On ALP factionalism see Senator Faulkner's speech:
http://www.crikey.com.au/articles/2005/10/26-1716-6965.html.
[no longer available. But see
http://australianpolitics.com/news/2005/10/05-10-22_faulkner.shtml
: "Undemocratic practices are often blamed on factions and
factionalism. There is nothing inherently wrong or undemocratic
about like-minded people voting together to maximise their chances
of success. It is, after all, the principle of Party politics.
When such groupings are based not on shared beliefs but on shared
venality, factionalism goes bad. When factional interests are put
ahead of the Party’s interests, the Party rots. As Party
membership declines, the influence of factional warriors
increases. They maximise their influence by excluding those who
disagree, not through leadership and persuasion. Those who defer
to the powerbrokers are rewarded with positions in the Party and
with employment. This is not factionalism [yes it is!]. It is
feudalism, and it is killing the ALP."]
See also R. Cavalier, "Could Chifley win Labor preselection today?"
Peter Onselen, "Fellowship of the Ring of New Mates".
On the "iron law of oligarchy" see Roberto Michels
Two ministers in the ACT government voted against the government's school closure policy at the 2006 conference, even though (they said afterwards) they agreed with it:
ABC News, July 31, Simon Corbell: “I think my faction got it wrong. And my colleagues know that. But at the end of the day you support the majority position of the groups you're aligned with. And that's what I did.”
Canberra Times, July 31: “But the two frontbenchers said yesterday
they had been bound to vote with the left despite
disagreeing with their faction's view”.
[Katy Gallagher:] “There's a diverse range of views
within the faction, but you go with the majority—that's how it
works,” she said.
James Madison's definition is classical: "By a faction, I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community" (Federalist Papers n. 10, emphasis added). This definition makes factionalism a bad thing by definition. In English the word does usually have an unfavourable connotation.
Can the term be defined neutrally? Perhaps in this way: A faction within a political party is a set of members who regularly vote together to carry decisions regarding party policy and rules and regularly vote for candidates on the faction's tickets (i.e. a list or slate of candidates) in elections within the party.
Anyone who joins a faction undertakes to vote for motions, amendments etc. endorsed by the faction and to vote for candidates endorsed by the faction.
There are varying degrees of factional discipline: for example, a faction may require support for its candidates but allow dissent from its policies (or allow dissent under certain conditions). At the other extreme, a faction may require "show and tell" in secret ballots, i.e. members may have to show one another their completed ballot papers before putting them in the ballot box. The ultimate sanction is expulsion from the faction and retaliatory opposition from the faction in votes within the party -- ex-members of the faction will be regularly voted down by the faction.
The neutral definition leaves the question open, are factions a bad thing? I suggest that in general factionalism is a bad thing, for two reasons:
(1) Ethically the factional culture is objectionable. Ordinary respect for other human beings means that their ideas should be listened to fair-mindedly, that when they stand for office they should be considered on their merits and not passed over for some less meritorious person who belongs to a faction. To have moral legitimacy, a majority vote has to be based on proper discussion. When democracy means just "getting the numbers", there is no reason why the defeated minority should treat the decision with any respect.
(2) Factionalism excludes non-factionists from the organisation and reduces its effectiveness. If one faction manages to dominate the organisation, there is no point in participation by anyone not a member of the faction. If you go to meetings and find that your motions or amendments are ruled out of order or there is a motion to pass to the next business, or the proposal is rejected without serious discussion, and you find that any candidate you nominate is defeated, then you might as well not be there. If there are several factions struggling for influence, the ideas and candidacy of people who do not belong to any faction will often be brushed aside. When it becomes clear to non-factionists that they might as well not be there, they stop coming to meetings and let their membership lapse and the organisation falls further into factionalism and becomes increasingly out of touch with the general community.
Though factionalism is, in my opinion, generally harmful to a party and morally objectionable, there may be (at least) two situations in which organising a faction can be justified:
(1) When there are serious ideological or philosophical differences, conflicting conceptions of what are "the rights of other citizens [or party members] or the permanent and aggregate interests of the community [or party]". In a situation like that it may be appropriate for exponents of differing views to organise to help their view prevail or at least hold its own. (Of course there are limits to what may legitimately be done to advance the views of a faction or party--it is still necessary to listen and to propose candidates at least as good as those put up by opponents.) Political parties, in relation to the community as a whole, are factions by my definition, and their justification is that they reflect the conflicting conceptions within the community of what justice and community interest requires. (Cf. Burke's famous definition of a political party: "a body of men united for promoting by their joint endeavours the national interest, upon some particular principle upon which they are all agreed" -- clearly there is not necessarily anything wrong with this.)
Factionalism within Australian political parties at the present time seems to have no philosophical basis (except perhaps for the religious factions--see my page, "Religion and Politics"). For the most part, the factions are syndicates of people who seek to advance their own political careers.
Another circumstance in which faction is justified is
(2) defence against dictatorship, i.e. when there is already a faction which, if not effectively opposed, will dominate the organisation. To prevent this, others may organise counter-factions.
Defensive factionalism is not a permanently satisfactory solution. People who do not belong to any of the rival factions have the same experience as when one faction dominates --- motions voted down without fair discussion, non-factional candidates automatically defeated, etc. -- they might as well not be there and may drop out. The better course of action for a defensive faction is to set out to make rules within the organisation designed to prevent domination by any faction and then disband or relax factional discipline.
The aim should be to make it possible for people who do not wish to join any faction to get their proposals and candidates considered seriously and impartially, so that they can make their full contribution to the organisation.
The basis of factionalism in Australian political parties today is generally not ideology but PATRONAGE, i.e. the ability of factional leaders to confer jobs, honours and other good things on themselves and their favoured supporters. If you want a political career, join a faction and make yourself useful.
Among the best things factional leaders dispose of are Senate seats. Factions control these in two ways:
Another good thing at the disposal of dominant factions is nomination to a "safe" seat in the House of Representatives; another is nomination to shadow cabinet; and of course there are many paid or prestigious positions within the party (e.g. State Secretary) that faction leaders can allocate.
The Trade Unions do not control the ALP---at least not in the sense that ordinary working people have much influence. Rather, the unions themselves are controlled by factions that form alliances with factions within the ALP. The factions use the unions as "nurseries". Patronage in the unions is used to foster and support junior factional members who hope later for a seat in the Senate or a safe seat in the House of Representatives. A typical career line: a university degree in law or industrial relations etc., a paid job in a union, leadership in a union, various positions in the ALP (including paid positions) culminating in a State Secretaryship or the like, nomination to the Senate or to a safe House of Representatives seat.
The reason why the factions take very little notice of the views of "rusted on" party members in the sub-branches is that professional politicians don't need the support of ordinary sub-branch members. Why take notice of people you can't use? In Australia factionalism within political parties is encouraged by our electoral system, especially compulsory voting. (I support compulsory voting --see "Why attending the polling place should continue to be obligatory", in Submission --- but compulsory voting does have drawbacks and this is one.) In Britain, Canada, the US, etc. poltical parties need to run "turn out the vote" campaigns: they doorknock to discover where their supporters are, and then on election day canvassers return and remind supporters to vote. (This sort of campaigning in my opinion involves unacceptable infringements of privacy!) "Get out the vote" campaigns make a measurable difference to a party's vote. They are labour-intensive, so that the party's professionals need the help of a large army of volunteers, including "rank-and-file" party members. This gives the party leadership a strong incentive to recruit new members and to keep all the members involved and happy. The culture of such parties is not factional (at least, not openly factional), but inclusive. In Australia, the efforts of "rank and file" party members contribute next to nothing to election results. Sub-branch members go through the traditional motions of election campaigning (letter boxing, handing out how-to-vote cards, etc.), but these activities have no, or very little, effect on the outcome. No one needs a "how-to-vote" card, since these days the candidate's party identification is printed on the ballot paper. Compulsory voting, compulsory allocation of preferences, party identification on the ballot paper, "above the line" Senate voting, and other features of the voting system, guarantee that the vote will flow to candidates nominated by the party machine, despite any lack of enthusiasm on the part of sub-branch members or voters. Since "rank and file" members make no serious contribution to election victory, Australian parties have no incentive to recruit members. Party membership is very low by international standards (0.015 per cent of voters, last I heard).
Factionalism seems less intense in the ACT than in the states, perhaps because its electoral system eliminates "safe" positions. Its key features are proportional representation, optional expression of preferences and "Robson rotation". These minimise the influence of party factions by maximising the influence of voters. The ACT electoral system does not offer much scope for electioneering by sub-branch members. In my opinion that is all right, since sub-branch members are voters--they get their influence that way.There will be no reduction in factionalism within Australian
political parties as long as there are "safe" House of
Representatives seats and safe positions on the Senate ballot
paper---as long as these things exist, factions will organise to
control them. The adoption at Federal level and in the States of
some features of the ACT electoral system would be a step in the
right direction. As I explain below, this could be done even for
the House of Representatives, with its single member
constituencies.
(1) Candidates for public office, and the chief officers within the party, should be selected directly by all the members. (Indirect election favours oligarchy.)
(2) Candidates for election to the party's governing bodies should be required to give a short presentation before the election, and should be required to mention in that presentation their membership of any faction.
(3) "Show and tell" should be prohibited, e.g. by a rule such as this:
(4) If the party has union affiliates (as the ALP does) the conditions of affiliation should include (a) provision for union members who do not wish to contribute to the party to "opt out", and (b) provision that union delegates to Party conferences etc. be elected by quota-preferential voting by postal ballot of all members of the union who have not “opted out”.
(5) Committees within the party (policy committees, campaign committees, rules committees etc.) should as far as possible be "open", i.e. they should have no fixed number of members and should be filled by volunteers rather than by election. (A committee with a fixed number of positions elected by branches or conference becomes a target for capture by factions.) Decisions made by "open" committees should take effect some fixed time after notification to the party's governing body or administrative committee unless disallowed.
These modifications to the party's rules would go some way toward loosening the grip of faction, but the most important reforms needed are to the Parliamentary electoral system.
This would open to the parties the option of nominating more than one candidate for a House of Representative seat without splitting the vote and losing the seat. A party might adopt as one of its rules that any candidate who got 30% or more in the preselection ballot would be one of the nominees for the seat (this rule might apply only to safe seats). The party might also decide to recommend one candidate over the other(s), but it would be up to the electors to decide whether to follow that recommendation.
Suppose a party nominated two candidates in a certain House of Representatives seat. Party supporters who had no reason for preferring one candidate to the other would vote "above the line", and (by virtue of (2)) half of their first preferences would go to one candidate and half to the other, with their second preference then going to the other candidate--so far the two candidates would be running equal. However, those electors who did prefer one candidate to the other would vote "below the line" and express that preference. Thus the party's candidate preferred by the greater number of the party's voters would come out in the end ahead of the other.
The same thing would happen in Senate elections. It would not be up to the party's management (i.e. the dominant faction) to put the party's candidates in order, that would be done by the electors. Supporters who had no reason to prefer one of the party's Senate candidates to another would vote "above the line", and (by virtue of (2)) their preferences would be allocated to all the party's candidates equally. The eventual choice among the candidates would be made by "below the line" voters--- who might follow the party managers' advice, or not, depending on whether they believed that the party machine reflected the party's philosophy.
See proposal 7 in my submission on the 2007 election.
What I am suggesting would in effect build a "primary" into the election. (See the article by Peter Lynch in the Melbourne Age.) A primary "built-in" to the election itself is much better than a primary held before the election, for several reasons. All of the party’s voters participate, without having to register or do anything but vote. In a separate primary voters often vote not according to their own preference but according to their idea of which candidate swinging voters are more likely to vote for in the real election. Also, separate primaries are held before the election campaign proper gets under way, when the issues are not yet clear. Also, after a separate primary the defeated candidates and their supporters may sit on their hands, whereas if the primary is built into the election itself the party's nominees will put their full weight behind the party's campaign---given the flow of preferences to the party's other candidate(s), the effort each candidate makes to get elected will in the end benefit whichever candidate turns out to have most support. Also, a separate primary increases the total cost of the election, thereby increasing the influence of wealthy donors.
The main argument for a primary is that it gives the voters who support a party (not just the miniscule fraction of them who are members of the party) a say in the selection of the candidate. This should lead to an improvement in the quality and representativeness of candidates and members of Parliament. A candidate who had become known to the electorate as a public spirited person with good ideas would be able to replace a non-performing sitting member without a great pre-selection battle. It would also open the way to the nomination of women and minority candidates for winnable seats.
The effect on branch stacking, backroom dealing and the other incidents of preselection contests would be to repress behaviour that the party's voters regard as ugly and dysfunctional. If one candidate became notorious for ruthless behaviour, many of the party's voters would vote "below the line" for the other candidate.
Another effect would be to weaken factionalism. If the basis of the factions is patronage, then anything that weakens the power of the party's managers to allocate "safe" House of Representatives seats or to put Senate candidates high on the list weakens the incentive to capture the party organisation.
Most Australians think that our
preferential voting system is pretty good in comparison with the
“first past the post” systems of many other countries. We also
support compulsory voting—at least in the sense that people must
go to the polling place and get their names crossed off the
list. This eliminates the “get out the vote” campaigns
characteristic of American politics, in which there is so much
scope for manipulation and for the corrupting influence of
money.
See submission to the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral
Matters:
Submission.html
Return to Home Page