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Much at stake in fight for parties' souls

By Kenneth Davidson
August 29 2002

Who should control a political party - the elected politicians or the rank-and-file members, without whom there would be no party and no career for the politicians and bureaucrats whose livelihood depends on the party?

Superficially, there is a similarity of interests. But it ain't necessarily so.

For the rank-and-file, the party is a means to an end. For the professionals, the party becomes a mechanism through which they can give expression to their own hopes and ambitions, which have a tendency over time to become detached from those of the members.

How these innate tensions are managed helps determine the quality of democracy for the whole community - not simply for the direct membership of the party.

Arguably, in a healthy, vibrant, participatory party founded on a reformist agenda, the inherent tensions cannot be resolved without the complete victory of the professionals, whose interest then becomes power at all costs. This destroys the rationale that led to the establishment of the party in the first place. This apparent conflict between the aims of the party and its professionals is being played out in both the Australian Democrats and the ALP now.

Both were founded as participatory parties, and in both, the professionals have attempted at various times to free themselves from what they see as the shackles imposed by the rank-and-file, which prevent them from making the deals they see as being necessary to achieve political power.

The issue from the perspective of the party member was summed up by Mat Reid in his presidential address to the 1907 ALP national conference, when he argued for the party to keep a tight rein on its elected representatives: "Opportunism will always produce opportunists. Once you allow the politician to boss the show, he will give away everything to save himself, because he believes himself indispensable to the show, and in fact ends up being the show himself, and making a holy show of the rest of us."

Reid was speaking of the ALP as it was nearly a century ago, but I doubt he would have much difficulty in understanding what is really going on in the ALP today, as the professional oligarchs attempt to dress up their totalitarian tendencies with a pretence of seeking structural reforms to increase rank-and-file participation in the party. Or what is really going on in the battle for control of the Democrats, for that matter.

The Canberra Press Gallery likes to treat the Democrats as the "fairies in the bottom of the garden". This attitude obscures a serious political issue - an issue that is being seriously played out in the Democrats and seriously avoided in the ALP.

Journalists have a reputation for libertarian tendencies. But this trait is undermined in political journalism by their preference for "strong" leadership and "tough" decisions. According to the media, Simon Crean has to impose his reform agenda on the ALP or die politically. How does this fit into the idea of reinjecting some real democracy into the ALP so that members have some say?

Has anybody drawn attention to the contradiction between the pretend objective of the Hawke/Wran report and the decision of the NSW ALP executive to gazump the local branches' role in preselecting the ALP candidate for the upcoming byelection in the federal NSW seat of Cunningham?

In Victoria, the Treasurer, John Brumby, is pressing on with his program of injecting expensive private capital into social infrastructure - in direct conflict with a unanimous resolution of the state ALP conference in May.

So who should have the say over party policy? The members operating in open party forums, or hucksters for private financial interests operating behind the scenes? If issues such as this can be kept off the agenda, democracy is dead or dying.

An unfortunate aspect of democracy is that its processes are not neat and tidy. Not everything can be wrapped up and captured in a 10-second "sound bite" for the 6pm TV news.

Unlike the ALP debate, where the essentially trivial question of whether the unions' share of the vote at national conferences should be reduced from 60 per cent to 50 per cent has been elevated to a litmus test of Crean's fitness to govern, the battle between the Democrats' "gang of four" and the party's national executive is of real importance to the nation.

Hopefully, there will not be a big trade-off between party democracy and electoral success.

Kim Beazley's betrayal of Labor's traditional egalitarian values in respect of health and education, and universal values in relation to refugees, arguably cost the ALP the last federal election. Greens' senator Bob Brown's quick backdown - in the face of opposition by his party conference - from his position that Telstra could be sold if the money was spent on the environment, has probably enhanced rather than diminished his iconic stature across the political spectrum.

The Democrats' "gang of four" (plus Meg Lees) has obviously been taken by surprise by the hostile public response to their political assassination of Natasha Stott Despoja, and many people have been impressed by the calm maturity shown by the formerly unknown Brian Greig in filling the leadership vacuum.

Greig's ability to communicate the message of the importance of democratic process, and his hope that his party can play an ongoing role in that process through the daily media scrums looking for phoney political conflict, has been good enough to remind this political sceptic that there are still some good people in the political jungle, capable of making a positive contribution to national governance - provided they are given the right opportunity by fair dinkum democratic political organisations.

Kenneth Davidson is a staff columnist.


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