
Issue No 45		10 March 2000

Review

Power and the Back Bar

Extracted from Party Girls (Pluto Press)

In an upcoming book, Julia Gillard argues the ALP retains a male culture that is fast losing step with contemporary society.

The Australian Labor Party both reflects Australia's mainstream culture and has a culture of its own. The Labor Party's roots are in unionism and militant industrial struggle. While many women were heroes in these struggles, the culture born was one of male bonds, male mateship, male leadership and male aggression.

For much of this century this culture fitted neatly in an Australia where the cultural stereotype, if not always the reality, was of a male breadwinner bringing wages home to a non-incoming earning wife whose world was centred on home making and childrearing.

Today's Australia no longer resembles this 1950s imagery. Neither does today's Labor Party.

State Branches and Union Delegates: Formal Structures of Power

Part of the difficulty with analysing the Labor Party's structure is, that like Australia generally, in many ways the Party remains a federation of state- based organizations with their own idiosyncrasies. Each of the state-based structures is founded on an amalgam of individual membership and trade union affiliation. In general terms, individuals can join the Labor Party and attend a locality based Branch, with individual membership giving a right to vote for the delegates who will form the peak decision-making body of the Party in that State. Trade unions affiliate to the Party for a claimed membership number and are allocated delegates to the peak decision-making body in proportion with that membership number. The number of delegates to the peak decision-making body is divided between affiliated trade unions and those elected by individual memberships in an agreed ratio, which is either 50% each or 60% for trade unions and 40% for delegates elected by individual members.

This kind of structure clearly has it shortcomings. Obviously, locality based membership branches are a hang over from an era when working hours facilitated men, in particular, gathering at evening meetings that were within walking distance. The limited forms of mass communications meant such meetings played a valuable role both in informing those who attended about current political issues and in performing 'on the ground' campaigning activities. While a number of local branches are vibrant and clearly meet a need for the members who participate in them, the reality is most Party members do not regularly attend their local branch. Many branches are held together by a dedicated, but small, group of Party members in the older age bracket.

The Labor Party is not alone in struggling to maintain a vibrant membership base and updating its structures to meet the needs of the modern world. Many civic organizations, which rely on volunteerism, are finding it increasingly difficult to renew their membership base as we confront a time pressured world with much of the population only just keeping their heads together as they struggle with work and family obligations.

The difficulties of maintaining volunteer involvement are compounded for political parties, such as the Labor Party, by the way in which modern politics is conducted. In this era of mass communications, increasingly political leaders conduct their dialogue with the electorate directly through free media and, at election times, through paid advertising. The message delivered by political leaders is shaped by the work done by a full time and professional political class of advisers, strategists, pollsters, spin doctors and the like. As the day-to-day pursuit of politics shifts increasingly into central hands, it is difficult to offer individual members much more than a role in fundraising, handing out how-to-votes cards and other campaign orientated tasks.

While each state Branch and the Labor Party nationally maintains a policy generation structure in which individual members can participate, the historic tension as to who really controls policy questions, the Party or its parliamentarians, remains.

There has been a general debate in the Labor Party in recent years about how to renew its membership base. Both John Pandazopoulos, the new Minister for Major Projects, Tourism and Gaming in Victoria and Jim Claven, the author of The Centre is Mine, have written persuasively about the need to move to a mass-based membership model like that used by British Labour under the leadership of Tony Blair. Within Britain, individual members have been empowered within the Party's decision making structure through the use of plebiscites and highly professional 'marketing' strategies have been used to sell membership. Such strategies have included highly discounted memberships, youth recruitment drives, the mass distribution of slick recruitment material, the use of targeted direct mail and telephone canvassing and high profile recruitment events such as 'Red Rose Week'. These strategies are credited with doubling British Labour's membership in a five-year period.

Within the Labor Party in Australia, this debate has yet to resolve in concrete changes. To the extent that membership rules have been altered, the tendency has been to tighten the criteria for being eligible to vote in preselection contests as a result of increasing concern about 'branch stacking' and membership manipulation.

There is no evidence to suggest that the continuing problems with giving individual members a real say and a real role discourages women more than men. However, given that for women, the struggle to balance work and family life is particularly intense, it is not surprising that a locality based branch structure, generally based on evening meetings at which childcare is not provided, tends to attract fewer women participants than male participants.

Alternatives to locality based branches such as work based branches, issues groups, women's branches and the like have been suggested but not warmly embraced. Just as the debate about increasing membership has become hostage to concerns about membership manipulation, so has the debate about branch structures with fears expressed that those seeking to manipulate membership will misuse more flexible branch structures.

As the Party has debated issues about the rights of individual membership, recruitment strategies and different branch structures, it has also debated the question of the appropriate degree of trade union influence on the Party. Some in this debate have suggested that as trade union membership numbers have declined, so should the percentage of votes guaranteed to trade union affiliates. Others put the view that, given the history of the Labor Party and the connection that still exists between unions and large numbers of workers, the Party would downgrade trade union influence at its peril. It is also suggested that, given it is virtually unheard of for trade unions to vote as a block, such a change would be no more than symbolic and have no substantial effect on outcomes.

When analysing this debate, it would be simplistic in the extreme to characterise trade union influence in the Party as simply equating to male influence. In recent times, trade unions have systematically developed affirmative action programs in order to better reflect and serve the constituency of working women. However, some historic organisational biases do exist. For example, teachers' unions, nurses' unions and the unions representing direct public sector workers have not traditionally been affiliated to the Labor Party. These are also unions with high female membership and leadership. The failure to affiliate is explained, in part, by the professional association backgrounds of these unions and, in part, by the political difficulties of developing an organisational link to the political party that may become the government and the employer. However, the non-affiliation of these unions does mean that many of the key unions affiliated to the Party have a larger male membership constituency than female membership constituency and a larger number of male officials than female officials.

Consequently, while the Labor Party's formal structures are not directly discriminatory, there are factors that mean those structures facilitate male involvement more than female involvement.

At the Right Pub at the Right Time: Informal Structures of Influence

Clearly, every organization has an informal structure that shadows and enlivens the formal structure. In the Labor Party, the factional structure is a large part of this informal structure, but it is not the whole story.

As noted above, the nature of modern politics has given rise to increasing amounts of influence being placed in the hands of the professional political class. Given the increasing importance of this political class, it is important to note that, at its most senior level, it is almost exclusively male. Currently, the Chiefs of Staff to our Federal and State Labor Leaders are all male - with the exception of Premier Bob Carr in New South Wales. The Labor Party's National Secretary and each State Secretary are male except for the State Secretary in the ACT.

In part this can be explained by the family-unfriendly nature of the jobs, which have historically required long hours and constant travel. The 'work to you drop' ethos which pervades this political class means there has been no real attempt to facilitate part-time work or working patterns which recognise family needs. In addition, these jobs tend to become a lifestyle in which being at the right pub or the right dinner at the right time can be as important as performing professional duties during the day. The ability of those with young families, and women in particular, to get in and stay in the networks, is therefore limited.

It is time that these practical and cultural matters were addressed and that the apparent barriers to women in filling these positions are systematically analysed and overcome. Unless this is done, we risk severely limiting the sources of advice and talent to Labor governments and leaders - by losing women's perspectives and skills.

Turning to the factional structure, which is so key to understanding the functioning of the Labor Party, we find a state of flux. The ideological divide, which first defined the Left/Right split, namely attitudes towards communism and the former Soviet Union, has given way. In many ways, the factions are now far more personality-based groupings with differences in style rather than substance.

This is not to say that the Labor Party lacks participation from a broad ideological spectrum. The Party continues to incorporate participants from a conservative Catholic background right through to those who still hold misty dreams of revolutionary rather than evolutionary change. In searching to define the current division between the Right and the Left, it can be said, in the broadest of terms, that the Right has a more free market economic perspective and a more conservative social perspective than the Left. Like all good generalisations, there are many exceptions to the rule. For many within the Party whose views were not tightly formulated before taking up membership, whether they join the Right or the Left is increasingly a decision based on personal connections, friendships and happenstance. Indeed, the breakdown in the clear ideological divide between Right and Left has meant that in a number of States there has been increasing factional fluidity with a breakdown of Right and/or Left groupings into smaller subgroups.

Where does all this leave women? Historically, the leadership of factions has been exclusively male, with the greatest displays of male political aggression saved for inter-factional negotiations and intra-factional dissent crushing. Only recently have we seen the emergence of female factional leaders. Clearly, these leaders, like the male leaders, do not have complete freedom of action and generally such female leaders are working within a paradigm largely defined by male trade union leaders, given the importance of trade unions to factional politics. However, some changes in style and substance are discernible, and it would be a mistake to underestimate the importance of this development.

Clearly, there remains a debate about the desirability of the Labor Party having any form of factional structure. However, whatever one's position on this debate it seems inevitable that factions will continue to exist within the Labor Party and within political parties generally. Consequently, women's involvement in factional structures at the senior level is desirable if we want to ensure that factions within the Party and the Party generally are fully open to women's participation and women's perspectives.

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  Issue 45 contents

Interview: Working Women
Nareen Young talks about how services are being delivered to our most vulnerable workers - and what unions need to do to make them their own.

Unions: Into the New Frontier
IT professionals are part of the new workforce that unions need to win over - and while they are often contractors, they're workers too.

History: Handling The Ladies
1943 - women were filling the gap in the workforce left by the diggers abroad and Australian managers needed some advice on how to deal with these strange creatures.

Technology: Building The Hypermacho Man
In a stinging critque of the �Wired� culture, Melanie Stewart Miller argues digital cultural is creating a new super-Man.

International: The Long March Home
Trade union women round the world used International Women�s Day to launch the World March of Women Against Poverty and Violence.

Satire: Kerosene Dilution Racket
The nursing home industry has been rocked by a new scandal with the revelation that some unscrupulous proprietors have been diluting their patients� kerosene baths with illicit liquids.

Review: Power and the Back Bar
In an upcoming book, Julia Gillard argues the ALP retains a male culture that is fast losing step with contemporary society.

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