Incremental 47 Year Disintegration of the ALP

by Tony Hayward-Ryan

The surprise defeat of the ALP in the recent Federal Election has been widely misinterpreted; this being blamed on election campaign strategies and tactics.

Whilst these factors no doubt played some part, such a convenient interpretation ignores more relevant long-term evidence and history.

The first step in post-election analysis must be to differentiate between ALP membership and electoral popularity. The two are only tenuously linked.

As Donald Horne pointed out in his 1964 book The Lucky Country (a savage but intensely insightful exercise in sarcasm and irony), Australian political parties do not win elections. Winning is incidental to the losing party being voted out as punishment for breaking faith with the electorate.

Although politicians love to embrace winning an election as empirical proof of electoral love, Donald Horne was absolutely correct in his analysis (to paraphrase)… while the party faithful may be tearfully jubilant at their local hero’s victory, the electorate en masse is casting a jaundiced eye on the losing politicians and muttering “Take that, you treacherous bastards”.

However, astute as he was, Donald Horne neglected to address electoral defeat when in opposition; a phenomenon which has deeper albeit hidden implications.

Party membership

An entirely separate dynamic of current party support is party membership. In 1972, it was estimated that the ALP had a membership of 340,000. Today it is rumoured to be around 30,000. Some Queensland sub-branch members suggest it is lower and admit that they do not have enough financial members to garner a legal quorum to elect candidates.

The incremental erosion of ALP national membership is what surviving party members need to focus on right now, because this reveals a vast malaise which, if not addressed vigorously, spells party death.

Why did the ALP lose so many members?

Before we examine the specific causes of membership erosion, we need to remind ourselves why Australia of 1950 to 1973 was a globally famous egalitarian democracy, in which the difference between rich and poor was $40,000 compared to $80,000 per annum (the latter being a Supreme Court Judge).

That the rich were only twice as wealthy as the poor (easily evident in the also famous Australian bell-curve demography), made our nation unique.

As a participating member of that post-war society, the circumstances and causes were highly visible:

Trade unions ensured that the national pie was shared equitably, with set-sum general wage increases which ensured egalitarianism.

Moreover, the unions won reasonable working hours and conditions, sick leave, and paid annual leave. By 1965, every Australian worker had access to full time work, a family home, a car, and annual holidays away from home; regardless of whether or not they actually availed themselves of these fruits of labour. Some chose seasonal work instead, but also had homes and gardens which ensured a pleasant year-round lifestyle according to taste. Their off-season periods made up the bulk of official unemployment statistics which, in the real world sense, were non-existent.

Whitlam’s drive to expand the university population through free tuition (rather than ensure primary and secondary education was free) resulted in a vast sector of graduates who were destined never to leave school and discover the real world; and who later engaged in historical revisionism which supported United Nations-led internationalism, globalisation, free trade, deregulation, economic rationalism, and a sustained attack against Family, parenthood, and the intergenerational transfer of values.

Born-again economic ideology

This demographic alienation commenced when, in 1973, Gough Whitlam was willingly guided by globalist investment banker protégé, Fred Gruen, to reduce protective tariffs by 25%, preparatory to eliminating tariffs altogether. In this Gruen was supported by Nugget Coombs, another Rothschild protégé. (Coombs was in fact the Bank for International Settlements (the entirely Rothschild-owned BIS of Basle Switzerland) agent whose role it was to establish a RBA under total Rothschild control. Another of his functions was to subvert the intended consensus modelled Northern Land Council into a more easily controlled hierarchical power pyramid).

With 80% of Australian jobs cascading from manufacturing and agriculture (as then gauged by the ATO), it was very predictable that tariff reduction (and eventual removal) would create massive unemployment when cheap foreign products flooded the market and local enterprises collapsed.

Thus, Australia’s working class intelligentsia, coupled with economists who rejected Milton Friedman’s worker capitalism revisionism, realised that the ALP was drifting dangerously away from its worker roots. It was becoming manifestly globalist.

Others noted that Gough Whitlam and Rhodes Scholar Bob Hawke were both graduates of the London School of Economics and were influenced by Fabian Socialism, the Tavistock Institute, and Internationalism in general, which was seen by many as anti-patriotic and anti-nationalist. They were supported in this by fellow Rhodes Scholar, Kim Beazley.

When Whitlam signed the Lima Agreement some 15% of ALP membership bitterly jumped ship over the following financial year. As he progressively signed some 130 international treaties, Whitlam’s patriotic motives were increasingly seen by geopolitically-aware workers as suspect. As unionists, they also noted doors closing against them for union secretary positions, their academic protagonists receiving much more favourable press.

How the academic takeover occurred

Few of these disillusioned critics realised that the ALP was, to some extent, a casualty of the Vietnam War. Contrary to popular belief, the anti-Vietnam War movement was led by worker activists in America and in both Australia and NZ, and that university students were involved in the protest movement only because it was extremely fashionable on campus to do so. Those who did not grow their hair and attend rallies found themselves celibate. Thus they abandoned their Liberal roots and embraced the left; which then nurtured new career ambitions.

When these students finally graduated, instead of emerging in their natural environment of professional class and Liberal Party membership, they sought jobs with the ALP and union movement and quickly replaced workers in the leadership of both organisations. By 1976, it seemed that most union secretaries had been squeezed aside by university graduates. Concomitantly, ALP branches became dominated by professionals, who also captured election candidacy. Many had never actually functioned as workers and most were teachers and lawyers; both entirely divorced from industrial reality.

Being essentially elitist, the graduate invasion force formed mutually-supporting albeit informal networks and by 1980, was dominating the ALP hierarchy. ALP prime ministers began overriding sub-branch election of candidates.

Meanwhile, Bob Hawke, as President of the ACTU, rejected fixed sum wage increases and introduced percentage increases, which saw highly paid unionists enjoy massive pay rises while retail workers and cleaners received paltry increases; a trend which was exponentially cumulative. Consequently, many Australians began to realise that the union movement and its political wing, the ALP, were the primary genesis of the rapidly expanding gap between Australian rich and poor. With the ALP (under Hawke) now seen as actively complicit in the destruction of Australia’s famous egalitarianism, yet another increment of memberships lapsed.

This trend was noticed by journalist John Pilger, who also uncovered Hawke’s deep relationship with the CIA, MI6, and now-American Rupert Murdoch.

Meanwhile, from 1979, both the ALP and LNP seamlessly promoted the UN-generated Policy of Multiculturalism as a spontaneous Australian movement (which it manifestly was not).

The ALP, under Hawke and Keating, continuing Whitlam’s work, launched a vigorous programme of tariff removals, economic rationalism, deregulation, and privatisation which, when Labor was replaced by John Howard’s LNP coalition, continued seamlessly.

This was when many Australians became convinced that any difference between ALP and the LNP coalition was purely verbal and, therefore, illusionary.

By the year 2000, assisted by internet bloggers and independent news publishers, an increasing percentage of ALP members identified what they now considered to be a Political Duopoly serving globalist ambitions. Unsurprisingly, the decline in ALP membership hastened apace.

Disillusioned public servants commenced whistle-blowing what they saw as betrayals of public service neutrality and loyalty to the Australian nation, and this included the joint party duopoly massive fudging of unemployment statistics. To former ALP stalwarts of my genre, this was the ultimate betrayal.

Also smelling a rat, top Australian editor Max Walsh launched a Newsweek-Bulletin national survey which identified 23% 1999 unemployment (applying a definition of employment internationally current since 1897). Yet the ALP freely quoted John Howard’s unemployment figures of 3%-6% while the Australian Independent’s Alliance’s (AIA) 2001 door-to-door sample survey of a pre-measured Australian demographic corridor revealed the real figure… 13%.

In 2007, John Howard proclaimed “an era of unprecedented prosperity” citing unemployment down to 3.4%. The ALP’s Kevin Rudd accepted this figure even though the AIA was recording 19%. In 2010 the AIA measured 23% unemployment and gauged homelessness at close to 3 million. The ALP and LNP quoted figures which hovered at 6% unemployed and homelessness at 300,000.

That same year, 54% of Australians guessed true unemployment to be between 15% and 30% (AIA survey). It should be noted that all AIA survey results (2001, 2004, 2007, 222010) were shared with the ALP, LNP, Greens, One Nation, and federal independents. None can claim innocence of statistical fraud.

With no empirical membership data available, it can nevertheless be safely assumed that abandonment of the ALP in financial membership terms was by now almost complete.

As more and more Australians became aware that the national unemployment figure was created by Centrelink, not by the Bureau of Statistics; and that employment was defined as “having one hour of study, training or work per week”, and that this obscene distortion and betrayal of Australia’s workers was embraced by the ALP, disillusionment morphed into sullen resentment and eventual fury.

This is where we are at today.

The original ALP membership has fled or died. The internet ensures that a new working class generation sees all politicians as corrupt and self-seeking.

Ironically, the surviving target of prospective ALP membership is now university graduates, few of whom will ever be workers in the sense of the ALP being the political wing of the worker’s unions.

The ALP is clearly dying and only its role as a partner of the 2-party system duopoly keeps it breathing. Rusted-on true believers may never bring themselves to acknowledge this.

Other issues also contributed to the rejection of the ALP but these are self-explanatory:

• The ALP’s ongoing refusal to protect consumers from toxic food additives and pharmaceutical products and remedies;
• Support for what is increasingly seen as apartheid Israel’s genocide of Palestinians and theft of their land;
• ALP (Hawke/Keating) support for relaxed media-ownership rules, purely to solicit Murdoch/Packer favouritism during election campaigns; which famously backfired when Howard did the same;
• Acceptance by ALP politicians of $10,000 election win gifts from Israel (seen as geopolitical bribery);
• ALP (Hawke) support for the fraudulent BBTBEC (Bovine Brucellosis and TB Eradication Campaign) which wiped out the NT’s prospective buffalo domestication programme, which had the capacity to establish economic independence for all Top End Aboriginal communities, and which precipitated the infamous and unnecessary live cattle export industry;
• Marriage being represented as an adult legal rights issue rather than the child’s right to a mother and father, a relationship which predated religion and politics by half a million years;
• Open slather entry policies for refugees and immigrants who manifestly have no intention of accommodating Australian language and culture;
• ALP support for Aboriginal media celebrities imposing unwanted policies on the traditional Indigenous people of north Australia, financing of which has been traced to Rio Tinto, BHP, and the Liberal Party of Australia (ie Treaty, Constitutional Recognition).
• Imposition of fracking on Territorians despite 90% electoral opposition.
• Post GFC, distribution of payments to Australians which Rudd cynically understood would be expended as mortgage top-ups and credit card debt; thereby gifting the four big banks from taxpayer funds at a time when the banks were so broke they could not lend to each other (diametrically the opposite of what Rudd repeatedly claimed).
• Union member-disenfranchisement through Hawke’s union merging;
• ALP support for the US invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan;
• ALP support for the current Venezuelan energy reticulation espionage, fund-freezing, oil export embargoes, and political interference;
• Support for America’s current invasion agenda: Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, Syria, Lebanon, Bolivia, and Nicaragua; and recently of Libya;
• Support for installation of US military sites in the NT, in addition to those that are already nuclear targets should China be provoked by the US into war (as recommended by the 2015 Rand Report);
• Support for Australian military provocations in the South China Sea;
• Supporting the fiction that the visits by three Chinese war ships was expected;
• ALP refusal to support Malcolm Fraser’s dire warnings of entanglement in WWIII if Australia continued its profoundly foolish military alliance with the US.

This list could become a litany, but surely you get the point.

An alternative road ahead

The ALP, ostensibly the workers party and, historically, the political wing of the union movement, should be ensuring the electorate is well-informed, thence with a capacity to formulate policies which an ALP Government can implement… a notion well understood by Thucydides, the Irish Monks, Thomas Paine, Abraham Lincoln, and Lord Johannes Acton… as Democracy.  Government of the people, by the people and for the people.

If these men, the most astute political minds in western history, could easily appreciate that the only power that is ultimately sustainable is People Power; and that The People are the source of all power… then who are these piddling ALP faction powerbrokers to deny Australians genuine democracy and egalitarian prosperity?

The choice should be clear. The ALP must place political power back into the electorate through democratic sub-branches and door-to-door surveys of full demographic corridors, or…

Face continued membership attrition and, eventually, be swept into obscurity by coalitions of small parties and independents.

And, this is not negotiable, abandonment of right wing elitist free trade ideology. This is nurtured in the ALP by the professional, academic and executive classes, not by the workers. Thus, the ALP must cleanse itself of this academic membership which, delusional as it is, discreetly describes itself as The Governing Class, in a pretentious rebranding of its predecessor, The Ruling Class.

Had the ALP leadership not been so blind to the true nature of democracy it would have realised that the current conflict between central Queensland and the southern states would be eventually reconcilable; with these regions democratically determining their own futures, with tolerance over the differences in outlook.

If Queenslanders want coal mining that is their democratic right, even though their belief in Adani jobs may prove to be hollow. Meanwhile, southern states need also to temper climate change genesis beliefs with less polarised conclusions, recognising legitimate scientific data which also points to massive deforestation in south Asia and South America.

Invariably, political problems, like any other problems, are resolved in the wake of thorough research.

Currently, the ALP is divided by BELIEFS, and beliefs may be defined as the adoption of a position or attitude despite the evidence. This comes perilously close to a definition of insanity.

What I am suggesting here is that the ALP pours its energy into research, the outcome of which should then be formulated by a genuine democratic process of electoral consensus formation.

Do this and the LNP, Greens, ON, and independents will waste away into extinction. Why? Because they survive only by occupying the vacuum left by the ALP’s incremental demise.

—Tony Hayward-Ryan (often authoring as Tony Ryan). tonyryan43@gmail.com

Author’s profile: As a Darwin rail yard crane operator, Tony was a prominent unionist (North Australia Worker’s Union) and ALP member and an inaugural member of NT Young Labor. His successful 1973 strike on the North Australia Railways doubled incomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander workers (from an average of $35 PW to $70 PW).

He departed in disgust from the ALP in 1976 when the then party president, later Senator Ted Robertson, in response to Tony’s query as to why we did not field candidates in Aboriginal-dominated electorates, declared that “an Aboriginal would never vote ALP”. (The following President, Jon Isaacs, heeded Tony’s advice and led the historic six seat landslide; the ALP’s first NT wins of that era).

As a welfare officer, he generated the departmental abandonment of unjustified Aboriginal family interventions, precipitated the auto-regulation of Bamyili (now Burunga), and converted the term Aboriginal fringe camps to Aboriginal Town Camps, in recognition that these were invariably on Aboriginal land and that it was mainstream Australians who were in fact occupying the fringe zones.

Tony has had successful careers in agriculture, plant operation, the public service, landscaping, tourism (Far North Safari), real estate, publishing, and research. Tony campaigned for decades to convince governments that failure to accommodate Aboriginal languages in liaison and consultation is the primary reason for uniform failures in Aboriginal health, education, employment, and economic development. He also urges government to abandon pressures for Aborigines to adopt hierarchical decision-making and instead accommodate traditional indigenous consensus protocols. He is currently assisting in the redevelopment of Muthamul Homeland, rendered inaccessible by Cyclone Lam and forcing Senior Australian of the Year nominee Buthimang Dhurrkay into exile. That an NT ALP Government actively prevents this reconciliation is an ongoing source of disappointment.

He has re-joined the ALP in the hope that the recent federal failure might precipitate an ALP return to roots and once again become a worker’s party. He accepts that he is a hopeless optimist.