Tuesday, 3 July 2012

Part 4: Lessons from History: The Limited Scale of the Threat

The End of the Party? Labor History and the Rise of the Greens.

Lessons from History: The Limited Scale of the Threat

The first lesson from history is that while left wing insurgent groups have been able to divide the progressive vote and damage the ALP, as Lang Labor found, there is a hard ceiling on the growth of their vote. The Greens may be able to woo voters within ideologically sympathetic geographic enclaves, but they are unlikely to grow their level of electoral support beyond around 15% of the national vote without significantly moderating their agenda and broadening their appeal. An examination of Australian polling and electoral data over the past decade provides substantial empirical support for this view.

Peter Brent, a well known scion of the psephological blogosphere under his pseudonym, Mumble, recently compared a time series of ten years of Labor and Greens poll and election results and noted that:
“Since late 2001, Greens have tended to do well in the polls when Labor has done badly... The Greens feed on dissatisfaction with the ALP from (in crude terms) “the left”. Their chances of winning more lower house seats at the next election largely depend on how badly the ALP does.”
 As such, the data show that in 2001 when September 11 and the Tampa saw Labor’s vote crash, the Greens’ vote spiked by 5 percentage points. In contrast, in 2007, when Kevin07 had Labor ascendant, the Greens’ vote increased only 1 percentage point on their 2004 result. The pattern continued in the 2010 election, when a calamitous election campaign marred by internal Labor recriminations led to the Greens’ vote jumping 4 percentage points to around 13% of the national vote (11.76% in the House of Representatives and 13.11% in the Senate).

However, it is important to note that while The Greens’ vote tends to increase when Labor’s vote falls, this relationship is not linear. More often, only a small proportion of the fall in Labor’s support transfers into increased support for The Greens.  Significantly, despite widespread dissatisfaction with the Gillard government, unparalleled prominence of Greens’ spokesmen in the hung parliament and major wins on their key policy issues, the Greens’ surveyed level of support has barely increased at all since the 2010 election, bouncing between 12 and 15%.

Instead, as can be seen from the work of another online psephologist, Scott Steel (AKA Possum’s Pollytics), a weighted aggregation of major pollsters as at 28 September 2011 (around Labor’s nadir), shows that while Labor’s Primary support had fallen by 9.7 percentage points since the 2010 election, the Greens’ primary support had increased by only 0.6 percentage points. For every ten voters who had left Labor since the 2010 election, only one had gone to the Greens and five had gone to the Tony Abbott led Liberal Party.

Similar patterns can be observed in the recent Victorian, New South Wales and Queensland State elections. In Victoria, despite a major Greens’ campaign to build on their record 2010 Federal Election result by electing a number of lower house MPs in inner city Melbourne electorates, The Greens’ primary vote increased by only 1.17 percentage points to 11.21% of the state wide result, a result that failed to produce a single lower house seat. Meanwhile, Labor’s primary vote had fallen by 6.81 percentage points on a statewide basis, more than half of which was picked up by the Liberal and National parties.

The 2011 New South Wales state election result told a particularly damning story of the limits of The Greens’ electoral appeal. Despite confronting what was universally regarded as a historically incompetent State Labor Government and an utterly demoralised Labor organisation, The Greens were only able to increase its primary vote by 1.33 percentage points (to 10.3%) in the face of a 13.43 percentage point fall in Labor’s primary vote.

Tellingly, as ABC elections analyst Antony Green subsequentlynoted, The Greens were not able to capitalise on the collapse of the Labor Primary in Labor held seats:
“There was a swathe of inner-city seats such as Coogee and Heffron where a collapse in Labor’s first preference vote could have put the Greens into second place. Instead the Green vote was static and all the change in vote was from Labor to Liberal. Even in the one seat the Greens did win, Balmain, the victory came about entirely because Labor’s collapse in support was so large that Labor fell to third place”.
Ultimately, even left leaning former Labor voters who had given up on the ALP in disgust, did not opt for The Greens. The Liberal Party increased their primary support by a total of 11.64 percentage points in the election; ten times the increase in The Greens’ vote.

A similar pattern can be seen in the most recent Queensland election in which a swing against the Labor Party of 15.4 percentage points (leaving a primary vote of just 26.8%) was accompanied by a fall in The Greens primary vote of 1.2 percentage points (to a primary of just 7.2%).

Consistent with the experience of all movements that have challenged the Labor Party from the left since Federation, recent polling and electoral evidence strongly suggests that the Greens’ appeal, at least as the party is currently orientated, is limited to a small sub-set of ideologically sympathetic Labor voters.   In total, across the Victorian, New South Wales and Queensland election results and polling since the 2010 Federal election, Labor has lost an average of 11.33 percentage points of primary support while the Greens have increased their primary support by an average of only 0.475 percentage points.

Given the parallels between the rise in the prominence of the Greens and Labor’s historic experience with left wing movements inside and outside the ALP, what lessons can the Party learn from its history to avoid the long periods of damaging division that have often accompanied these movements?

Posted by at No comments:

Part 3: A Direct Historical Parallel to the Challenge of the Greens: The Lang Labor Split

The End of the Party? Labor History and the Rise of the Greens.

A Direct Historical Parallel to the Challenge of the Greens: The Lang Labor Split

For the pessimists, the ALP’s collapse in surveyed primary support since the 2010 election is frequently cited as the most compelling evidence of Labor’s impending demise. In the past 12 months, Labor’s surveyed national primary support has fallen as low as 26% and has generally struggled to lift much above 30%. This is truly a disastrous situation and would result in the wholesale rout of the party should it be reproduced at an election. Many have speculated that such a rout would leave Labor vulnerable to being overtaken by The Greens. However, those with an eye to history will know that this is not the first time Labor’s primary support has been this low, nor is it the first time Labor has been electorally challenged from the Left.  

At the 1931 Federal Election, the Labor Government led by Prime Minister James Scullin suffered a swing against it of -22%, leaving the ALP with a primary vote of just 27%. Labor MPs of the calibre of John Curtin, Ben Chifley and ‘Red Ted’ Theodore all lost their seats in the ensuing rout. While this result occurred in the throes of the Great Depression, Labor’s catastrophic performance was not merely a function of economic circumstance. Instead, more than half of the collapse in Labor’s support was directly attributable to the emergence of an opportunistic Left wing challenger to the ALP; the Australian Labor Party (NSW), more popularly referred to a ‘Lang Labor’.

Lang Labor was a splinter group of left wing Labor MPs loyal to the New South Wales Premier Jack Lang who triggered the 1931 election by voting with the conservative Opposition against the Government on a confidence motion. Lang Labor MPs advocated the adoption of the Lang Plan in response to the Great Depression, a populist left wing programme which called for a repudiation of Australia’s foreign debt (what we would call ‘default’ today) and the abandonment of the gold standard in favour of a goods standard that would significantly increase the monetary supply. While Conservatives and moderates were aghast at such an extreme proposal at the time, Lang Labor was able to capture around 10% of the national vote in the 1931 election. As its support was largely concentrated in NSW, it was further able to convert this support into four seats in Federal Parliament (including the infamous hard left MP Eddie Ward, who would go on to become a constant thorn in the sides of both Curtin and Chifley).  At the subsequent election in 1934, Lang Labor increased its support to 14% and its Parliamentary representation to nine seats. Meanwhile Labor’s primary support fell even further to just 26%, consigning the divided progressive movement to continued Opposition.

The similarities between the circumstances in which the progressive movement found itself in the early 1930s and current electoral environment are significant. In both cases, the progressive movement is deeply divided. On one side is an insurgent minority group supported by 10-15% of voters and advocating an extreme policy agenda to which the majority of the electorate is actively hostile. On the other side is the bulk of the progressive movement, weakened by internal conflict and external vicissitudes, fighting a war on two fronts and losing the vital middle ground necessary to form government.

So what does history tell us about the prospects for the Greens and the ALP within this context?

Posted by at No comments:

Part 2: Electoral Challenges to Labor from the Left in Historical Context

The End of the Party? Labor History and the Rise of the Greens.

Electoral Challenges to Labor from the Left in Historical Context

The history of the Australian Labor Party is best understood as a history of a conflict between the forces of electoralism and the forces of ideology. From the earliest days of the Labor party, in the shearers camps around Barcaldine and the workers cottages in Balmain, progressives have fought over whether the proper role of the Labor Party was to seek Government or to promote larger scale change in society through the pursuit of ideological ends. Labor historian Denis Murphy has described this conflict as the clash between the ‘more immediate goals of the empiricists and liberals’ within the ALP and the ‘long term aspirations of the socialists and idealists’.[i]

The majority of the trade unionists who had sat under the Tree of Knowledge had their political enlightenment forged in the practicalities of wage negotiations. Having been under the jackboot of the Queensland Colonial Army and a hostile conservative Government, they understood the negative power of holding government. As a result, they had specific, practical policy goals for the Labor Party and they sought government to deliver them.
 
As historian, Ross Fitzgerald has written of this period:
“Labor electoralism, to which most Queensland unions remained loyal for so long, was based on the notion that manipulation of the state was the most effective strategy for labour advancement. The immediate goals of this strategy were at no stage more ambitious than the modest extension of state enterprise and social welfare services, and ‘socialism’ was consciously redefined to fit within these bounds.’[ii]
Murphy has echoed this view, noting that
“In the years when the Labor party was establishing itself there was little intellectual tradition in Australian society. Reflecting this, the Labor party placed a greater emphasis on practical political questions and, though there were some theorists among the socialist groups, the party was only marginally concerned with theories of politics.”[iii]
To this end, the early policy platforms of the ALP were focused on a limited number of objectives that were directly relevant to the lives of their potential constituents: increased wages; workers compensation; workplace health and safety improvements; protections for workers against sickness, old age and unemployment; and electoral reforms to give workers genuine representation (particularly universal, equal franchise, one vote, one value and the abolition of conservative upper houses).

However, as Murphy intimates, even in the late 1890s, there was a parallel, more ideological and militant stream of thought present in both the party and the broader progressive movement. This stream of thought rejected the incrementalism of the electoralists and advocated more fundamental political change.  Over the course of Labor's history, groups both within the Labor movement (eg the Socialist Leagues, the Industrial Workers of the World, the One Big Unionists) and outside the ALP (eg Lang Labor, the Communist Party) have continually emerged seeking to shift Labor from its founding electoralist objective.  

The degree of success that these groups achieved in influencing Labor’s political agenda has varied significantly. Their influence has generally been stronger in periods of extreme adversity for progressive voters, when more extreme policy prescriptions became more appealing to a desperate electorate (eg wars, economic recession or depression) or when the ALP was facing adversity of its own, generally in the form of internal divisions on unrelated matters (eg religious sectarianism, single issue policy divides eg conscription).

An early example of the dynamic of this conflict between the electoralists and the ideologues within the progressive movement can be seen over the push for the inclusion of the nationalisation of industry as the key plank of Labor’s policy platform. Driven initially by members of the Socialist Leagues (and later by the IWW), and opposed primarily by the Labor MPs and candidates who ultimately had to face the voters, the nationalisation objective divided and damaged the ALP for more than 20 years before the issue was laid to rest.

As Ross McMullin wrote in his centennial history of the ALP, the debate over the inclusion of the nationalisation plank in Labor’s platform caused divisions within the ALP across the nation. When the nationalisation plank was not included in the 1898 NSW Labor electoral platform:
"Many socialists resigned from the Political Labor League, including its secretary. According to one of them, the Labor Party had ‘degenerated into a mere vote-catching machine, doing no educational work, and generally following a policy of supineness.’"[iv]
The debate was even more rancorous in Queensland where in 1907 the Labor Premier Bill Kidston and the bulk of his Labor caucus split from the organisational wing of the ALP over the issue and the broader question of industrial control of the parliamentary party[v]. The split led to a decade of Opposition before a new leader, TJ Ryan was able to reunite the Party and return Labor to Government.

Ultimately, this early scene of conflict was resolved in favour of the electoralists at Labor’s 1922 Federal Conference. While the party did incorporate a ‘socialist objective’ into its platform, in light of the fact that as ‘Red Ted’ Theodore noted, ‘no two delegates would agree as to what socialisation of industry meant’[vi], a rider was agreed to the effect that the objective would only apply to the extent that it was necessary to ‘eliminate exploitation and other anti-social features’ - effectively rendering the objective moot.[vii] 

Viewed within this historical context, the rise of the Greens and their policy agenda can be seen as simply the latest manifestation of the challenge to Labor’s electoralist mission by ideologues within the progressive movement. In fact, the parallels between the rise of the Greens and one particular historical conflict of this kind are particularly striking.

Part 3: A Direct Historical Parallel: The Lang Labor Split

[i] Murphy, D. (1990), “T.J. Ryan: a political biography”, University of Queensland Press.
[ii] Fitzgerald, R. & Thornton, H. (1989), “Labor in Queensland: from the 1800s to 1988”, University of Queensland Press.
[iii] Murphy, D. (1990), “T.J. Ryan: a political biography”, University of Queensland Press.
[iv] McMullin, R. (1991), “The Light on the Hill”, Oxford University Press Australia.
[v] Fitzgerald, R. & Thornton, H. (1989), “Labor in Queensland: from the 1800s to 1988”, University of Queensland Press.
[vi] McMullin, R. (1991), “The Light on the Hill”, Oxford University Press Australia.
[vii] McMullin, R. (1991), “The Light on the Hill”, Oxford University Press Australia.


Posted by at No comments:

The End of the Party? Labor's History and the Rise of the Greens

Background

About 12 months ago I wrote a long form essay pushing back against the hysteria that was accompanying the precipitous decline in Labor's Primary Vote after the 2010 election. Understandably, 7000+ words on Labor history isn't everyone's cup of tea and the (general appeal) publication took a pass.

But, with the latest Nielson Poll showing Labor's Primary Vote still languishing at 28%, I still think the piece is relevant and would appeal to the True Believers in the audience of this blog. So, I've updated the piece to take into account developments over the past 12 months and have chunked it out so that it's digestible on a blog.

I publish this in knowledge that a few thousand words on Labor's relationship with The Greens won't do anything to dispel the notion that I'm obsessed with The Greens. So let me say this: I get it - they aren't the main enemy. To paraphrase Albo words we need to be fighting Tories. Our political strategy should not revolve around combating The Greens. But that is the ultimate message of this piece. Labor has faced and seen off a series of challenges from the left in its history. But we saw them off by fighting not for ideological purity, but for the centre ground of Australian politics. It's this fact that we need to keep our focus on when confronting the electoral catastrophes in Queensland and New South Wales and when preparing to fight the next Federal Election.

The End of the Party? Labor History and the Rise of the Greens.

Part 1: Introduction - Hysteria and History

"We'll all be rooned," said Hanrahan, In accents most forlorn”. Self-flagellation and teeth gnashing have long been favoured pastimes of members of the Labor Party and its fellow travellers. Angst-ridden debate about what Labor ought to stand for and the extent to which the Party has abandoned its founding principles have been standard fare in progressive political discourse since before Federation. However, since the 2010 Australian Federal election, the focal point for ALP navel gazing has shifted from ideological ennui to an existential panic. Just as Hanrahan, the protagonist of John O'Brien’s iconic Australian bush poem, glumly predicted that his district’s dry spell would foreshadow collective doom, so too have progressives begun to talk (sometimes in accents most forlorn, sometimes in open glee) of the terminal roon of the ALP. The dramatic collapse in Labor’s primary vote since the formation of minority government by Julia Gillard in 2010 and the parallel rise in the prominence of The Greens has led many to speculate on the Party’s very viability within this ‘New Paradigm’.

In this vein, The Greens’ former Parliamentary leader Bob Brown has predicted that:
"I believe the Greens as a party are in a similar position to what the Labor Party was 100 years ago. We represent a widespread view of the community and our support is geographically widespread. I think that within 50 years we will supplant one of the major parties in Australia."
This idea is not just a Greens talking point; it has even being publicly entertained by some of the most senior figures in the ALP. Former Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd has stated that given the prevailing electoral and organisational situation, he believes that Labor risks becoming a“diminished political rump” and a “marginalised third party of Australian politics given the opportunism of the Greens”.

Party elder, Senator John Faulkner, has similarly told colleagues that Labor is:
 “facing our first electoral challenge in history from the left, in the Greens. And we are a declining political force”.
While the left has always incorporated electoral pessimism into its electoral worldview, these statements should not be lightly dismissed. One should always be careful to avoid the assumption that the status quo reflects the natural order of things. Societies and systems of government continually evolve and so too do the actors and their roles in them. Political parties come and go. Since Federation, Australia has seen the rise and fall of both minor parties (eg the Democrats, One Nation) and former parties of Government (eg the United Australia Party, Free Trade Party, The Commonwealth Liberal Party, the Protectionist Party). Similarly, just last year in another stable democracy, the Liberals, a former party of Government, were usurped by the New Democratic Party as the official opposition party in Canada. As such, the primacy of the ALP as the dominant party of the left in Australian politics should not be taken for granted.

So are the Hanrahans right? Is Australia currently approaching an inflection point in which the nation’s oldest political party could be usurped at the ballot box by a new progressive force?  If so, how should the Party’s leadership, and its ever diminishing number of members, respond?

To answer these questions, Labor should look to its past. As Graham Freudenberg wrote in “Cause for Power”, the official history of the New South Wales branch of the ALP,
“The Australian Labor Party was born with a sense of history. That sense of its past has always been, and remains, one of its great sources of strength and its confidence about its future.”
Freudenberg, G. (1991), “Cause for Power: The Official History of the New South Wales Branch of the Australian Labor Party”, Pluto Press.
Labor’s history shows that the Party’s current dire position is far from unique and further, that the threat posed by the Greens is nothing new. Like poor Hanrahan, those proclaiming the demise of the ALP are merely heralding the ebb of a long-term cycle. For more than a century, Labor has been pushed and pulled between forces of electoralism and those of ideology both within and outside the Party. However, in the long run, the ALP has always responded to bouts of ideological extremism that threatened its long term viability by successfully reaffirming its commitment to electoralism. Viewed in this way, Labor’s history offers not only solace that the rise in the prominence of The Greens as an ideological challenger to the left of the ALP does not signal the decline of the Party, but also practical lessons for how it should go about responding to this challenge to its electoral prospects.


Part 2: Electoral Challenges to Labor from the Left in Historical Context

Posted by at No comments:

Friday, 18 May 2012

In Defence of New Labour, Electoralism and Focus Groups


One of the more encouraging initiatives in modernising the ALP party organisation is Labor Voice, the new Centre Left Journal "of ideas and discussion". As you'll see from the piece below that I contributed to Volume 2 of Voice, I've long thought that the Labor Right hasn't publicly argued the principled case for electoralism as the core strategy of the progressive movement. In this regard, a journal that encourages those on the right of the ALP to publicly articulate what they stand for and the principles under-pinning this world view has the potential to add a lot to the quality of the policy and political discourse within Labor. 

I was particularly pleased to be able to contribute an article that pays homage to one of the great champions of centre-left politics that I had the privilege to know personally, the late Philip Gould. Philip was probably the best advocate of the electoralist mission of Labour politics and I've long through that his work deserves to be more broadly read and understood in Australia. The parallels between Gould's work with the British Labour Party of the 1980s and the political situation currently confronting the ALP are difficult to miss....

The Reckoning of a Hollowman -  Labor Voice Vol 2. 2012

A Hollow Man died in London last year.  Philip Gould, the Labour Party pollster and key architect of Tony Blair's "New Labour", was told in September 2011 that he would die of oesophageal cancer within three months. With morbid accuracy, he died in the first week of November.

It is a strange burden to be forced to examine one’s mortality this way.  The inevitability of the outcome removes the incentive for self-delusion; the half-true self-justifications that we cling to in order to live with ourselves. There is little choice but to honestly assess the value of one's life.
In response to his prognosis, Gould took stock. As an inveterate political communicator, he did so publicly. 

He told The Guardian:  
“The moment you enter the death phase it is a different place. It's more intense, more extraordinary, much more powerful…. When I thought maybe I've just got a few weeks, I thought ‘God this is what they mean by the reckoning. I've got to sort all this stuff out in days. Is it possible to sort out all those things in your past that you'd prefer not to have done’?"
It is fashionable to view political professionals, particularly those working for the major political parties, as soulless beings engaged in inherently immoral work. Those on the left are the subject of particular derision and are generally assumed to be cravenly and routinely sublimating what political beliefs they do hold in a meaningless and never ending pursuit of government. Working Dog Productions perfectly synthesised this attitude when it named its satire of modern Australian politics, “The Hollow Men” after T.S. Elliot’s despairing lament for the lost souls of Europe’s inter-war years.

Gould was a particular target for this kind of moral disapproval. While Blair’s Press Secretary, Alastair Campbell was a more prominent hate figure amongst the media for his supposed role in installing ‘spin’ at the heart of the democratic discourse, Gould was accused of a far greater sin than mere rough political practice. Gould’s purported sin was of leading the entire Labour Party into a collective act of apostasy against progressive ideology. As the man who pioneered the regular use of polling and focus groups by the Labour Party, for many in the UK progressive movement he was considered the patient zero of The Hollow Man disease.  So, faced with the searing honestly of self-reflection in the face of inescapable death, what was the product of Gould’s reckoning?

Gould did not repent and seek forgiveness of those who long accused him of selling out the party and its ideology. Gould was not a death bed convert to the righteousness of the causes of the hard left ideologues who he fought in the name of Labour ‘modernisation’ throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s. Instead, Gould spent last months and weeks of his life revising and expanding his New Labour history and campaigning manifesto, “The Unfinished Revolution”. In doing so, he produced what is probably the greatest modern articulation of the philosophical case for the pursuit of the progressive cause through the democratic process. It is a compelling justification of the moral value of a life’s work.

“The Unfinished Revolution” begins with a Labour Party that had turned in on itself and away from the country that it was seeking to govern. The UK was changing. Throughout the 70s and 80s, the ‘working class’ upon whose votes the Labour Governments of Attlee and Wilson were founded was shrinking in absolute  terms and in its place, an expanded middle class was emerging. This new middle class was not hostile to the goals of the progressive cause. Indeed, their basic ambition of seeking a better life for themselves and their children than that experienced by their parents is at the core of the progressive vision. The new middle class was however less ideological than the working class it was superseding and had aspirations that were greater than the more immediate, traditional Labour policy objectives; it was for this emerging demographic that the term ‘aspirational class’ was first used. Gould was born of this aspirational class and grew up watching the Labour party first abandon it, and then become actively hostile to its hopes and interests. With the shrinking electoral clout of the working class, he understood from early in his career that this was a recipe for electoral isolation.

The nadir of Gould’s career came in the wake of Labour’s infamous 1983 election loss under Michael Foot. Labour had gone into the election with a 700 page manifesto promising unilateral nuclear disarmament, immediate withdrawal from the European Common Market, the nationalisation of the 25 largest companies in the UK and across the board increases in taxation – in some instances pushing marginal rates to 93%. Critics derided it as ‘the longest suicide note in history’ and as a result, Labour’s (already depleted) vote fell by almost 10% to 27.6%. Labour avoided being overtaken by the SDP-Liberal Alliance as the major party of the left in the UK by only 2 percentage points.

The result galvanised Gould’s approach to the progressive cause. He observed:
“Labour (in the 1980s) had not merely stopped listening or lost touch: it had declared political war on the values, instincts and ethics of the great majority of decent, hard-working voters. Where were the policies for my old school-friends – now with families and homes of their own – in a manifesto advocating increased taxes, immediate withdrawal from the EEC, unilateral disarmament, a massive extension of public ownership and exchange and import controls?”
Gould viewed this electoral surrender as a moral failing on the part of the Labour party. He believed that Labor’s ideological self-obsession and electoral self-banishment were a betrayal of the very people the party was setting out to protect:
“The party I loved instinctively was to betray the (middle classes), its natural supporters: ordinary people with suburban dreams who worked hard to improve their homes and their lives; to get gradually better cars, washing machines and televisions; to go on holiday in Spain rather than Bournemouth. These people wanted sensible, moderate policies which conformed to their understanding and their daily lives. Labour became a party enslaved by dogma: .. . It abandoned the centre ground of British politics and camped out on the margins, forlorn and useless, offering a miasma of extremism, dogmatism, intolerance and wilful elitism which put the hopes and dreams of ordinary people last.
..
I felt humiliated by these (election) defeats, but it wasn’t me that was hurt: it was the millions of ordinary working people who deserved a better life, but who were repeatedly let down by progressive parties which campaigned poorly and did not seem to think that it mattered.”
This was the context for Gould’s championing of focus groups.  He wanted Labour to listen to the people and hear how they, and the UK more generally, had changed since the 1950s. Gould insisted that Labour must focus its attentions first on the voting public, not on its own Talmudic ideological debates. For him, the fount of political wisdom was not to be found in the dogma of ideology, but in the minds of the people. Vox populi, vox dei; the voice of the people is the voice of God.

From this perspective, focus groups were not a shameful thing to be furtively held in the darkened backrooms of a political party, they were the equivalent of opening the windows of a shut in Labour party and letting the sun shine in on the atrophied strategic thinking of those cloistered inside.

Gould didn’t fetish-ise focus groups and he was well aware of their quantitative limitations. He would have thought the Australian mythos of ‘focus group driven politics’ laughably reductive. For him, the strength of focus groups wasn’t that they told you ‘what voters wanted to hear’, rather that they revealed the complexity of public opinion:
“Although their scientific validity is less than that of an opinion poll, they are in a sense truer because you can talk to people as they really are, not as abstractions captured in a single moment. You gain access to real people with ideas and opinions that connect both to the past and to the future, who do not care much or at all about politics, and who think at one and the same time at many different levels. The complexity of public opinion reflects the complexity of politics; people have paradoxical views and opinions that cannot be reduced to easy choices or one-dimensional solutions.. a focus group is a place where you can dig beneath the surface and feel the forces gathering below.”
Gould also recognised that there were dangers associated with the pendulum swinging too far away from principle and towards populist driven policy making. However his fundamental point was that there is nothing morally impure about listening to the electorate, rather, in a democractic system of Government it was a moral imperative. Gould explained the balancing act thus:
“Focus groups do not of necessity involve dilution of principle or compromise – to say that implies that the voters are fools, which they are not. They want politicians who are tough, honest and courageous, and who govern with principle… But they also want to be heard. Of course, governing with principle and yet in a continuous dialogue with the voters is complicated. But modern politics is complicated. The electorate is more demanding and is right to be so. It is up to us to meet the new challenge.”
This was Gould’s ultimate goal, to give Labour the tools it needed to respond to this challenge and to become an outward looking vehicle for achieving democratic progressive change. History shows that he succeeded beyond his wildest political fantasies.  Between 1983 and 1997, when the Blair Government was triumphantly elected, Labour increased its net Parliamentary representation by 323 seats, turning a 144 seat loss into a 179 seat majority. The vast bulk of this increase in support came from the middle classes that it had been Gould’s mission to re-engage and that sustained more than a decade of Labour Government.
The importance of building the foundations for long-term government was Gould’s second great passion and the source of the title of his book. Gould understood, as the ideological zealots to his left did not, that achieving lasting change in a modern democracy requires time to build support not just in the progressive movement, but also in the broader community. Gould saw Labour’s task as not just winning elections, but ‘winning centuries’:
“This is the test by which the New Labour government should be judged. .. If a progressive coalition can govern Britain for a majority of the time then more poverty will be removed and more real change implemented than could ever be achieved by short, sharp, occasional spasms of radicalism. Lasting change can only happen over time, as part of a progressive project for government. .. We need a new long-term radicalism, to ensure that progressive instincts become rooted in the institutions of the nation, just as conservative instincts were in the past.”
A decade of New Labour government shows the fruits of Gould’s approach. Between 1997 and 2008, Labour changed the terms of the political debate in the United Kingdom. The political centre shifted decisively to the Left. On issues like the NHS, the minimum wage, anti-poverty programs, climate change policy and gay rights, the Tories were forced to adopt positions that a decade before would have been unimaginable. No Tory leader would risk entering an election on a platform of dismantling the NHS, as John Major did in 1997. In a non-trivial sense, the forced evolution of the Tories from the party of Margaret Thatcher to the party of David Cameron was one of the most enduring achievements of New Labour. It was New Labour’s patient management of reform and its enduring electoral success that created a political environment in which a subsequent Tory government was prevented from rolling back the bulk of the Labour policy agenda.

It was while observing these early years of the Cameron Government that Gould sat down to record the reckoning of his political career. Reading the expanded sections of “The Unfinished Revolution”, Gould’s anxiety that the lessons of Labour’s period in opposition in the 1980s and 90s are not forgotten as the party begins its first spell in opposition in the 21st century. Gould, the great political listener, is asking for the MPs and advisors who are currently in the position that he was in 20 years ago to listen to his life’s political experience:
"I have written this analysis now because I believe I have a responsibility to do so, and because this is a part of the story not yet told. It was written initially for the next generation of Labour (and not so Labour) supporters who grew up with New Labour but who may not feel they fully understand it, and may perhaps have lost faith in it. It is, I suppose, a letter from my generation to theirs. I want people to know what has been achieved, and what can be achieved again. The revolution is never finished."
The product of Gould’s life reckoning deserves to be widely read and reflected on by those on the centre left in Australia. All too frequently, those who locate themselves on the right wing of the Labor Party, being biased towards practical thought rather than ideological introspection to begin with, abandon the debate over the philosophical meaning of the progressive movement to those on our left. This failure to articulate what we really stand for is what leaves us open to the "Hollowman" charge. “The Unfinished Revolution” rebuts this charge by articulating what we all instinctively understand: that clinging to ideology both blinds us to the realities of policy making in an ever changing world and betrays the political mission of the progressive cause. More than this though, Gould makes it clear that despite the derision and moral judgement that is frequently heaped upon us, the centre left’s approach policy and politics is not a function of our moral failings, but of our moral maturity. While his death it a tragic loss for the progressive movement the world over, it is satisfying to think that he was able to contemplate the end of his life confident in the contribution he made to the cause and knowing that he has left a rich legacy of political insight for the generations who follow him.
Posted by at No comments:

Saturday, 14 April 2012

The Labor - Greens Electoral Dynamic in the Post Brown Era

The unexpected timing of Bob Brown's resignation has triggered off a slew of commentary about what the former Greens' Leader's departure will mean for the future of The Greens.

For his own part, Brown was unequivocal. At his resignation press conference, he repeated his oft stated claim that regardless of his involvement, it was The Greens destiny to replace Labor as the governing political party of the Left in Australia: 
"The Greens are on trajectory to become a future government. Our job isn't to make the so-and-sos honest - it's to replace them".
Looking at the big picture, rather than the personality driven analysis that is predominating in the wash up of Brown's decision, is this a realistic ambition? 

While people often discuss rise of the The Greens as an unprecedented challenge to the viability of the ALP, over the course of Labor's history, groups both within the Labor movement (eg the Socialist Leagues, the Industrial Workers of the World, the One Big Unionists) and outside the ALP (eg Lang Labor, the Communist Party) have frequently emerged to challenge Labor from the left. 

History shows that while these left wing challenger groups have been able to divide the progressive vote and damage the electability of the ALP, there is a hard ceiling on the growth of their vote. This suggests that while The Greens may be able to woo voters within ideologically sympathetic geographic enclaves, they are unlikely to grow their level of electoral support beyond around 15% of the national vote (the level achieved by Lang Labor at the peak of its appeal) without significantly moderating their agenda and broadening their electoral appeal. An examination of national Australian polling and State level electoral data over the past decade provides substantial empirical support for this view. This direct evidence is further supported by what little public evidence there is of the attitudes of potential left wing voters with those of Greens' candidates. 

In this context, while the departure of Bob Brown is no doubt a significant contemporary political event, in the long run, it does not seem likely to alter the broader structural obstacles to The Greens becoming a Party of government.

The Polling and Electoral Evidence

Peter Brent, a well known scion of the psephological blogosphere under his pseudonym, Mumble, recently compared a time series of ten years of Labor and Greens poll and election results and noted that:

“Since late 2001, Greens have tended to do well in the polls when Labor has done badly .. The Greens feed on dissatisfaction with the ALP from (in crude terms) “the left”. Their chances of winning more lower house seats at the next election largely depend on how badly the ALP does.”

As such, the data show that in 2001 when September 11 and the Tampa saw Labor’s vote crash, the Greens’ vote spiked by 5 percentage points. In contrast, in 2007, when Kevin07 had Labor ascendant, the Greens’ vote increased only 1 percentage point on their 2004 result. The pattern continued in the 2010 election, when a calamitous election campaign marred by internal Labor recriminations led to the Greens’ vote jumping 4 percentage points to around 13% of the national vote (11.76% in the House of Representatives and 13.11% in the Senate).

However, it is important to note that while The Greens’ vote tends to increase when Labor’s vote falls, this relationship is not linear. More often, only a small proportion of the fall in Labor’s support transfers into increased support for The Greens.  Significantly, despite widespread dissatisfaction with the Gillard government, unparalleled prominence of Greens’ spokesmen in the hung parliament and major wins on their key policy issues, the Greens’ surveyed level of support has barely increased at all since the 2010 election, bouncing between 12 and 15%.

Instead, as can be seen from the work of another online psephologist, Scott Steel, AKA Possum’s Pollytics, by examining a weighted aggregation of major pollsters as at 28 September 2011 (around Labor’s nadir), it can be seen that while Labor’s Primary support had fallen by 9.7 percentage points since the 2010 election, the Greens’ primary support had increased by only 0.6 percentage points. 


For every ten primary votes that had left Labor since the 2010 election, only one had gone to the Greens and five had gone to the Tony Abbott led Liberal Party.

Similar patterns can be observed in the recent Victorian, New South Wales and Queensland State elections. In Victoria, despite a major Greens’ campaign to build on their record 2010 Federal Election result by electing a number of lower house MPs in inner city Melbourne electorates, The Greens’ primary vote increased by only 1.17 percentage points to 11.21% of the state wide result, a result that failed to produce a single lower house seat. Meanwhile, Labor’s primary vote had fallen by 6.81 percentage points on a statewide basis, more than half of which was picked up by the Liberal and National parties.

The 2011 New South Wales state election result told a particularly damning story of the limits of The Greens’ electoral appeal. Despite confronting what was universally regarded as a historically incompetent State Labor Government and an utterly demoralised Labor organisation, The Greens were only able to increase its Primary vote by 1.33 percentage points (to 10.3%) in the face of a 13.43 percentage point fall in Labor’s primary vote.

Tellingly, as ABC elections analyst Antony Green subsequently noted, The Greens were not able to capitalise on the collapse of the Labor Primary in Labor held seats:

“There was a swathe of inner-city seats such as Coogee and Heffron where a collapse in Labor’s first preference vote could have put the Greens into second place. Instead the Green vote was static and all the change in vote was from Labor to Liberal. Even in the one seat the Greens did win, Balmain, the victory came about entirely because Labor’s collapse in support was so large that Labor fell to third place”

Ultimately, even left leaning former Labor voters who had given up on the ALP in disgust, chose to vote for the Liberal party rather than elect Greens MPs to replace sitting Labor Members. Across the state, ten times as many voters left Labor for the Liberal Party, who increased their primary support by a total of 11.64 percentage points.

A similar pattern can be seen in the most recent Queensland election in which a swing against the Labor Party of 15.4 percentage points (leaving a primary vote of just 26.8%) was accompanied by a fall in The Greens primary vote of 1.2 percentage points (to a primary of just 7.2%).

In total, across the Victorian, New South Wales and Queensland election results and polling since the 2010 Federal election, Labor has lost an average of 11.33 percentage points of primary support while the Greens have increased their primary support by an average of only 0.475 percentage points.

The Disconnect Between Left Wing Voters and Green Candidates

Observers should not be under any illusions as to the breadth of the electoral appeal of The Greens’ agenda. The ANU’s Australian Electoral Study has found that on a left-right scale running from 0 (far left) to 10 (far right) while voters on average place themselves in the centre of the scale, at 5.03, they place the Greens on average at 3.3; significantly more left wing than the mean voter.

Older, but more granular academic research shows that the attitudes of Greens candidates on specific policy issues are substantially to the left of the views of not only the broader electorate, but even of those of self-identified Labor voters (Betts, K. (2004), “PEOPLE AND PARLIAMENTARIANS: THE GREAT DIVIDE”, People and Place, vol. 12, no. 2, 64). For example, given a choice between reducing taxes or spending more on social services, 93% of Greens candidates favoured spending more on social services. Labor voters, however, were split fairly evenly, with roughly a third favouring reduced taxes, a third favouring more social services, and a third indicating no real preference. Similarly, only 26.5% of Greens candidates agreed or strongly disagreed with the statement that high income tax makes people less willing to work hard, while in contrast 66.6% of Labor voters did so. While this research is more than a decade old and this ideological gulf may have moderated in the intervening years, this data is consistent with the apparent ceiling on The Greens vote, even in the most fortuitous of electoral environments, revealed by recent polling and electoral data.

The Strategic Implications for the Labor - Greens Relationship

The lesson from this data is clear. Labor should recognise this electoral disconnect and not embrace the ideologically limited electoral agenda of The Greens. Ideological isolation is a particular risk in a situation in which Labor is confronted by a left wing movement that is active electorally. Labor can never be ‘more left’ than The Greens on totemic ideological issues. No matter how far Labor moves to the left, The Greens will always be able to move further across themselves, continuing to harvest the votes of those who are motivated by left wing orthodoxy. However, by engaging in an ideological bidding war with a party who is pitching to only a narrow segment of the voting population, Labor can very easily lose the votes of the vast majority of voters who are not motivated by these issues, driving them into the camp of the conservatives.

In response to the increasing prominence (if not electoral success) of The Greens, Labor must explicitly reaffirm its philosophy of seeking office in its own right, with all of the tactical implications that entails. There is certainly widespread dysfunction in the modern ALP, however the dysfunction is not the instinct to retain government.  To this end, Labor must make the moral case for electoralism as the least-worst hope for the progressive movement. By focusing on remaining relevant to the interests, hopes and dreams of the majority of Australian voters, much can be achieved through the use of Government to achieve incremental progressive reform. Moreover, history has repeatedly taught that when ideology has drawn Labor’s focus away from the need to obtain majority support, the progressive movement has achieved nothing in the face of long term conservative governments. 

As the former UK Labour leader, Hugh Gaitskell has warned progressives:“we can never go farther than we can persuade at least half of the people to go.”
Posted by at 1 comment:

Wednesday, 11 April 2012

The 8000 and Beyond - Modernising ALP Membership to Grow the Party's Membership Base

Summary

A common complaint about the current organisational state of the ALP is that the party is unable to effectively attract and retain members. While  there are legitimate disagreements about the causes of this situation, most observers now agree that "something must be done" to address this situation.

For the most part, the "something" that Party Members currently believe must be done is the re-empowerment of members through organisational reforms designed to decentralise control over the development of party policy and the election of party office bearers. Knowing that many around them have been driven away by the experience of branch meetings and policy committees, they argue that if the Party makes the rewards of membership more 'meaningful' and the returns of investing time in the party more tangible, the members will return. This "Community Organising Model" of growing Labor's membership has been endorsed by both the Prime Minister and the 2011 National Conference and is the key strategy that the Party is implementing in pursuit of Prime Minister Gillard's target of growing Labor's membership by 8000 members in 2012.

Implicit in this argument (and a major theme of Chapter Five of the 2011 National Review) is an appeal to history; Labor was last an effective mass membership party in the 1960s and 70s, therefore changing the Party's organisational structures to look more like they did in the past will recapture this lost golden age.

Unfortunately, I don't think it will work.

The problem with this model is that by looking inwards, to the experience of current members for solutions, it ignores the primary cause of Labor's membership decline; the broader structural decline in mass member organisation participation rates in general in Western societies over the past 40 years.

As the 2011 National Review itself noted:
Deeper cultural changes have also been at work. This is reflected in declining membership of churches and community groups as well as political parties. These changes are extensively documented and proceed at a different pace in different societies. In other words the problems faced by Australian Labor are not unique. They are common to most traditional political parties in western societies in the postindustrial era.
Modern examples of modern mass-membership organisations built on high levels of individual engagement and commitment from empowered members (ie those employing a Community Organising Model) are difficult to find.  Whether it is because of changing work arrangements or greater competition from a wider range of leisure time pursuits or something else altogether, people simply do not want to invest large amounts of their time in the traditional functions of a mass membership political party.

 The men and women of the dedication and zeal of those who founded and grew the ALP through relentless local organising in the first half of the 20th century would not be able to replicate the feat in the 21st century. The world has moved on from this model of organisation and onto new forms of collective action

The old model of a mass membership political party is dead.

In this context, an approach that focused only on making Labor membership 'richer' or more rewarding for those who make significant commitments to the Party is unlikely to substantially increase the number of Party Members. At the same time, such an approach would give more control over the direction of the party to a  currently narrow membership base - potentially making attracting new members even more difficult. In short the Community Organising Model has the potential to be both ineffective and counter productive.

Instead, of looking to the past, we need to adapt to new realities. The question we need to be asking is not what current Labor Members want from the ALP, but instead what Labor supporters currently outside the party want of the ALP. We need to be asking what Labor Membership needs to look like to attract new members in the 21st century.

Given that the structural challenges to membership organisations are not unique to the ALP, when responding to these cultural changes the party would be best served by looking not inwards or to the past for solutions, but outwards to the contemporary practices of the modern membership organisations that are thriving in this new environment. Labor needs to look to the membership innovations developed by successful modern organisations and it needs to adapt these to Labor's mission.

An examination of the peer groups that are currently out-competing the ALP for citizens' time and money (eg single issue groups, campaigning groups and sporting clubs) shows that the most successful groups:
  • Are structured to allow supporters the flexibility to determine their own level of engagement;
  • Make joining extremely easy (and often costless) and then create numerous avenues for converting latent or 'shallow' engagement into more valuable campaign contributions on an ad hoc basis.
Labor needs to make membership more relevant to the differing needs of individuals in modern society. Labor needs to create a membership structure that accommodates both the declining number of people who want the traditional, time intensive experience of a mass membership political party and the growing group who prefer the shallow, ad hoc engagement that is the new norm. The concept of a one size fits all notion of party membership needs to end. In short, to grow  the membership of the ALP in the 21st century, the party must change what it means to be a Labor member.

Below the fold: The Detail - The Numbers, The Response to Date and Benchmarking Against Best Practice and What Needs to be Done


Read more »
Posted by at 1 comment:
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)