Nicholas Reece July 8, 2013
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is looking for new direction in New South Wales. Photo: Andrew Meares
Kevin Rudd's intervention in the NSW branch of the Labor Party is a welcome step for Australia's oldest political party. But the reforms arising from the intervention fall well short of the changes that are needed to secure Labor's future as a modern, mass-member, progressive party.
Rudd is positioning himself as the solution to public concern about the party he leads. The politics are hard to fault - Labor is so on the nose in NSW that a clean break is needed to give voters moral permission to vote for the party again.
The reforms include: zero tolerance for corruption; a ban on property developers standing as political candidates; an independent judicial process for assessment of complaints; a requirement that 50 per cent of the NSW administrative committee is made up of rank-and-file members plus three independent directors; and a new charter of rights and responsibilities.
Some media reports labelled the reforms as window dressing. That is too harsh. The changes will mean NSW Labor will have the highest political governance standards of any political party in Australia.
But the reforms are also mostly defensive measures aimed at stopping the rot of corruption. What is needed next is another wave of reforms to reset the operation of the party machine, attract more members, and put the organisation on a more democratic foundation.
The good news is that this is something Rudd has signalled he intends to do. The Liberal Party, the Nationals and the Greens should all take note - because all Australian parties need a strong dose of reform.
Australia holds the wooden spoon for citizen engagement with political parties - we have the lowest level of party membership of any advanced Western democracy. Membership of the ALP has fallen to around 40,000. The Liberal Party is in a similar situation. The Greens and the Nationals have fewer members again. The major Australian political parties now have fewer members than many AFL clubs and struggle to staff voting booths properly on election day.
There are several initiatives that have been proven to help reverse this decline in Canada, Britain and Ireland - all Westminster parliamentary democracies like ours.
The first involves the direct election of the party leader by the rank-and-file members of the party. In Canada, Britain and Ireland, all the major parties now give rank-and-file members a say in choosing the leader. And their political parties have membership figures the Australian parties can only dream of.
Last year, Canada's New Democratic Party held a ballot of its members for the leadership. As part of the campaign, it signed up 45,000 new people and now has 130,000 members. The other major progressive party in Canada is the Liberal Party. It registered 130,000 members and supporters to participate in a leadership ballot in April this year. The Conservative Party has a similar model and has 100,000 members.
The democracies that use the direct-election model do not have the revolving door of party leadership that Australia has. Nor do they have a situation like ours where a nation of 23 million people can have a prime minister elected with just 57 votes from their party colleagues.
The second reform is the introduction of community-based primary pre-selections that allow party members and registered ''supporters'' to select the party's local candidate. Local primaries will attract new branch members and volunteers, preselect better candidates and transform the party's culture through community engagement.
The ALP in Victoria conducted Australia's first primary pre-selection in the state seat of Kilsyth in 2010, and NSW Labor and the NSW Nationals have also run trials. These primaries enjoyed enough success to warrant their further trials, including in a winnable seat. Critics suggest primaries will give rise to ''money, politics and corruption'', but this has not been evident in the trials.
A third reform is to allow the caucus to elect the members of the ministry. This gives extra power to MPs to offset the loss of their exclusive power to elect the leader. It also applies a new check on the additional power of the leader as a result of the stronger mandate derived from direct election by party members.
As a package these three reforms represent a grand bargain in which everybody gives something up but everybody gets something new in return - from the party supporter to the rank-and-file member, right up to the MPs and the leader.
It would provide a critical injection of democracy at the top, bottom and middle of Australia's political parties. And once one makes the move, the others will be compelled to follow.
Nicholas Reece is a public policy fellow at Melbourne University and a former Victorian secretary of the ALP.
