This is the core delusion of 21st-century democracy, that political parties can fragment and hollow out, yet still win the confidence of the people.

Mark Latham in Not Dead Yet

Latham starts his Quarterly Essay regretting he did not do enough during his fourteen months as Labor leader to develop new thinking in the party. As usual, Latham is too modest. By leading his party to one of its worst post-war defeats in 2004, Latham did more than his fair share in bringing Labor’s crisis and “new thinking” to the surface. By 2005 and 2006, Labor despondency reached such a depth that it sparked off an open condemnation of the party’s structure and factional system.

A flashpoint was the threatened deselection of Simon Crean by the Victorian Right in 2006, supposedly for flirting with the Left and attempting to dilute the influence of the unions during his period as leader. At the time, a certain “leadership aspirant” criticised the then leader, Kim Beazley, for not standing by Crean’s pre-selection, claiming that this was an example of why the factional system needed to be wound back.

Crean’s seeing off of the Right’s union candidate in March 2006 was perceived as a blow to Beazley and the factional system. It eventually led to said leadership aspirant from the left lining up with another from the right, who actually had the numbers, and deposing Beazley – and so the Rudd-Gillard partnership was born. The new leadership team immediately confirmed their position on the factions by leaving their own. Rudd broke tradition by formally taking the power to appoint his own frontbench from the factions, something Gillard has tried to hold on to.

The dialectic of history has rearranged the players like the ending of a bad Shakespearean RomCom, but the dynamic remains. The leadership oscillations between party reformers like Crean, Latham, and Rudd, and those representing the power bases, Beazley, and with Gillard on both sides, represent the party grappling with a dilemma of how to move away from a power structure that has lost its relevance, but nevertheless remains the party power structure. After having attacked the power brokers in his Diaries, Latham’s essay now attempts to resolve a dilemma that now has broken out into the open.

Latham’s diagnosis of Labor’s problem is simple. Labor is being run by union bosses who exercise their power over the party through a faction system that has left it an empty shell. Indeed the less influence unions have in society, the more they have looked to exercise it in the party.

Latham tells it like it is:

Unionisation in Australia has fallen to 18 per cent economy-wide, with private sector coverage at just 13 per cent. Whether the traditionalists like it or not, minority union membership is here to stay. In a highly skilled and competitive modern economy – dominated by small businesses, contractors and information workers – it is impossible to organise mass union membership. A majority of economic agents see no need for collective representation.

The union oligarchy is at odds with the new economy and:

… the rise of a new aspirational class: the free agents of the new economy (the start-up entrepreneurs, contractors and information-rich specialists) who resent the intervention of outsiders, whether in the form of excessive government regulation or trade union collectivism.

Explaining the decline of unions and Labor membership by the rise of this aspiring entrepreneurial workforce sounds terribly new thinking. Unfortunately, Latham gives no evidence for it.

That’s probably because there isn’t any. Indeed looking at what is actually happening shows a reality that is almost opposite to the picture painted by Latham, and others.

Far from there being some Golden Age of a homogenous labour force, Labor and the unions in Australia were formed in what was a relatively heterogeneous workforce for a developed economy. The Australian workforce had a higher level of self-employment than even what is regarded as a fairly heterogeneous US workforce. By 1960, still over 18% of the Australian work-force was self-employed compared to 16% in the US. It fell during the post war boom, especially with consolidation in farming, to around 12% by the early 1970s, but still well above the US’s 8% level.

However, as the first post-war downturn hit in the mid-1970s, this level started to rise again, flat-lined during the 1980s at around 15%, then began moving upwards as the economy soured again at the end of the decade.

It was during the early 1990s recession – as union membership began its terminal decline as self-employed numbers continued to rise – it became fashionable amongst political theorists to talk of a profound sea change in the workforce that meant collective bodies like unions and ALP membership were a thing of the past. It was favoured on the left to explain failure both on the industrial and political scene – but also on the right, as a justification for the inroads they were supposedly making with traditional Labor working class supporters. When the Liberals came to power in 1996, then Liberal party director Andrew Robb brought it into the political lexicon naming this new demographic of former-blue-collar-now-self-employed, the “Howard Battlers”.

Then something rather awkward happened. As the economy recovered in the mid-1990s, self-employed numbers began to fall. Rather than all those Howard Battlers running off to Penrith to start up their plumbing business, there was a drift back to working for the boss as the economy recovered and pay and conditions being offered by employers improved. It was a trend that continued through the Howard years and carried on when Labor came back to office in 2007, as the level began returning to the historic lows of the early 1970s.

So rather than the workforce becoming more entrepreneurial and reliant on self-employment over the last 50 years, it has actually become less.

But it wasn’t just the numbers that contradicts Latham’s scenario, so does their dynamic. Rather than all these entrepreneurs supposedly latching onto the heady opportunities unleashed by Labor’s deregulated economy, it was noticed that self-employed numbers tended to rise during a downturn, i.e. when the benefits of a deregulated economy would be least evident. It suggests that a turn to self-employment was less a grab at newly liberated flows of capital, as “new thinkers” like Latham like to suppose, but more a way of keeping the money coming in as conditions deteriorated in the workplace. When the good times returned, working for a boss might have seemed more attractive than chancing even a buoyant market with limited capital resources.

Needless to say, these workers who returned to being an employee over the last decade didn’t re-join a union. Union numbers continued to fall regardless of how many were self-employed. The idea that the workforce was turning away from unions because they were self-employed was a myth. If anything, it was likely to be the other way round. When times were tough, the increasing ineffectiveness of unions probably made going it alone, with all its risks, an increasingly viable option.

The decline of union membership (and Labor’s primary vote) was not due to some sociological “new economy” but as a response to the failure of Labor and the unions to maintain living standards and protect jobs during the 1980s and early 1990s. in fact the balance tipping towards employers led to what was a discernible and persistent trend in employment, its increasing casualization, which although rising modestly overall over the past 20 years, nevertheless disguises a major shift from part- to full-time casual employment within it.

It is necessary going into this in a bit of detail because this view of a new entrepreneurial workforce has become so entrenched in commentary, mainly because it so suits both sides of politics to believe it.

This raises an important question. Much of the way society is discussed is done through the prism of our political system. Distortions can occur even on something where statistics are readily available, let alone on things that are harder to measure. So what happens to that view of society when the political system starts to decay? Latham’s essay gives an unsettling answer.

But before looking at this, it is necessary to look at how Latham not only distorts what has been happening in the workforce but also Labor’s relationship to it.

Latham has an odd view of the history of the Labor party and its role in Australian society. For Latham the key dynamic is between the union/faction leaders and the party membership:

The formalisation of Labor’s factional system in the 1980s has coincided with a hollowing out of party membership. … When we think of Labor party splits, the parliamentary schisms of 1916, 1931 and 1955 come to mind – in each case, highlighted by the decision of a significant proportion of Labor MPs to leave the party. The current split is different and, in many respects, more serious. The union/factional wing has divorced itself from the rank-and-file. … The ALP’s original purpose, the mass participation of working men and women in parliamentary democracy, has dissolved.

But the key tension in Labor has never been between the membership and its leadership and is not now. Nor is it a case that it has lost its original purpose as “the mass participation of working men and women in parliamentary democracy”. It never had it. No party with a colour bar for half of its existence could ever claim that.

Labor’s significance has always rested on its role as a political vehicle for the trade union leadership, which in turn rested on its ties with the significant, organised section of the labour force. It was the social significance of the trade union organisations that gave Labor its significance. This relationship with organised labour became especially critical in government when managing opposition to any measures that went against the interests of the workforce.

It was this conflict between the Labor/union leadership and its base in organised labour that led to the splits of 1916 and 1931. The split within the parliamentary party itself merely reflected the dilemma Labor and the union leadership faced when unable to impose its program (conscription, austerity) on sections of the workforce on whose ties its case for government nevertheless ultimately relied.

From this angle there could be said to be one final such “split” between the party/union leadership and its social base: when the Parliamentary party and the union leadership unanimously came together to impose wage restraint in the 1980s Accord. Except this time, instead of union members opposing Labor’s program from within the union movement, they simply abandoned both.

Throughout, the membership of the ALP has had little do with it. Indeed the “faceless men” tag originally alluded to the subordinate role even the Parliamentary Party played relative to the union leadership, let alone its membership.

The membership’s main importance in the last few decades has been as a tool for the Parliamentary Party to push back against the power of the union leadership. This was a feature of Whitlam’s modernising of the ALP: to bring in a more middle class membership as a counter-point to union influence. This was especially the case on the left. In states like South Australia and New South Wales, the “new left” on social issues was used as a counter influence against the old left unions – which has its echo in the way that gay marriage is used as an internal political football in the party today.

Like his re-writing of changes in the workforce, Latham’s re-writing of Labor’s historical role is a convenient distortion, but even less convincing. To read Latham talk of Labor’s “grassroots” and being “community-based”, one wonders what party he is talking about. It gets close to parody when he talks of the success of Labor leaders coming from “perspectives and ideas gleaned from grassroots political participation”:

The party’s four great reformers, John Curtin, Ben Chifley, Gough Whitlam and Paul Keating, each followed this pattern: the young Curtin crusading for social justice with the Salvation Army … Chifley, a servant of the local community, not just a federal MP, treasurer and prime minister, but also as an Abercrombie Shire councillor; Whitlam raising a young family in Cabramatta in Sydney’s south-west, gathering ideas for education, health and urban policy from his electorate; and finally the young Keating, bruised by his father’s frustration in trying to raise bank finance for his family’s manufacturing business – personal catalyst for the deregulation of Australia’s financial system in the 1980s.

The idea of the patrician Whitlam as some community organiser is especially amusing. But the notion that these leaders rose because of grassroots activity and formed their programmes around it, rather than, say, through managing the complex tensions and power relations between business, organised labour, the broader electorate and international factors, is all wonderful nonsense.

The ALP is not the Australian Democrats. Or, at least it wasn’t.

Latham’s view on the labour force and Labor’s role has little basis in reality. Nevertheless it’s an important spin for party reformers. First it allows them to represent Labor’s problem as merely one of needing a new narrative to connect to this new aspirational workforce, and being a “victim of its own success” (rather than its opposite as far as its base is concerned). Secondly, it allows party reformers to flatter Labor by posing reform as returning Labor to past glories. Yet what Latham and other party reformers are proposing is something quite new from what Labor used to be.

Finally, it continues the practice over recent decades of using the party membership and the “community” as a stage army for the party power brokers, but in a way that has quite different implications for democracy. Latham is quite explicit on using the membership and the community to support existing power brokers. Indeed, as you would expect from someone with an insider’s distorted view of the world, when he turns his attention to Labor’s internal affairs, Latham suddenly becomes sharp as a tack.

Latham puts his finger on the central dilemma of party reform. Reformers (like Hawker?) might want to end the formal connection with the union movement that would turn Labor into a “social democratic party, unencumbered by direct/union factional influence”…

… but this not going to happen. Most obviously, union chiefs are not going to sacrifice their power, especially when they have already lost so much in terms of workforce coverage.

Realistically,

With the ALP-union link preserved, reformers need to pursue the next best option. Pragmatically, there is no alternative. The union/faction chiefs will not commit hari-kiri (by ending union affiliations) but some of them might, in certain circumstances, sponsor significant reform. … This occurs when a small but influential band of leaders decides that something dramatic needs to be done to avoid organisational collapse.

In other words, reform only comes from above when there is no other choice for staying in power. This is useful to remember as the sight of ALP factional chiefs standing up to tell us that factions have too much power is becoming as ritualistic (and meaningful) as an Acknowledgement to Country.

Having argued that reform can only come from above, it is no surprise then who Latham thinks should be leading this reform:

The key player for Labor, as ever, is the NSW Right. It is led by two young reform-minded officials, he NSW general secretary, Sam Dastyari, and Paul Howes from the AWU. … They understand the organisational task confronting them, with Dastyari declaring in December 2012, “The challenge facing us is, really, reform or die. The Labor Party has to change, it has to reform, it has to be prepared to embrace big ideas”.

It is a long time since ta NSW general secretary has spoken this way. Dastyari is the most significant advocate of reform in the party today: a senior powerbroker who accepts the necessity for change … Anyone who wants Labor to prosper will want him to succeed in his reform programme.

Latham sees the decline of the NSW Right as a major factor in the party’s current troubles. For Latham, the NSW Right is the glue that binds the party together and its unravelling over recent years has implications across the party. For Labor to revive, so must the NSW Right.

It has to be said that reviving the NSW Right might not be a political task that grips the imagination of the nation. It might not even especially thrill the centre-leftish readership of Quarterly Essay (it certainly doesn’t set this blogger alight). But in reducing Labor’s problem down to restoring the balance between the union leadership and the parliamentary party/membership, Latham is led to inevitably trying to revive the faction that was supposed to underpin it.

The problem with this is that it ignores why the NSW Right ran into problems in the first place. Latham sees the problems with the NSW Right stemming from the current NSW Labor leader, Robertson, siding with the left as head of the NSW Labor Council and then leading the unions to undermine the Parliamentary Party in NSW over privatisation and in Canberra over party reform.

But hollowed-out unions, as Latham would describe them, would only have influence over the Parliamentary Party because it was already in disarray. The NSW Right faces the same problem as the Coalition, it has nothing to be against. The ALP Right’s role as a bulwark against balancing the electoral demands of the Parliamentary Party with pressure from its base becomes irrelevant if there is no pressure. In fact, the ALP Right’s position has inverted. Rather than benefiting from balancing these demands, its position is now threatened by them.

The ALP Right is now torn between managing pressure from the union leadership, on which its influence relied, and party reformers who want to free the Parliamentary party from what they see as the union liability. In NSW, this led to them turning to a reformer like Rees, then dumping him, and in Canberra, to Rudd, then dumping him. In looking for the NSW Right to solve the party’s crisis, Latham has turned to the section of it that arguably demonstrates it the most.

This is not some subjective assessment of this blogger. The electorate delivered its verdict on the state of the NSW Right on 26 March 2011 when it gave Labor a worse result than when it split in half and ran against itself in the 1930s. For Latham, 2011 was less a verdict on the NSW Right but the union influence that eclipsed it. So putting this catastrophic result to one side, Latham sees the NSW Right, and the party, reviving itself through community activism.

According to Latham, Dastyari’s “big idea” is the introduction of primaries for Labor candidates. It has to be said, NSW Labor’s attempts so far can’t exactly be called a sparkling advance for democracy. Sussex St was reported to have directed their candidate on preferences in last year’s Sydney Mayoral election and abandoned its promise to run a candidate in the following Sydney by-election altogether. In both cases it looked suspiciously like classic Sussex St manoeuvring for electoral advantage than a grassroots revolution.

But then as Latham rather cynically notes, this is really about improving Labor’s “participatory credentials” more than anything. It comes from the impasse inside Labor of reforming a party while keeping its power brokers in place. As Latham says, given the impossibility of breaking the union nexus, the introduction of primary pre-selections is “Labor’s last hope”.

But Latham is trying to square the circle. Those power brokers are in their positions because they represent the historic nexus between the institutions of organised labour and the parliamentary party, a nexus that has had its day. From a starting point that has lost its social relevance, Latham is now forced to concoct a political program that has no real social basis, and the result is not pretty.

What platform should these new “community” candidates stand on? Naturally Latham doesn’t suggest that the community itself should decide, let’s not go berserk. Rather, Latham proposed new policies for a “post-left electorate” that have understandably raised the ire of what left exists, and the eyebrows of others as well.

One of the depressing things of the current government is to see the return of the miserabilist view of the Australian electorate as xenophobic and hip-pocket sensitive that characterised the last years of the Howard government. In Gillard’s case it has turned what was a smart, socially progressive politician into a Howard parody who thinks asylum seekers is a leading electorate concern, who would rather be at home watching kids read than at some fancy-pantsy NATO conference in Brussels, and who has what are, no doubt, deeply held personal views on the sanctity of marriage.

Yet Gillard’s re-run of the Howard years requires forgetting that awkward period in between, when from 2007 to 2009, Australia’s most popular political leader in living memory proved that this miserabilist view was not necessarily the case. It has been fashionable to put Labor’s only election victory in the last 20 years in 2007 down to the success of Rudd’s small target strategy. Certainly it was true in regards to what were the usual divisive issues of the economy and government spending. Rudd’s difference lay in what were more seen as “symbols” like signing Kyoto, ending the Pacific Solution, withdrawing from Iraq and apologising to the Stolen Generation.

But those “symbols” certainly weren’t regarded as such during Howard’s government but rather demonstrating his superior ability to tap into the electorate compared to the world-view of effete latté sipping inner-city elites. Yet all this was thrown overboard in the last months of Howard’s government when he was running like an effete inner-city type himself, promising an ETS and to give indigenous recognition in the Constitution. This miserabilist view was especially discredited a few months later when after that most limp-wristed of gestures, the Apology, not only did Rudd’s popularity soar to record levels, but also the refusal by Howard, and unfortunate acolytes such as Dutton, to attend was regarded as an embarrassment.

However, the Apology also touched on the problems for Labor of Rudd’s approach, despite its obvious electoral rationale. Labor bowed to Howard’s miserabilist view because as an explanation for their electoral losses, as being simply too good for a selfish racist electorate, it was more comforting than accepting their irrelevance. The problem is that it also made them look out of touch and elitist (and also rather insulting of the electorate) which Howard exploited ruthlessly with his attacks on the “elite’s black armband view of history”.

Rudd found a solution to that dilemma. His Apology speech differed from how the Sorry campaign had posed it under Howard, by not making it a collective guilt trip but to lay the blame squarely on the political class. It was a deft example of the anti-political tone of the Rudd period that lay behind his electoral appeal and that faded as he began bowing not only to international developments but also the machinations of the party’s surprisingly resilient power brokers.

Since such an anti-political approach is untenable for Latham’s project of reviving the fortunes of the power brokers, he comes back to the Howard-Gillard miserabilist approach – in spades.

Latham’s says it is necessary to appeal to a post-left (but not “post-right”) electorate that is aspirational and diverse, but apparently with some rather unaspirational and undiverse concerns over “feral” welfare scroungers and “ethnic street gangs”. According to Latham, Labor needs to drop the taboos and tap into this “earthy no-nonsense” approach to politics that is “evidenced-based” rather than reliant on outdated values of “liberal rights”.

Latham instead proposes something called “liberal solidarity”, which is supposed to allow liberal rights only being granted if that person exhibits “ethical behaviour”. What follows is a list of petty social engineering intrusiveness, such as making free public education conditional on parents improving the home learning environment and free public health care conditional on patients following doctor’s strictures on lifestyle.

For Latham, classical liberalism with its emphasis on individual freedoms belongs to a different era. He says:

Such a society is now passed. The free exercise of human rights, in tandem with the changing nature of work and communication technologies, has loosened the glue of social capital. This is the price of modernity: instead of being heavily inculcated in traditional social norms, our obligations to each other have become optional.

For someone arguing for a new “evidence-based” politics, Latham gives no evidence for this supposed breakdown in social behaviour. What we do know is that compared to fifty years ago, “classical liberalism” would surely more describe today than the past. Indigenous people can now enjoy a whole range of classical liberal rights that were once denied, non-whites can now enter the country and take up citizenship that was denied, single women, both indigenous and white, are free to bring up children without having them taken away.

Such a degree of social engineering was possible in the past because the state and other institutions such as the church had the authority to get away with it. These days they do not, and even the type of petty intrusiveness that Latham is proposing is likely to run into trouble. In the past, the basis for the state’s authority was that it was run by political parties that had some base in civil society. With that base now gone, how this authority can be recovered is a problem over which the political class frets. For now, talking up the decay of society does at least pose the need for intervention. But it doesn’t necessarily lay the ground for the consent of it.

Fortunately, for our political class there is one group in society that pretty well everyone is free to make up any crackpot sociological theories about and with a good chance that they can be tested out. After years of being ignored, indigenous communities have become everyone’s favourite guinea pigs for sociological theories, whether from feminists, the right or centre-left social engineers like Latham.

In his essay, Latham starts by proposing a novel solution to persistent poverty:

Poverty alleviation is not, in the first instance, about the quality of services. It is about breaking down the culture which makes the rational use of government services improbable. The starting point for a reform must be a policy of dispersal of moving disadvantaged people out of underclass suburbs. In public housing, where government has the power to move tenants around this is a straightforward task … governments need to lease back private dwellings for public tenants, integrating families into “normal” suburbs.

And the natural first candidate for this is, of course …

Relocation strategies are also need in the cause of aboriginal welfare. Forty years of land rights reform, encouraging Aboriginal people to remain in uneconomic locations, has been a failure. It has allowed the left to believe it has done something positive for these communities when, in reality, they are still living in abysmal conditions.

Latham’s ideas on poverty in general are just silly. To claim poverty is a product of living in a poor suburb rather than say, a suburb being poor because there are poor people in it, is to confuse cause and effect to the level of absurdity. Poverty is obviously a product of the inequalities and unevenness of the market system, Latham here is expressing the typical frustration of a failed left that believed it would be cured by public services.

When it gets to indigenous communities it becomes less amusing. Because of its geography, Australia has long been adept at sustaining uneconomic isolated communities to a first world level and there is no doubt that given the proper level for resources that could pave roads and provide social housing and amenities to the level they are in Coober Pedy or Hawker, they could do so in isolated indigenous communities as well.

However, the question of location has a different angle than that for poverty in general and that is the problem of land rights. The problem is not indigenous culture or the relationship to land, but the politics of land rights that uses culture and relationship to land as a cover for separate development. The phoney two nations approach, that has all the downside of separateness and, as was clear during the intervention, none of the advantages of self-determination, is a legacy of a compromise from similar segregation and apartheid arrangements in colonial areas around the world that persists in our political system and Constitution.

The intervention has allowed the land rights compromise to be challenged by such indigenous spokespeople such as Marcia Langton and Noel Pearson. But the basis of that challenge is acceptance of the premise of the intervention, the unproven widespread abuse of children, that would not have been believed but for the idea of separate cultural standards. In criticising land rights and separation these “new thinkers” have nevertheless accepted the premise of separate development in its most degraded form.

The result of this new degraded separatism is that now indigenous communities have become a free-for-all for “new thinkers” across the political spectrum as a practice ground for developing a new relationship to society before it is tried out elsewhere. We have already seen this with the current government’s use of rights based welfare being taken from NT indigenous communities and being rolled out in test centres around the country. From the right, Abbott has also been a frequent visitor to communities such as Aurukun in Queensland to look at more interventionist “responsibility-based” community measures. Latham is articulating a search for a new relationship of politics to society, based not on its representation, but on intervention on a degraded basis. You have been warned.

We are not there yet, and Latham spelling such ideas out has caused some discomfort. He is on more comfortable ground when he also calls for Labor to embrace the Keating legacy of a free, deregulated market. A call to return to the Keating legacy is at least more in keeping with similar calls currently from elsewhere in Labor, but forgets that the political appeal of a deregulated market died in 2008- 2009 when even the right had to embrace unprecedented government intervention. Globally, such intervention has shown no sign of easing, no matter how much the right dresses it up with austerity.

That the Keating legacy has ever had any sort of electoral appeal is a myth. Keating himself won only one election – and that was by running against a Coalition keen to take economic reform even further. After that, Howard presided over rising government expenditure and welfare hand-outs to the less feral middle class. Latham correctly noted Rudd’s unsuccessful attempt to make a moral high case against the market in 2008, but there is no evidence that there is an appetite for a deregulated market either, least of all from the business sector that has traditionally been its supporter.

The calls for return to Keating politics has little to do with electoral reality than the internal needs for some in Labor to call for a balance between the Parliamentary party and its traditional union power brokers. It has especially become a crie de coeur for those trying to reconcile the Gillard power brokers with the Rudd roots-and-all party reformers. It was an attempt to find a compromise that blew up so spectacularly last month, when Crean attempted to use Rudd to resolve the need for party brokers to reform while retaining control, but who couldn’t even get his own supporters to join him in the convoluted coup.

Since then, a blow-out in the Ministry and warning noises from those departed give all the signs of an argy-bargy coming that might not even have the grace to wait till opposition. In attempting to ingratiate himself with a party that turned its back on him, Latham has ignored the real dynamic between the ructions he is trying to reconcile. But tragically, Latham has also forgotten why it did turn its back on him after his short stint of the leadership. His call for new “values” to relate to voters is likely to be no more successful than they were in 2004, an electoral disaster of which he mentions not a word. For all his faux blokeishness and Western Sydney credentials, he had no more ability to understand the electorate than any insider Labor hack.

If Bowen, Ferguson, Carr and the other Rudd backers now support the Prime Minister 100%, why did they leave her government? If it was because it was the honourable thing to do because they were planning to vote against her, why did they not leave after last year’s spill when they (presumably) actually did?

Nor does it make much sense on Gillard’s side. If the Rudd backers left because they were going to be pushed anyway, why should they have been? After all, if Rudd is no longer a threat then surely it would have made sense to display a united team. At least this time it would be real because there is now no alternative. Why, instead of moving forward and leaving what happened in the past, do we now have disunity entrenched for all the world to see on the backbench?

Since Federation there have been only two occasions that have produced a Government Ministerial walk-out even comparable to what we saw on Friday, both Labor: 1916 and 1931. Why does 2013 seem different?

The first reason is that the earlier cases were to do with a clear issue; conscription in 1916 and austerity in 1931. On Friday there was no clear issue, other than Rudd v Gillard, which had been resolved the day before.

In both 1916 and 1931, the splits in the Ministry reflected difficulties of imposing conscription and austerity on Labor’s base in organised labour. This time the underlying issue is the lack of any social base and how Labor should respond to it. It is because this is at its core a deeply internal Labor dispute, that nothing is quite as it seems.

Seeing this as about Gillard v Rudd, rather than the institutional tussle it actually is, continually blindsides commentators. Because they measure what is happening purely by Rudd’s prospects, they keep seeing every Rudd defeat as “closure”, when it is nothing of the sort. Rudd was written off last February after what was, we were continually told, the biggest loss in a spill in political history. Yet even Gillard loyalist Tony Burke had to admit that support for Rudd had grown since then to approaching half of caucus last Thursday.

It is now clear, as the facts emerge as the Rudd camp and Crean trade blows, that things went pretty much as described by this blog on Friday.

No doubt the Rudd camp were working together to some degree on the hope that Crean would able to sway the Caucus, or at least his groupies, to support Rudd (by the way, for the Gillardista Laborites out there, contrary to what Rudd claimed, he might have just been satisfied with a majority than a draft). Not surprising, Crean’s “non-endorsement” failed to bring anyone over at all and left the Rudd camp short of a majority.

No doubt smelling a rat, Rudd tried to contact Crean to deter him from calling a spill, but Crean was prepared to go ahead and flush him out by forcing him to challenge anyway. Crean denies having had any contact with Rudd (curious for a leadership “team” about to make a bid) but nearly every journalist has seen (been shown) the text that Rudd sent that morning to find out what Crean was up to but Crean presumably ignored.

Crean represented the compromise grouping that accepted Rudd was a necessary alternative, but only if he was kept under tight rein from the power brokers with Crean as deputy. He was not the only one. Martin Ferguson appeared also in that camp in his resignation speech, as Paul Kelly describes:

Ferguson offered the same critique of the government as mounted by Crean on Thursday, just more forceful. He is close to Crean and last year Ferguson advised Rudd to run on a ticket with Crean as deputy as a means of uniting the party under a new leadership. Rudd rejected this advice.

Uniting the party? Ferguson spoke of voting for Rudd and Crean (rather than Albanese) as he didn’t believe in a “winner-takes-all situation”. If this is just about Gillard v Rudd, whatever can he mean?

A clue came from a theme from Ferguson’s speech that was repeated by others on Friday, the need to return to the Hawke-Keating legacy. It was fervently picked up by The Australian and other right-wing culture bores as criticism of the “class war” rhetoric of the Gillard-Swan team. Outside the bubble of right-wing commentators, it is hard to believe this is taken any more seriously as Swan’s banging on about Springsteen and seen as little more than just another re-branding exercise. Certainly a return to the Hawke-Keating legacy would be unnecessary if you never left it.

However, in internal Labor circles the “values” rhetoric is seen for what it is, a nod towards Gillard’s union backers. The call for a return to Keating is code for those in the Parliamentary party that are now objecting to excessive union influence and seeing it as the cause of their problems. Rudd is the obvious pole of attraction for those who want more detachment from the bondage of the unions and their factional system, as Rudd knows how to turn it into electoral advantage.

But he may not be the only option. Another interesting resignation speech was that of Chris Bowen’s. For someone supposedly committing “political suicide” it was remarkably engaged. Indeed near the end it was beginning to sound like a campaign speech. It may be for the future. Rudd was appearing to hand over the mantle to Bowen on Friday (but given wily Rudd’s record, perhaps Bowen shouldn’t take it for granted).

The fact is that Labor has won only one election in the last twenty years, and that was by hiding under someone’s name. They are now set for an historic defeat under a leadership asserting “Labor values“ that few either think relevant or even believe is sincere. These departures are not committing political suicide and no one is giving up their seat. They are distancing themselves from what is coming, because they know when it does, it will discredit those associated with it. After that, the real argy-bargy can start. You think it’s about Rudd v Gillard? You ain’t seen nothing yet.

Crean finds out its too late.

Sales: is today’s outcome what you had in mind?

Crean: No, but it’s an outcome. I said that what I wanted was a circuit-breaker, it’s not the circuit breaker … I thought, but it is a circuit breaker.

Crean on 730

Welcome to party reform. Over the last couple of years, Labor’s problems have spawned a raft of contributions on how it can be reformed, the latest being Latham’s in the Quarterly Essay (review coming). They are thoughtful, considered pieces, chock full of insightful advice how Labor can reconnect to the electorate and revive itself. However, the problem they all share is that they assume the process is under Labor’s control. Yesterday showed that it is not.

There was a lot that happened in yesterday’s first ever spill without a challenger that didn’t make sense. But what was especially odd was the event that kicked it off, Crean’s press conference calling for a spill.

For someone who was recommending that Labor dump its current leader for Rudd, it was hardly an endorsement. Indeed while Crean said that he would be voting for him, he seemed to be determined to discourage anyone else from doing so.

Crean had nothing positive to say about Rudd. He even refused under questioning to say that Rudd was more likely than Gillard to win an election. Indeed, the main takeaway from Crean’s press conference was that Rudd’s destabilisation was undermining the government and the cause of its unpopularity, something hardly likely to win him votes in Caucus. Given such an “endorsement”, perhaps that might account for Crean’s odd inability to bring across the handful of “Creanites” that he is supposed to lead in the Victorian right to also support Rudd. Stranger still, Crean wouldn’t even say whether he thought Rudd would win the ballot.

However, the most peculiar feature of Crean’s statement, for which he disappointingly was not questioned later on 730 was why he wanted to put himself forward as deputy (a bid later withdrawn). Crean and Rudd could hardly be thought of as a team. Crean has spent much of the last couple of years trashing Rudd and his lack of “discipline” and there appeared no change to this view yesterday. Indeed it seemed that it was Rudd’s lack of discipline was why Crean wanted to be his deputy. But it was clarified in this revealing exchange:

Crean: It was important in arriving at this decision that I was convinced him to be what I’ve referred to on other occasions as a changed Kevin. Or if you like, a more disciplined asset. Now I’m satisfied with the response that I’ve had, but I believe that it’s important that he continues to be held to it, that’s why I’ve put my name forward for the deputy position. I hope that’s a view that the party shares.

Journalist: to put a check on him?

Crean: No I don’t say to put a check on him, I say to use the authority of the office of the leadership group, to actually get better balance into decision-making as we go forward. Now anyone who knows me knows that while I might have strong views, I’m also an inclusive person, so I don’t say this is another narrow group. The criticism of his government was that it was too concentrated. I want it to become more inclusive. I think from this position I can guarantee that.

This gets to the nub of the issue, and clarifies all this guff about Rudd being “impossible to work with” etc. etc. The real issue is that behind the Gillard-Rudd tussle is an institutional one on how the party is run. Backing Gillard are the party power brokers, while Rudd is using his electoral popularity to challenge it. Since such a challenge is only possible because the institutions the power brokers represent have lost their social base, inevitably there is nothing for Rudd to replace the power brokers with than himself and the coterie around him.

At one level, Crean was doing what he did in February last year, drawing Rudd out to challenge before numbers had built to take him over the line. But if Rudd did succeed, then Crean was there as deputy to put a check on Rudd to ensure that the party’s traditional power brokers did not totally lose control. On the other hand, Crean’s call for Labor to go back to its Hawke-Keating roots was also targeted at a Parliamentary leadership increasingly reliant on union backers for survival.

Crean was trying to find a compromise between a party power structure that has lost its relevance and a challenger whose popularity rests on not being part of it. It failed because things have gone past the point where a compromise is possible. All that happened yesterday is to polarise it even more with Rudd backers now deserting or being pushed from their government posts and leaving Crean no longer the Minister of whatever it was.

Commentators were falling over each other to say that Rudd was finished, lacked bottle etc. etc. – but then they said that after the last spill. Rudd was supposed to be fatally damaged after being excoriated by the cabinet, but remains if anything as popular as ever. Suggesting that Rudd might have lost credibility for not taking the wonderful gift of the Labor leadership right now implies that Labor is more popular than Rudd. Labor’s dilemma is that this is increasingly not the case.

I’ve decided, these will be my people.

At the risk of spoiling one’s chances for Australia’s Best Blog (especially given the earnestness of the judge) this blog has a confession to make. It finds policy a bit of a bore.

Fortunately it is not alone. It’s not just worthy blogs that seem to have a problem keeping their readership focussed, politicians don’t really have much time for it either. Despite what they may claim, neither side has much appetite for policy these days.

Since Federation, pretty well every election has been fought around at least one or two of the following:

• Economy, state spending and welfare
• Foreign policy, national security and foreign wars
• Environment
• Industrial relations
• Immigration

Unless something spectacular happens, 2013 will be the first election where none of these are seriously contested in the public sphere. Even 2010 managed just to stagger over the line with something about immigration and the economy. This year, these aren’t seriously up for debate either.

On the economy, the debate has continued the downward slide since Costello: namely who happened to be hanging around the Treasurer’s office when times were good/bad, with the other side not really having any reason why it would have been different under them. Labor would naturally like to claim credit for its handling of the GFC, but has somewhat spoilt it by dumping the leader in charge and then a year ago telling the world how chaotic the government was at the time. The Coalition will no doubt raise Labor’s failure to bring down a surplus, but no one can accuse them of not having tried.

On foreign policy, Australia is distinguished by not only loyally following the UK and then the US in practically every military venture but, unlike the other two, often uncomfortably. Sometimes Australian participation in foreign wars has been contested by Labor, or in the case of a Labor war, like the 1991 Gulf War, the Labor left. Yet here we are in Australia’s longest war in its history, and there is no debate. Even when awkward moments arise, it is unlikely that anything political will be made of them.

It’s usually Labor that claims the Coalition is not interested in discussing policy. But funnily enough, on what has been arguably the most contentious policy difference between the two sides in the current term of Parliament, climate change and the carbon tax, Labor barely wants to talk about it. Gillard tried her best to dampen it down the last election – slightly embarrassing when she was forced to backtrack to keep government with the Greens. But after having to introduce it, Labor has hardly campaigned on it and Gillard gave it one line in her landmark speech to the NPC in January and in western Sydney last night.

And, of course, industrial relations has truly lost its punch. Both sides find it convenient to claim that Workchoices was a decider in 2007, and Labor would still like to claim it’s a live issue today, but largely for branding reasons. Business had little interest in Howard’s industrial reforms and is unlikely to really care what the Coalition wants to do in the future, because the unions are no longer a threat in the workplace.

Indeed it is precisely because the real basis for industrial relations has lost its content that, for the parties organised around it, re-branding has become more important than ever. For Labor, the loss of its institutional base has been felt for over a decade through the prism of asylum seekers being the issue that has detached the party from its traditional base. It is why Labor always prefers to see its 2001 loss as due to Tampa than 9/11. It is also why immediately after the party power brokers reasserted themselves against Rudd, their insecurities over asylum seekers came once again to the fore. After trying to get some solution that would still distinguish Labor from the Coalition, that’s now failed and Labor has had to admit that Howard was right all along – so shutting down that debate as well.

Other than for a brief period during the Rudd interregnum, the Coalition has played on this insecurity ruthlessly. Despite Labor toeing the Coalition line on the Pacific Solution, it is no surprise that the Morrison–Brandis double act tried it on again last week ahead of Gillard’s visit to western Sydney.

Explaining Gillard’s trip with local polling and second-hand guesses at what really concerns western Sydney residents misses the point. This is not really about them.

It is the grappling with a loss of social base that is the real political issue in Australia today. Because of it, there are important issues buried deep beneath the consensus: the use of the indigenous intervention to set the precedent for an historic change in welfare reforms, the Constitutional con of an innocuous preamble that hides an attempt to retain the race powers laws, the international stalement of a weakening superpower that is locking Australia into a war it can’t get out of.

But these are secondary because the crisis in both the parties has now broken to the surface and leadership issues are merely the most tangible sign of it for Labor. It is no wonder then that to avoid it, it tends to be Labor supporters (but by no means exclusively) that want to focus on “policy” like, er, broadband (optic fibre or copper wiring?). Nevertheless such political ructions are important because it goes to the heart of the changing way that sections in society are being represented.

Something unusual is happening in politics. It is turning upside down. Instead of sections in society looking for representation through political parties, we now have political parties looking to find some section of society to represent and justify themselves. This is especially an issue for Labor now because it is in the middle of an institutional wrangle over its structure and because the Coalition has always been more coy about its base anyway. Gillard visit is not to “carry on governing” (unless the broadband’s better) but to redefine the party using western Sydney residents as a backdrop.

Gillard delivered her speech well last night, it’s her ability to connect to a Labor-friendly audience being a reason why the power brokers backed her in the first place. Yet there was nothing new in the speech last night other than Latham-esque platitudes to aspiration and a law and order initiative that the Coalition could quite convincingly argue was a re-hash of their own. This is not surprising as neither Labor nor the Coalition has anything to bring to the table.

But the content of the speech or the “policy” in it is not the issue here. What is more important is that Gillard and Labor, detached as they (like the Coalition) are, can be seen to relate to someone in society. This need to “relate” to a particular community may mean that the campaign begins to sound more and more like a local state election than a federal one, as we saw last time near the end. But that is all the 2013 Federal election will really be about.

Paul and Bill belt it out. Bless.

I’m not the leader of a party called the progressive party.
I’m not the leader of a party called the moderate party.
I’m not the leader of a party even called the socialist democratic party.
I’m a leader of the party called the Labor Party deliberately because that is what we come from. That is what we believe in and that is who we are.

Julia Gillard at the AWU Conference, Jupiters Casino

As Labor stumbles, the ideological vultures are circling. A raft of articles is emerging in the press recognising that Labor is now in a profound crisis. One such is by Waleed Aly who wrote a piece in Friday’s SMH entitled Labor has lost the plot, and the narrative.

Aly is a sort of a travelling ideological repairman fixing up broken down political parties stranded on the roadside. A few years ago, when the Liberals were in trouble, he wrote a piece in the Quarterly Essay called What’s Right: The Future for Conservatism in Australia that was chock full of helpful advice for the right. This time, now that it’s the left in trouble, they are also benefiting from his services.

Aly’s argument is straightforward. Labor is in much bigger trouble than simply poor polls and leadership worries, it also has an ideological problem. In fact it has since Keating, but it now has become unavoidable. Labor’s loss of narrative is a familiar refrain, not least repeated several times by Paul Kelly over past years, who repeats it again in The Weekend Australian. Recoiling from the AWU shindig, for Kelly it only confirms the party’s crisis of identity.

Saying that Labor has a crisis of ideology and identity sounds very profound. But in fact, it misses the profundity of what is actually happening.

The period that those who claim Labor now has an ideological problem would most struggle with is the Hawke/Keating years. Waleed Aly airily claims that Labor’s message then was clear, the Hawke government was about “a new, deregulated, globalised economy”. No confusion there.

Actually there was. The first point to make was that a lot of the “narrative” of Hawke/Keating years only emerged in hindsight. At the time, indeed, a common refrain was that Labor under Hawke didn’t stand for very much. For sure, a lot of what happened under Hawke was a pragmatic response to forces that were driving deregulation around the world. But a problem for the ALP leadership was also that there was a limit to how explicit they could be, because centering government policy on a “new, deregulated, globalised economy” flew in the face of what Labor was supposed to be about. If ideology was so important, it should have been a period of party upheaval and crisis.

But it wasn’t. While there were some set piece confrontations with the party’s left over side issues such as MX missiles and uranium mining, the core of the government’s program was untouched. Indeed far from descending into crisis, Labor experienced one of its most stable, and electorally successful, periods in its history.

The reason was that Labor could bring something to the table to help bring about this “new, deregulated, globalised economy” – its relationship with the unions. While the 1980s saw more direct assaults on unions by Reagan and Thatcher in the name of deregulation and flexibility, Australian Labor was able to achieve the same with the unions in a matey embrace.

To be blunt about it, while the Australian union leadership saw their brethren being marginalised elsewhere in the world, they were prepared to deliver up their own membership for a seat at the table. It was why Australian employees suffered a decline in real wages under Hawke not experienced under Thatcher and Reagan – and still faced the job insecurities of privatisation in the public sector and from the market generally with unemployment hitting 11% by the time Hawke had left office.

Unsurprisingly, union members returned the favour. When Hawke came to office, around 50% of Australian employees were in a union. By the time Labor lost office in 1996, it was just over 30% and falling fast. Now with over 80% of the Australian workforce no longer in unions, they have become marginalised on the industrial scene anyway. It is the loss of that social base that Labor is struggling to adapt to, not some problem of ideology.

In fact it is hard to think of any centre left party that has been less concerned with ideology through its history than the Australian Labor Party. The ALP reflects the political conservatism of the Australian union movement that led to its rapid institutionalisation and the emergence of Labor governments long before they appeared elsewhere. That conservatism is probably best summed up by what was arguably the one ideology it did have for most of the last century, race. The White Australia Policy was official policy of the union movement and Labor, and not abandoned officially by unions like the AWU until the 1970s – so giving us five minutes of sunshine before they sold out their members under Hawke.

The choice the unions made during Hawke’s time has only become starker today. Either they stick with Gillard and keep their influence in the party, and so face certain defeat at the election and being even more marginalised on the industrial scene under the Coalition – or they remove Gillard, leaving the possibility of Rudd coming in and the union leaders having no influence anywhere. If they turn on Gillard, it will only be because they no longer believe she will protect their position. The only real question is how long caucus can allow them to make that choice.

It is difficult to see how the process can be reversed. Labor’s social base is going only one way, and inevitably it will have to accommodate to that. For both parties, it will mean a different type of politics than the representative politics we saw in the last century. Or rather, it will make clearer what politics has already become.

Australia, of course, is not alone in experiencing this change in the nature of politics. In Europe, with the catalyst of the financial crisis, we are already seeing the emergence of a more technocratic political class taking their line from Brussels.

In Australia, the process is more drawn out, and revealing, because there isn’t such a catalyst, except for a certain Queenslander. It’s no coincidence, though, that his campaign manager has looked to Europe for examples of the future shape of the ALP as well. These more technocrat parties, with less direct ties to society and less agenda from them, may need some ideology to fill the gap. For our wandering ideology-makers like Aly or Soutphommasane, that sounds like good news for their job prospects.