Kevin Rudd tells Labor to rise above union factions to win government
Kevin Rudd has warned federal Labor it has to rise above union-based factions if it wants to win government from opposition.
In a veiled swipe at former union leader and leader Bill Shorten, the former prime minister says the ALP can’t rely on winning the next election by default. “With declining union membership, and the radically changing nature of work, there is less and less prospect of the party winning without embracing an ever-broadening political constituency,’’ he says. “We cannot simply conclude that the party will win the next election by default.
“The community embraces Labor leaders when they rise above the narrow demands of the union-based factions. Australians are not dumb.”
Mr Rudd is the second former Labor prime minister in the past month to issue a damning assessment of Labor under Mr Shorten.
Paul Keating told The Australian three weeks ago that Labor was veering too far from the political centre and will struggle to return to power. Mr Keating said Labor was under too much sway from factional bosses and party officials who have “an unerring sense of what they believe is right” and “lord it over the parliamentary party”
Mr Keating said Labor lacked the broad, diverse membership it once had and its parliamentary ranks needed to be refreshed with new talent.
Former prime minister Paul Keating. Picture: Stuart McEvoy
Mr Rudd, on the 10-year anniversary of becoming Labor leader, admits taking on the factions within the ALP wasn’t for the faint-hearted. “I know from experience,” he writes in an opinion piece published by Fairfax Media today.
Mr Rudd defends his decision to change the way Labor leaders were elected, through a 50-50 ballot of the entire party membership, as well as the parliamentary party.
It was this rule change — that Mr Shorten’s principal backer Stephen Conroy railed against — that actually protected the opposition leader when there was threat of a parliamentary uprising against him once Malcolm Turnbull replaced Tony Abbott, he writes.
He calls on Labor to continue democratising the party and re-engage with the public on a new policy agenda.
“Those who rail against the arguments I advance in this article will allege I am anti-union,” he says. “This argument is as cheap as it is untrue.”
Mr Rudd says he is, instead, anti-faction. “I was the leader who campaigned successfully in 2007 for the defeat of John Howard, the repeal of his Orwellian ‘Work Choices’ Act, and the introduction of the Fair Work Act.”
He says current factional powerbrokers now “want to either freeze party reform in its tracks or roll back the new leadership rule if they can get away with it. But if the party is to survive and prosper as the authentic voice of progressive politics in Australia, I believe it must do two things.
“First, the program of democratising the party should continue, including submitting the election of the party’s national conference, national executive and national secretary as well as Senate preselections to a ballot of the entire party membership. This would further reduce union-based factional power and re-engage ordinary people in a broadbased, mass political party.
“Second, the party should use this democratising process to dramatically re-engage the Australian people on a new policy agenda, deploying a fully responsive political leadership, responding to the substantive concerns of those alienated from the political process. This is the only way to prevent the continued bleeding of the party’s vote by the Hansonites, the Greens and other populist parties, as we have seen in the general collapse of the centre-left across the world, as well as the corrosion of the broad political centre as a whole and the steady migration of voters to the extremes.’’
Asked on Sky News this morning to comment on Mr Rudd’s comments, Labor frontbencher Jason Clare said the party had already undertaken significant reform under Mr Shorten.
It was more important to focus on getting the right policies for Australians than internal reform, he said. “We’ve learned the lessons of the past, we’ve put in place rules that make sure we don’t have a repeat of what’s happened,” he said. “That doesn’t mean there’s not more reform that needs to be done.”
Mr Keating told
The Australian’s Troy Bramston that Labor has not kept faith with his legacy and wars playing to its dwindling base rather than making a compelling pitch for the winners of the new economy that the Hawke-Keating government created. He worries that the party lacks faith in the market to improve economic and social outcomes as it did a generation ago.
“The Labor Party today has not taken ownership and leadership of its own creation: that is the huge and wealthy middle-class economy which Labor exclusively created,” Mr Keating said.
“Labor has now, and has had, the core Labor program, and it’s now got the core Labor vote, which is about 35 per cent. Labor is now being attacked by the Greens in the capital cities, where votes are being sheared off. And it is being attacked by people like Pauline Hanson, who are pulling away blue-collar workers. But it is not getting concomitant support from the centre, which is locked up under the Coalition’s 42 per cent of the primary vote — and that is because it has lost the ability to speak aspirationally to people and to fashion policies to meet those aspirations.”
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/nat...t/news-story/b0d75842ad9cf5e95c92ca06cf68c2e4
