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The Australian Labor Party: A Legacy of Betrayal, Abandonment and Neglect

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The Battler

Founded in 1901 amidst the first sitting of the new Australian Federal Parliament, the Australian Labor Party (ALP) is the oldest-continuing political party in Australia. The ALP is is the nominally progressive wing of the two-party duopoly in Australian politics, generally considered the ‘lesser of two evils.’

Despite the popular belief that the ALP is a progressive panacea for the selfish, authoritarian and soulless Tory opposition, its history is replete with betrayals of the working class and corruption. From the first moment it became electorally viable, the ALP has been a magnet for careerists and opportunists who placed their own interests and ambition of the wellbeing of the Australian people.

This page works to document the sordid history of Laborite opportunism and betrayals. Check back periodically for updates.

AUKUS

Colluding with the class enemy: Neoliberalism and the Accord

Complicity in crimes against humanity

https://www.tiktok.com/embed/v2/7297142125655821573?lang=en-US&referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fseqldiww.org%2Fthe-australian-labor-party-a-legacy-of-betrayal-abandonment-and-neglect%2F

Prime MInister Anthony Dutton

Disciplining Unions and Workers for Capital

  • The Accord: a class collaboration project that weakened unions
  • Bob Hawke: The PM who tamed the labour movement
    • https://www.greenleft.org.au/2019/1222/analysis/bob-hawke-pm-who-tamed-labour-movement
      Bob Hawke played a critical role, along with Paul Keating, in the launching of the international neoliberal offensive in Australia during the 1980s, which has now reached its peak under the current Coalition regime. But perhaps his most damaging legacy is the taming of the trade union movement, which has had long-term serious consequences right up to this day.
  • Anti-Communism in the Unions: The Case of the Federated Clerks’ Union in South Australia, 1944–60
    • Labour historians remain fascinated by the struggle against communism in Australian trade unions during the Cold War’s early years, typically examining major unions at the national level. This article, by contrast, uses detailed archival research to explore the anti-communists’ bitter, decade-and-a-half-long attempt to displace secretary Harry Krantz and his supporters in the South Australian branch of the Federated Clerks’ Union (FCU). While the aims of the right-wing activists were dubious, the incumbents’ methods were even more questionable. By 1952 the FCU in South Australia had distinguished itself by being the only major state branch to survive the anti-communist crusade. This article demonstrates reasons for the Left’s success. They were certainly aided by the Australian Labor Party (ALP) dissolving the anti-communist industrial groups in the state in 1951. But strategy, tactics and personal factors played a significant role. Krantz’s ability and political nous were not matched by the anti-communists, and he had won impressive gains for union members. A final factor was Krantz and his allies’ ruthlessness and forensic knowledge – and exploitation – of union rules.
  • Australian Unions Need to Stop Pinning Their Hopes on the Labor Party
  • Labor’s connection to trade unions—for better or worse
    • https://redflag.org.au/article/labors-connection-trade-unions-better-or-worse/
      Labor, rather than representing workers, is the party of Australia’s trade union officials. Unions are more than a lobby group imposing external influence upon the ALP. They are embedded in its internal operation at all levels of the party apparatus—from local branches to the highest parliamentary office—and impact its structure, financing, candidates, policies and campaigns.
  • Union membership in free fall as union leaders suck up to Labor
    • https://redflag.org.au/article/union-membership-free-fall-union-leaders-suck-labor/
      Union coverage, in steady decline since the early 1980s, took another sharp turn for the worse in 2022. The latest figures, released by the Bureau of Statistics in mid-December, show that membership has fallen by 76,000 in two years, to 1.4 million, even as the workforce has grown. The outcome is that just one in eight workers in Australia are now union members, down from one in two 40 years ago.
  • The problem with the Fair Work Act
    • https://redflag.org.au/article/node-6358/
      The Fair Work Act that is the target of the ACTU’s Change the Rules campaign undermines wages and conditions and hamstrings trade unions. Passed by the Rudd Labor government in 2009, it is a particularly ugly piece of legislation, with many obvious problems.
  • Claims Fair Work Commission is anti-business are ‘clearly wrong’, says expert
  • Company that owes worker $17,000 may never have to pay
  • Neither Simple nor Fair – Restricting Legal Representation before Fair Work Australia
    • https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm
      Fair Work Australia is the Commonwealth Government’s proposed ‘one-stop shop’ for employment relations matters. An important feature of FWA is its unfair dismissal jurisdiction, which is supposedly designed to deliver a simpler, faster and less costly process by restricting legal representation of parties before FWA and instituting a mixed ‘inquisitorial-adversarial’ model of dispute resolution. This study examines whether restricting legal representation achieves the primary goal of Labor’s substantive workplace relations reforms – fairness by reference to three key elements: legal truth, cost and efficiency. Following this examination, the article finds that imposing further restrictions on legal representation undermines fairness because it creates an imbalance between costs, legal truth and efficiency. The article recommends that, subject to minor amendments aimed at improving the unfair dismissal process, the present statutory treatment of legal representation should remain.
  • From the Arbitration System to the Fair Work Act: The Changing Approach in Australia to Voice and Representation at Work
    • https://classic.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/AdelLawRw/2013/2.html
      This article explores mechanisms for employee voice and representation at work by reference to five processes for making rules about the employment relationship: statutory regulation, delegated regulation, collective agreement-making, individual contracting, and managerial unilateralism. We look in particular at five labour law regimes that have operated in Australia: the traditional conciliation and arbitration system; the enterprise bargaining regime introduced in 1993; the Workplace Relations Act as it operated after 1996; the ‘Work Choices’ amendments that took effect in 2006; and the Fair Work legislation from 2009 onwards. Our analysis of those regimes suggests three main findings. First, the support for union forms of collective voice has declined, but the laws have also changed dramatically in the types of support offered for trade unions. Secondly, the diminishing legislative support for unions has not been counterbalanced by the development of alternative collective forms of employee voice. Thirdly, the individualisation of rule-making processes and employee voice has been a consistent trend in Australian labour law.

Extractivists’ Wet Dream

Increasing Aged Pension to 67

Landlords’ Wet Dream

  • Federal Labor dumps negative gearing policy, backs tax cuts
    • https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/labor-dumps-neg
      Federal Labor has dumped its signature housing policy of winding back negative gearing after two election losses while putting itself on a campaign footing by ending its long-time opposition to scheduled tax cuts for high-income earners.ative-gearing-backs-tax-cuts-20210726-p58cxs.html
  • Labor pledges not to touch negative gearing, capital gains as pressure mounts
  • Australia’s ‘deeply unfair’ housing system is in crisis – and our politicians are failing us
    • https://theconversation.com/australias-deeply-unfair-housing-system-is-in-crisis-and-our-politicians-are-failing-us-219001
      The fact that one of the least populated countries on Earth contains the world’s second most expensive housing is a national calamity, and a stunning failure of public policy,” writes Alan Kohler, in the latest Quarterly Essay . . . He doesn’t mince words. We are in a housing crisis – and it is a public policy failure of the biggest kind. This crisis is about more than housing: it is a social and economic crisis, creating a society defined by inherited wealth.

LGBTI rights

NACC

NDIS

NT Intervention

  • How do the parties stack up on ending the Intervention?
  • The Northern Territory Intervention and the liberal defence of racism
    • https://marxistleftreview.org/articles/the-northern-territory-intervention-and-the-liberal-defence-of-racism/
      The moral panic they were central in creating to “justify” the Intervention resulted in the demonisation of Aboriginal people as paedophiles and child abusers. The middle-class liberals’ own pro-capitalist position, promoting individual solutions, seeing their own self-advancement as “proof” that those at the bottom of society are there because of their own incapacity, and looking to the state rather than struggles from below as the way to fix things, opened the door to support for the NT Intervention’s military invasion of Aboriginal communities – just as it did for similar social layers to support military interventions in “failed states” overseas. Underlying these attitudes was something more fundamental: the long-term hostility of pastoralists, mining companies, other capitalists and governments – the Australian ruling class, in other words – to Aboriginal rights. Again, the ruling class’s racism does not simply reflect mass racist attitudes. Instead it creates and reinforces them in an assertion of the capitalist class’s own interests.
  • The Intervention, Stronger Futures and Racial Discrimination: Placing the Australian Government under Scrutiny
    • https://researchportalplus.anu.edu.au/en/publications/the-intervention-stronger-futures-and-racial-discrimination-placi/
      The Northern Territory Emergency Response (NTER/Intervention), instigated in 2007 by Australia’s Federal Government, has led to prolonged human rights abuses for Australia’s First Peoples living in the Northern Territory. Indigenous peoples have frequently been denied three types of rights in Australia: citizenship rights, Indigenous rights such as self-determination and human rights. Although the Intervention infringes all three, the focal point of this publication will be human rights denied in the context of the Intervention, specifically, the right to protection from racial discrimination. The relationship between some Intervention measures and the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination is considered, with case studies on two problematic measures that continue under the Intervention’s successor framework of Stronger Futures: income management and criminalising possession and supply of alcohol.

NT Water Grabs

  • NT Government plan to let Big Business take our water 
    • https://territoryrivers.org.au/action/nt-government-plan-to-let-big-business-take-our-water/
      The Lawler Government will soon announce a series of plans which will allow huge amounts of extra water to be taken from our precious rivers and groundwater systems for thirsty industries like cotton and fracking. They will also lead to a rush of new dams on floodplains. This will see massive amounts of water taken from rivers such as the Daly, Roper, and Victoria and will threaten our fishing, tourism, local communities and our Top End lifestyle.
  • Act now to protect the Territory’s water: new evidence slams the government’s fracking science

Oligarchy’s Wet Dream

  • Why is Anthony Albanese so fucking shit?
  • Albo’s Waterloo: The Clayton’s PM and the Farrellisation of Labor
    • https://theaimn.net/albos-waterloo-the-claytons-pm-and-the-farrellisation-of-labor/
      Bernard Keane is half right. In today’s Crikey, he despairs of our PM as “a  political manager, a risk-averse executive who always plays the percentages.” Dead right, as far as it goes. But Keane, for all his nous, undercooks the grill. This isn’t one man’s failure of nerve. It’s a captured party’s moral collapse; decades of corporate capture and right-faction strangulation producing, at the hour of maximum crisis, a Clayton’s Prime Minister with added charisma bypass: the PM you have when you’re not having ScoMo.

Persecuting whistleblowers

Racism & Anti-Semitism

  • The Kingdom of Shylock (1917),by Francis George Anstey MP(ALP)
    • https://bendebney.info/the-kingdom-of-shylock/
      “There was a time in the history of the British race when the jobber pursued his gambling in Change Alley or the Jews’ Walk, in the surreptitious manner of the accursed. He had one eye on the speculative customer and the other on the passing police. The Jew Medina came in the train of William the Dutchman. He gave Marlborough £6,000 a year for the first tips of victories in France or Flanders. All the tricks bound up in rising and falling prices, lying reports from the seat of war, the pretended arrival of couriers, the formation of financial cliques to work the market, cabals and connivings behind the scenes, the whole system of Mammon’s Wheels—Medina, the father, knew them well, and worked them to the full. His successors have amplified his methods . . . After Medina came the Jew, Manessah Lopez. He amassed a fortune in the panic which followed the false news that Queen Anne was dead. He “bought on the slump and sold on the rise.” Then came Samson Gideon and the Goldsmids—Abraham and Benjamin. These were succeeded by the Rothschilds.’
  • ‘I Stand By White Australia’, Arthur Calwell, Australian Federal Minister for Immigration, 1949
    • https://collections.museumsvictoria.com.au/items/1485019
      Calwell became the first Minister for Immigration in 1945 and was committed to a system which controlled immigration in accordance with the White Australia policy and enforced the deportation of prohibited immigrants. In October 1948 Calwell introduced the Aliens Deportation Bill and in 1949, the War-time Refugees Removal Bill. Also, in this period there were a number of court cases and personal stories of deportations being debated in the media. These debates in the public domain were the impetus for Professor Ball’s original article and Calwell’s response. Calwell’s argument in this pamphlet is that the introduction of a quota would be a form of appeasement to those prohibited migrants who wanted to stay, that a quota would be more discriminatory than the policy that was already in place and
    • that Australia risked offending the Asian nations even more by introducing a quota.
  • One Nation surges as Labor paves the way for rise in racism

Raising the Retirement Age to 67

Reducing the parenting payment cutoff age to 8

Refugees

  • Labor’s refugee shame ten years on—End offshore detention
  • Parliament excises mainland from migration zone
  • Australian Labor government “excises” entire country to bar refugees

Reverse Robin Hood for Private Education

Revolving door between the ALP and big business

  • Revolving Doors – democracy at risk
  • Revolving Doors – Greg Combet
    • https://michaelwest.com.au/greg-combet/
      Greg Combet is a former Australian politician and trade unionist. He was a member of Parliament for 6 years, and held ministerial positions under both the Rudd and The Gillard Government. Since leaving parliament, Combet has worked as a consultant to unions, been a company director as well as an appointment by the Morrison Government to provide policy advice during the Pandemic.
  • Revolving Doors – Anna Bligh AC
  • Revolving Doors – Martin Ferguson
    • https://michaelwest.com.au/martin-ferguson/
      APPEA, the Australian Petroleum Producers and Exploration Association, is the peak lobby group for the oil and gas industry in Australia. Ferguson took up a position as the chair of its advisory council only six months after he retired as minister. The lobbying code of conduct requires an 18-month cooling-off period for ex-ministers, which was clearly not enforced in Ferguson’s case. See Manning (2014).
  • Revolving Doors – Wayne Swan
    • https://michaelwest.com.au/wayne-swan/
      Independent Non-executive Director, Stanwell Corporation, 12 December 2019 – Present. Stanwell Corporation is a Queensland government-owned corporation and is the state’s largest electricity generator. It runs coal-fired power stations.

Robodebt

Tax cuts for the moneyed aristocracy

Union busting: The CFMEU, with legislation supported by the ACTU and the Libs

  • Admin purge of CFMEU in Victoria targets militancy
  • The CFMEU Setup: How Workers Get Mugged in an Election Year
    • https://theaimn.net/the-cfmeu-setup-how-workers-get-mugged-in-an-election-year/
      On the other hand, The CFMEU built the hospitals Sarah staffs. Its pattern bargaining dragged EBA rates upward across the whole sector. Non-union sparkies like Sarah’s brother banked the lift without paying the dues. Raze the union and you don’t clean up the industry. You hand developers a gift-wrapped, defenceless workforce and call it accountability.

Union busting: The BLF

Union busting: The 1990 Pilot’s Strike

  • 1989: Australian pilots strike
  • 30 Years Since the 1989 Australian Pilots’ Dispute
    • https://internationalsocialist.net/2019/09/australia-2/
      The airlines were backed to the hilt by the Hawke Labor government, the right-wing media, and unfortunately, the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU). Against all odds, the pilots put up a hard fight, but in the end, they were beaten by an unholy alliance that was hell bent on taking Australian capitalism in a new direction.

Spooks

White Australia Policy

Wholly-Owned Corporate Dark Money Subsidiary

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