“Glassey’s Apostasy: This Political Rat”. So declared the headline of the Labor-aligned Brisbane Worker newspaper editorial of 14 July 1900, after the Queensland colonial MP Thomas Glassey quit the fledging Labor Party.
It quoted the great union journalist, Henry Boote, then editing the Gympie Truth. We “should not revile Glassey as a traitor” but regard him as a “benefactor”: “He was a source of weakness [and] the Party is really strengthened by his secession.”
Even in 1900, Glassey wasn’t the first Labor MP to ‘rat’. That dubious honour goes to Joseph Cook, later leader of the first incarnation of the federal Liberal Party, who split from the ALP who split from Labor to join the ‘free traders’ in 1894 over its caucus pledge. NSW Labor contested that year’s election with two sets of candidates: ‘Solidarities’, who accepted the pledge, and ‘Independent’ Laborites.
Labor’s vote collapsed – just 15 ‘Solidarities’ were elected to a lower house of 141 members. Yet in time emerged a more united party. Frustrated by these goings-on, a coalition of urban MPs and the bush-centric Australian Workers Union rebuilt Labor, forcing collective discipline on the parliamentarians and expelling renegades.
Since the 1890s, the pledge has been a pillar of Labor’s collectivist democracy, itself drawn from the union concept of solidarity in the workforce. In theory, working-class members preselected candidates, shaped policy and campaigned locally. Labor MPs were delegates implementing the party’s platform, determined at conference, rather than autonomous agents exercising ‘independent judgement’.
Small ‘l’ liberals and conservatives were horrified by Labor’s ethos of solidarity, as they remain today. Such ‘dictatorial’ methods, they claimed, demeaned the ‘honour’ of MPs and would destroy the ‘representative’ character of parliament.
Blinded by class snobbery, they were wrong.
Parliament did not collapse. Labor’s collectivist democracy has helped it endure three serious splits, depression, two world wars and rats, the most infamous one-time ALP prime minister, Billy Hughes, over conscription in 1916, ironically an urban alumnus of the 1890s NSW disciplinarians.
Looked at from the vantage point of history, then, Senator Fatima Payman’s ratting on the ALP is nothing new. Whatever moral superiority Payman and her defenders adopt to justify her behaviour; they cannot claim originality. (One would have more sympathy for her position had she argued her case in caucus and been consistent on injustices faced by her Muslim brothers and sisters, in Syria for instance, at the hands of Bashar Al-Assad, or persecuted Chinese Uighurs).
Given that the ALP prides itself on collectivism, there is a valid argument to be made that her defection is a collective failure: Payman was preselected without much life experience, and certainly didn’t receive adequate mentoring before entering parliament. As an observant Muslim woman, she may very well have felt isolated in the boozy, freewheeling, still largely Anglo culture of Canberra.
However, the cacophony of media commentary arguing that Labor’s caucus discipline is somehow outdated in modern, multicultural Australia, to be tossed into the dustbin of history, is alarmingly ignorant of history and short on facts.
If anything, the pledge is more vital in the diverse, electorally volatile Australia of the 2020s. Indeed, the signed federal pledge adopted in 1901 responded to the diversity of the fledgling national party which brought together geographically disparate state parties and a wide spectrum of beliefs (free trade versus protectionism) as well as differing forms of Christianity (Protestant, Methodist and Catholic).
Loosening or abolishing the ALP’s pledge is a slippery slope. It would likely result in Labor MPs being picked off one by one on a multitude of issues, from the right by the Coalition and by the Greens to its left, condemning the party to schism after schism. More importantly it is a bulwark against the contradictory impulses of modern progressivism which have infected the ALP of late.
Progressivism worships at the altar of individualism. It cuts against the grain of Labor’s communitarian belief in a society distinguished by relative material equality, of social solidarity, and opposition to dog-eat-dog neoliberalism. Paradoxically, progressivism also fetishises identity politics by pitting one group against another group in a Hobbesian war against all. Only Labor’s collectivist democracy – on which the pledge to be bound by party decisions is based – can resist its siren song.
On a personal note, at the recent Victorian state ALP conference I spoke against extremist and divisive “pro-Palestinian motions”. I was heckled throughout, told to “sit down Zionist” (the extreme left’s code word for Jew) and repeatedly termed a “mutt”.
We lost the vote. But I had argued my case in our democratic, collective decision-making forum. I didn’t spit the dummy. I accepted the result; and I remain a proud member of the ALP. The same logic has applied to state Labor MPs opposed to euthanasia or federal members sceptical of marriage equality. When one joins the ALP, you are, or at least should be, cognisant of its collective ethos.
Make your case, win or lose, and then come together in solidarity. Simple.
Labor will survive Fatima Payman and talk of a Muslim teal-style insurgency in electorates in Western Sydney and suburban parts of Melbourne. A valid argument can be made that this is a condescending view of any ‘Islamic’ bloc vote.
As for Thomas Glassey, one of his excuses for his newfound independence, was the ALP’s divided and, in conservative eyes, supposedly ‘disloyal’ views on the Boer War. Perhaps this sounds familiar, 124 years on. The inability of a few to accept the majority will of their colleagues is a familiar tale, particularly during times of war. It is no more reason in 2024 than it was in 1900 to junk Labor’s best chance of holding itself, and a more fractured, less cohesive society, together.
