Leadership changes only aggravate Labor's malady

LABOR'S leadership ballot was supposed to revitalise the party. Instead, it has revitalised the factions, leaving them firmly in control. Rather than learn from the past six years, Labor seems intent on repeating its mistakes.

The situation Labor faces is dire. From 1972 to 2013, the major parties' share of the primary vote for the House of Representatives declined from 96 per cent to less than 80 per cent. Over three-quarters of that decline was at Labor's expense.

A long run of disastrous leaders has contributed to that collapse. So it is scarcely surprising that Labor would amend its leadership rules. But the changes it has made seem more likely to worsen the problems than to resolve them.

Allowing members to vote for the party leader itself introduces new risks. Almost by definition, a party's members are unrepresentative of the electorate, and tend to be more passionately committed to its core beliefs than even the party's average electoral supporter.

With each member's vote unlikely to affect the outcome, and individual members having little at stake in the ballot, leadership votes become a chance to express an ideological stance within the party, with scant regard to the party's electoral prospects. As a result, instead of widening the party's appeal, the process may select the leader whose views best echo members' prejudices.

In theory, that risk should be smaller when the leader is selected by MPs. After all, the electoral process makes it likely MPs will be reasonably representative of their electorates, and hence somewhat more centrist than party members.

At the same time, MPs have the most to gain from the party being in power, giving them a strong incentive to choose leaders who can speak to a broad audience. And MPs will know more about the individual candidates, as they deal with them on a daily basis.

Yet the Latham, Rudd and Gillard disasters show that hardly guarantees wise choices. Rather, the reality is that no selection process entirely avoids mistakes.

Whether those mistakes can be corrected is therefore at least as important as the procedures by which a leader is chosen.

Unfortunately, the changes Labor has made to its rules impose unprecedented restrictions on leadership challenges. Even before those changes, the requirement that 30 per cent of caucus agree before a leadership spill could be called was far higher than the current 20 per cent threshold in Britain's Labour Party.

Now, 75 per cent of caucus will need to sign a petition to force a challenge to a serving prime minister and 60 per cent to an opposition leader.

Those hurdles will have a dramatic impact on the extent to which incumbent leaders face the threat of dismissal. Inevitably, leaders enjoy a degree of natural protection, as their ability to punish those who seek to move against them make attempted ejections highly risky. Even British Labour's low thresholds, therefore, proved sufficient to shield Tony Blair and then Gordon Brown from challenge, despite their losing the confidence of the party room.

With the ALP's new thresholds, ejecting an incumbent leader will be virtually impossible. Indeed, challenges will only have any hope of success if they are orchestrated by the factions.

As well as allowing dysfunctional leadership to persist, that will make the factions even more important, both to leaders, who can rest secure so long as they enjoy their support, and to individual MPs, who will count for nothing when they act alone.

The high threshold required to nominate as a candidate in a leadership vote will accentuate that effect, as the factions will be the gatekeepers to securing endorsements and the key communications channel to members.

Instead of ensuring greater internal democracy, Labor's changes will therefore entrench its power brokers. And those powerbrokers are increasingly based in, and dependent on, the unions.

Historically, that link was a source of strength, as the unions provided the training ground for the party's cadres. Moreover, when the unions had deep roots in the community, rising through the ranks itself acted as a selection mechanism, weeding out at least some of the worst incompetents.

But, with barely 20 per cent of full-time employees now unionised, the unions primarily serve their officials rather than the other way around.

Nor is that on a small scale. In 1975, when the unions had nearly three million members, they employed barely 2000 officials. Now, with only 1.8 million members, they employ more than 4000, a ratio of officials to members five times that in Britain. And the composition of that employment has changed dramatically.

In the early 1970s, union officials were overwhelmingly drawn from their members' ranks. In contrast, today's officials are twice as likely as their members to be university educated, with an even greater gap in the unions whose members are in the private sector.

Far from producing battle-hardened leaders, all that system generates is power-hungry apparatchiks whose prime loyalty is to the faction that sponsored their career.

No wonder Labor has proven incapable of confronting the root causes of its failure. Those causes do not lie in disunity; rather, disunity is the symptom of a party in which ideas count for nothing and power for everything. Yet, however deadly the battle over the spoils, there was no dissent within Labor on the policies that led to its downfall.

Stretching from the Fair Work Act to the carbon and mining taxes, those policies, enthusiastically endorsed by the unions, veered the party to the Left just as the electorate was moving to the Right. Yet Labor refused, and still refuses, to recognise the electoral cost that was certain to inflict.

John F. Kennedy famously referred to himself as an idealist shorn of illusions; Labor is now little more than a party of illusionists shorn of ideals.

That is a malady no leadership selection mechanism can cure; to think otherwise is merely to add one more delusion to Labor's never-ending pile.