Comment

Barry Jones
How Labor factions actually work

Laws are like sausages. It is best not to see them made.
– Attributed to Otto von Bismarck

During the turbulent but productive Whitlam era, every caucus meeting was a potential minefield, with confrontations, more personal than factional, over forthcoming legislation and even the budget. There were raised voices, individual attacks and occasional shouting matches.

When Bob Hawke became prime minister in 1983, a new model of caucus management was adopted. Factions were used constructively to achieve consensus on contentious issues such as uranium mining.

Typically, Hawke would nominate two members from the Left, two from the Right and one from the middle – Bill Hayden’s Centre Left, also known as the “lonely hearts club” – and tell them to go away and find a formula, which was then adopted. It worked very well and in the 13 years of the Hawke–Keating government, open conflict in caucus meetings was extremely rare.

When Kim Beazley became opposition leader in 1996, he allowed the factions to make the running on policy formulations and took, essentially, a non-interventionist role. In the 1998 election, centred on John Howard’s proposed goods and services tax, Labor polled well but not quite enough.

In 2001, Labor lost ground. The times suited Howard – the Tampa crisis and the 9/11 attacks in the United States both helped to shape his image as a tough and decisive leader.

By this time, the factions had become ends in themselves. The party had been lost to them. These factions were really secretive patronage machines, adept at branch stacking, sometimes on an industrial scale.

Simon Crean, the Labor leader who followed Beazley, nominated Bob Hawke and Neville Wran to conduct a national committee of review. They were impressed by a passionate commitment to change.

ALP members wanted “bottom up” processes to replace the then system of “democratic centralism” in which head office, factional leaders and spin doctors made all the important decisions about how the party operated, policy directions and choice of candidates.

Members attacked “the deadening impact of factionalism and the associated phenomenon of branch stacking” and “the cancerous effect this activity has had on the democratic traditions that have been the strength of our party”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXs8q2BrJI0&ab_channel=TheSaturdayPaper

In October 2002 a special ALP national conference adopted most of the Hawke–Wran Review, changing the trade union/branch representation ratio at conferences from 60:40 to 50:50. Paradoxically, as unionism contracted within the Australian community, it increased its power base within the ALP, with local branches becoming factional echo chambers. Importantly, and tragically, the factions were not touched. The reforms did nothing to change the system of patronage that has undermined the party.

In September 2006, former minister Robert Ray, himself an early factional warlord, attacked what factions had become – “a production line of soulless apparatchiks”. He ran through a litany of complaints: “the Stasi element … people who would rather lose an election than lose their place in the pecking order … control freaks with tunnel vision”.

In Queensland, the Right had a variety of sub-factions, hard to explain to anyone south of the Tweed, and Kevin Rudd was an edgy member of one of them. When he defeated Howard in 2007, he indicated that he thought factional power was excessive and he planned to run the show. So long as his poll ratings were stratospheric, he was safe. After the inevitable decline began in 2010, the factions removed him overnight.

The South Australian ALP used to be the least factional, with free spirits such as Don Dunstan, Neal Blewett, Richard Gun, Ralph Jacobi, Hugh Hudson, Lynn Arnold and John Bannon. Now it is the most factionalised.

Lynn Arnold was a long-serving minister and premier of South Australia from 1992-93. After Labor’s defeat in 1993, he moved to Spain to research for a PhD in linguistics, worked for World Vision, then ran Anglicare. Since Anglicare was essentially a lobbying body, Lynn thought it appropriate to resign from the ALP.

When he left Anglicare, he was ordained as an Anglican priest and later appointed to St Peter’s Cathedral, Adelaide. He made several attempts to rejoin the ALP but was essentially fobbed off by head office. When he tried, he was asked who he was. Clearly factional heavies were worried about his intentions and whether he would rock the boat. While he remains a supporter, he is not a party member.

With the entrenched factional system, branches are largely irrelevant, community engagement pointless and recruitment a waste of time.

Neither the ALP nor the Liberal Party show any enthusiasm for recruitment on a large scale, particularly if it threatens the power base of existing factions. So there has been selective recruiting – of, for example, Mormons, Pentecostals and Plymouth Brethren in the Victorian Liberal Party – and a thousand such recruits can determine preselection in three or four federal electorates.

In the ALP the terms “Left” and “Right” are simply brand names, like “Crows” or “Cats” in the AFL.

Two decades ago, I warned that factions created the danger of making the Labor Party look like a transactional organisation in which power is regarded as factional property. I pushed for an urgent expansion of party membership, which never happened.

I have written before that I would not have won preselection under the current faction system. Nor would Gareth Evans. The system is too badly rigged, too beholden, too distorted by cronyism.

Factionalism in the Liberal Party is harder to define, highly personal and vindictive. Witness the aftermath of the Moira Deeming and John Pesutto defamation case, with a determination to bankrupt the former leader and drive him from parliament.

Liberal factions are driven by personalities and are more ideological than in the ALP. What might be described as the “red meat” faction draws support from far-right preferences, mining magnates and News Corp. It rejects action on climate change, is anti-science, homophobic, xenophobic and Trumpist.

Sussan Ley is trying to hold the moderates together and has shown steely resolve.

One might assume that in election campaigns voters might care to have it explained to them what the factions are and how candidates and ministers are chosen. However, in practice these issues are not important to most voters, who are pragmatic, concentrating on preferred outcomes, not entrails.

Of Labor’s record number of 122 caucus members, only two are not in a faction – Andrew Leigh and Alicia Payne, both from the ACT. Leigh, an economist with an international reputation, has paid a high price for his independence.

I have deplored the recent relegation of Mark Dreyfus and Ed Husic, which was handled in a particularly graceless way.

Several commentators have drawn parallels between Husic’s removal as minister for science and my defenestration from the same office in April 1990.

In both cases the situation is capable of two interpretations: pure bastardry with a refusal of the leader to intervene being one; applied mathematics, the other.

Following the collapse of the Pyramid Building Society in Victoria, John Cain’s state government was in trouble. While the ALP won the 1990 federal election, six MPs from Victoria, all of whom would have voted for me in a caucus ballot, lost their seats. Centre-Left ministers from Victoria were over-represented, while South Australia was under-represented. I was defeated by a single vote.

I was the last surviving minister from 1983 never to have been elevated to cabinet. Being in a class of one conferred a cachet of exclusiveness, but I could have done without it.

Despite the secretive nature of the ALP’s factional machinations, the quality of ministers in Albanese’s cabinet is very high, and some are outstanding.

The new minister for industry and innovation and minister for science, Tim Ayres, is from the NSW Left. We have never met, but he turns out to be a close follower of my writing and we have arranged to meet and keep in touch. I have high hopes that blue sky research will still be supported, even as universities become increasingly commercialised.

The problem with factions, though, is they consume passion and intellectual energy, which should be devoted to solving our existential crises, especially climate change.

As Stewart Sweeney wrote in Pearls & Irritations last month: “Australia’s policy machinery has long favoured ‘the economy we have’ over ‘the economy we need’. And the economy we have is overwhelmingly shaped by three entangled dependencies: property development, resource extraction and short-term migration-fed consumption growth. Real innovation policy – building sovereign capability, backing advanced manufacturing, supporting genuine R&D – threatens all three. So it is sidelined.”

Australia’s changing age profile means that an increasing proportion of workers are in the “bedpan” economy, inevitably leading to low productivity, as historically defined, with aged-care and childcare workers, and millions more in the “precariat” of low-paid repetitive jobs such as cleaning, maintenance and fast foods.

Harvard University’s Economic Complexity Index has Australia in serious decline, from ranking 71 in 2000 to 105 in 2023. This country is behind Indonesia (72), South Africa (77) and Cambodia (80) but ahead of Ethiopia (117).

This is Australia’s real challenge, but who is talking about it?

The combination of factionalism and federalism, based on state rather than national priorities, causes diabolical problems for the national leadership.

Western Australia made a major contribution to Labor’s thumping majority, winning 11 of 16 seats – but it did so strongly backed by a pro-mining state government, eager for more revenue from extractive industry. That means Woodside’s North West Shelf project, with its threat to the ancient rock art on the Burrup Peninsula, will be embedded.

I am, however, reasonably optimistic there will be major changes to taxation policy, leading to a dramatic improvement in the prospects of new-home buyers. One dares to hope the Gonski education reforms and the Henry taxation review will be adopted in full.

All that is really needed is courage and vision.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on June 7, 2025 as "How Labor factions actually work".

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