What sort of political party fails to select its candidates until the election is virtually upon them?
What sort of political party finds itself being sued by its members and castigated by its own MPs using parliamentary privilege?
The answer is a party that is facing a cultural crisis.
In the past 12 months, both the Labor and Liberal parties have been dealing with internal strife that has burst forth into the public domain.
For Labor, it was allegations of rampant branch stacking in the Victorian branch, litigation over intervention by the national executive in preselections for the Victorian Senate ticket and allegations of bullying of the late senator Kimberley Kitching.
For the Liberal party, it has been the manufactured crisis in the NSW division over preselections. It has led to litigation, and free and unflattering character assessments of the prime minister, Scott Morrison, from within his own party.
On one level it’s tempting to see these crises as a dysfunctional family soap opera – the outcome of petty politics and personal rivalry.
But there is much more at stake. Democracy depends on having at least two functioning, robust parties that operate according to something more than the law of the jungle.
Labor’s internal woes are a story for another day.
The current crisis in the NSW Liberals over preselection raise serious issues about control of the party, integrity and what it means to be a member of a political party.
Matthew Camenzuli, a member of the NSW Liberals’ state executive, thinks political parties are the sum of their members and he sought to assert their rights in the courts – specifically, to choose candidates. Morrison and the factional apparatchiks in the Liberal party begged to differ.
The NSW Liberal party made changes to its rules for preselection in 2018 after a push by the right faction to give branch members a bigger say. The right, led by former prime minister Tony Abbott, argued that the membership out there in the branches was more conservative than the party machine and it was high time members had a bigger say in who represented them.
The Warringah rules, as they are known, were duly adopted, bringing a greater degree of grassroots democracy and a diminution of the power for the factional organisers.
Factional organisers are the people who work the room, get elected to the various bodies of the party and control branch numbers, sometimes by bringing in new members loyal to them.
At least that was the thinking. But in the first real test of the new preselection processes – the 2022 federal election – the factions have reasserted themselves.
The decision in the court of appeal is a technical one: the court decided the case mainly on the issue of “justiciability” – that it was not the role of courts to involve themselves in adjudicating on the internal rules of unincorporated political parties.
It did not deal with the fairness or moral correctness of what has happened.
That remains one for the NSW Liberal party organisation to tackle.
The fact is that the factional warlords have triumphed over the membership, again.
The “inconvenient” new Warringah rules were sidestepped by the party heavyweights. Much of the blame has been sheeted home to the prime minister’s representative on the NSW state executive, his immigration minister, Alex Hawke.
By failing to turn up for months to vet possible candidates, Hawke engineered a crisis, where just a few weeks from the May poll there were no candidates. Few believe he would have done so without a wink from his boss.
The factions then attempted to carve up the spoils – as they had done in the past. But some members of the NSW Liberals were not buying this attempt to sidestep their new democratic rights to participate in preselections.
The result has been expensive and embarrassing litigation, which has ultimately rewarded those who chose to winkle their way around the party rules.
The big winner is the prime minister’s centre right faction and Hawke himself, who avoided having to face an uncertain branch plebiscite in his northern Sydney seat of Mitchell, an area where allegations of branch stacking are common.
Yes, there are good reasons for giving the prime minister of the day or the head office a say in who becomes the candidate. They may have a star candidate or want to achieve greater gender equality in the party. But that wasn’t what the NSW Liberals voted for in 2018.
It raises the question that all major parties must grapple with: whose party is it?
In the US, political parties choose their candidates though primaries where thousands of people vote, even those who are not party members. It can lead to some odd populist results and arguably leads to candidates from the extremes of the party rather than the middle. But ordinary people get to participate. Americans proudly declare themselves Democrats or Republicans and engage in their political process.
In Australia, it seems candidates are chosen by the prime minister or the leader, or at best a small cabal of factional power-brokers, who might be motivated by shoring up their own power bases in the party.
Is that really preferable?
All three major Australian parties are struggling to maintain their membership. In NSW, the most populous state, the NSW Liberal party claims 11,000 members but some say it is lower – below 10,000. NSW Labor has perhaps a few thousand more thanks to its affiliation with the unions.
In a state with a population of 8.2 million people it’s hardly a ringing endorsement of participatory democracy.
It’s easy to understand why the courts would not wish to wade into the murky pool of internal party politics. But it is certainly one for the major political parties.
Just ask the independents, who have benefited from perception that our major political parties are moving further away from local communities and their real concerns.
The crisis that has wracked the Liberal party is really a deeper crisis of democracy.
