People devote a lot of time to consuming political news. On its own – if people don’t do anything with this political knowledge – it achieves nothing. If a person’s political activity consists only in speaking with friends who have consumed the same news, and already believe the same things, nothing will change for the better.
Moreover, people naturally tend to focus on dramatic political stories, leading them to spend more time following American politics than our own, even though they have even less influence there than here.
I’ve long felt the need to do more. Studying political philosophy and democratic theory filled my head with silly ideas like it being the responsibility of every citizen to try and make their society great.
But the asinine behaviour of student politicians at university – and the way such behaviour was mirrored in Canberra – turned me off politics for a long time.
At some point though, the need to do something, anything, outweighed my cynical reluctance and I joined the Australian Labor Party.
My circle of friends are university educated, live in the inner suburbs of Sydney, and pay attention to political news. They read Twitter; they listen to Chapo Trap House; and they largely vote Greens.
When it was discovered that I had joined the Labor party, a couple of friends independently wanted to talk it through, understand my reasoning. Each conversation, though entirely separate, followed a similar path.
Labor had come to represent for them something unconscionable. The party’s identity had become intolerably tainted by reprehensible people and actions; both brought up the offshore detention of asylum seekers. To voluntarily associate with such a group was dubious at best. While there may be plenty of well-meaning people in the party, it was nevertheless controlled by vacuous hacks, devoid of principles, and the outright corrupt. They would compromise with the right too readily, never willing to stand and fight.
Both of these friends received my arguments magnanimously. While still sceptical, they were at least reassured I had not gone mad, nor was I a secret fascist. I did not need to be ostracised.
For more or less any policy position on the Greens platform, you could find plenty of people in Labor who would support it. The difference between the parties is not so much of ideology. The parties have different internal rules. They emphasise different areas of policy according to the interests of their different bases of support. They face different electoral incentives. The difference between the parties is more about strategy. So which to support? Which of them offers a better vehicle for advancing progressive causes?
With preferential voting – and if voting is the only political action you take – preferencing the Greens ahead of Labor can make perfect sense. If a Labor candidate is elected then you have at least made known your desire to see a more clearly progressive agenda. While if a Greens MP is elected, they would have a public platform to openly disagree with the Labor party (unlike a Labor MP who must keep their criticisms behind the closed doors of caucus meetings) and could submit private member’s bills to raise issues ignored by the government.
But actually joining a party poses a more complicated question. Where is one’s time best spent?
At election time Greens campaigners largely work against Labor ones, since their support is concentrated in inner city electorates. Money gets spent on corflutes and fliers and ads. Deep and lasting resentments are carved between the young generations of each party.
Yet what can be gained from the effort? If a Greens candidate wins a lower house seat it means removing a Labor Left member from parliament, shifting the political centre of gravity within the caucus to the right.
Outside of election time, Greens rhetoric regularly lumps ‘Labor and Liberals’ together as a unit, reinforcing a false equivalence necessary for drawing votes away from Labor, though producing apathy as a side effect, and dulling faith in the parliamentary system.
If the ALP hold a majority in parliament in their own right, they have no particular reason to work with the Greens. And if Labor and the Greens combined are a minority, the point is moot. The Greens’ electoral enemy is the ALP, yet they need a Labor government.
I always found it bizarre when friends who had been volunteering in Greens campaigns would celebrate holding on to their seats while blaming Labor for losing the election.
The Labor party instead separates the struggle to control the agenda from the struggle to get elected to parliament. First there is the competition internally between Left and Right for preselections, party offices and conference resolutions; but then they are united at election time against the Liberals.
So the electoral influence of the Greens depends on two things: the ALP being successful enough to form government, and the ALP adopting a progressive agenda. Yet both of these goals are pursued by Labor members. Which is why I decided to become one.
In my federal division, around 108,000 people are enrolled to vote. The seat is safely Labor’s with almost 60% of the two-party preferred and it was one of the few electorates to see a (small) swing towards Labor in the last election. But this means any one vote makes virtually no difference.
Of ALP members that vote in a preselection though, I’d expect the number to be at most a few hundred. So by joining the party, attending meetings, and casting a ballot in a preselection, a person can increase their influence over who is to be the member of parliament by a few orders of magnitude. Moreover, there are opportunities to have actual conversations with prospective candidates and your fellow electors.
In my first local branch meeting I met the sitting federal member. On a number of occasions since, I have gotten to meet the sitting state member. And the branch secretary is also on the local council.
Meetings have exposed me to people who see politics in a different way. The members of Young Labor, for example, clearly don’t see themselves as a corrupting influence on the party. And the older members are always most concerned with local issues: what a clearway will mean for High Street businesses, what a proposed apartment block means for views, what to do about the overwhelmed post office package service – issues that are important to people’s everyday lives and ones I had rarely thought about before.
These meetings are not exactly fun, but part of the point we started with is that democratic politics is work not leisure, production not consumption. Still, an hour a month is a small investment, and a more edifying use of that time than looking at Twitter.
I can’t say I have, as yet, accomplished anything useful with my time in the party, and maybe I never will. It is a long process, getting to know people and learning the internal workings of the party. But all we can do is try.