The Australian Labor Government 1983-1993 : Strategies for maintaining office

Abstract

There has been much discussion and comment on the development of the Australian Labor Party in recent decades. From this there has emerged a basic agreement among commentators that the contemporary Labor Party is no longer the Labor Party in its original sense. The Labor Party today is even very different from the Labor Party, let us say, of the 1960s. Dean Jaensch (1989a: 21-22) insists that since the late 1960s the Labor Party has increasingly shifted to the model which Kirchheimer called a "catch-all" party. It is becoming progressively more pragmatic and responsive rather than expressive, and is placing much less emphasis on ideology, membership, organisational solidarity and expression. Since 1967, for instance, the Labor Party has been involved in considerable introspection and some changes, involving departures from traditional ideology and policy positions and fundamental changes to its internal structures and processes. These developments are still continuing. They received their initial momentum from the Whitlam government, which launched reforms in almost all sectors, and culminated in the period of the Hawke and Keating governments.