The authors of this book have been involved in radical politics for between 30 and 40 years, for most of that time as members of Marxist organisations, Socialist Alternative and its forerunners. Apart from a brief period in the early 1980s, when Rick was in the ALP, our relationships with the Labor Party have been from the outside. Because the ALP is a large and powerful organisation, historically associated with the left, it has affected the course and potential of all our political activities. This has taken different forms. As Labor has long been committed to managing Australian capitalism we have been highly critical of the Party. We opposed Labor governments in the late 1980s when they destroyed a militant trade union, the Builders' Labourers' Federation, and today we actively support campaigns against the Gillard government's treatment of asylum seekers, gays and lesbians, construction workers and Indigenous people. On the other hand, because Labor seeks to appeal to a working class voting base, and because a sizeable number of people believe that the Party is dedicated to achieving progressive social reform, we have also worked alongside ALP members and responded to initiatives of Labor leaders in various struggles against particular odious manifestations of the capitalist system. In recent years, these have included campaigns against WorkChoices, the invasion of Iraq and the Howard government's attacks on refugees.

Today, ALP supporters and even many critics regard the Curtin and Chifley governments between 1941 and 1949 as a period of achievement, exemplifying the best in the Party's traditions. There is no doubt that the Labor governments of the 1940s did a great deal. It is, however, worth asking whose interests they served. This chapter briefly considers their actions and ALP policies in several key areas. While these governments were responsible for the rapid expansion of the Australian welfare state and attempted to nationalise the banks, they also devoted a great deal of effort to containing and even defeating working class struggles, and to promoting capitalists' profits. Contradictory pressures from workers and bosses in the late 1940s help to explain the eventual fall of the Chifley government in 1949. They also contributed to the great split of the mid 1950s that had devastating consequences for the Party in Victoria, Queensland and federally.

Still smarting from its internal turmoil in the 1930s, Labor lost the 1940 federal elections with a primary vote of only 40 per cent. But the UAP–Country Party coalition was not in a commanding position because it was incapable of mobilising the working class for war. Workers simply did not trust Prime Minister ‘Pig Iron Bob’ Menzies, who had been an admirer of Hitler, had prosecuted wharfies for banning the export of scrap metal to Japan in 1938, and had supported Chamberlain's Munich Agreement.

The Rudd government was the first federal Labor government with no meaningful connection to the Labor Party. A parliamentary leadership – courtesy of the taxpayers – enjoys a dominating public presence, unlimited travel, a standing army of MPs, a larger army of well-paid staffers, furnished offices in every capital city, computers, telephones and postage and stationery. Public funding of election campaigns and donations from the corporate sector have rendered unimportant the contributions of cash and energy from unions and party members. Electors are reached by direct mail and electronic mail. The letterbox delivery of the candidate's pamphlet is decidedly old hat. Local campaigns are not run locally and are local only in the sense that any deviations from the central message are authorised to the last comma. The organisation of the modern political party does not require a presence below, not even at election times – except perhaps for the odd photo opportunity.

Modern Labor operates in accordance with an axiom: a parliamentary leader sustained by good opinion polls will prevail on all matters, including decisions contrary to party policy. Where Morris Iemma had failed in New South Wales, Anna Bligh, Premier of Queensland, succeeded. She persuaded the Queensland ALP Conference to approve the sale of a wide range of public assets so as to overcome a shortage of finance. Her arguments were no more or less compelling (or specious) than those put by Morris Iemma but Bligh was a winner riding high in the polls.

Critics of ALP Conferences are correct that modern governments cannot have a mere thousand people issuing instructions to an elected government. These critics of union control and conference sovereignty found their voices so very late. Those who denounced the unions exercising their formal voting strength on the floor of Conference were a galaxy of those who had benefited from the union bloc vote throughout their careers. Bob Carr, Barrie Unsworth and Paul Keating were vocal that unions were not entitled to dictate to an elected government. In set-piece offerings they denied the legitimacy of a conference decision that was adverse to the wishes of the government. None of these former leaders had been shy about demanding the support of the bloc vote to back in their enterprises in times past.

It was fine and good for unions to have untrammelled power on the floor of Conference when they delivered what governments wanted; it was an outrage when unions were in earnest about matters inconvenient to government. Bob Carr had not wavered in his support for union bloc control of the ALP Conference during his 17 years as party leader. A handful of union officials had always delivered what he wanted – bar electricity privatisation. Persuading the representatives of the party membership was a less certain, more demanding affair. The membership had to cop whatever an inner group of Right union officials found acceptable.

Giuseppe and Maria Iemma arrived in Australia in 1960. The young couple, recently married, had departed their village in Calabria, what had been their whole world. Within a year their only child was born – a son, Maurizio, who became known outside the family as Morris. When Morris was six, the family moved from the inner-city to Beverly Hills in Sydney's southern suburbs, where they have lived all the years since. The Iemma parents both worked, a variety of jobs in car building, textiles, print shops. Getting and keeping work was often hard with English language difficulties.

Giuseppe had been a communist in a country which enjoyed the largest Communist Party membership outside the Iron Curtain. He did not abandon his faith in a new country. Both parents valued politics and political discussion. Morris Iemma grew up in a household where politics was the staple of discussion. More than discussion; it was a household which believed in collective action to protect the worker in his or her place of work and believed in the possibility of reform by political action. It was a household in which an emerging Gough Whitlam was the hero. Giuseppe took his son to Whitlam rallies. He kept a close eye on the Labor leader in newspapers. Television and radio delivered the Labor leader into the household. In 1974 the Iemmas took Australian citizenship as a tribute to their hero.

In 2003, under the leadership of Simon Crean, National Conference reduced the proportion of union delegates at future state and national conferences from 60 to 50 per cent. The impact on the character and control of the ALP was zero. An axiom of organisation is that big blocs versus clusters of smaller groupings will mean the big blocs prevail. In public companies, if the largest holding of shares represents 30–40 per cent, that bloc will control the company. So for the ALP, whether the proportion is 60:40, 50:50, 40:60 or 30:70, the ratio amounts to union control of the conference floor. Control of the floor translates into control of the conference agenda, control of proceedings and control of the atmospherics. The group which controls conference will win the positions elected by conference, most importantly the officers of the party, the ruling executive and the delegates to national conference. Control at conference delivers control of the party between conferences and a dominating position at the conference that follows.

At an ALP conference, it is rare that unions vote together as a bloc. They do not have to. Over the years since 1916, they have imposed a culture that is all-pervasive; a culture of pre-meeting caucuses and caucuses within caucuses; log-rolling to achieve outcomes; the elevation of loyalty ahead of ability. A spoils culture in which the purpose of organisation is self-advancement.

All that mattered after the Conference happened off camera. The media had lost interest in the story once it ceased to be the pyrotechnics of abuse. The story revived from time to time when it suited the government to outline its present thinking or that part of such thinking it thought useful to put into the public domain. The actual story, the ongoing story before and after the Conference, required a knowledge of ALP history and tradition – the nuances behind ALP governance that makes a dysfunctional 19th-century party electable and relevant.

The government defies Conference

Once Conference adjourned, most of the delegates scattered to the four winds. They resumed their usual lives. Unlike the political class, they had real jobs with real employers where a real performance was required to earn their wages and salaries. Prosecuting the will of Conference fell to the leadership of Unions NSW and the ALP full-time officers. Omitted from the negotiating table were the representatives of the membership. Omitted were the people who had turned defeat for the government into a rout. The advocates of Conference supremacy around the table were plagued, some less than others, with doubts about pushing opposition all the way – wherever that might end.

Karl Bitar was home from California in time for the Saturday of negotiations ahead of Caucus on Sunday. Lots of precedents were being set. An agreed list of names had to go to the Right caucus. The ‘Left’ had already decided on its nominations. The new Premier and the General Secretary met at the Concord West home of Luke Foley, an emphatic tribute to Foley's effectiveness during the previous weeks. The meeting settled most of what went forward to the Right. Rees explained the role of Bitar:

The Premier devolved to the General Secretary the role of co-ordinator general for the Right. Given the Right was incapable of providing a leadership contender and had fallen to pieces, Bitar was assuming the role that used to be played by Carr and Iemma, augmented down the years by the likes of John Aquilina, Michael Egan, Richard Amery, Paul Whelan, John Della Bosca as well as Obeid and Tripodi. The Premier was now in a position similar to Neville Wran: he was not a member of the Right, he did not belong to a faction.

Workers in the colony of New South Wales created a political party in reaction to the use by employers of the full might of government to defeat strike action. The year was 1891. Workers had organised themselves into trade unions to protect and enhance the rights and working conditions of their members by way of action in common. Trade unions formed a political party in their own interest by establishing local labour leagues which anyone with a commitment to a party of organised labour could join. The party was a localist party – a labour league for every suburb and town across the colony with sufficient local support.

The party grew from below. The leagues selected their own candidates to contest constituencies in the Labor interest. For the first time in the history of Westminster parliaments, a coherent mass of people without wealth, income, ancestry, property, social standing, patronage or powerful connections could seriously contest the constituencies where they lived. Labor candidates and MPs came from the communities they represented. Having themselves selected a local candidate, all of the members of the leagues united behind that candidate. In return, the candidates selected for the first outing in 1891, for all of the party's first century and beyond, were obliged to express the views of the membership below. Without that right to select their own candidates – the driving imperative for the party's founding – the Labor Party would have been nothing.

In July 2005, Bob Carr announced he was standing down as Premier of New South Wales. Succession would fall to the minister in his Cabinet supported by the dominant Right-wing faction of the Labor Party. Events moved swiftly. The party's General Secretary, Mark Arbib, made clear his preference for the then Minister for Health, Morris Iemma, over the supposed favourite, Carl Scully. A phalanx of MPs from the ALP Right proceeded to align their support with the wishes of the General Secretary. The amount of public discussion was minimal, what was done was done in private. It was done quickly. Carl Scully announced his withdrawal from the race. Iemma proceeded to be unopposed within the Right and unopposed within the State Parliamentary Labor Party.

Within days, Deputy Premier Andrew Refshauge and Planning Minister Craig Knowles resigned from the ministry and the Parliament. In a matter of months, the ALP had lost the ticking heart of the Carr government – Carr himself after 24 years in Parliament; Michael Egan, an energetic Treasurer with interests across all policy, who had first entered Parliament in 1978; Refshauge, nominally on the Left, a veteran of 24 years; Craig Knowles, a man of integrity, in his 20th year as an MP, out of contention because of indiscretions sub-trivial.

Any advantage to the Liberal Opposition was forfeit almost instantly. The Liberal leader, John Brogden, was the subject of newspaper reports of his alleged behaviour in bars with women who were not his wife.

Competition for power is the natural condition of political activity. At its first electoral outing in 1891, Labor won seats in large numbers – 35 seats on debut, an arrival not matched by the Country Party, One Nation, nor any other political force in all the years since. Seats won and held acquired status as ‘safe’, impregnable fortresses akin to the property of the party, the most valuable of spoils there for the taking. Or giving. Labor endorsement was tantamount to winning the seat. With payment of MPs and the achievement of government, membership of Parliament via ALP endorsement became an entrée to power and a glittering life. Men would do almost anything to win that prize. So, it has proven, will women.

The people in charge of party administration – and those who challenge them – have believed their pre-eminent task to be the delivering of the prize of Parliament to themselves and their supporters. If the master plan for local preselection required support in the higher levels of the party, the master plan warranted such an amendment. Preselection battles have echoed wider struggles for control of the administration and the right to write the rules of conflict; those wider struggles were preludes to the right to dominate the preselection process. Every serious schismatic struggle in the ALP is about determining who gets to select who goes into Parliament.