View from The Hill: ‘identity politics’ has challenged the Labor Party to define its identity

Saturday’s Queensland result provides the latest evidence of the dual tugs on the modern Labor Party, coming from its different constituencies.

The smallest swing against the Miles government was in inner Brisbane; the swing became bigger in the outer suburbs, and larger again in the regions. The broad state figures were: south-east Queensland 6.3%; rural/regional Queensland 9.2%. The awings in the city were: inner Brisbane 5.0%; outer Brisbane 7.7%.

This sort of divide reflects a challenge, first recognised decades ago, that’s highlighted by former Labor senator and minister Kim Carr, in his just-published A Long March. In a scathing critique of Labor’s problems, Carr calls this a “cultural crisis.”

“The Labor ship has struck the rock of identity politics,” Carr writes, “with too many of its spokespeople adopting a censorious tone to those who fail to embrace their particular social policy agendas”.

From the left, old school and former factional heavyweight, Carr argues Labor has sought to build a new constituency without paying sufficient attention to its traditional support base.

Over decades, the once-working class party has taken up causes that appeal to the wealthier, better-educated middle- class voters, and these people have moved their support to it. The cost has been an erosion of outer suburban votes, the people now being aggressively targeted by opposition leader Peter Dutton.

Meanwhile, in inner urban areas Labor has come under increasing pressure from the Greens. The danger for the ALP, Carr believes, is by trying to compete with the Greens on identity politics it will inevitably be outmanoeuvred.

“The profound challenge for the Labor Party in the 2020s is to find a way to bind together its more affluent and educated support base in the inner and middle suburbs of the big cities with its less well-off and less formally educated supporters in the outer suburbs and regional cities,” Carr says.

Political historian Paul Strangio, however, warns that while obviously Labor has to straddle constituencies, “there is no returning to an imagined ‘heartland’. The outer suburbs Carr seems to want Labor to focus upon are themselves radically changing. They are not a repository of old-fashioned working class values and priorities, and nor on their own are they sufficient to provide a basis for the party to hold government.”

Carr says the issue is how to build Labor’s primary vote in its heartland communities.

On what we’ve seen in recent politics, this appears a formidable, if not insurmountable, hope for any time soon.

Voters don’t trust parties, let alone join them. The popularity of “community candidates” has seen a record-sized crossbench in the House of Representatives, with an expanded Greens presence and disillusionment with the Liberals making a strong contribution to the number in 2022. Next year’s election will test whether this trend is entrenched.

Carr points out that Labor has a party membership that’s wealthier and older than the general community. Its membership is “thin” in the outer suburbs and the regions compared with the inner areas.

Among the consequences is that the messages coming up through the party may not gell with the preoccupations of the broader community, he says.

Over the years the ALP rank and file has not just shrunk numerically but been deprived of most of the not-inconsiderable power it once had within the party.

In terms of clout, Labor’s national conference, which sets the platform, is a diminished beast, though massively swollen numerically. The party membership’s power over preselections has been greatly reduced, thanks to factional deal-making and frequent intervention by the party’s national executive. In just one significant way has the rank and file gained power: it now has a 50% voice in electing the party’s leader, so far exercised once, in 2013, when Bill Shorten and Anthony Albanese faced off.

Given the shrinkage and balkanisation of the party, there is currently not the interest in internal party reform that erupted periodically and often heatedly in earlier years.

Labor veteran Race Mathews’ career, documented by his wife Iola in Race Mathews: A Life in Politics, has an extraordinarily broad political CV: a staffer for federal and state leaders, MP for the federal seat of Casey (elected on the 1972 Whitlam wave and defeated in the 1975 post-dismissal rout), and a Victorian state minister. An enduring preoccupation for Mathews, who was part of an influx of young, well-educated middle-class activists attracted to Labor in the 1960s and early 1970s, was fighting to make the Labor Party fit for purpose and more internally democratic.

Serving on Gough Whitlam’s staff in the late 1960s, Mathews was in the thick of the then-opposition leader’s tumultuous battle with the troglodytes of the Victorian party, who preferred political impotence to the power of government. Whitlam knew that unless the ALP organisation was reformed, Labor’s road to office would be obstructed.

Way back when, the party’s organisation, in which the left flexed a lot of muscle, liked to signal that the MPs were under its thumb. In 1963, then-opposition leader Arthur Calwell and Whitlam, his deputy, were embarrassed when photographed outside a Canberra hotel waiting for the party’s special national conference (to which they were not delegates) to decide Labor’s attitude to the North West Cape joint facility. The ultimate decision was not the problem – the line it was made by “36 faceless men” was.

Mathews later highlighted the significance of the 1970 federal intervention in Victoria, saying it had led to important reforms in that state and elsewhere. “Good people were brought into parliament and membership was a rewarding experience.” But then factionalism “ossified” the party and “if you weren’t part of the factions, you were marginalised”.

In his 70s Mathews (who is now aged 89 and suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease) was still fighting for democratisation of Labor’s organisation, which he described as “archaic and decrepit”. While party leaders and others were supportive in principle, the quest for a new wave of change ultimately brought only limited outcomes.

Iola Mathews quotes her husband’s Facebook answer to those who wondered why he, at 80, he was still in these trenches.

He wrote: “The fact is that nobody ever changed the party other than from inside it, or ever will. And shaping it closer to our heart’s desire is the only game in town.”

The truth is, however, it’s a game those who run the Labor Party these days have no serious interest in pursuing. As Strangio observes, “the age of the mass party has passed”.

Michelle Grattan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.