When Labor marched to defeat in 2001, it is thought that more than half of the paid-up members of the party voted for the Greens, primarily at disgust at Kim Beazley’s shameful, if pragmatic, moral capitulation over refugees. At the 2004 election, the Labor primary vote increased by 0.3 per cent, to 38 per cent, one of the lowest of all time. The Green vote, at 6.9 per cent nationally, increased by about 2 per cent. The greater proportion of these increases came from the collapse of the Democrat vote (down 4.2 per cent to 1.2 per cent), since Labor’s vote, in two-party preferred terms, fell by 2.1 per cent. It does look quite unlikely that any of the Labor supporters who deserted their party in disgust to vote Green in 2001 found their way clear to return their first preference vote to the party.
For those who see politics in two-dimensional terms, the problem Labor has is not in recruiting support from its left, but from the centre. The primary aspect of Labor’s debacle, indeed, is that it was even less successful in filling the centre than last time, and is now a four per cent—two terms if it is lucky—swing away from regaining government.
Labor’s willingness to let as much as five per cent of its core vote go, by default, to the Greens, is at the centre of its disaster. Those core voters represent a big proportion of the old idealistic core of the party—those invested with notions that political Labor is something of a crusade—about better conditions for the workers, looking after others, extending human rights, and the organised power of people to make a difference in people’s lives. The sort of people who feel that supporting the party is a sort of crusade, and a positive duty of citizenship. People with passion, and not only passion to share the spoils of office.
By no means necessarily old-style trade union members, or the sort of people whose power in the party stems from their control of the votes that trade unions automatically accrue to themselves by affiliation with the party. The real people who represent an ever-declining, ever unreformed and ever less representative slice of the Australian workforce, now facing further assaults from the re-elected Howard Government. It is not the party machines which have deserted Labor, but the branch membership. The sort of people focused on issues such