when launching the book by former NSW minister Rodney Cavalier, Power Crisis, a work of forensic rage at the self-destruction of the Labor Party. Cavalier's thesis is that the Labor Party is dying from below as its membership collapses while the trade unions that control its conferences have lost their social relevance.

For Cavalier, Labor's malaise lies in its structure and culture. Referring to former leader Simon Crean's reform that reduced the union ratio at state conferences to 50 per cent, Cavalier says: "The impact on the character and control of the ALP was zero. Whether the proportion is 60-40, 50-50, 40-60 or 30-70, the ratio amounts to union control of the conference. Arguments in favour of union control require sophistry worthy of belief in a flat earth. Belonging to the ALP is not a part of the life of a modern Australian worker. Even in Bowral in the year of Don Bradman's birth, the ranks of workers on May Day filled the main street from side to side and for its length. Now May Day, Labor Day and the union picnics days are no more. The para-world of unions was an anachronism by the 1970s."

Yet in NSW, which constitutes nearly 40 per cent of Australia's gross domestic product, the union interest is paramount. It is enshrined and championed over the public interest. This is not a secret; it is a reality, brazen in its contempt for Australian democracy. In the epic 2008 NSW crisis the party machine destroyed its own premier, Morris Iemma, because he refused to submit to the union-dominated conference in its demand that he, as elected premier, abandon his cabinet-authorised plan for electricity privatisation.

The Labor government has dismissed repeated proposals to improve the efficiency of Sydney Ferries by privatisation, a move fought relentlessly by the unions.

This week Keneally defied Julia Gillard by revealing her plan to welsh on last year's Council of Australian Governments agreement for uniform occupational health and safety laws, the achievement repeatedly nominated by Gillard during the election as proof of her economic reform credentials.

The idea that Gillard would tolerate NSW betrayal is inconceivable, though what she does now is another issue.

There is, however, no question of the politics; this betrayal is driven by trade union interests. They seek to perpetuate the NSW system of occupational health and safety laws that have been criticised in the courts, that are unjust and biased in favour of unions.

This action will unite every segment of NSW business against a government that is weak, untrustful and contemptuous of the public interest.

Gillard, speaking through gritted teeth this week, said: "A deal is a deal and the federal government requires this deal to be honoured. This is a key economic reform. It's a key economic reform that was agreed by NSW."

Where is the ACTU? It is backing Keneally and opposing Gillard. ACTU secretary Jeff Lawrence said Gillard's proposed national system should have included a right to third-party prosecutions and an onus on employers to prove they provided a safe workplace.

"The proposed national workplace safety laws should now be reviewed to lift standards and protections for all Australian workers," Lawrence said. That is, Gillard should beat a retreat before Keneally. Frankly, she might as well resign at the same time.

Speaking against the evening beauty of the Sydney Cricket Ground where Cavalier presides as chairman of the board, Faulkner lamented how much Labor had changed in the 40 years since he and Cavalier were fresh-faced branch activists.

Cavalier and Mark Latham are opposites in many ways, yet Cavalier has penned the most damning internal ALP critique since The Latham Diaries. "According to the author, the modern ALP is unrepresentative of its membership, values free and unsure of its future direction," Faulkner said. "In this book he [Cavalier] focuses on what has come to be called in the media the 'NSW disease'; the churn and burn of political leaders, the perceived short-term focus on polling and the relentless tactical battle for day-by-day advantage in the media and the endless, constant, politics of spin."

Moving from the book to make his own appeal, Faulkner said: "We are struggling with the perception we are wholly and solely driven by polling and focus groups. For the Labor Party, steeling our spine and showing real courage, not just cunning, is the challenge that lies before us."

Don't think Faulkner endorses all of Cavalier's book. He doesn't. Indeed, he said "very few" would back all its judgments. The truth is that Cavalier's lethal critique of trade union dominance over state Labor parties has little support within Labor ranks judged by those who want corrective reform. Cavalier, in effect, is a maverick pointing to structural flaws in the Labor Party that have no apparent solution.

Given his decades-long alignment with the Labor Left, Cavalier also confronts the depth of the ideological crisis facing Labor. He writes: "To be on the Left meant being committed to the social reconstruction of our society. It is not about supporting the entry of refugees, which places you beside an ALP right-winger such as John Robertson of NSW, a former Liberal MP such as Petro Georgiou of Victoria or Cardinal George Pell. Mother Teresa believed in combating poverty and starvation. No one called her Left. Being for a republic places you with Malcolm Turnbull and the big end of town."

Cavalier's conclusion is that "in the absence of an ideology, gesture politics has become all important to those wearing the label of Left". Yes, gesture politics can invest the Left with wider public appeal. But the ideological vacuum within the traditional Left is being rapidly filled by the Greens. It is the Greens who possess the strongest, clearest, most universal ideological position that converts into general principles to underpin public policy and mobilise voters.

The Greens are both Labor's friend and enemy: they assist Labor to keep the Coalition out of power yet they steal seats and votes from Labor by stoking the sense of disillusionment with it.

The 2010 hung parliament saw Gillard enter a historic working alliance with the Greens in which she obtained no concessions whatsoever from the Greens beyond their declared public stance: that they wanted Gillard, not Tony Abbott in office. So Gillard has chosen to brand her government a Labor-Green alliance, thereby giving the Coalition its permanent political strategy for the next election. Just witness the palpable fear in Labor ranks this week at the Murray-Darling Basin report.

The gravity of the threat to Labor is not to be mentioned in polite company; the more the Greens influence left politics the more they prejudice Labor and the more it bleeds public support.

This risk is confronted by Labor intellectual Dennis Glover in the recent book All That's Left, edited by Nick Dyrenfurth and Tim Soutphommasane.

"They are on a collision course," Glover says of Labor and the Greens. Warning that Labor's eventual replacement by the Greens is "not inevitable", Glover argues for a mutual Labor-Greens deal in their common interest but remains alive to the sheer difficulty in bringing this to fruition.

Meanwhile, in an event worthy of Alice In Wonderland, ALP Premier Brumby appeals to Liberal voters in the Victorian election to preference Labor over the Greens to ensure re-elected Labor can govern safely without the embarrassment of new Green MPs or, horror upon horror, Labor being forced to rely on the Greens to form a government.

According to this line, it is the responsible role of the Liberal Party and its voters to protect Labor from the Greens' attack. The Liberals, as a party, would be crazy to fall for this self-interested Labor pitch, though Brumby is sensible to make it.

For the Liberals, the main opponent is Labor, not the Greens. The more the Greens define the Left, the more public opinion will move to the Coalition on the Centre-Right.

The Victorian poll presents Gillard with fresh danger: the prospect of the Greens, her alliance partner, winning seats from the Labor Party and compounding this strategic dilemma to which Labor has no answer. Little wonder it wants to keep talking about Tony Abbott.