Labor Left
The Labor Left, also known as the Socialist Left and Progressive Left, is an organised Left faction of the Australian Labor Party. It competes with the more economically liberal Labor Right faction.
The Labor Left operates autonomously in each State and Territory of Australia, and organises as a broad alliance at the national level. Its policy positions include party democratisation, economic interventionism, progressive tax reform, refugee rights, gender equality and gay marriage. The faction includes members with a range of political perspectives, including Keynesianism, trade union militancy, Fabian social democracy, New Leftism and democratic socialism.
Factional activity
Most political parties contain informal factions of members who work towards common goals. However the Australian Labor Party is noted for having highly structured and organised factions across the ideological spectrum.Labor Left is a membership-based organisation which has internal office bearers, publications, and policy positions. The faction coordinates political activity and policy development across different hierarchical levels and organisational components of the party, negotiates with other factions on political strategy and policy, and uses party processes to try to defeat other groups if consensus cannot be reached.
Many members of parliament and trade union leaders are formally aligned with the Left and Right factions, and party positions and ministerial allocations are negotiated and divided between the factions based on the proportion of Labor caucus aligned with that faction.
History
Labor left factions before the 1950s
Historian Frank Bongiorno has noted that there had been a number of organisations associated with the left wing of Labor before the 1950s, from the Australian Socialist League in the 1890s, the industrial left which emerged during World War I, the early supporters of Jack Lang, and the State Labor Party of the 1940s.Labor Party split of 1955
The modern Labor Left emerged from the Labor Party split of 1955, in which anti-Communist activists associated with B. A. Santamaria and the Industrial Groups formed the Democratic Labor Party while left-wing parliamentarians and unions loyal to H. V. Evatt and Arthur Calwell remained in the Australian Labor Party. The earliest formal factional organization was the NSW Combined Unions and Branches Steering Committee, which was formed in January 1955.The split played out differently across the country, with anti-Communists leaving the party in Victoria and Queensland but remaining within in most other states. This created a power vacuum which allowed the Left to take control of the Federal Executive and Victorian state branch, while its opponents were preserved elsewhere. Tom Uren described the left of the Labor Party Caucus upon his election to Parliament in the late 1950s as "a loosely knit grouping... consist mostly of anti-Catholics, although some members were militants or socialists".
From 1965 organised internal groups emerged to challenge the control of the Left, supported by figures such as John Button and Gough Whitlam. After the Victorian branch lost the 1970 state election in the midst of a public dispute with Whitlam over state aid for private schools, the South Australian Left, led by Clyde Cameron, and New South Wales Left, led by Arthur Gietzelt, agreed to support an intervention which saw the Victorian state branch abolished and subsequently reconstructed without Left control. Leftists in the Victorian party subsequently regrouped as the formally organized Socialist Left faction. In Queensland, the left coalesced around senator George Georges. Despite an increasing level of organisation in the grassroots party, this was not reflected within the Parliamentary caucus: Ken Fry noted that when he was elected to Parliament in 1974, meetings of left MPs were irregular and they responded to events in an ad hoc manner. The Labor Left suffered the loss of two of its key leaders in the mid-1970s with the downfall of Jim Cairns and the elevation of Lionel Murphy to the High Court of Australia, yet it continued to make advances in terms of nationwide organisation: right-wing power broker Graham Richardson has acknowledged that "at the beginning of the 1980s the Left was the only national faction".
Labor Left split in the 1980s
Labor leftists continued to formalise their organisation into the 1980s. In Tasmania, the Broad Left formalised itself in 1983, having taken control of the state party after reforms democratised it in 1976. In the Australian Capital Territory, the Left Caucus was founded after a left candidate was not preselected in 1982. However, the Left were unable to translate their organisational advances into a presence in the Hawke Government: although about a third of the Parliamentary caucus were aligned with the Left at the time, only one member was appointed to Hawke's first cabinet, Stewart West: leading left-winger Brian Howe placed high in the ministry ballot, but was relegated to a junior ministerial position. This came against the background of an increasing factionalising across the party and the emergence of a centre-left faction which joined with the Labor Right to dominate the Hawke government. Left influence was also restricted by the ALP's binding pledge committing legislators to accept caucus discipline, allowing members little freedom to dissent. Left influence also declined at the national conference, with the faction losing its conference majority in the early 1980s.During the 1980s, after a prolonged dispute over ideological and tactical issues a split occurred within the South Wales Labor Left creating two fractions; the 'Hard Left' and the 'Soft Left'. A significant event which caused the split was the election of the Secretary Assistant of the New South Wales Labor Party, where the Hard Left faction supported Anthony Albanese while the Soft Left faction supported Jan Burnswoods. The Hard Left faction aligned itself and gained support from grassroots movements, maintaining "closer links with broader left-wing groups, such as the Communist Party of Australia, People for Nuclear Disarmament and the African National Congress" as well as the wider trade union movement. The Soft Left was aligned with the Labor Right faction and rank and file party branches. The factions had significantly different views on policy. The Soft Left supported Keating's privatisation of the Commonwealth Bank and Qantas, as well as the Gulf War, while the Hard Left members were more often against these. Lindsay Tanner has argued that such splits reflect the importance of a divide which cut across the traditional left-right axis, namely the opposition of "rationalists" and "traditionalists", with the former supporting the Prices and Incomes Accord and union mergers, and abandoning or watering down their commitment to tradition Labor objectives such as public ownership, non-interventionism in foreign policy, and maintenance of working-class living standards, whilst the latter were negative towards the Accord, opposed to union mergers, sympathetic toward economic autarky, and attached to traditional Labor policy objectives. This divide can be seen through the career of Joan Kirner, who servved as Premier of Victoria between 1990 and 1992 and was the first member of the modern Labor Left to lead a government, who supported the ascent of Paul Keating to the post of Prime Minister and his decision to privatise Commonwealth Bank to finance a bailout for the ailing State Bank of Victoria. This resulted in the formation of a splinter group from the Socialist Left, the Pledge faction, which opposed privatisation: in 1996 Pledge allied with another left split, the Labour Renewal Alliance, and the right wing Labor Unity faction to take control of the party away from the Socialist Left.
Labor Left factions from all jurisdictions
Federal Members of the Labor Left
| Name | Parliamentary seat | Other positions | State/Territory |
| Anthony Albanese | Member for Grayndler | Leader of the Opposition | NSW |
| Tanya Plibersek | Member for Sydney | Shadow Minister for Education and Training | NSW |
| Stephen Jones | Member for Whitlam | Shadow Assistant Treasurer; Shadow Minister for Financial Services | NSW |
| Jenny McAllister | Senator for New South Wales | NSW | |
| Julie Owens | Member for Parramatta | NSW | |
| Sharon Claydon | Member for Newcastle | NSW | |
| Susan Templeman | Member for Macquarie | NSW | |
| Pat Conroy | Member for Shortland | Shadow Minister for International Development and the Pacific; Shadow Minister Assisting for Climate Change; Shadow Minister Assisting for Defence | NSW |
| Anne Stanley | Member for Werriwa | NSW | |
| Linda Burney | Member for Barton | Shadow Minister for Families and Social Services; Shadow Minister for Indigenous Australians | NSW |
| Catherine King | Member for Ballarat | Shadow Minister for Infrastructure, Transport, and Regional Development | Victoria |
| Brendan O'Connor | Member for Gorton | Shadow Minister for Employment and Industry; Shadow Minister for Science; Shadow Minister for Small and Family Business | Victoria |
| Andrew Giles | Member for Scullin | Shadow Minister for Cities and Urban Infrastructure; Shadow Minister for Multicultural Affairs; Shadow Minister Assisting for Immigration and Citizenship | Victoria |
| Julian Hill | Member for Bruce | Victoria | |
| Kim Carr | Senator for Victoria | Victoria | |
| Maria Vamvakinou | Member for Calwell | Victoria | |
| Lisa Chesters | Member for Bendigo | Victoria | |
| Ged Kearney | Member for Cooper | Victoria | |
| Terri Butler | Member for Griffith | Shadow Minister for the Environment and Water | Queensland |
| Graham Perrett | Member for Moreton | Queensland | |
| Murray Watt | Senator for Queensland | Shadow Minister for Northern Australia; Shadow Minister for Natural Disaster and Emergency Management | Queensland |
| Sue Lines | Senator for Western Australia | Deputy Senate President | WA |
| Louise Pratt | Senator for Western Australia | Shadow Assistant Minister for Manufacturing | WA |
| Josh Wilson | Member for Fremantle | Shadow Assistant Minister for the Environment | WA |
| Patrick Gorman | Member for Perth | WA | |
| Anne Aly | Member for Cowan | WA | |
| Mark Butler | Member for Hindmarsh | Shadow Minister for Climate Change and Energy; Deputy Manager of Opposition Business in the House of Representatives | SA |
| Tony Zappia | Member for Makin | SA | |
| Penny Wong | Senator for South Australia | Leader of the Opposition in the Senate; Shadow Minister for Foreign Affairs | SA |
| Julie Collins | Member for Franklin | Shadow Minister for Ageing and Seniors; Shadow Minister for Women | Tasmania |
| Carol Brown | Senator for Tasmania | Tasmania | |
| Anne Urquhart | Senator for Tasmania | Tasmania | |
| Brian Mitchell | Member for Lyons | Tasmania | |
| Katy Gallagher | Senator for the Australian Capital Territory | Shadow Minister for Finance; Shadow Minister for the Public Service; Manager of Opposition Business in the Senate | ACT |
| Warren Snowdon | Member for Lingiari | NT | |
| Malarndirri McCarthy | Senator for the Northern Territory | NT |