Fractured factions to Shorten's speech: five things to watch at Labor conference
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Version 0 of 1. Showstoppers – when to tune in Let’s start with the specific and synchronise our diaries now. The conference starts on Friday and runs over the next three days. If you don’t fancy jumping on board our coverage for the long haul, let me give you some tips about when it’s worth your while to tune in. Bill Shorten will open proceedings at the 47th national conference with a speech delivered on Friday morning, shortly after 9.30am. The party will then roll forward into the economic debate, which will include some general feistiness on free trade. Saturday will see two interesting debates: climate change and asylum policy. Both are scheduled for the afternoon. Climate change feisty is about renewable energy and about Australia’s post-2020 emissions targets, while asylum feisty is predominantly about boat turnbacks. Sunday’s points of interest will be the debate on the recognition of Palestine, and the party rules debate in the afternoon, which covers various democratisation proposals. I’ll get more into democratisation shortly. By the numbers You know you are in an interesting and unusual ALP national conference when senior people somehow get tied up for weeks in a pitched internal battle over the factional balance of the Young Labor delegation. Yes, that actually happened. It happened not because of a strange descent into micro compulsion, but because the right faction really wanted three handy Young Labor votes on the conference floor, and the prospect of a functional majority. The left would only give them two. The left won. Welcome to the new normal. The right faction has controlled the ALP national conference more or less since 1984. Not this time. The numbers are tight. Let me say that again. T-i-g-h-t. The right has 197 votes, the left 196 and there are four nominally non-aligned votes up for grabs. With the numerical balance that fine, the incentives for head tossing theatrics and internal horse-trading have hit an all-time high. Nightmare for control freaks, this particular knees-up. Discipline and democratisation Head tossing theatrics and internal horse-trading leads me naturally to our next conference thought, which flows from numbers but is more complex than numbers. We need to think about discipline and democratisation. Put simply there is more of the latter and less of the former. That’s a conference dynamic worth noting. What’s going on in Labor right now is a cultural shift worthy of a PhD thesis in anthropology, but for our purposes, let’s just know what we need to know. First thing to know is rigid factional blocs are no longer a thing. The party is currently populated by a bunch of sub-factions which sometimes go to war and sometimes sue for peace, and sometimes do both at the same time. Through the 1980s and 90s, persisting into the Rudd/Gillard period was the organising principle that there are two tribal factions, with soldiers deployed in willing lock-step. While we all persist in thinking in the old tradition, fact is it’s over. Things are far more fluid, and part of the reason they are fluid (apart from the fact that they just don’t make terrifying factional head-kickers like they used to) is a nascent culture of democratisation. The rank-and-file Ah yes, the members. The members are restive. Labor – both federally and at the state level – has over the past few years begun to respond to calls to dilute some of the party’s historical institutional power, be it factional power, or trade union power. Labor is still a distance short of genuine democracy, but the members are dealing themselves in increasingly to key debates. Party members in 2013 participated in the ALP’s first grassroots leadership vote, and this national conference will deal with a push to extend that grass roots ballot model to Senate preselections and to the selection of conference delegates. The lived experience of democratisation is it has boosted the relative power of the left. Big Labor branches in city metro areas lean progressive. The left often out-polls the right in membership votes. Right powerbrokers and trade union officials tend to view various proposals to activate the rank and file as threats to their hegemony. That’s why these proposals tend to run into resistance. Have a look on the weekend, let’s see what happens. Freedom … a bugger of a thing The sum of the 2015 national conference parts tells a story of a political movement in transition. All the small contextual sub-currents are, in some ways, more interesting than some of the headline debates will see over the weekend. Labor stands on the brink of being able to exercise some genuine free thinking. The closeness of the numbers at this event makes individuals and small groups really powerful in the event they choose to exercise their power. Debate and dissent is a productive quality in a political movement, even if it gets written up in highly reductionist terms. But freedom can sometimes be better in theory than in practice. Labor is within sight of the next federal election. There will be enormous pressure exercised behind the scenes to keep the dissent to manageable levels lest the party leadership be embarrassed. It’s a funny thing: this conference contains all the conditions to be genuinely productive and genuinely memorable, but the consequential nature of freedom also means it’s entirely capable of fizzing to nothing. |