By Nick Martin

Being the oldest political party in Australia, Labor and the progressive movement have a proud legacy of innovation and progress in Australian society. Our movement has laid the basis for nation building and economic growth, the expansion of social services and one of the world’s best social nets.

At the beginning of the second decade of the 21^st century it is clear that there are new challenges that we now face as a progressive movement. Challenges that must be addressed if we are to continue to be a source of innovation and progress in Australia.

Over last weekend more than 500 Labor members, supporters and Progressive Australians gathered at Sydney University to take up that challenge and plan the future of the progressive movement in Australia.

The Building a Progressive Australia Conference was organised by the Chifley Research Centre, Labor’s national think-tank, with two very clear objectives.

1. First, the conference aimed to renew Labor’s values for the 21^st century, looking to the timeless goals of our movement but refocusing them on current challenges.
2. Second, the conference provided an important opportunity to explore ways to rebuild the progressive movement, drawing particular lessons from our history and the experience of similar political parties overseas.

The participants in the conference and the many more who participated online deserve congratulations for starting a critical conversation about how to keep Australia on a progressive political course.

Sharing a Vision for Progressive Australia

Attendees came from all states and territories and were joined by colleagues from New Zealand, the UK and US. Keynotes and plenary sessions helped to frame the debate.

James Purnell, former Secretary of State in the last UK Labour Government gave an overview of the current debates in social-democracy over our commitment to reform and renewal. Barack Obama’s model of community organising was outlined by Mitch Stewart, the Director of Organizing for America. They were joined by Matt Browne from the leading US progressive think-tank, the Center for American Progress (CAP), and Tom McMahon the pioneering head of the US Democrats who first implemented organising strategies for US elections.

Australian speakers also featured strongly, sharing their vision for a progressive Australia. Newly elected leader of the NSW Labor Party, John Robertson, delivered an important address to the conference on the need for Labor to embrace a reform agenda and to open up our party to greater participation from members and supporters.

Ged Kearney from the ACTU spoke about the need to connect with new constituencies, like contractors and others in marginal employment, to build the Labor base. Speakers from the union movement, academics and voices from important campaigns in climate change and community services all added their voices to the discussion and debate.

Active Government & Civil Society

A key discussion at the conference included the need to reconnect a Labor agenda with its historic role as a movement outside of parliament and firmly embedded in civil society.

James Purnell and a number of speakers drew on the experience of community organisers in the UK and the US to make the point that progressive politics is more often about listening to constituencies than governing from on high. The way progressives can rebuild from opposition was an important conversation for Labor members and supporters from New South Wales and Victoria, with former Premier Bob Carr and Chief Minister Clare Martin leading discussion.

One of the important international experiences that has a direct relevance for Australia is the implementation of an organising agenda here. In the UK, the work of groups like Citizens UK have rejuvenated urban community politics by picking up local political issues and organising communities of interest around them.

In the US, the organising experience is firmly entrenched in the progressive community and in the culture of the US Democrats. The need for respect and empowerment of supporters is now part of the election campaigning techniques employed by the Democrats. In Australia, the work of groups like the Sydney Alliance provide a new example of how faith groups, unions and local communities in our largest city can use organising to build local power. The new training organisation, Campaign Action, has now demonstrated how progressive campaign training and organising can help win seats.

Where to from here?

Many people have asked ‘what are the next steps?’ We’ve kick-started that conversation but now it’s your turn to continue the conversation in your local community, with your friends or in your union or Labor branches.

Over coming weeks the team at Progressive Australia will be releasing the videos from the sessions along with a toolkit to help you take the ideas discussed at the conference to a wider audience. Our website will continue to be a site for open discussion and debate on the future of progressive politics.

We are committed to growing the movement through Progressive Australia using the forumfor an ongoing conversation with Party members, supporters and the community.

In coming months we will have more to say about future events around Australia so stay tuned to www.progressiveaustralia.org.au for updates and to continue the conversation

The passion, conviction and excitement shown throughout the weekend is simply the beginning of something bigger. Renewing Labor’s mission to deliver genuine progress in Australia won’t be achieved without much hard work, but it is the only challenge that really matters.

How will you be renewing the progressive movement in your local community?

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Nick Martin is the Assistant National Secretary of the Australian Labor Party and Deputy Campaign Director. He is the Chair of the Chifley Research Centre, Labor’s national think-tank, and has played a critical role in steering Labor’s National Policy Committee.

The community’s distaste right now for politicians and the political process is really something. Labor is suffering the brunt of that disenchantment – and we’ve done our fair share to contribute to it. Yet maybe the firestorm of state electoral losses and public disillusionment can open seeds of renewal. The massive scale of the NSW defeat – and the sullen mood of voters across the country – suggest we need to think beyond short-term tactics to larger questions about rebuilding progressive politics.

One of the most important structural challenges is to rebuild our community base. Around the world, a steep decline in mass party membership is by default making social democratic parties professional, managerialist organisations – easier to run than democratic organisations, but culturally disconnected from the people they seek to represent. In place of strong organic community links they become bloodless public relations organisations – managing a political brand, researching and testing political messages, raising funds and executing election campaigns. Values like fairness, social justice, compassion, community and sustainability get reduced to mere ‘brand attributes’, instead of deep-seated convictions that shape the policies and culture of the organisation.

Labor has not yet become that kind of organisation, but our community links have atrophied. Once, a strong union membership base gave us deep connections to local communities. Communities were more localised, and members were often involved in many voluntary and social activities – like sports, schools, churches and service organisations. Party members were the eyes and ears of their communities and they kept caucus members in touch. We truly were a labour movement, and our local networks helped thousands of people with practical things like adult education and emergency relief.

Today, things have changed. Community life is less localised, and while there’s still local community champions among our membership, most are greying and fewer are taking their place. Yet we have barely changed our formal party structures. We are left with the formal relics of a past era – like the obligation of attendance at dull, procedural branch meetings. This simply isn’t a relevant or authentic way for people to channel their political energies, so people go elsewhere.

You find similar trends in churches, which remain among the strongest community organisations in Australia. Smaller local churches that stuck with old patterns and formal styles have declined, while the well-organised, high-energy Pentecostal megachurches have enjoyed explosive growth. Faith is alive and strong in Australia, but its expression is changing.  So too in politics, groups like GetUp! have become the megachurches of our political landscape mobilising tens of thousands for every campaign they run – while in our depleted ALP branches, the poor branch secretary faithfully  carries on, like a church organist playing to a row of empty pews.

Politics is about power, and progressive politics can never be just about exercising the power of government while we are in office. It must always be about distributing power more evenly in society – which means reducing the power of elites and empowering communities. In the words of the father of community organising, Saul Alinsky, in 1971: “Change comes from power, and power comes from organisation. In order to act people must get together.” This is not about the formalities of membership – it is about actually organising people on the ground to work together.

In the modern Labor Party, we rarely think of politics in terms of building power by building movements – we are so preoccupied with the immediate tactics of electoral politics and a state-centred model of achieving change. We need to broaden our approach. Our strategies need to engage people in our political battles, instead of operating only at elite levels – a lesson particularly highlighted by climate change policy in our first term in office. The way we operate now, we don’t even ask the question how we might mobilise a movement around big reform challenges, because we’re so accustomed to thinking that change comes from the top down. After the defeat of British Labour in 1931, R. H.Tawney argued in his essay The Choice Before the Labour Party that Labour, “when it ought to have called people to a long and arduous struggle, it too often did the opposite. It courted them with hopes of cheaply won benefits… It demanded too little and offered too much.” Perhaps that is true of Australian Labor, 80 years later.

As the party’s 2010 election review recommended, we should look closely at what we can learn from community organising about how we might engage and mobilise people for change. Saul Alinsky’s efforts in Chicago in the 1930s began America’s rich history of organising, and it continues across the US today. In the last ten years, Britain has seen the success of London Citizens and groups in northern England. British Labour is engaging with this model – Ed Miliband recently brought on board Britain’s champion of organising, Maurice Glasman, to advance the agenda in response to the UK Conservatives’ Big Society initiative. A new Australian initiative, the Sydney Alliance, is also in its early stages.

Community organising is not merely a tactic – it involves a patient, long-term process of developing local leaders and acting on priorities chosen by local communities, to advance the common good. It means helping local communities rebuild their community life and seeking to overcome the alienation and disconnectedness of modern life. Combine strong community networks with the rapid mobilisation potential of online technologies, and you could begin to restore people’s faith in the capacity of politics to deliver real change. It is happening elsewhere – witness the success of popular movements that have successfully mobilised mass public support for anti-corruption laws in Brazil and India during the past year.

Rebuilding our community base is part of the larger challenge of rebuilding Australia’s progressive infrastructure with a plurality of organisations and institutions. Just as the dominance of big department stores has been diluted by a much more diffuse and competitive retail sector, the centrality of major political parties is being diluted by a more diverse political landscape. The Labor Party can no longer embody all the progressive aspirations of Australians. Many people will feel a stronger attachment to the Greens, to progressive campaigning groups like GetUp! and to single issue groups. Especially when Labor is on the nose with the public, we need to reach out to this broader progressive base that may do a better job than us in mobilising people and making the case for change.

In thinking of how we strengthen Australia’s progressive infrastructure, we could learn from the way American progressives have built up their infrastructure during the past decade – with progressive media, think tanks, advocacy organisations, research capacity, strategic analysis and leadership development. Better communications strategy has been a priority, based on the recognition that since the Reagan era conservatives had reframed many debates through a disciplined, energetic communications strategy. At the leading progressive think-tank, the Center for American Progress, half the organisation’s resources are devoted to its communications capability. CAP drives the daily rapid response from progressive organisations to the hugely powerful conservative media, and it sets the benchmark for effective campaigning by Democrat candidates.

A progressive Australian future relies a stronger progressive infrastructure than what we have today, and it requires more than just renewal of the Labor Party. We must scale up the nascent think-tank infrastructure. We need to generate greater diversity in the media to counter the growing dominance of conservative voices, just as we did with Labor newspapers a century ago. We need to invest in leadership development programs. We need to continue the renewal of the union movement. And we must improve collaboration across the different parts of the progressive movement. These are all components in winning future elections – and just as importantly, ensuring that we can achieve change when we win.

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Tim Dixon is Senior Fellow at purpose.com in New York, a home for 21^st century movement-building. From 2005 to 2010 he was speechwriter and senior economic adviser to Prime Ministers Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd and Opposition Leader Kim Beazley.