Clueless, leaderless and blind

Nicholson cartoon

THE Labor Party faces a governing crisis. Its dismal national conference at the weekend exposed not just a political institution in decline but a party that cannot govern effectively any more.

Labor remains in complete denial of this reality. Its arrogance is breathtaking as it sits on a 31 per cent primary vote and pretends recovery is around the corner.

It is beset by a complex malaise. It suffers both a leadership crisis and a grassroots membership crisis. There are no saviours: no Gough Whitlam or Bob Hawke to inspire a new generation. In truth, Labor is clueless about what to do.

The much lauded Faulkner-Bracks-Carr review is a valuable document, but any idea this is the answer to Labor's problem is ludicrous. This review ducked the issue of trade union power. It is like spring cleaning the house but ignoring the elephant on the lounge. By backing the rule giving unions 50 per cent of ALP conferences the wise men revealed the unsolvable nature of Labor's dilemma.

The party was created in the 1890s and its purpose is accomplished. To a great extent, its race is run. Created to protect and advance unionists and workers, Labor's success over more than a century is heroic.

But union coverage is falling (now about 14 per cent of the private sector) and class divisions have succumbed as workers become little capitalists and wage-earning investors. The party's structure is obsolete yet Labor remains psychologically incapable of its own reinvention.

The upshot is the industrial relations platform change this weekend. What does the 2011 workplace really need? In case you missed it, the chant is for compulsory arbitration's revival. It is back to the future.

In my 2009 book The March of Patriots I argued that in the 1990s Paul Keating and Bill Kelty, acting on behalf of Labor and the unions respectively, signed the death warrant for compulsory arbitration in favour of enterprise bargaining. Not so fast.

Have a read of former NSW minister Frank Sartor's recent book, The Fog on the Hill, to see, chapter and verse, how the NSW unions were able, on issue after issue, to "wield power over the Labor government at will and gradually strangled the government's ability to govern".

The model is broken. Since Labor was elected in 2007 it has re-regulated the labour market and offered multiple concessions to the unions. But they are not enough. The real reason the party clings to the institutional ties with the unions is obvious yet unspoken: it is weakness. With rank-and-file membership in decline, the union sheet anchor is more important than ever. As its public standing sinks, Labor clings tight, like a drowning man, to its identity as a trade union party.

The point about the Hawke-Keating economic reforms that many of us missed is now apparent: ongoing Labor support for the pro-market Hawke-Keating ideas was dependent on reform of the Labor Party itself, a reform that has not happened. The consequence is that the productivity agenda is dead. Labor, over four years, has reverted to instinct, backing government intervention, monopoly and regulation. The conflict is entrenched between Labor culture and the demands of the modern economy.

The further irony is that reviving Labor via the Faulkner-Bracks-Carr technique of giving more power to the rank and file is a double-edged sword. More democracy is good. But rank-and-file Labor culture today is far distant from the Australian community. Nobody attending national conference could miss this point.

It is the reason Mark Latham has branded such reform a deluded romance whose impact would be the Labor embrace of an open door to boats, tax-and-spending budgets, higher climate change taxes and left-wing libertarianism in place of suburban family values.

The Labor rank and file is worthy but its policies guarantee a Coalition government. Slight problem. This is the joke about the nonexistent party reform agenda. It penetrates to the rise of the Greens as a profound dilemma for Labor. John Faulkner seems the only senior ALP figure able to state the obvious: with Labor now fighting the Greens on its Left and the Coalition on its Right, the party faces a challenge without precedent in its history.

Yet its energy, its activists and even many of its ministerial staff are located in this pro-Greens beltway. How many ALP staff actually vote Green? Labor's terror is that of losing a generation of activists to the Greens yet it is also losing a generation of voters to the Coalition.

The activists and the voters are defecting in opposite directions. Labor is a torn party, torn between the fight for its activist-believers heading Left and for its voters heading to the Coalition.

Same-sex marriage is a classic insight into its modern dilemma. The brilliant rainbow campaign conquered Labor from within and without as a single-issue cause, backed by the rank and file, using social media and defining the reform as a 100 per cent rights issue.

Advocate after advocate said there was no voting downside, no electoral negative. This is denied outright by a range of Labor MPs who believe Labor will be punished at the ballot box. Sentiment varies wildly from seat to seat.

You might think that with a primary vote of 31 per cent Labor's chief electoral problem was its alienation from conservative Australia and this decision only entrenches that alienation. But Labor's same-sex champions insist you are wrong and that Labor must respond to grassroots causes on the Left.

Meanwhile, Greens leader Bob Brown had a lethal reply to such arguments. Post-conference, Brown mocked Labor for lacking conviction on same-sex marriage, backing offshore processing and expanding uranium exports. In short, Brown thinks the Greens still easily out-credential Labor on the Left.

All this testifies to a bigger Labor story that nobody likes to mention lest it appear in a family newspaper: the intellectual and ideological collapse of the Labor Right.

The Right, of course, has its rising stars -- Chris Bowen, Bill Shorten, Jason Clare, Paul Howes, among others. It still has the numbers. Just. Until the rank and file gets more power. Its role in leadership contests will be decisive. But the great cultural events that gave the Right its inner faith and fighting credo have disappeared.

These were the Cold War that gave the Right moral stature in its internal brawls with the pro-socialist and sometime pro-communist Left; and the influence of Christianity, which meant a widely shared system of social and moral values championed by the Right and persuasive within the party.

Politics today is more fragmented. The old certainties based on the Western cultural tradition are falling apart. The Right has not found new sources of moral appeal for a new generation of Labor activists.

Gillard tries to govern from the Right but both the Right's banner and Labor's banner are now at permanent half-mast.