Darkness at Noon

The Victorian branch of the Australian Labor Party is a mess of factional branch stacking. This much is pretty well common knowledge. Not surprisingly then, Victoria – where the ALP has been in power for over 10 years – has one of the poorest levels of governmental transparency in Australia. For a state government to not have a lobbyist register in 2009 is criminal (or should be).

This is not to mention the ALP’s meddling in Local Council politics is actually criminal in some cases. One only needs to look at Brimbank City Council to understand just how bad things have become.

So not only is the ALP Government not making the whole of government more accountable, its internal workings are just as bad.

The ALP’s has lost connection to its rank-and-file membership base which is dwindling and has long since simply been ignored by the ALP executive and power brokers. The effects of tightening up party rules around memberships has simply meant that only a small handful understand the system well enough to stack it and they have become the major power brokers. Instead of getting back to basics, it has just concentrated power even further.

To combat this lack of transparency, the ALP are trialing US-style primaries to determine candidates for next year’s state election. The idea is to let Labor voters, rather than just Labor members, the opportunity to determine candidates. How this is going to prevent branch stacking is beyond me. Surely it just opens up an whole new pool of people whose votes can be manipulated.

If the ALP is serious about cleaning up this mess then they ought to firstly make the Victorian Government a lot more transparent and accountable. They must also reform the disclosure laws for local councils in an attempt to expose the current exploitation of this system.

Next it needs to genuinely attempt to reconnect with its base. That is going to be a long haul. I’m not sure what the role of Unions are in this but they are clearly central to both connecting to the base and branch stacking/power broking. What incentive does one have to be a member of the ALP at the moment? You have no influence over policy, not influence over the candidates that are selected and stuff all voting rights in the scheme of things especially when branch stacking is rife.

Running US style primaries just isn’t going to fix this.