Trevor Cook

Unions and the ALP: Between dependence and independence

Here is the final version of my phd thesis:

Cook Thesis Final

Greens, the ALP and unions

 I have written an opinion piece (see below) published on Online Opinion today which links the current argument between the ALP and Greens to the broader argument in my recently completed doctoral thesis. It deals with some of the implications of my thesis.

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 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 artifact.

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.

 

Anna Funder, All that I am

This is a stunning novel. It's a long-time since I've enjoyed a new novel quite as much. The story is fantastic (I had no idea), and the tone is just right. It is fast-paced and gripping but also deeply revealing about human motives. I rarely think that novelists 'get' politics - they either romanticise it or demonise it. But Funder has a deep appreciation. The sense of time and place - the atmospherics - are wonderful. Her descriptions are precise and evocative, and never become cloying or atificial. As the blurb says the novel is 'intelligent'. As a writer, Funder is masterful her control is remarkable. You've got to read it.

The joy of anonymity

First published on the Drum in 2008.

We are in the midst of an obsession with celebrity. Mistakenly, many people think fame, real or vicarious, will enrich them spiritually as well as materially. But, the joy of being anonymous in a large city is one of the great achievements of modern civilisation. So why are most people desperate to ignore this source of liberty and joyous engagement with the world around them?

Anonymity is a comparatively recent phenomenon in human history. Most of our ancestors knew everyone they came into contact with on a daily basis. And everyone knew them. In a village or a nomadic tribe, everyone knows you and your business. There is no such thing as privacy, everything you do, every move you make, is subject to scrutiny.

When a villager or tribesmen doesn't know someone, that person is a stranger - a mysterious person with possibly harmful intentions. Before the emergence of large cities, everyone was on alert in the presence of a stranger. And for many people this sense of strangeness has been transferred to the city itself and the crowds that fill it.

Most of us merely tolerate difference to a greater or lesser degree. We still by and large prefer the congenial company of those who are like us. Our friendships tend to reflect us in many ways in class, religion, sexual orientation, marital status and so on. We congregate together, in small groups, like villagers amid a sea of unknown, and strange, humanity.

This resistance in the face of strangeness is one reason for the popularity of celebrity. Celebrity seems to work by convincing us that we are just like lots of other people and that they are just like us. Celebrity reassures us that we are not alone or isolated. We imitate the clothes and opinions of the famous to solemnise our connection with them.

Celebrity is a false promise for the observer and it can be catastrophic for the celebrated.

The observer must cling to the illusion that there is a village-like connection where none can possibly exist. To the commercial beneficiaries of celebrity, the observers' hopes are not important. They are only important as consumers of movies, clothes and music.

For most of us, the illusion that we may yet enjoy some sort of relationship with our confected heroes dies with fading youth and our interest in the famous may settle down to a harmless past time. If it doesn't, it may morph into the sort of insanity that drove Mark Chapman to murder John Lennon. In fact, the famous are often stalked by deranged fans clinging to the illusion of some 'relationship' too literally.

Many of the famous do not cope well. They rage and lash out like animals caged in a bizarre zoo. Think of Britney Spears. Or the sadness of Heath Ledger, rich and lonely in Manhattan. Or the public disintegration of Australian football stars like Ben Cousins, Andrew Johns and Wayne Carey.

The famous can never take a step outside their gilded prisons. They are under scrutiny. A simple walk to the park or a local shop is out of the question. Any indiscretion or personal misfortune is liable to be intensified through front page coverage. The shekel-seeking photographers are ever present, eager for the 'money shot' that conveys some drama like Britney freaking out yet again.

In this celebrity culture being anonymous, or unknown, conveys the sense of missing out on something important that our civilisation has to offer.

But for those of us who can do so, walking through cities observing the beauty and drama all around us is an intellectually and spiritually enriching pleasure that has only recently been available to humanity.

In 19th century Paris, the great poet, Charles Baudelaire helped to popularise, in certain circles, the idea of the flaneur. The flaneur, from the French word meaning 'to stroll', was traditionally a rich gentleman who displayed his wealth through idle walks in Parisian cafes.

As 'flaneur' became a literary concept it came to mean someone who engages emotionally and intellectually with the unknown crowd around them; the literary flaneur observes the people he encounters with interest and empathy, not with fear and resistance.

Many of these literary flaneurs were, and are, novelists. Dickens was a frequent and extensive walker and his novels are filled with his evocative observations of people and places like the Cheapside market visited by Pip in Great Expectations: "all asmear with filth and fat and blood... the great black dome of St Paul's bulging at me."

Perhaps the greatest, and most famous, of flaneurs in modern literature is James Joyce's Leopold Bloom. Bloom is perfect because he is a citizen of Dublin but, being jewish, also an outsider. He is known by many of those he meets but as a lower middle class seller of newspaper advertisements he is essentially inconsequential. He is free.

Joyce gives us Dublin through Bloom. His most important character is interested in every aspect of the city's life as it unfolds around him. He is empathetic with the people around him; he seeks to understand, he wonders how it feels to be other people, to live other lives. He wonders about the connections between his observations and everything he already knows.

Bloom, or any flaneur, is only possible because our major cities allow most of us to move about freely subject to only to a minimum of scrutiny and interest from those around us.

Our cities today are, in many ways, far more diverse, complex and interesting than the Dublin of 1904 or even Victorian London. Yet, most people rush through the crowds getting between point A and point B almost oblivious to the wonders of the world around them and unable to shed their feelings of strangeness.

The sights, smells and sounds on any day, in any major city are fantastic and far surpass anything that could be encountered through a screen. You don't need to be a Baudelaire, Dickens or Joyce to revel in it. You just need to engage - to observe and think for yourself.

Sadly, many people believe the famous, and the lives of the famous, must be so much more interesting than themselves and their own lives. That's, perhaps, the most horrible by-product of our celebrity age. It's an illusion sustained by our failure to engage fully with the life going on all around us in these incredible cities.

 

The Fairfax moment or choice killed the hometown rag

It's funny when it finally happens.

All these years experts have been warning about the demise of the newspaper.  

Many bloggers, including me, have been pointing out (gleefully, often with malice) that the emperor was rapidly losing her clothes.

Still, it has a sense of unreality about it. 

Like it would have felt (would feel) if capitalism really did collapse.

Or will feel if the polar bears really do die out.

Somehow there is not much joy in finally being proven right.

When I was a paper boy (sometime back in the late 60s, early 70s), Sydney had two afternoon newspapers each producing several editions. The most important edition on Saturdays was the one that had the details of the 'last race'.

People waited for those newspapers, and those editions, their daily lives were marked by them.

I had a little book of the regulars, people who got the same paper everyday - and you were deeply unpopular if you were late or 'forgot'.

The Daily Mirror was full of page 3 bikini girls and tales about the markers of degradation and civilisation-destroying events like the release of Easy Rider (it sounded very interesting to this teenager).  The Sun, the fairfax rival, was more sombre and serious. As a paper boy you got to know that some people were Mirror readers and some were Sun readers, and a few good customers even bought both.

And so like many of us in the older demographic, I loved newspapers. In Canberra, we got most of them every morning (AFR, Tele, SMH, Age, Australian, CT). We were well-informed and across things.

But then the Internet - and the excitement of reading the NY Times and London Times and Washington Post online as they hit the streets in their home cities. I first got online in 1996, you could see the power and potential of the Internet from the first 'web-surfing' session.

Now there is so much to read that it is pointless to get (nearly) everything - there's not enough time.  The ambition to be across everything happening has been made absurd.

I now read free stuff from around the english speaking world.

I subscribe to a couple of magazine online (Harpers, NY Review of Books, Le Monde monthly) and read them on my tablet. We still get the New Yorker the old way through the letter box, often it goes unopened because it is just easier and more fun to read the tablet version. 

Occasionally, I buy a single issue of a newspaper to read on my tablet, but when I do it's usually the International Herald Tribune. 

They give away the SMH at the gym, but I can't even be bothered picking it up anymore - just more stuff to go in the recycling bin.

I wouldn't go back to the old days - I'm not that nostalgic.

The choice today is just too wonderful.

But choice means I don't want 'editions' and 'subscriptions' much anymore - I just want articles.

I use aggregators and twitter pointers to find those articles, as well as a few favourite bloggers who provide a similiar service.

How does journalism survive in a disaggregated world saturated by consumer choice?

I don't think anyone knows, we're still in the early days of the Internet and the digital revolution.

There'll be a lot more creative destruction before this technology reaches maturity.

One thing I do remember from the days I read Alfred Sloan is that old companies have a poor track record making the jump to a new technology. Qantas didn't start life as a railway company.

I'm not sure that Fairfax will make a successful jump, and that's sad.

But as Karl Marx observed the great thing about capitalism is that it destroys the past and that's good because you can't get to the future by sticking with the past.

It's sad for the people on the sharp end of this Fairfax moment, but it's inevitable and that train has been coming down the tunnel for a long time now.

"Could" - the new media c-word

Have you noticed that under every scary headline about the future of the global economy, there is at least one key sentence that hinges on the word "could", as in "the future of the euro could be determined by the greek elections".  Of course, these statements are all strictly true, they are just spun to be alarmist and therefore catch the attention of the jaded media consumer.  It is also true that you could win the lottery on Thursday, it's just that the statement tells you very little.  An informative statement would give you some meaningful asessment of the likelihood of winning the lottery on Thursday.  It is, of couse, much more difficult (and let's face it less interesting) to make such judgements.  Much more exciting to just go with that magical word "could".  My advice is to discount any media story that relies on it.

Michael Lewis on success, luck and careers

 

Gatz

I saw this 8 hour performance twice when it was performed at the Opera House several years ago as part of the Sydney Writers Festival. Gatsby is an iconic book for me - it's one of the truly great ones - and I was nervous that it would lose something in a stage performance. It lost nothing. It was magnificent. We all have our interpretations of our favourite books, and I'm very particular. But I found the interpretation flawless from my point of view, especially the end which is so critical.  If you get a chance to see it - do yourself a favour. It was one of the most enjoyable and memorable theatre experiences of my life. It is probably a good idea to read the book, or re-read it, before seeing Gatz, but it is not necessary.

Bloomsday broadcasts

An iPad with the Tunein app allows us to sample bloomsday broadcasts from around the world:

BBC Radio 4 - kicking off at 9am and running until midnight: a new, five-and-a-half hour dramatisation of Ulysses, narrated by Stephen Rea and starring Henry Goodman, Niamh Cusack and Andrew Scott, will be punctuated by broadcasts by Mark Lawson in Dublin and discussions about the book's place in 20th-century literature.

WBAI (NYC) - Radio Bloomsday Radio Bloomsday will be broadcast live on WBAI 99.5FM on Saturday night June 16, 2012 from 7pm until 2am. You can listen anywhere on the world at www.wbai.org. Artists interpret James Joyce's Ulysses through spoken word and song.

Bloomsday on Broadway   

Other links Bloomsday events around the world and Frank Delaney's wonderful Ulysses podcasts.

If you know of any other broadcasts please leave a comment below.