Poll Bludger: Faulkner dares to take on the unions
At a time when corruption scandals and electoral debacles
have left the party at a historically low ebb, Senator John Faulkner’s
image as a straight-shooting honest broker is a rare asset for the ALP.
He once again put that reputation to use in pursuing the case for party reform in a speech on Tuesday evening, offering his most comprehensive prescription to date for how the party might dig itself out of its present hole.
One one level, as Bernard Keane explored in Crikey yesterday,
Faulkner considered the challenges posed to all political parties by
the changing expectations of democratic participation in the age of
social media.
But the more substantive of his proposals were concerned
with the specific problem facing the ALP: namely the domination of its
decision-making by a small coterie of union officials, and the networks
of patronage encouraged by its existing structures.
Tackling the matter head-on, Faulkner advocated a ban on MPs
being bound to vote along factional lines in caucus. However, such
arrangements merely provide formal expression to the underlying reality
that a parliamentarian’s career longevity usually depends on he/she
staying faithful to those who put him/ her there.
Recognising this, the Faulkner blueprint is equally
concerned with the composition of the party’s state conferences, which
in turn determine the administrative and preselection committees that
have so much bearing on who represents the party in Parliament.
One proposal is for union members to “opt in” to be counted
for purposes of affiliation to the ALP. As well as leaving it to members
to determine if their fees would be used to pay a contribution to the
party, this would also mean that a union’s entitlement to representation
at conference would be determined by the number of opt-in members,
rather than the total membership.
Such a measure was brought in by the Labour Party in the UK
earlier this year, and those who have argued that the ALP should follow
suit have included Julia Gillard, former Gillard government minister
Greg Combet, and Throsby MP Stephen Jones, himself a former union heavyweight as New South Wales secretary of the Community and Public Sector Union.
One of many obstacles here is that the measure would not
stand to impact on all unions equally, as it can be presumed that some
unions’ membership bases would be more amenable to opting in than
others.
Party observers say the powerful Right faction Shop,
Distributive and Allied Employees Association, noted as a force for
social conservatism, would have a particularly difficult time persuading
the retail workers who dominate its membership to sign on. Other unions
of both the Left (United Voice and the Australian Services Union) and
Right (the Transport Workers Union) would do rather a lot better out of
the arrangement.
Another approach taken by Faulkner involves putting the
selection of delegates to state conferences in the hands of the union
membership, rather than the leadership. Of particular significance is
Faulkner’s view that the elections should be conducted “under the
principle of proportional representation”. Otherwise, elections for
delegates would largely replicate those conducted for the union
leadership, providing a more roundabout means for delivering them what
they have already. If a union’s conference delegation was instead made
to consist of multiple competing entities within the party, it would no
longer operate as a bloc of loyal soldiers acting at the behest of the
leadership.
A hint to the likelihood of Faulkner’s proposals taking
effect, in the short term at least, is provided by his call for the
union component at party conferences to be cut from its existing 50% to
20%.
Given the political trauma endured by former Labor leader
Simon Crean, when he succeeded in reducing it from 60% in 2002, this
seems extravagantly ambitious. Then as now, the reform project was
confronted by the conundrum, by no means peculiar to the ALP, that power
to change the organisational status quo lies in the hands of its very
beneficiaries.
So for the moment at least, it appears the best Faulkner can
hope for is to add momentum to a reform drive that continues to proceed
tentatively and inconsistently.
It is no doubt telling that the New South Wales and
Queensland branches, having been reduced to parliamentary rumps at their
most recent state elections, have gone further down the reform path
than other states, particularly Victoria, where the party has never
ceased to be competitive.
The troubling corollary for federal Labor is that it may
take a few more strokes of the electoral lash before it feels emboldened
to take the measures necessary to ensure that its next spell in office
will be less tumultuous than the last.
No comments:
Post a Comment