So far the Australian Labor Party has been resistant to thoroughgoing reform. The problem here isn’t ideology — the ALP has never been an ideological party — it’s power.

Bruce Hawker The Australian 26 April 2012

The shenanigans at the HSU may be in extremis, but they highlight several things that go beyond just one union. It’s worth pointing out that the timing of the “actions” taken by the union leadership, the ACTU and the ALP, is driven less by what is happening at the HSU, which appears to have been going on for years, but more due to factors closer to home; faction fights both within the union and the party and the need by the government to cling on to its position in Parliament.

It also is a reminder that the problems of the union movement might not lie in the fact that we live in a post-industrial era, as Latham thinks, nor because everyone is so well off, as Megalogenis seems to think. It is hard to think of a growing section of the workforce that would be more in need for an effective response to generally lousy conditions – and yet so badly served by the organisation that claims to act on their behalf.

At the root of the schmozzle is the members’ lack of control over this “union”, not only shown by the rorting of members’ funds, but the way the police have been called in to fix it. From this angle, the police solution is highly unsatisfactory. First, because there is likely to be a world of difference between what is acceptable to the police for the leadership’s use of funds within the strict letter of the law, and what would be acceptable to the low-paid members who actually financed them. Secondly, because if the intention is to get the union to be accountable to its members, surely cleaning up the mess in the HSU would have been a very incentivising place to start. Kathy Jackson might talk about giving the union back to its members, but handing over control to a third party seems an odd way of going about it.

But of course Jackson is not talking about members regaining control of the union, but “democratising” it – something that we are starting to see are two very different things.

This difference is coming up in that other talk about ‘democratising’ going on right now, the reform of the ALP. In response to the Cabinet having raised the stakes by threatening a walk-out on a Rudd come-back, Bruce Hawker has responded in kind by upping the ante with a call for wide-scale reform of the Labor party in a piece in The Australian. Hawker’s piece accompanies a growing call for reform from those in and around Labor, but is perhaps more interesting because one, it implicitly makes clear its link to the Rudd challenge and so what is currently the most likely way any reform will actually happen, and two, in doing so becomes more explicit on what this reform is actually about.

Hawker’s argument hinges on the quote above, which is true (although to be correct, ALP positions like the White Australia Policy were fairly ideological, but you sort of get Hawker’s point) – the ALP was a largely a pragmatic response by the union leadership to pursue its interests in the political sphere.

At the core of leadership tussle between Gillard and Rudd is a power struggle over how the party should run now that the unions that built it have lost their social role. This is why, although Rudd was rejected because he was “impossible to work with”, his strongest, almost unanimous, rejection came from a union leadership that wouldn’t especially be dealing with Rudd on a day-to-day basis. Not because of any difference in policy between Gillard and Rudd towards their members (nor all the other issues that those like Howes claim are so important to them, like asylum seekers) but because of the different attitude between Rudd and Gillard to the influence of union bosses in the ALP.

As Hawker says, there is no ideological position, but just one for power’s sake – something Howes confirmed with the utter emptiness of his reasons for keeping Gillard that he gave on the weekend. But Hawker’s point does raise an interesting question: if those power brokers are clinging on for no other reason than power, for what reason do those like Hawker want to take it away?

As with Rudd, Hawker pins his case on electoral viability. Rather optimistically, perhaps, Hawker hopes the success of the French Socialist candidate yesterday might be a trigger for a shake-up in the ALP. Hawker points out how the Socialists revived their fortunes by opening up the choosing of their Presidential candidate to any voter and this ‘democratising’ of the party revived public interest in the party that has carried on to election day.

Let’s leave aside the question of how much Hollande’s success was due to the revival of the Socialists, and how much due to the deep unpopularity of the first President of the Fifth Republic to fail to lead on the first round. Like Kathy Jackson’s ‘democratising’ of the HSU, there is a meaning of democracy that is not how it’s usually understood, at least in Australia for the last 100 years.

The Australian political system has been based on social groups coming together and forming political parties to represent them. This type of democracy, probably best called ‘representative democracy’ runs counter to the type of party democracy Hawker is talking about. Since these parties represent the interests of particular groups, they are naturally closed to those particular groups. The ALP required union membership and the Liberals had a more informal exclusion that, well, let’s just say, roughly equates to the one in society.

By its very openness, Hawker’s party democracy assumes, that this sort of ‘representative democracy’ is dead. If a political party is open to anyone, then it represents no one in particular at all. This is not ‘representative democracy’ where social groups put their desired candidate in Parliament by broadening their appeal to other groups – such as Labor would do with state spending to appeal to some sections of the middle class.

What Hawker proposes is more like ‘X-factor democracy’ where a relatively passive support base chooses the most appealing candidate given to them. In France, where politics is a national sport, viewing figures for candidate debates can indeed outstrip Masterchef, as Hawker notes in a rather unfortunate comparison.

The level of participation in the primaries was remarkable: nearly 2.9 million people voted in them. Furthermore, more than five million people watched the televised debate between the candidates for the Socialist Party’s nomination. The debate even beat the popular French show Master Chef on a rival network, no mean feat in a nation of gourmands.

In Australia, Gary, George and Matt might just be able to hold their own.

It would be important not to counter-pose the two too strongly. In Australian politics, there has always been an element of both social groups putting forward their interests, and then being forced to choose from something else entirely. The great schisms in the ALP, especially over conscription and the Depression, were based on this split between Labor members in Parliament and the social base that sent them there. This party reform just removes the need for a social base altogether.

For the ALP, opening it to anyone presumably includes those who not only have little to do with unions but those who think unions have no real role to play in Australian society at all. Indeed there might even come a day when Labor is run by one. Maybe that’s why there is an air of inevitability to it – didn’t we already have a trial run?

Labor’s problem is not sleaze, but a lack of political authority. Gillard’s weekend move has just made that worse.

On their own, both the Thomson and the Slipper affair should have been relatively easy to handle. Thomson wasn’t a Minister so there would have been no great back-down from slapping him a bit, making a big song and dance about taking him off any committee, and even talking about the seriousness of the charges and the need to clean up the unions (without actually doing anything about it). The threat would have been that Thomson resigned his seat and caused a by-election, but then someone with the threat of criminal charges from activities in an organisation Labor still has some influence over, might not have been in a strong position to negotiate.

Slipper should have been even easier. First, because standing him aside would not have fundamentally changed the government’s position. Secondly, because his alleged misdemeanours occurred while he was a Liberal and thirdly, because of that, was much more widely seen as a problem with “all politicians” rather than just the government that appointed him to the Speakership. Labor could have easily done as Shorten actually did, talk up the seriousness of the sexual harassment charge while leaving everything to the investigation.

But this is not really about Thomson and Slipper, or even Labor’s tactics for handling them. Both cases have simply become another touchstone for what the problem has been all along, the chronic loss of political authority from a party that remains organised on a basis that has little social meaning. By coming back to “take control” of the situation, Gillard merely made the issue all about herself again.

When Gillard said a line had been crossed in perceptions of Parliament, it was a line that even most of the Canberra Press Gallery, normally most sensitive to such things, could not even see. Rather it was the line around her own leadership that was being crossed. Grattan, in a sharp piece that alluded to former glory, put her finger on it by showing how Shorten did a nice undermining of the PM by fully backing her (even if it made him look like a joke to anyone else) but without actually arguing for her position – indeed actually contradicting it.

What is happening now is historic because it is the first round of Gillard leadership speculation that even Barrie Cassidy can’t blame on Rudd. But inevitably talk turns to the possibility of Rudd’s return. Yet in speculating on it there is some obliviousness in the Press Gallery to what has changed in the dynamic since February.

This is a dynamic that can be little explained by electoral realities. This is about an internal power struggle in the party for which since June 2010 (indeed even for some months before) the electorate has come an increasingly poor second to the needs of ALP power brokers to hang on. The result of the attacks on Rudd in February was not only to flush him out, and force a premature challenge before he could build momentum, but to do whatever possible to prevent another one.

This was why we had the bizarre parade of Ministers, as well as Gillard herself, launching vitriolic attacks on not only Rudd personally, but also on his time in office, so as to warn of the dangers of another go. It didn’t matter that it meant trashing Labor’s biggest asset, its handling of the GFC. The Coalition made some inroads attacking the periphery of the government’s program around pink batts etc. But even they didn’t go as far as Gillard did in her Adelaide press conference on the 23 February when she made clear that the dysfunctionality went to the very heart of the government at the time.

The most damaging aspect of the Ministry’s attacks was not so much what it did for Rudd, but to suggest that his return would now mean half the Cabinet walking out. In effect, the government strapped explosives around its waist and threatened to blow itself up were Rudd to come back. There was always going to be damage to Labor’s credibility if they turned back to someone they had previously dumped. What the government did in February was to make the damage explicit – and personal.

In doing so, the government has reduced any electoral benefits from a Rudd return and, combined with the even deeper disillusionment of the electorate since then, has made an electorally successful second Rudd term even less likely this side of the election and so raises the question why he would bother.

This suggests two things. First, having made such a stand, it seems even more likely that the party will turn to someone else before Rudd on grounds that will make little electoral sense. Secondly, a Rudd return would require an even greater gutting out of the party’s structure as outlined in a piece by Hawker last week. With the first looking more likely, it looks increasingly as though the electorate will have its own “gutting out” of the party, before the likes of Hawker can dress it up as “party reform”.

Actually this blog doesn’t care that much. From a democratic point of view, fretting about the decline of a political party rather misses the point. The only question of any interest is how people can get what they want – not how to revive an organisation that might no longer do the job. As Bob Katter showed, setting up a new political party on even the flakiest of premises is no big deal.

Starting from an electoral defeat doesn’t help much for understanding what is going on either. Some almost-as-progressive blogs have come in with a counter line saying basically, don’t worry about Queensland and NSW, we’ve been here before, it’s just a phase in the cycle.

One example is a piece by the ABC’s Antony Green cautioning against being too quick to write Labor off. His argument centres on a graph showing Labor’s share of state and federal seats across the country since 1969, saying that it shows that Labor’s current sharp decline is just part of the political cycle.

Labor seats in state and federal lower houses since the wall to wall Coalition governments in May 1969. (A Green ABC)

The first obvious point to make is that by starting in 1969, near the end of 23 years of Coalition federal rule, it makes it look as though such cycles are part of Australian politics. In fact for most of the 20th century, Australian politics was marked by long periods of continuous government (usually Coalition) and sporadic periods of Labor rule often ending in splits on the Labor side and a realignment of non-Labor parties. From this graph we can make the first profound observation that yes, Australian politics is cyclical – except of course when it isn’t.

Moreover, if we are meant to read the graph and conclude something about Australian politics, then it would suggest that Labor’s fortunes are getting better and better, with each trough less than before and each peak ascending even higher to the glory years of 2005-2006.

Somehow this intuitively doesn’t feel quite right.

There’s a good reason for that. If we look at actual votes Labor has received in both state and federal over the same time, we don’t get much of “cycle”. It’s more undulating decline.

ALP state and federal primary vote 1969 - 2012

In fact, going back further we see that in terms of votes, Labor’s “golden days” of 2005-6 were worse than even the slump during the DLP split of the 1950s (even before including the “non-Communist” Labor party) and was only beaten by the party splits during the Depression of the 1930s.

Labor’s lousy voting record in recent decades has generally not translated to seats mainly, of course, because of preferential voting, with Green preferences coming back to Labor (compared to the DLP days when they went away from Labor).

This is partly why the long-running decline in Labor’s primary vote tends to get ignored – except where it starts to get so bad that Labor falls behind the Greens or independents and loses what had been a core seat.

But it’s also possible to pick up an unwillingness to take the decline at face value. Commentary increasingly wants to ascribe meta-tactical reasons for voters not giving their first vote to Labor to “teach them a lesson” and “send a message” rather than Labor simply being no longer most voter’s first preference.

Even political parties can fall for such meta thinking – as we saw in Queensland when near the end of the election campaign Labor started asking voters not to give the LNP a too big majority – as though someone would go into a polling booth and cast opposite to how they were going to vote to offset those of other voters. Now we seem to also have an expectation that voters will balk at the size of the LNP majority and swing back to Labor in the coming by-election in Bligh’s seat – when the very opposite may happen.

But the decline of voting is one thing, yet this is not just any political party we are talking about. This is the Australian Labor Party, set up and run by the union leadership. Labor’s vote is not only in decline, but so is the social base that set it up.

The decline of union membership in Australia is well recorded. Andrew Leigh, who became Labor’s Member for Fraser at the last election, wrote an article in 2008 tracking the decline and looking at the reasons for it.

Leigh directly takes on what he sees as the “common explanations” for the decline of the unions – one being because workers became more sceptical about them. He argues this is wrong because when unions were rising, such as in the 1970s, Australians were more likely to have negative opinions about them and tell pollsters that they had “too much power” and less likely to think they were “good for Australia”.

But it is precisely when unions had some weight to throw about that obviously other sections of society would most object. It’s only when unions became powerless and a weak bargaining tool for its members that they would get a sympathy vote – something union leaders have been only too happy to play up in recent years, summed up by the Workchoices ad showing a worker crying on the phone to her mum, that everyone loved so much.

Leigh also takes up the other “common” reason given, the impact of the union accord with the Labor government in the 1980s. This should be a powerful argument given that it resulted in the biggest blow to Australian workers’ standards since the war. But Leigh says that this is unconvincing as well, since the sharpest declines happened in the 1990s after the accord was over.

Readers can judge from Leigh’s graph when the decline occurred, but its acceleration is fairly straightforward – for the same reason unions so rapidly formed – unity is strength. Once unions start to lose their bargaining mass there’s not much point being in them. It has to be said, for someone who has studied this, Leigh shows a surprising naivety of how collective action works, not only how unions throw their weight around but how others react when they do. But then, such naivety over the nature of social conflict is probably prerequisite these days for being in the Parliamentary Labor Party.

Leigh thinks the unions’ decline has little to do with what the unions actually did, but due to changes in the workplace. This is a favourite and uncontroversial reason, that is nobody’s fault and is based on a romantic view that in the past the Australian workforce were collectivised proletarians in the factories rather than the highly fragmented workforce (especially with a higher proportion of agricultural workers) that it actually was.

But at least Leigh addresses the causes that had actually to do with how the unions let down their members. Leigh says blaming worker disillusionment with unions, especially during the Hawke accord is “common”. It may be in academia, but it’s certainly rare in the media.

Indeed in the press you tend to read the opposite reason. George Megalogenis, for example, thinks the unions’, and Labor’s, decline happened because they were too successful for their members. This is understandable given that it would otherwise cast a poor light on his favourite period: the highly educative reform period of the Hawke/Keating years. Presumably having enough plasma TVs, workers decided they had more than enough money and no longer needed the unions for higher pay. Hmmm. It is possible people leave organisations because they are too successful. Although leaving organisations because they are not effective enough has also been heard of. The reader will obviously have to decide.

But the decline of Labor’s vote and its base in the unions is clear. So this leaves an important question: if, on any social criteria, Labor is clearly in decline, but commentators like Antony Green can still say Labor’s fortunes are just part of a “political cycle” what exactly do they mean by “political”?

What Green means by political in his piece is purely representation in the Parliament. Ironically the increasing cyclical nature of political representation, the way Labor’s seats can blow out and then implode, has much to do with the party’s decline in society and the loosening ties from its social base (especially in Queensland where the two party system is at its weakest and which is probably over-represented in Green’s graph). Commentators like saying that the electorate is becoming more “volatile”. But it’s not really swinging from one side to the other, but increasingly indifferent to either. In short, the cyclicality of parties in Parliament comes from the increasing detachment of society from what is going on in there.

So in a way, Green and others have a point. Politics is becoming more cyclical, but only because the nature of politics is changing from what it was in the 20th century. Then parties were formed because social groups in society wanted representation in Parliament – and based their loyalties accordingly. Now we have instead, parties looking for someone in society to represent.

That’s why, for example, we have state funding of political parties. Usually posed to prevent undue influence from sectional interests on political parties, it is really about the opposite. It’s the lack of interest by social groups in political parties and financing them which is why the state must step in.

Menzies’ Liberals were formed on the basis of translating the interests of metropolitan business interests to a broader audience in the middle class and some sections of the working class. Now politics is turned upside down. Instead of political parties trying to translate particular interests to a broader section of society, now we have parties eager to appear to be representing anybody in particular. So we have political leaders spending most of the election campaign bothering and getting photographed with “ordinary” voters to show how they can “connect” with real people.

As a perceptive piece in The Drum recently pointed out, yesterday’s political apparatchik is seen as a true son of Labor in the past, while today’s apparatchik is now something for the party to be defensive about, because they are in a party that no longer represents anything much.

Politics in the 21st century is now operating on the absence of any real connection in society, but politicians constantly needing to manufacture one. There is no sign that this detachment will reverse – even in countries that are now going through economic crisis, the detachment of the state from society is only consolidating.

If politics is now less about society seeking political representation than politicians seeking social representation, it also changes the nature of how the state is perceived – or, more accurately, commentators are now catching up with how the state is already widely perceived – as something to be avoided unless necessary and politics purely as a pursuit in its own terms.

This is getting reflected in a subtle differentiation emerging in commentary both in the mainstream press and the blogosphere – between those who still see politics as being driven directly by society and those who see it as more detached.

This is especially seen in the blogosphere where politics is now increasingly confused with policy. So, a “serious” political blog will show just how serious it is by having a long piece on, say, the NBN. Optic fibre or copper wiring with wireless? How on earth could anyone have an opinion on this or even care? Aren’t there experts paid to work out such things? What had been the real basis for interest in politics, as a forum for the competition of interests in society, is now missing from such high-minded “policy” discussions.

Or take the writers in The Australian, probably the largest single collection of political commentators in Australia. Compare Paul Kelly talk about government policy and popularity as though the two are related, with that of George Megalogenis who treats policy as something politicians need to educate the public on whether they like it or not. Or compare the way Shanahan will talk of the latest poll, desperately trying to relate it to whatever happened in politics over the last fortnight, with that of Peter Brent’s Mumble that tends to treat it happening under its own fairly vague laws, and therefore getting closer to the mark of what is going on.

So will Labor survive? That is a question that relies little on whether it can revive its “values” and reconnect in any meaningful way to the electorate. In reality the survival of either of the main parties depends on the opposite: how well can they adapt to operating with no social base? This is the real content to the discussion of party reform in Labor, a discussion that has, for the time being, been put on ice because Rudd threatens to take it to its logical conclusion. But whether the major parties will survive is one question – yet there is now a more important one. Why should anyone else care?

Given that we haven’t been here before, exactly which cycle are they talking about? Just to give some historical perspective, which some clearly lack, the last time Labor had a result anything like this was 1957 when Labor expelled its Premier, the Cabinet walked out and the party split in half.

But even then, Labor still polled better than it did on Saturday. At least in 1957 there was also another equal-sized ‘Labor’ party – this time it was Labor on its own.

But it was not just what happened to Labor that made Saturday’s result so extraordinary. One thing that has been little mentioned is what happened on the other side. Parachuting Newman was extraordinarily risky, but there’s been little discussion as to why the LNP had to take that risk.

It’s been forgotten that the reason for the LNP’s merger all of four years ago, was to manage the collapse of the Liberal’s Queensland branch. At a time when Labor was ascendant both in state and federal politics in Queensland, the Liberals were failing to sustain itself as a party. The “merger” amounted to a virtual LNP take-over that was opposed by the Federal Liberal Party and saw the then state Liberal President Mal Brough walk off in a huff claiming that the merger was “all over the shop” and showed why voters were so disenchanted with the non-Labor side of politics.

The problem for the Nationals was that while it finally dealt with any competition from the junior party, it still left them no way of making inroads into Labor seats in Brisbane. Taking the risk of bringing someone from outside the party, both what it said about the existing party and its status in Brisbane, where they couldn’t even find him a safe seat, was testament to the collapsed state of the Liberals in Queensland.

But once they did, what they met was a Labor party facing collapse itself.

Politically, Queensland is distinguished in the Federation by being the state where the two-party system has historically been at its weakest. This was mainly due to Queensland’s unusually low level of urbanisation/industrialisation combining with the weakness of the two–party system in Australia itself. On the left we had a highly organised but deeply conservative labour movement, and on the right, a lack of the type of institutions with the authority on which to base a conservative political entity that could encompass the disparate interests of rural and metropolitan business.

On the left, the combination of a high level of organisation in the labour movement, but its conservative politics, meant the polarisation of the Cold War hit Labor hard, especially in states where Labor had a strong rural conservative base like Victoria and Queensland and where the DLP split of the 1950s was most severe (NSW had already expelled much of the left during the Lang years, so in effect, the ‘Groupers’ won there). On the right, while rural and city business interests were united in their opposition to the unions, they differed on tariffs and state intervention, and so the non-Labor side had split as well in the 1920s, with the split especially entrenched in Queensland.

Labor’s split and defeat in 1957 brought all of this out and ushered in the National Party era to continue to the late 1980s. While Labor likes to portray itself as the main victim of the gerrymander that Bjelke-Peterson inherited from Labor, as Mumble points out, it was the Liberals who were the bigger losers. Labor got back into power as soon as the vote justified it, which was not until 1989.

The Labor that emerged into government was a very different beast than the one that sunk in 1957. Queensland Labor was one of the last state parties to “modernise” in the 1970s and shrug off its union links; the trigger being the 1974 “cricket team” election disaster. In fact, Queensland Labor under Goss and Beattie had more similarities with the technocrat Labor governments that came to power in Victoria and South Australia in the 1990s than the business-union model that was prevalent the decade before.

One of the signs of the weakness of the two party system in Queensland are the periodic bouts of phoney populism, that has been more driven by antagonism to the political order, especially in Canberra, than attraction for whichever party was channelling it at the time. As a result, at various times a disparate range of political leaders including a peanut farmer, a small-town accountant from south of the border, a fish-shop owner, a Mandarin-speaking diplomat and the latest, a north Queensland business man, have all made the mistake of thinking the support they were getting was all about them rather than the political order they were targeting.

There was an element of this being against the “old politics” in the popularity of technocrat Labor as well. Labor was more able to pose itself against the old order at least in appearance because the problem of its union links forced it to. In reality there was a compromise within technocrat Labor, while it presented itself against the old order, it maintained its union links especially through the public sector and closely identified with the state.

This was why Labor found itself far more accountable, and criticised, for the level of public services than the actual state of services justified. It was especially ironic in Queensland where Bjelke-Peterson’s anti-left, union-bashing agenda meant that he could keep the schools, hospitals and transport services of even the Nationals heartland in a dilapidated state with little political pressure.

While Labor’s end-of-politics technocrat model had some appeal, in reality it was built on sand. It never restored Labor’s social base that it lost with the declining influence of the unions, except maybe from public service employees, and even those it lost with the sale of state assets and an attempt to offload the costs of running the services. What was often under-estimated was the conflict between those who demand better services, without paying too much for them, and the interests of employees who had to provide them.

To replace ‘technocrat Labor’ we now have “muddle through” Liberals that are popping up around the country and now, for the first time, the dominant party governing in Queensland. They don’t strongly identify with the state, but neither are they especially against it, they’re certainly not pro-union, but neither, after a few attempts, are they especially union-bashing, besides there is little need. Drift is more likely the problem for the Liberals now, and the possibility of fragmentation, but they don’t have the internal inflexibilities that Labor has.

Labor is in shock and understandably so. The technocrat model enabled Labor to get away with a case for governing without needing to upset its now redundant internal organisation. The trouble is what it should transform to now is not clear. Probably the most graphic sign of how confused Labor is was Beattie’s rambling performance on Sunday when it was clear that for someone who has been tweeting the demise of the government for months, he still hasn’t thought of what it should do now. His main suggestion was that Gillard should come up to Queensland more and even buy a house up there. Right …

Are there implications federally? In one way not, it was state based, just as NSW was state based and the coming losses in South Australia and Tasmania, both likely to be also record losses, will be state based. There are no issues implications because the Queensland election didn’t really have any, it was more about the entire model of government than a single issue, as it will be in the other states. Labor in Canberra won’t fall on issues either, just on its lack of political authority. There will be more talk no doubt on internal party reform and greater say from members, but Labor in Canberra has already shown where it stands on that. In a way Albanese is probably right, this does represent an end of a cycle in Queensland, but one that stretches back way past 1989.

Actually, with a couple of flagellators, maybe a little bit more application to the self might have been more helpful than first rushing to beat up the rest of the media.

One example is Ben Eltham. Writing in The Drum, Eltham was one of those commentators, mainly to be found in the blogosphere, who believed the Labor leadership stoush was nothing more than a media conspiracy – right up to the point Rudd resigned from the Ministry and decided to fill in his new-found free time by challenging for the Labor leadership. Such a view required not only obliviousness to the credible reports coming from the press gallery, but also a complete ignorance of the internal dynamics of a party that they so clearly love.

In Eltham’s case, while at least he admits he was wrong, he doesn’t go into why he took up such a bizarre position. Instead, he goes on to reaffirm again the overwhelming power of the media on the political process. In doing so, he simply makes the same mistake that let him think the media could carry on for months talking about a leadership challenge from thin air.

There’s no doubt that the media is becoming more influential in political affairs. But this is not because the media is becoming more powerful. Indeed pretty well every survey shows that the media has less credibility and is less trusted in Australia than almost anywhere in the world.

In fact, it’s the very acuteness of the credibility problem faced by the media that is understandably causing journalists to become increasingly sensitive to how they are getting caught up in political messes like the one we just had. The source of this closer relationship between the media and the political class is not coming from a media throwing its weight around but from a political system breaking down.

For the last century, Australia’s political system has organised around its oldest party, the Australian Labor Party and for 20 years, both Labor and non-Labor parties have struggled with an eroding base. What we are seeing now are the social problems of both parties now becoming an internal one, and changing the relationship with the media in the process.

This is especially so for the most internally structured party, the ALP, and the clearest sign its internal system was starting to break down was the rise of Rudd. Labor’s first leader not to be sponsored by the unions not only needed the media to rise in the party, but, because of the breakdown in influence of the party’s normal power structures, could do so as well.

Rudd was the master of “destabilisation”, of using the media to undermine internal opponents – but only because the party’s main power bass were becoming increasingly insecure about how to marry its internal way of deciding who to promote with electoral success. What made Rudd especially dangerous internally was the way, as he took on positions of authority and higher public profile, he made an electoral virtue over his distance from those running the “old politics”, especially after he won office.

If the power brokers’ loss of control of the Labor leadership was one sign of their weakness, an even stronger sign was how they won it back. Instead of powerful faction leaders pulling the internal levers as they would have in the past, they were forced to go public. The template, of course, was the breakdown between party and government in the home state of the party’s most powerful faction, the NSW Right.

The destabiliser was himself destabilised as Rudd became the victim of leaks in late 2009 and 2010, especially of the ETS delay and the infamous internal poll that ended up in the media’s hands in June 2010. Finally, there was the actual ousting, a media event in itself as, only a few days after an acquiescent caucus meeting, the faceless men put their faces in front of the TV cameras to present caucus with a fait accompli.

In the run up to the second challenge, both sides were clearly at it. The Rudd side was briefing after every stuff-up, talking about a troubled party and concerns about the leadership. What was necessary, of course, was the party actually to be troubled and losing direction, so journalists would find that insecurity when they asked around after things went wrong. It was especially the internal breakdown exposed by the National Conference and the ministry reshuffle which made the Rudd challenge a possibility. Rudd himself was flushed out with Ministers going on the nation’s airwaves in an extraordinarily vicious public display that would normally have never left the walls of the caucus room and that we are now supposed to forget.

Nor has it ended with Rudd out of the picture, as even the mundane tussle of Ministry spot between the factions now becomes a media event.

Understandably just how journalists should react to now being regularly used for even the most internal machinations is not obvious. A key government member briefing against another key government member could well be argued to be news and the public should be told. The problem is made even worse because clearly the cosy ground rules by which they previously operated even during the Howard years, and which let journalists like Michael Brissenden sit on a story like Costello talking about challenging Howard for two years before deigning to tell the rest of us, have broken down.

Probably one way is to avoid passing on things that are clearly dodgy. Some relatively easy ones are polling stories, because they can be verified elsewhere. That 2010 internal poll, for example, was easy to take with a pinch of salt, simply because it showed what the professional polling did not, that Labor was heading for a massive defeat and that Gillard was more popular than Rudd at the time. Subsequent stories confirm that as for much internal polling, it was managed externally but for internal political purposes, in this case, to build support for Gillard replacing Rudd.

Yet some journalists accepted it. Indeed not only the poll, but the way it was supposed to have been innocently presented to Rudd at the time. Here’s one journalist’s account of what happened, written on the day Rudd was dumped:

On Friday of last week, the party’s national secretary, Karl Bitar, went to Rudd’s Parliament House office with internal party polling that showed just how bad the situation had become in marginal Queensland seats. He wanted to present the material to the prime minister himself. Remarkably, Rudd’s 31-year-old chief of staff, Alistair Jordan, didn’t allow that to happen. He told Bitar to lock the polling away and show it to nobody.

An astonished Bitar told Jordan the polling didn’t belong to the prime minister; it belonged to the Labor Party, and he left the office.

I suspect that was the same polling that showed up on Andrew Bolt’s Herald Sun blog last weekend.

The actions, the dialogue and even the emotions must have been difficult to find out. Could the journalist have been fed it, possibly by someone close enough to Bitar to know he was “astonished”? Even leaving aside the dodginess of the poll itself, could a story about the presenting of a poll that was supposedly done in the best interests of the ALP but somehow ended up in the hands of one of its biggest haters, show a journalist that was, er, rather uncritical when he blithely reproduced it?

Such uncritical passing on of dubious leaked information to pursue a political agenda would not be possible because this, of course, was Barrie Cassidy, and Barrie has told us that not only does he not believe in such things but thinks now is the time journalists come clean on the terms of engagement so we don’t get mis-fed rubbish. Well, let’s not get too worried how some want to spin it, because the truth is staring us in the face like never before. But some journalists might at least make some effort to keep the hypocrisy under check.