Australian Labor has finally joined the death throes of centre-left social democratic parties everywhere. Our primary vote has been trending down for decades. We may be in government federally, with arguably one of the most able governments in Australian history; we may still be one of the most enduring laborist parties on the planet, but the decay of our base, if not reversed, could be terminal.

In ten years, Australia could have no coherent left able to win government. As this country faces the polycrises of climate change, geopolitical transformation and economic failure, the Left could consist of Labor and Green rumps and a circus of cultural socialists. On the side of Capital will be big money and cultural fascists relying on populism to recruit their storm troops.

Many are cheering the death of two-party politics, blind to the weakness of coalition governments around the world. Dream on post-materialist radicals: your fluidity serves to preserve the status quo and can’t challenge economic power.

What Labor party people know is that there are only two sides: Labour and Capital, and that Capital is always the winner unless Labour can mobilise to build the institutions for it to trickle down.

The collapse of liberal democracy into reactive populism maps the ascendancy of neoliberalism and the excess wealth accumulation and elite overproduction it funded. We are now in a state of polycrisis, and we have lost our weapons to resist.

By the time the baby boomers depart, the world’s population will have more than trebled just in their lifetimes. Societies are captive to global economic and technological changes that reach every corner of the world. Global adult literacy has doubled since 1950 to almost 90% today; university education has become a mass global system, with more than 90% of universities being built since 1949. Participation rates in once poor countries are over 50%.

The jobs and opportunities for all those graduates have not kept up, both in developed and developing countries. There is a surplus of credentialed young people who find themselves shut out of the careers and relevance they expected, and with that, the incomes and security that could purchase a home.

The ABS tells us that 44 per cent of Australian adults are functionally illiterate and therefore cannot participate fully, as is their right, in public life and the economy. Only 30 per cent of the population reads newspapers and consumes TV and radio news, all of which is meant to be filtered by editorial standards. Education and cultural capital have become a painful wedge between those who have the words and skills to participate and those who haven’t, and this is one of modern politics’ greatest challenges.

The old industrial working class that built the labour movement has been replaced by automation. Workers no longer work in places where they can build solidarity—their mobilisation has to be virtual. Today’s unionists are predominantly female and ‘white collar’ and taxpayers pay their salaries. They are the lucky ones with union coverage for their wages and conditions.

Outside government employment, most people are in an informal economy where they are on their own. The old outsiders are joined by new outsiders, a white-collar precariat, who find themselves in the same boat as the old proletariat—shut out of a secure future and a home. They have been pushed across the class divide between Capital and Labour; they are what used to be called declassé—culturally middle class, materially working class.

The third divide is generational, the under 45s, and these are the people that Labor needs to take this country into the future. They are highly politicised but distrust political parties. Anton Jäger sees our time in the developed west as one of Hyperpolitics, where we have ‘extreme politicisation without political consequences’. From the Arab Spring, to the 99%, to the Black Lives Matter, to Extinction Rebellion, to the Yellow Vests, it has been mass mobilisation that ‘struts and frets its hour upon the stage/and is heard no more’. 

There is rage, analysis, intensity, even violence, but there is no channeling of that rage into political institutions to contest power, win it and act. The political rage is not disciplined into effective action, a discipline that involves party structures to debate, research, refine, negotiate and land upon a way forward. They see politics as a closed system, dominated by a political class of careerists who too often have chosen the right parents. They need Labor, but the fault is not entirely theirs. Labor needs to change.

Now take hold of the half-full glass. Unlike most other liberal democracies, we have an actual, functioning party of the left, kept grounded by the union movement. The Democratic Party in the US is a vast campaign machine, but it is not a real party with structures to take ideas forward to the leadership. The UK Labour Party has survived because of its laborist purpose and local roots despite serious inherent class and cultural conflict.  

Being a delegate at the ALP National Conference teaches you a lot. This last National Conference in Adelaide was mocked for not having open fights on the floor. But behind the scenes delegates argued and negotiated with Ministerial advisors to refine a platform document that had already gone through multiple levels of consultation with party policy committees, regular members and unions; which had weathered lobbyists and factional biases and had been subjected to severe realpolitik of whether the time was right, our enemies would not blow up our best-laid plans, and above all, whether it would pass the pub test.

If lobbyists are hassling ministers and their staff, so too are unions and horizontal organising groups like Labor for Refugees and LEAN. Complex issues cannot be debated in 3-minute jousts on the floor of conference, however eloquent. Conference puts the finishing touch with the final amendments from delegates. And the 2026 platform is a Labor one, that fights for those who only can only exercise power together: its first chapter is ‘An economy that works for everyone’.

Labor is one of the few governing political parties with a structure that enables policy ideas to be initiated from the bottom up, from the side across, and from the top down. LEAN is the outstanding success story of horizontal campaigning that reaches across the whole country. The media and outsiders are cynical about this, but they are wrong. They simply don’t understand that a political movement is a complex managed argument. It will always have divisions and differences, and one of those within the ranks is AUKUS.

The Labor Party is made up of around 60,000 voices that come from every walk of life and from all over the country. It’s a living organism. Its rules and structures enable these voices to interact, argue, debate—a sifting mechanism to find a consensus that will work politically. But if the party respected its members’ democratic rights to vote in pre-selections, like the Canberra branches do under the AEC, its national membership might be like the ACT’s—1 per cent of the whole electorate, that is over 300,000 nationally.

The party’s rules are like the law of the land that preserves order. Inevitably people break them and try to work around them. The results may profit individuals in the short term, but the damage is long term in the quality of political candidates and leadership. This internal war squanders a lot of oxygen, especially among young members.

Yes, Labor could recruit more members because a big party builds herd immunity against perverse minority interests and expands its social capital. Yes, it could respect branch members rather than simply use them for donations and campaign fodder. Yes, it could train its up-and-coming members better in political skills and knowledge. Yes, it could open branch meetings to more discussion from the floor. Yes, it could involve branches in policy committee discussions. Yes, it could do more to educate members and the public about politics and Labor: education was always Labor’s key mission, and the unions still do it.

Labor could make itself a force within civil society and local communities. It could win back public trust and affection by reaching out rather than retreating into factional cliques. And it could blow away the persistent odour of dirty dealing by publicly reforming its pre-selections and major party elections. People want to believe in Labor. Members want to have a say. Currently it is look away, cough up, hand out and keep quiet.

Australian Labor is not short of ideas—it has them in spades. It’s also got some very good politicians. A magical new leader is not going to happen—even Gough and Bob can’t rise from the dead and Mamdani can’t be cloned. What we have is more than good enough. The problem is the pub test.

What we don’t have is a big enough movement that engages with the society around it. It is the party members who in everyday life communicate and live Labor values and ideas in the pub. Branch members want to do more, but they feel stifled by the secrecy and exclusiveness of the factions. We are ostensibly a mass party that is controlled by an elite.

In Victoria that is just four faceless men. Most branch members have never heard of the Stability Pact that decides the division of power. Enabling them are dutiful factional servants, protecting their personal slot in the pipeline for pre-selection: keep the tribes fighting among themselves, police their numbers, and you too could be bumped into parliament.

Labor can only be as bold as voters will let it be. Jim Chalmers unleashed the first steps of his big structural reform agenda in the last budget, and the vested interests are howling. The enemies of progressive change are formidable and cashed up. Labor needs a great army of Labor people, to argue our case in the pub. So, if you are disaffected, stop complaining, come back, pick up your half-full glass.

If Labor dies, it will be our fault, and we will have abandoned the future to the bad guys.

“People don’t have free will when they make history, but they make history nonetheless.”

   — Rosa Luxemburg, written in prison in 1915.

Janet McCalman, October 2027 

Janet McCalman AC is a life member of both the ALP and the Victorian Fabians. She has been a delegate to state and national conferences and convenes the Labor Academy, founded by the late Race Mathews. She is an award-winning social historian.