The Australian Labor Party’s union base has long been its greatest strength – and, often, its greatest handicap.
In 1963, a photo emerged of the then Labor leader Arthur Calwell, and his deputy, Gough Whitlam, standing in the dark outside the Kingston Hotel in Canberra, waiting to be told by the party conference – dominated by union heavyweights – what their policies would be. “Labor’s Faceless Men” became a rallying cry which took Menzies’ government to an increased majority in the subsequent election.
Labor’s Faceless Men were involuntarily dragged out of the shadows again in 2010, when a cabal of factional powerbrokers ousted PM Kevin Rudd.
After Rudd in turn deposed his replacement, Julia Gillard, he moved to lessen the unions’ power-grip on the party. But unions remained particularly strong influencers in Labor’s powerful Victorian branch. Current leader Anthony Albanese is again moving to restrict unions’ influence.
They’re not happy – and they’re striking back where it hurts: at the hip-pocket.
Victorian unions representing 85,000 workers will on Tuesday formally ask the ALP to return hundreds of thousands of dollars in affiliation fees, threatening Anthony Albanese’s campaign war chest ahead of the next election.
Albanese, from NSW, is not just trying to influence pre-selections in Victoria, he’s also trying to nobble union influence by putting distance between their money and their influence.
After using the courts to derail Mr Albanese’s plans to fast-track preselections in Victoria, union leaders are furious with a legal argument from the ALP that affiliation fees are akin to donations.
The union secretaries, who argue Victorian members should be allowed to vote in preselections, are contesting the ALP’s argument that union affiliation “has no bearing, buys no votes”.
“It gives a sense of entitlement but gives rise to no claim,” said the ALP’s legal counsel, Peter Willis SC, in legal hearings on Thursday.
Victorian Labor has long been notorious for branch-stacking – a scandal which raised its head again in the person of party powerbroker Adem Somyurek – and Premier Daniel Andrews overtly paid off the United Firefighters Union for their campaigning, by handing it the management of the proudly volunteer Country Fire Authority.
So unions are not about to give up their Victorian power easily.
Sources say the letter is a stark warning to the ALP about the financial implications of stopping rank-and-file votes in Victorian preselections, even if the unions fail in the case to be heard in the Supreme Court of Victoria later this month[…]
Unions pay a quarterly fee of $1.43 per member to be affiliated with Labor. This would bring the fees for the seven unions close to $500,000 a year.
On top of affiliation fees, unions contribute major donations ahead of state and federal elections, with the CFMEU contributing more than $1m to Bill Shorten’s campaign in 2019.
The CFMEU’s Victorian branch alone paid nearly $44,000 in the last quarter of 2020 for affiliation fees for its 30,472 members.
The Australian
Albanese is wedged between a rock and hard place on this issue.
On the one hand, unions might be seen as Labor’s last, tenuous link to its claim to be “the party of the worker”.
On the other, less than one-fifth of Australian workers are union members. Most of those, moreover, are public sector workers: 28% of public service workers are union members, less than 10% of blue-collar mining or construction workers.
So, when hardly any workers are unionists, how can Labor point to union powerbrokers as its justification for claiming to represent “workers”?
But unions’ money is even more valuable to the ALP than China’s Aldi bags full of cash.
Dare Anthony Albanese risk pissing off Labor’s angry, hissing golden goose?
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