From pledge to purge
The continuing story of Senator Payman and the way in which solidarity can turn into intolerance
Labor’s own federal platform, assembled at a Sydney conference in 1900, was a modest affair that left parliamentarians a free hand on the fiscal issue, although the Melbourne Trades Hall Council demanded that Victorian Labor candidates ‘be pledged to a Protectionist Policy’.
The federal platform committed Labor to fight for one adult, one vote, the total exclusion of coloured and other undesirable races, and old-age pensions.
—Frank Bongiorno, Dreamers and Schemers: A Political History of Australia
In his semi-regular email newsletter, electoral commentator Andrew Catsaras offered a summary of the Senator Payman story that I think many would relate to:
Labor Senator Fatima Payman is uncomfortable with the policy position of the Australian Labor Party (ALP).
The ALP has strict rules about members voting.
The Senator, on this occasion, cannot abide by those rules.
The ALP cannot accept her position.
The Senator cannot accept the Party's position.
An irreconcilable difference.
The Senator resigns and sits as an Independent.
Interesting story.
Shouldn't warrant more than a thirty second component of a radio or TV news bulletin and two paragraphs in a newspaper.
Should it?
Catsaras answers his own question with a memeified “Not a chance in hell”, and so it has proved to be.
While Senator Payman’s actions may not, on the surface, be the most important issue in the world, they do speak to something that is at the heart of our current political situation: the shift within electorates away from the major parties, specifically, from the LNP and the Labor Party.
As one Labor insider said to me this morning when I asked him about what is happening, “this is what happens when a major party of the industrial era atrophies: it is inevitable that people at the edge will break off.”
To put it another way, the issue reaches well beyond the current conflict over what Senator Payman has or hasn’t done and spotlights a fundamental feature of electoral politics in this, our—almost—post-party era.1
Social media is full of Labor supporters and Labor and union operatives calling Senator Payman a rat, invoking the labour movement’s most potent insult, and, to put it mildly, the name-calling speaks to an attitude that is deeply out of touch. In saying that, I don’t want to underplay the importance of “the pledge” itself, and I understand that, as another Labor person put it to me yesterday, the pledge remains “the one golden rule” of Labor membership.
But in an era where the Party itself can barely muster a third of the primary vote—Labor received 32.6% at the 2022 Federal election—strict adherence to something like the pledge doesn’t make Labor look like a strong, democratic party of the masses; it makes them look like a cult.
In their exceedingly well put together book about the origins of Labor Party—A Little History of the Labor Party—Frank Bongiorno and Nick Dyrenfurth set out the introduction of the pledge, helping to explain its historical significance, if not its ongoing efficacy within the party:
After electors sent them into parliament, the Labor representatives often found themselves divided. These schisms owed much to Labor’s novel conception of party democracy. In theory, working-class voters would select parliamentary candidates, help frame policy and coordinate campaigns through their LELs2. Labor MPs were to be delegates implementing the party’s platform, which was to be determined collectively at an annual conference, rather than autonomous agents exercising independent judgment. Internal democracy was also deemed necessary in parliament. NSW Labor’s first ‘caucus’ meeting in 1891 (a term that had previously carried pejorative implications) resolved that MPs were required to sign a ‘pledge’ binding them to majority decisions and hence to voting as a solid bloc. This attempt to import the ethos of union solidarity into parliamentary politics was rapidly put to the test.
Dyrenfurth, Nick; Bongiorno, Frank. A Little History of the Australian Labor Party (p. 41). NewSouth. Kindle Edition.
They note that even back then, the idea of a “pledge” raised the sorts of concerns we are seeing arise again—inevitably, I would say—in regard to Senator Payman’s recent decision to cross the floor and vote for a Greens’ motion about recognition of Palestine, namely, that it forces people to vote against their conscience:
Unity of purpose was conspicuously short-lived. NSW Labor split over the question of free trade versus protection, which was then called ‘the fiscal issue’. Only James McGowen, a boilermaker, was prepared to put aside his fiscal creed for solidarity’s sake. Unions disaffiliated and members left the party in disgust. Aside from the fiscal divide, many Labor MPs argued that the extra-parliamentary wing needed to trust the politicians and not bind them with inflexible rules. One Labor MP, Joseph Cook, added that signing the pledge could compel a man to vote against his life-long beliefs. He soon resigned to join the Free Traders. NSW Labor contested the 1894 election with two groups of candidates: ‘Solidarities’, who accepted the pledge, and ‘Independent’ Laborites, who rejected it.
Dyrenfurth, Nick; Bongiorno, Frank. A Little History of the Australian Labor Party (p. 41). NewSouth. Kindle Edition.
The Labor vote at the 1894 election “collapsed”, but as Bongiorno and Dreyenfurth note, despite the fact that “just 15 ‘Solidarities’ were elected to a lower house of 141…the result was a more united party.” Eventually, “a coalition of ex-ASL urban politicians3 and bush unionists slowly took over the party, forcing discipline on the parliamentarians, expelling single-taxers and the more radical socialists in the process.”
And then, on 27 April 1904 the world’s first labour government, under the leadership of John Watson, was elected.
Their account is a reminder of the vibrancy and importance of the emergence of the Labor Party, of the significant role it has played in the development of the country, as well as the centrality of the pledge to party success: even as the history reminds us of the deeply racist and patriarchal roots of the labour movement more generally.4
The best account I have seen of the importance of the sort of solidarity the pledge tries to underpin came in a social media thread by Guardian columnist and playwright, Van Badham. She argued, convincingly, I think, that “As a student politician, I disliked the idea of a binding caucus, so I didn’t join one. Super easy!
“Also, my non-binding left caucus fell apart due to infighting, I myself was purged when I publicly supported a minority position, & people we elected to leadership position kept ratting & joining other factions after our votes & time & resources had put them in (paid) jobs.
“What did it teach me?
“It taught me that collectivist outcomes oblige collectivist processes. It taught me that if I believed in those collectivist outcomes but didn’t have media, comms, creative practice and board governance, where all the decision making is still binding but where I have more confidence in my capacity to make a constructive contribution to inevitable compromises.”
I am less convinced by Badham’s further suggestion that “Those raging against Labor for processes developed to ensure collectivist outcomes are revealing either a conspicuous ‘me at all costs’ individualism antithetical to the collectivist project or a staggering naïveté that behooves no adult.”
This overlooks the fact that many other collectivist organisations don’t require the strict adherence that the pledge demands and that, as John Quiggin noted in comments on my earlier post, that no other political party in the democratic world demands the same level of fealty to internal discipline as the ALP.
In other words, Labor’s pledge doesn’t define the standard for what counts as solidarity and crossing the floor on a single matter doesn’t come close to qualifying as “me at all costs individualism”. Within such parameters, it’s hardly surprising that many see the demands of the pledge as overweening, and in fact, the entire history of the party is riddled with conflicts it has caused.5
More importantly, the nature of the disagreement that sparked Senator Payman’s crossing of the floor in the first place, the ongoing slaughter in Gaza, is not only hugely significant, but likely sui generis. The idea that party members should not be granted some leeway when faced with such momentous events speaks not to solidarity but to intolerance.
Labor critics of Senator Payman are hinting—often through leaks to normally Labor-hostile media—that there is some grand conspiracy behind what she is doing, that all of this was “long planned”. Nothing I have read or heard convinces me of that, though I will acknowledge that the decision to cross the floor in the first place is perhaps more complicated than the Senator’s version of events allows, and Jenny Hockcing provides some important detail.
But we are getting away from the point here, namely, that what we are seeing with Payman’s departure from Labor, and the circumstances under which it has happened, speaks to the brittleness of the support that underpins most major parties these days, those that formed in another era and who are still clinging to norms that most of the electorate no longer hold in high regard. Even if an earlier decision to cross the floor had been taken—and I am not suggesting that’s what happened— and even if, as Jenny Hocking suggests, Senator Payman “clearly had not…been true to Labor policy”, the Senator's actions would still speak to a legitimate dissatisfaction with the ability of the party to properly manage the diversity it claims to represent.
As Kos Samaras from Redbridge notes, “Labor holds the most diverse seats in the country with the least diverse MPs,” and for years, “voices within Labor have raised concerns about the party's diversity issue, but these warnings were often brushed aside or overlooked. This challenge strikes deeper within Labor compared to the Liberals, given that Labor represents the majority of diverse electorates in the country.”
I, for one, would not welcome, as has been suggested might be an upshot of all of this, the emergence of another overtly religiously based party or faction, any more than I was happy about the existence of australianchristians.org.au or Fred Nile’s Christian Democratic Party, or Family First, or even, for heaven’s sake, the DLP. But if it comes to that, we need to recognise the part Labor’s failure to harmonise the views of a single Senator on one of the defining political matters of our generation would have played in driving that outcome.
Whatever premium the party places on the pledge, the fact remains, and the Payman case underlines, that it sets up an impossible conflict of interest within a party that claims, not just a labour heritage, but a current and future desire to represent the progressive values of a diverse nation of the twenty-first century. Leaking to right-wing media against a young Muslim senator, and worse, letting it be known that the party might try to exclude her from the Senate altogether on the basis of her Afghan heritage, is the sort ham-fisted, racist-adjacent behaviour that is empowered by an outdated code of conduct like the pledge.
Structures that can’t bend risk snapping off at the knees, and unless Labor finds a way to accomodate the diversity they openly seek in recruiting young members like Senator Payman, the party may well keel over in the electorates of the outer suburbs, as early as the next election.
I guess I should clarify “post-party”. Not the end of parties; just the end of their dominance.
Labor Electoral Leagues, which are now called “local branches”.
Australian Socialist League.
Labor’s commitment to internal solidarity is also no doubt affected by its experience with “the split” and the emergence of the Democratic Labor Party after the 1955 Hobart party conference, but getting into all that is beyond the scope of this discussion. Again, the Bongiorno/Dreyenfurth book is worth a look.
For example, as Jenny Hocking notes: “Gough Whitlam understood better than most the travails of changing Labor policy in a party in which caucus solidarity, with decisions of the Labor caucus binding on all parliamentary members, is paramount. There was no shortage of times in which he chafed against the strictures of party discipline, famously coming close to expulsion himself for perceived ‘disloyalty’ to the ’12 witless men’ as he termed the party Executive, yet he never crossed the floor to vote against his own party and nor did any member of his government.”
As you imply, the internal culture of the Labor party hasn't really changed since the 1950s. The Split reflected that culture and helped to perpetuate it. It was still the dividing line in the 1980s, when Albanese, Plibersek, Shorten and others went through the process of political formation. And we see it today in the use of words like "rat" and "renegade" to describe what would, in any other party, be a fairly ordinary policy disagreement.
The public discussion has tended to polarise unhelpfully between a circling of the wagons in defence of Labor's existing system of collective party/caucus discipline, phrased in language that appeals to the Labor faithful but to few others, and a thoughtless dismissal of any form of collective party solidarity. Nobody has yet found a way to make representative democracy work without political parties (or their equivalents) playing some role, and a political party has to adhere to some system of collective solidarity and discipline in order to function as a party. Every party practices collective discipline: the Liberals are far less liberal than they make out in relation to how they have treated their own maverick MPs over the past few decades, and it is not that long since Lee Rhiannon was suspended from the Greens party room because of her stance on an issue of education funding.
There is certainly a discussion to be had about whether Labor's particular regime of collective discipline is unduly rigid and no longer sustainable in its present form in contemporary Australian society and politics, and that discussion would include what kind of obligations a party can impose on its members and representatives in relation to a situation like that in Israel/Palestine, where widely differing views exist not only among its members but within its support base.