Labor’s national conferences are freighted with history, steeped in tribal sentiment and an exercise in grassroots democracy in contest with supreme factional management.
The party’s 49th national conference, and the first held since 2018, is the strangest in a generation. When the 402 delegates assemble in Brisbane on Thursday, Labor’s national Left faction will have a workable majority for the first time since 1979.
But divisions within the Left, based on personality, geography and union allegiance, make furious agreement unlikely.
Anthony Albanese is no stranger to national conferences. He was a delegate to the 1986 national conference in Hobart and voted with his then radical, obdurate and always obstructionist Left faction to abandon the float of the dollar and return to a regulated exchange rate. The Left also opposed wage restraint and fiscal consolidation.
Deals have been brokered to avoid floor fights on Middle East policy by labelling Israeli settlements as “illegal” and referring to Palestinian territories as “occupied”; supporting a parliamentary inquiry into the impact of free trade agreements on local jobs, and; increasing the humanitarian migration intake to 20,000 per year to allay concerns over refugee policy. But it may not stop some of the delegates seeking to relitigate these matters.
Read the article by Troy Bramston in The Australian.