Opinion
Payman saga shows Labor can’t have its caucus, and eat it too
Sean Kelly
ColumnistThe Bloomberg columnist Matt Levine has, for a number of years, run an argument about cryptocurrencies. Crypto, he says, was intended as a way of disrupting finance by creating a new type of financial system. In fact, what crypto ended up doing was recreating, bit by bit, the old financial system. Slowly, it became apparent that crypto users wanted pretty much all the conveniences that people who just use money have: the ability to keep cash safe, to lend to others, to know that you’re transferring cash to the right person.
That’s because money – or any money substitute – is ultimately there to serve a set of purposes. So when a “new” form of money comes along, it tends to gravitate back to a set of rules and institutions that allow it to meet those aims.
Illustration: Jim PavlidisCredit:
This is something I’ve had on my mind ever since the teals appeared. Get a group of individuals together with similar concerns. Put them in a situation where their interests coincide – and where acting together is more powerful than acting separately. They’re not a party – but how long until they start replicating the habits of parties? Like, say, meeting regularly, or dividing up issues between them to make their workloads more efficient? Reportedly, both of those happen already.
Which is not a criticism, or a roundabout way of accusing the teals of being a party in disguise. It’s just that, over time, you often see – in pretty much any area of society – similar patterns begin to form because, as with money, there are consistent needs that have to be met.
Which brings us to the Labor Party and the rule that MPs must vote as a unified group, in sharp focus over the past fortnight as Senator Fatima Payman crossed the floor then left the party.
I’ve explained before some of the history of Labor’s rules. A key question, early on, was how to make sure MPs stayed true to the workers they represented. One answer was that party policy was decided by a national conference of the party – as it still is. Once that policy was determined, with caucus discussing specific applications of that policy (i.e. laws), all MPs had to vote for it. Forcing everyone to vote the same way was, in part, about solidarity as a way of wielding power, but it was also about ensuring ordinary members, who were workers, retained power.
Senator Fatima Payman quit the Labor Party on Thursday.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
A century ago, as his biographer Terry Irving explains, this was laid out clearly by archaeologist and influential political thinker Vere Gordon Childe. And even back then, Childe argued the theory didn’t really work in practice. Caucus wasn’t really in control, because ministers manipulated it. And over time, the party, desperate to appeal to a broad set of voters in order to form majority government, crept away from its original purpose anyway.
This could be read as an argument against Labor’s rules, or it could be read as an argument for enforcing them more strictly. Probably the best way to understand Childe’s critique, though, is as a thoughtful articulation of the tensions that will always bedevil a significant political party. What relationship should MPs have with their constituents? Who should wield power within a party while it governs? How to strike the right balance between keeping power, staying true to beliefs, and representing the community?
There are no easy answers. This past week, many have argued that the Labor MPs who in the past were forced to vote against gay marriage – because that was the party’s position – prove that MPs should be able to vote with their conscience more often. Well, perhaps. But then consider the opposite argument, put by then senator John Faulkner at the 2011 national conference that adopted a conscience vote, that every MP should be compelled to vote for marriage equality. The practice of having conscience votes was applied inconsistently, and human rights could not be at the mercy of individual opinions. “A conscience vote on human rights is not conscionable”, he said. What might have happened in the oft-forgotten 2012 parliamentary vote on marriage if Labor, rather than permitting a conscience vote, had bound its members to vote Yes?
Which is not to say the Labor Party, defending its rules, has acquitted itself well this past week. The backgrounding against Payman has been ugly – attacking her dual citizenship was ill-judged. And accusations she had been planning this for a month are confused. As most of us know, it is possible to consider something for some time but not make a decision until the last moment. What is the implication here, anyway: that only an impulsive, naïve, ill-thought-through decision would be acceptable?
Then there are the arguments that Payman didn’t raise her issues in caucus (Payman says she raised them in other channels). This is a reasonable point. The difficulty with it, though, is the implication that caucus is frequently a place of free-flowing debate, where policy positions are arrived at after robust discussion. If caucus has had many such discussions over the past two years then Labor has kept it very quiet.
Labor’s rules are its own. In practice, though, the Coalition and the Greens act very similarly, with rigid discipline. Like crypto’s reinvention of the financial system, this gives it the feel of inevitability. But this is not the same as saying it is a good thing. Increasingly, our parties, creatures of our media-managed age, resemble large-scale PR machines for whatever their leadership decides.
This is a mark against Payman too. Caucus will only operate differently if those within caucus start behaving differently. Some argue Payman has given up her chance to change Labor’s stance on Palestine. It is of more lasting significance, though, that Payman has given up her chance to challenge the way Labor Party democracy currently works.
Finally: Israel’s ongoing attacks in Gaza are horrific. Payman’s critics have charged that her actions won’t change anything. They’re right. But that ignores the moral burden each of us carries: to speak clearly on matters of moral and practical urgency, and to make our voice heard in whatever way is open to us. You can argue, of course, that if you want to do so then a political party is probably not the right place for you. Which, of course, is the decision Payman has made.
Sean Kelly is an author, columnist and a former adviser to Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd.