The flowering of silence at Labor’s National Conference

How managed unity shut down debate on Gaza, AUKUS and the gas tax.

Joel Jenkins || The Labor machine rolled into Adelaide for the Australian Labor Party’s 50th National Conference — a tightly managed event focused on unity, platform updates, and positioning against One Nation. That managed unity came at a clear cost: open debate on Israel/Palestine, AUKUS, a tax on the gas giants, and gambling reform was shut down, and so was the political capital of anyone who dared challenge it.

Unity is a concept that has redefined the resting state of the party in recent times, particularly as the current Labor platform has evolved into something almost unrecognisable from older iterations of the party. At the conference it largely meant resolving contentious issues in backrooms beforehand so the formal proceedings stayed orderly, despite a few early stumbles.

This manicured environment allowed the government to spruik its cost-of-living measures, housing, wages, jobs growth and caucus diversity without interruption, while contrasting itself with a rising One Nation. It also eliminated dissent on the party’s stance favourable to Israel and negligent toward Palestinian suffering. There was no ruckus over AUKUS, nor a whimper on the gas tax — and there would be no disruptions.

“We choose protest rather than just progress, we choose outcomes rather than outrage, and we choose to deliver real change,” rehearsed the crafted line of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, with equal parts proto-autocrat and self-styled Urenite Labor stalwart from Grayndler. His words were designed to speak to a disenfranchised base, scold those wanting more, and serve as a thinly veiled warning to any backbenchers (and much of the wider public) who still believe the party could do better.

Former cabinet minister-turned-exiled-backbencher Ed Husic offered the one clarion line of resistance at the conference. It was a position that felt outlawed, and it was shut down by the machine with a punitive rather than open-minded reception. Husic’s bid to amend the platform to reference “a plausible claim of genocide” failed, and his actions were almost certainly noted by a party that has dealt harshly with parliamentarians who dare speak against the hypocrisy — a conversation anyone can have with Fatima Payman.

Speaking to Patricia Karvelas on ABC Afternoon Briefing, ALP Senator Murray Watt — who sits on the supposed left of what has become a blob-like neoliberal party of government — offered his two-cents on Husic: “There’s been a range of different topics that Ed has been seeking to move amendments or have changes made, and to date none of them have actually happened.” Watt then tried to contain the rebellion by deferring to the views of Victorian MPs Josh Burns and Basem Abdo: “I think [Husic] expresses the view of some rank-and-file members, but so do people like Josh and Abdo.”

The views Watt claims Husic shares with only “some” rank-and-file members are in fact closer to the clear majority of Australians who now hold unfavourable views of Israel and its conduct in Gaza. By contrast, the position defended by Josh Burns — who in December 2023 insisted a ceasefire was not significant even as Israeli forces bombed hospitals and struck civilians on designated evacuation routes — is far narrower. Watt’s appeal to a “broad church” therefore felt disingenuous. It minimised the scale of public and internal unease that Husic was articulating, and it did so at the likely cost of Husic’s future standing inside the party.

It wasn’t just Israel/Palestine kept off the open floor debate. It was the gas export tax, the spectre of AUKUS, and the low-hanging fruit that seems so far away: gambling reform. It was everything important except a few polished words among axiomatic sentences that amounted to catchphrases from the incongruous. All the back room deals and IOU’s in the name of unity, looked more like micromanaging the platform of a proto-authoritarian political apparatus larping as a member-driven democratic utopia distilled into a political party.

Bernard Keane wrote for Crikey that “the party of Hawke and Keating has turned into the party of Richard Marles.” And the party of Richard Marles looks like the post-Shorten organisational style of ALP National Secretary Paul Erickson, who is considered the brains behind the operation of this version of the ALP. It is Erickson who has been the party’s soothsayer, and his imprimatur has been linked to the party’s election success. It is Erickson who crafted the tightly controlled environment in which floor fights were minimised and dissent tucked away at the conference. Although Erickson does not personally dictate every policy outcome of the party, he has provided the sterile environment for powerbrokers like Marles to transplant their overall position, and prepared the surgical tools for the party to undergo the operation and transformation into the political entity we see today.

Erickson’s Labor Party is the party that codified AUKUS after being shut out of the preliminary discussions, that has gone silent on taxing the super-profits of foreign-owned multinationals, and that has remained in power while Israel has carried out what the UN has described as a genocide in Gaza. It is the party that talks tough on militarism, supports war, and bends over for Washington. Under this government the political environment has become unrecognisable, as has the trajectory of the country — and it is under this government that One Nation has risen to poll neck-and-neck with power. Perhaps some real debate is needed in a party that still conjures the ghosts of Curtin, Whitlam and Hawke on stage while a core leadership group works behind the scenes to sell the country out.

There is a theme of authoritarianism that now runs like a crack through the foundation of the party. It shows in the style of government that both state and federal Labor have chosen to impose on Australians, and it was on full display at the curated, astroturfed conference in Adelaide. The event served as a rubber stamp for a powerful leadership core that has taken the party from its members and now steers the platform away from the national interest toward the narrow interests of a captured few. The old labyrinthine buzz of a traditional Labor conference has been replaced by a ‘gang of four’ style of obedience: the leaders control the floor from their panopticon above, while the members sit down and shut up in the hall below.

Speaking to the new style of Labor conference, Don Farrell scoffed at the observation that floor debate had been all but smothered and laughed that it was all “a flowering of democracy.” The smirking senator’s empty words, set against the glaring reality of a tightly controlled event, carried the hollow ring of official pronouncements from a regime that specialised in declaring democracy while extinguishing it.

Labor is attempting to normalise its brave new world by shoehorning it into the party structure from root to branch, whilst removing the traditional barriers that would have seen the party faithful in uproar. That sounds like ‘full steam with AUKUS’, it means inviting a Taiwanese delegation at a time of diplomatic sensitivity with Beijing, and it involves catchphrases and slogans designed to call any opposition ‘outrage,’ and any protest a barrier to ‘progress.’

It’s not as if Labor is enforcing order and cohesion at its conference to push through taxes on tax-dodging miners or the year-on-year profits of the big duopolies. The party is not working upstream in the backrooms to drive keystone nation-building projects past the factions beholden to the private sector, nor is it imposing this Omerta to wrest the platform back from the lobbying groups that limit its ability to act in the interests of its members and the nation. It did not use the silence imposed on the rank and file to announce a contract with the people to take on the Murdoch media empire, uproot the gambling companies, or review Scott Morrison’s AUKUS deal in the national interest. Instead, it tightened the strings to silence the real dissent, worry and concern inside the party — protecting the status quo on foreign policy and corporate power far more effectively than it advances the transformative domestic reforms that many of its members still believe Labor exists to deliver. No Medicare card waving can hide that.

Liberal MP Simon Kennedy said the Prime Minister had “bent to the gambling lobby” by failing to fully adopt the Murphy report in the platform, a reminder that Labor is often just as compromised on the simplest issues as it is on the complex ones — and in some cases less progressive than its conservative rivals. One Nation is rising in the polls with a gas tax that Labor carefully kept off the conference floor. Andrew Hastie has been more openly critical of Donald Trump’s misadventure in Iran than Richard Marles has managed. And on Insiders, the same Prime Minister who once founded the Parliamentary Friends of Palestine — whose government has supported Israel militarily, diplomatically and economically, and who has overseen a Royal Commission into Antisemitism — spoke tersely of “a country, a conflict, a fair way away from us.”

“If they put me in the freezer, I don’t give a shit,” said Ed Husic after his bid was dismissed. He is a politician who has spoken against AUKUS, argued for a tax on gas, and taken a moral stand on the Middle East — positions that command broad public support. Those positions were shut down by a party determined to drive the country down a narrower, less popular path. The ALP camp in Canberra, remote from the realities most Australians face and apparently blind to the optics of their own authoritarianism, may still believe the conference went exactly as they had hoped.