The current public spat between the ALP and the Greens points to deeper changes in our party system; particularly the growing irrelevance of the ALP’s structure and the way in which its blue-collar union base has narrowed the party’s connection with the community leaving it vulnerable to attacks on the right (Howard’s battlers) and on the left (from the Greens).

In my recently completed doctoral thesis (available online: http://trevorcook.typepad.com/weblog/) I drew attention to the paralysis that afflicts the ALP in its attempts to rebuild from historically low and perilous declines in its primary vote.

My thesis, essentially, is that party structure matters and that the ALP’s relationship with the union movement, through the affiliation of mostly blue collar unions, has become a burden in a world where only a minority of the electorate identifies with the old unionised blue collar world that began to decline in the 1950s and collapsed in the 1990s as Australia opened its economy and a much larger proportion of the population gained access to higher education.

The popular political image of the blue-collar worker today is the fabled ‘tradie’; an independent small business person more concerned with the impact of the tax system than industrial relations and likely to see unions as a problem or an historical artefact.

Meanwhile, the typical union member in Australia today is a professional woman with a university degree working in the community services sector. About a quarter of today’s union members belong to two big unions, covering teachers and nurses, which are not affiliated to the ALP and whose officials rarely make it into ALP parliamentary caucuses.

One interviewee with long experience at a senior level in the union movement, summed up the problem for the ALP, and gave me the title for my thesis. He said that both unions and the party want to seem more independent while continuing to derive the benefits of social democratic style dependence. They want to avoid voter and union member scepticism, even hostility, about the close relationship between unions and the ALP. At the same time, unions want the ALP to deliver legislation that protects them and the ALP wants access to the enormous human and financial resources that unions can provide at election time.

In the face of plummeting membership in the 1990s, the ACTU turned away from the Scandinavian-inspired corporatism of the Accord, with its insider tactics and elite negotiation, towards some successful pressure group style unions in the USA.

The star turn was the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) lauded in ACTU strategies and reports of the time as the fastest-growing union in the western world. The core strategy of the SEIU for recruiting and retaining members was campaigning. This new approach reached its pinnacle in Australia in 2007 with the campaign against Workchoices.

The US-inspired revival of union political clout, however, is based on political independence – the capacity to campaign for and against policies, parties and candidates based on union interests and not constrained by prior political affiliations and commitments.

In my thesis interviews, people in the ALP and in affiliated unions often praised an acceptance of these constraints as examples of political ‘maturity’, and they often criticised unaffiliated unions for lacking it.

When Labor won office in 2007, the spirit of independent campaigning in the union movement took a back seat to insider deals. Many in the union movement have blamed this predilection for elite co-operation as the reason why the union movement was ineffective in its campaign against the Abbott led coalition in 2010. It’s also why the Coalition probably has little to fear from the union movement in 2013.

Many observers like to argue that structure doesn’t matter, that voters don’t care how the sausages are made. The problem with this view is that bad structure produces unappetizing sausages. Inevitably, a few generations of tasteless sausages results in a party leadership that few people in the electorate feel connected to, much less inspired by.

At a time when blue collar unions have become irrelevant to the vast majority of Australian voters, about half the federal ALP caucus are former officials of affiliated unions. Some have had national profiles like Greg Combet and Bill Shorten before they entered Parliament, many were undistinguished state union officials. Some were put in Parliament to get them out of the union movement.

At the same time, there are virtually no former officials in the federal caucus from non-affiliated unions, including the big successful unions covering teachers and unions – that is, the unions that feel less politically constrained and are more likely to campaign against ALP governments.

Worse still, there are very few people in the federal caucus from the NGOs and the community organisations that the ALP in recent organisational reviews has highlighted as important to its connection with the broader community. These so-called ‘like-minded’ organisations might get consulted by an ALP anxious for new sources of electoral support, but they rarely find their way inside the tent of caucus.

The ALP’s low appeal to the electorate goes a lot deeper than the usual problems and remedies often cited in the media and on commentary websites. It is not just about Gillard or the carbon tax or asylum seekers. It is not just about ‘standing for something’.

Nor will it be solved by another swing of the electoral pendulum. The ALP’s primary support is at its lowest for a century. There is no Whitlam to drag in a new middle class, nor can the ALP fall back on another round of Carr-Beattie media spin and political timidity. Those options are one-offs.

It is about community connection, real connection, not focus group replacements, and that goes to the way in which candidates for public office are selected and that, in the ALP, raises the question of which external groups are privileged above others.

The ALP continues to privilege blue-collar unions even though their significance in the broader electorate no longer warrants it. At the same time, the union movement continues to disappoint many current, former and potential members because it is unable to act independently when the ALP is in government.

Structure, and the political constraints it brings with it, are driving people towards the more apparently ‘independent’ Greens, just as a decade ago the non-unionised tradies were attracted to the Howard-led Liberals.

No amounting of moaning about preference deals will change that. Only a more open ALP structure capable of producing political candidates more representative of the broader community and more appealing to it can reverse the ALP’s long-term political decline.

Unions & The ALP: Building A Broader Community Connection

It must be immensely frustrating for loyal Labor party men and women to, day after day, have to deal with the Gordian knot of their current electoral situation. Many of them are desperate for any circuit breaker and the NSW Right have decided they know what the right one is.

It is now well documented that Labor is facing an increasing disconnect between its two core constituencies, the outer urban working class and the inner urban left wing bourgeoisie. More and more, these two groups have diametrically opposed views on almost everything.

Historically this Labor alliance was built on the desire of the wealthier left wing elite to “look after” the working class, and a desire to build a “flatter” society with greater opportunity for those from a poor background and more accountability to pay for this from the rich. The irony is that the free market and Australia’s mineral wealth has provided this “flatter” society by making much of the working class at least as rich as the middle class. The left wing intelligentsia is slowly realising that the people they were “protecting” have a very different view of the world to them, and don’t really need or want their protection.

Blue collar workers in the outer suburbs are overwhelmingly concerned with cost of living, with many also uncomfortable about rapid social and demographic change.

The inner city left winger is worried about social justice and the environment. These two groups might as well live on different planets. Most outer metro fringe suburbs are still largely Anglo-Celtic and totally reliant on cars for work, shopping and recreation and evening entertainment options are limited. Meanwhile, in Melbourne and Sydney particularly, inner city suburbs are highly multicultural, public transport rich and brimming with a wide variety of options for an evening out. These groups lead very different lives and their political views in 2012 reflect that.

The NSW Right’s solution is to somehow destroy the Greens and re-establish their identity by leaving inner city trendies to themselves and focusing solely on the traditional soul of the Party, the “working class”. While on the surface this sounds like a good idea, people like Paul Howes are effectively asking the Labor Party to jump off its pushmepullyou horse onto an old nag that doesn’t even really exist anymore.

Both manufacturing employment and union membership have been in freefall in Australia for more than twenty years. The economic deregulation instigated by the Hawke Government and carried on by the Howard Government has created a new class of self-employed blue collar workers, and the mining boom has created another class of very wealthy blue collar employees. Many of these people feel no particular loyalty to the labour movement, and definitely not the Labor Party.

Meanwhile, the most loyal of all Labor voting groups are non-anglophone immigrants, most of whom cluster around the inner to middle ring suburbs of our biggest cities. 23 of the 25 Federal electorates with the highest proportion of people from a non-English speaking background have a Labor MP. So what is the genius suggestion of many within the Party and some on the sidelines, like Malcolm Mackerras? That’s right, focus on “stopping the boats”, jump in bed with Family First, the DLP, the Christian Democrats, basically anyone who’s more comfortable with a whiter Australia ahead of the Greens. Clever, innit?

The reality is that many of the social issues that the Labor right wing so desperately wants to avoid in fear of upsetting the “traditional Labor voter”, like gay marriage, are actually already widely accepted across both blue collar and white collar parts of the community, and the opportunity to differentiate themselves from the Liberal Party is lost.

Added to this is the fact that Tony Abbott is a far more authentic DLP-style politician than Julia Gillard or anyone else in the Cabinet could ever be, and what the Labor Party is facing is indeed electoral wipe-out, with their inner city MPs (almost all Ministers) only surviving on Liberal Party preferences, or even worse, the potential for Labor to come third in these seats, as NSW Health Minister Verity Firth did in Balmain in 2011. In Paul Howes’s world of putting the Greens last, that potentially means a Liberal member for Sydney or Melbourne.

So rather than trying to win back the growing inner city latte-sipping crowd by selling the message that they are almost as socially progressive as the Greens but without the economic nuttiness, the NSW Right wants to vacate the field entirely.

Let us remember that this is the group of political maestros that almost solely got the Party into this mess, starting long ago with the spin over substance of the Carr premiership, the mantra of focus group over policy, telling Rudd to backflip on an ETS and finally the truly moronic “Lindsay test” in which every potential ALP policy had to be saleable to the voters of a single electorate in far western Sydney. It seems now to be continuing down the course of what political historians may well view in 20 years as a textbook case of completely destroying a major political party.

NSW Right Trying To Lead Labor Straight Off A Cliff