The issues involved in, and the consequences of, electricity
privatisation
Bob Gould
(continued)
The shopping centre was a commercial disaster and the Convention
Centre was only marginally successful. We=92re now told that after a
fairly short time Darling Harbour is out of date and a big new scheme
is proposed to knock down most of it, including the Convention Centre,
and start again, with further massive subsidies to big business.
Who=92s to guarantee that business plan won=92t be just as commercially
disastrous as the previous one? But you can bet the different
commercial entities involved will be guaranteed, from the public
purse, against possible failure.
A couple of months ago Labor Party head office announced the new venue
for the state conference, in the Convention Centre, and not even in
the most appropriate part of the Convention Centre, which was already
booked.
My first reaction was that there might have been a conspiracy of some
sort, but I put that aside. It=92s more likely to be a bureaucratic cock-
up than an outright conspiracy. Given a choice between cock-up and
conspiracy, the cock-up is usually the more likely.
The practical bottom line, however, takes the following form.
Initially head office said no branch observers could watch the
conference because the limited space at the back was needed for paying
business observers. When a number of members made a fuss, that was
modified and provision was made for about 100 observers, but any
number above that would have to sit in a ridiculous room down a
corridor watching a television feed.
To my mind, this symbolises the direction in which Iemma and Costa are
pu****ng the Labor Party. Members take third place to cor****ate
interests. That=92s not the Labor Party I joined 53 years ago.
The first conference I attended was also the first held in the Town
Hall, in 1954. Conferences at the Town Hall became a big political
event, the galleries were often crowded with members watching, there
was coming and going of delegates and alternate delegates to talk to
branch members in the galleries, there were left and right
conspiracies beneath the stage and in the councilors=92 rooms at the
side, and everyone gathered for a cup of tea and a pie at Johno
Johnson=92s pie shop.
In the foyer, Johno Johnson flogged his puddings and raffles for Labor
funds, I ran a labour movement bookstall in the corner for which I
paid rent to the party, and delegates were credentialed and other
Labor organisations also had stalls in the foyer. There were
substantial demonstrations outside the Town Hall on the issues of the
day.
The conference involved the delegates and active members of Labor
Party branches. The odd cor****ate donor was rather incidental to this
big political process. At moments of great tension and heat,
demonstrations would take place in the gallery and people would hang
banners over the side.
The Darling Harbour venue is ideally designed to destroy this
political process as far as possible. How can the branch members and
delegates interact in these cir***stances? As a 50-year member of the
Labor Party I want the Town Hall back as the proper venue for a
gathering of 850-odd delegates and many additional branch observers.
What do we do now?
Barring some enormous U-turns at the last minute, which appear
unlikely because the unions and the Labor ranks are fighting for our
political lives and our right to influence events in the Labor Party,
come Monday morning we will face a political crisis of the sort we
haven=92t seen for a very long time in Labor politics.
The best intelligence I can get is that the right and left tickets for
the administrative committee contain a comfortable majority of people
committed to oppose privatisation. Conference will probably carry, by
a comfortable margin, complete opposition to electricity privatisation
and will make that opposition part of the party platform.
It will also probably authorise the incoming administrative committee
to take any steps necessary to ensure that the Labor caucus carries
out this policy in the parliament.
It=92s at this moment that the behaviour of the left ministers in the
cabinet becomes a critical factor. I=92ve been rather disappointed, as a
long-standing leftist in the Labor Party, at the behaviour of the left
ministers so far and their tendency to shelter behind the manufactured
story that caucus and cabinet solidarity requires them to be
relatively silent on the internal battle over privatisation.
It=92s quite clear that cabinet solidarity does not exist in the rules
of the ALP, and caucus solidarity applies only to votes in the
parliament, not battles in the Labor Party.
If opposition to privatisation is written into the platform, the
question becomes one of an apparent conflict between two principles:
Labor Party solidarity expressed in the platform and caucus solidarity
in the parliament. All Labor Party history suggests that the platform
and party solidarity are the superior principle. At this point, party
solidarity has to to prevail.
If the left ministers in the caucus have the courage to defy Iemma and
Costa and lead the fight in the caucus to ditch the privatisation,
they will redeem themselves mightily in the eyes of the labour
movement and caucus will probably go the right way.
Whatever happens in caucus, and subsequently in the parliament, the
anti-privatisation majority of the administrative committee should
steel themselves to take the necessary organisational steps against
any Labor MP who votes for the privatisation in the parliament in
those cir***stance.
The spectre being raised by some sup****ters of Iemma is the precedent
of the Labor Party forcing Labor policy on Premier Vince Gair in the
1950s. In the subsequent split, Gair=92s breakaway retained a large
number of Labor seats, but that=92s unlikely to happen in the current
cir***stances in NSW.
The Iemma government is in deep trouble anyway, and the privatisation
is overwhelmingly unpopular with the voters. The appropriate analogies
are the split over conscription, the Lang split and the split with the
Groupers in states other than Queensland in the 1950s, in which Labor
lost government but wiped out the breakaways. That would also happen
in NSW.
It need not come to that kind of split if Iemma gets wise counsel not
to defy the Labor Party, or if the left ministers defy Iemma and rally
a majority in the caucus.
The left ministers are actually in the situation that the only way
they may prevent a split is to defy Iemma and Costa, and Costa is
re****ted to have indicated that he intends to leave politics soon, in
any case.
In Labor politics, as in politics generally, nothing is ever certain.
Lots of permutations are possible, but in my view the only thing to
fear is fear itself and the fight for proper Labor policies is more
im****tant than any personal considerations.
Tags: electricity privatisation, Labor Party
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One Response to =93Crunch time for the Labor Party as a force for
progress=94 Bob Gould Says:
May 2, 2008 at 12:33 am
Michael Berrell comments on the Green Left discussion list about my
article, but he can=92t see the wood for the trees.
Some people seem to be almost born sectarians, and Berrell is one. I
produce a leaftlet, which I=92ll be giving out in the next two or three
days, providing a bit of a balance sheet on the battle in the labour
movement about electricity privatisation, and Berrell, like his mates
at the World Socialist Web Site, isn=92t the slightest bit interested in
any of that sort of strategic analysis. All he can think to say is
that Mick Costa=92s ****ft to the right is further evidence of the
degeneration of the Labor Party.
Berrell is so pious, like a Presbyterian parson denouncing sin.
The im****tant thing about the current struggle is not that there=92s an
ideological right wing, of which Costa is the most extreme example in
the Labor Party at the moment. There has always been a right wing in
the ALP.
What is im****tant, in the material world that I inhabit, is that the
rather battered Labor ranks have been mobilised by the struggle
against electricity privatisation into a substantial fightback against
a right-wing Labor government. It=92s also extraordinarily im****tant
that the overwhelming majority of trade unions in NSW, both left and
right, have stuck to their guns despite hysterical pressure from the
majority of Labor politicians and, particularly in the last week, from
the bourgeois media.
The Financial Review, in particular, has babbled this week about
=93union enforcers=94 etc. This has increased the noise from other right-
wing pundits, some of whom used to be on the left, about pu****ng the
unions out of the Labor Party.
We=92re in the midst of a political, industrial and community struggle,
Brother Berrell, or hadn=92t you noticed? The outcome of this struggle
is of very considerable im****tance. Of course, it=92s not won yet, and
there could still be some twists and turns.
Nevertheless, the ranks of the Labor Party, the unions, Green
activists and community activists have made considerable progress in
this struggle.
I spelled out, in my leaflet, my ideas about how to proceed at this
stage of the struggle and every Labor Party conference delegate that I
can reach, and every demonstrator outside the conference, will get
one. I expect to distribute my whole print run without too much
trouble.
Mike Berrell, you=92ve seen my ideas on how to proceed expressed in a
limited way. What are your ideas on how to proceed, or do you believe
that we=92re doomed to fail because of the Labor Party and trade union
aspect of the struggle?
That=92s the view of your mentors at the WSWS. What are your views on
how to proceed in this struggle?
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