The politics of a permeable coalition : the Australian Labor Party 1955-1972

Abstract

An examination of the structure of the Australian Labor Party, a general view of its history and a knowledge of what others have written about organisations yields hypotheses about the likely influences on decisionmaking by the Federal bodies of the ALP in three specific areas. The thirteen hypotheses relate to various strivings within the party and to a number of possible external influences upon it. The hypotheses are tested in three case studies which concern unity tickets in trade union elections, 1955-61, state aid to non-state schools, 1963-66, and foreign and defence policy, especially in relation to Vietnam, 1966-67. The case studies yield three more hypotheses about how the party makes decisions. These further hypotheses incorporate concepts which have been found useful in studies by others of decisionmaking in other organisations but which rarely have been applied to political parties, as they are here. As well as testing the hypotheses, the thesis draws general conclusions about the effects both of the party's structure and conventions and of its susceptibility to external influences upon its ability to make decisions. It also suggests how the way the party made decisions affected its ability to survive as an organisation. The central argument of the thesis is that, during the period under consideration, 1955 to 1972, and perhaps always, the need to keep the coalition together by making concessions to sub-coalitions is just as important a consideration for decisionmakers as is the need to produce electoral policy and that the former need will affect all the party's important decisionmaking. Finally, the thesis examines a number of attempts at organisational reform which attempted to by-pass the parts of the structure mainly concerned with coalition-maintenance, in order to make electoral policies on their merits as vote winners and as solutions to problems in the community. It is argued that by-passing was based on a particular political strategy which became associated with E.G. Whitlam, that this strategy incorporated an incomplete view of the nature of politics and that the party's future development requires the closer identification of electoral policy with the internal politics of the party.