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A review
The People’s Choice
Electoral Politics in 20th century NSW
Three vols. Edited by Michael Hogan and David Clune
Published by the Parliament of NSW, 2001
By Bob Gould
These three volumes are extremely elegant. As a professional
bookseller, who also happens to be a political agitator, researcher,
writer and ideologue, I generally distinguish between books as objects,
and books for my own research and consumption. The elegant books as
objects I tend to treat as tradeable commodities, and have quite a
serious interest in them from that angle, but my own personal
collection of 20,000 or so reading and working books, are anything but
books as objects. I tend to keep the most battered copy for my own use,
and flog the ones in better condition.
Occasionally, books come along which are useful from the point
of
view of my core interests, and are beautiful objects as well. An
earlier example of such a book is Shirley Fitzgerald’s useful history
of Sydney. The three volumes I am discussing here, combine spectacular
design, and visual excitement (achieved by incorporating a kind of
cartoonists account of NSW politics, and other first class
illustrations), with enormous utility, for the serious student of
politics, class and social relations.
The only defect, as the editors acknowledge, is the lack of
coloured
maps of election results, and no list of results seat by seat, for
which they refer you to the useful book by B.D. Graham. Maybe the
Parliament of NSW could also afford a supplementary volume updating
Graham, and including detailed coloured maps of results. Such a four
volume set would be a delight indeed, and an enormously useful research
tool.
The evolving demographics of NSW politics in the 20th
century.
Significant changes, but surprising elements of continuity, in the
interface of social class, ethnicity and politics, particularly in the
division between the Labor and conservative sides of electoral politics
It is possible to get a vivid insight into the social dynamics
of
life and politics in NSW, if one considers the evidence from the
electoral sphere, assembled in “The People’s Choice”, alongside, and in
dynamic interaction with, Shirley Fitzgerald’s and Peter Spearritt’s
useful books on Sydney, and, most importantly, with the indispensable,
and reasonably accessible Social Atlases and other summary statistical
publications, produced for the last twenty years or so, by the
extremely efficient Australian Bureau of Census and Statistics. These
Bureau publications give you an insight into occupational structure,
ethnicity, age, income and other issues. It is necessary to bring all
these factors into relationship with each other, to get a useful
picture. Happily, a serious overview of "People's Choice", the
Fitzgerald and Spearritt books, and the Census Bureau publications,
makes such an inquiry possible.
In my view, most discussion of political trends, elections,
and
popular sociology, in the media, in universities, and on the political
left, is hopelessly superficial. Such discussion almost never addresses
the interface between the above network of factors. A good example of
this superficiality is the current discussion of the question of
so-called “aspirational voters”. Demagogues like Mark Latham and Alex
Sanchez, and their supporters in the bourgeois media, seize on an
apparent phenomenon, which they claim is new, to justify proposals
which would move the labor movement dramatically to the right. However,
when you examine the phenomenon of “aspirational voters”, it is in fact
one of the oldest issues in NSW electoral politics, and is always, and
has always been, mediated by occupational location, ethnicity, religion
and other factors. In "People's Choice" the conservative electoral
alignment of outer suburban areas, at some points in the political
cycle, is documented, for different periods. In a number of
illuminating tables. "People's Choice" also documents that these outer
suburban areas have swung as solidly to Labor at other points of the
cycle, than they have to the Liberals in the 1996 and 2001 Federal
elections. “Aspirational voters” in these outer suburban areas,
actually swung to Labor in the most spectacular way of all, in four
very different contexts, the first Lang Depression election in 1930
(partly because of Lang’s populist radicalism), in 1941 (despite a
three-way split in the labor movement), in the 1953 election, and in
the “Wranslide” of 1981. These outer suburban seats largely swung to
Labor in the 1999 State election, though not as sharply as in the other
four instances.
Major electoral landmarks in NSW
"People's Choice" commences with the 1901 election. It is
ironic that one major factor in this election was Australia’s
involvement in a foreign war, that of British Imperialism against the
Boers in South Africa. Jingoes attacked one Labor leader, W.A. Holman,
because of his opposition to the Boer War, but he held the country seat
of Grenfell despite the “patriotic” brouhaha. It is ironic that as we
run up to the first state election of the new century, one of the
background issues could conceivably be Australia’s involvement in the
war, of the now dominant American Imperialism, on Iraq. Tories in
Australia have the dogged habit of sending Australians off to die in
the foreign wars, of the dominant world imperialism. "People's Choice"
also records the opposition of the Catholic Cardinal, Daniel Moran, to
the Boer War, and the cutting edge which this gave to the then
underlying sectarian divide in NSW politics, with Catholics on the
Labor or Protectionist side, and Protestant bigots on the conservative
side. The opposition of Protestant bigots to alcohol, gambling and most
sports, tended to sharpen these cultural divisions.
The striking thing about the 1901 election is the smallness of
the
electorate. In 1901, NSW, and most Australian states, had a broader
franchise than most other countries in the world, and Australia was
noted for its early extension of the franchise. Nevertheless, by modern
standards, this franchise was still extremely limited. Voting was
confined to male British subjects over 21. You had to go through a very
elaborate procedure to get on the roll, and claim a voting right, which
operated against itinerant workers and many others. Voting was not
compulsory. Of the 1,354,846 NSW population, only 298,673 were on the
roll, and only 196,514 voted. Labor got 36,427 or 18.68 per cent of the
vote, to win 24 seats, of the 125 available. The Labor votes were
concentrated in overwhelmingly proletarian inner Sydney seats, where
nearly a third of the population were Irish Catholics, in mining seats
in Newcastle and the Illawarra, and in some country areas, mainly
inland wheat farming or pastoral areas (usually, again, places with an
unusually high proportion of Catholics).
Census and Statistics Bureau information for this early period
is
rather sketchy, but Shirley Fitzgerald has documented the class
composition of Inner Sydney. Her very valuable early book, “Rising
Damp” has a mine of information on the class composition of Sydney,
painstakingly gathered from a variety of sources. In 1901, the CBD of
Sydney had an enormous residential population, and a very, very crowded
one, most of whom were industrial workers in the light industries
around the city, and many of whom worked on the waterfront. There were
ten electoral seats concentrated around and in the CBD, and they mostly
had overwhelming Labor majorities.
Women’s suffrage
The electoral roll for the 1904 election more than doubled to
689,490, with the introduction of women’s suffrage. The Labor vote went
up to 23 per cent, so there is no indication that women voted more
conservatively then men. The sectarian mobilisation of conservative
Protestants continued, which pushed Catholics even more towards the
Labor Party. The sectarian issue became even sharper in the 1907
election, with the Protestant wowsers mobilising against Labor, under
the rubric of opposing “Rum, Romanism, Socialism and Gambling”, but the
Labor vote gave another leap to 33 per cent. Finally, in 1910, after a
decade in which the new institution of industrial arbitration, and
other factors, had contributed to a mushrooming of trade unions, to
include a very large part of the working population, the Labor vote
leapt to 49 per cent of an electorate of 867,695, despite non
compulsory voting, and the continuing Protestant mobilisation against
Labor. Labor still did not make much headway in the outer suburban
areas (the “aspirational voters”), but it won the Illawarra and
Newcastle mining seats, and it made gains in the country. In 1910 Labor
was able to form its first NSW government, with a majority of one.
Trade union predominance in the ALP takes clear shape. The
conscription split
From about 1910 onwards, the trade unions asserted themselves
more
and more in the ALP. From about 1915 they began to take effective
control of the ALP. The 1915 ALP Conference in NSW was the arena for an
intense conflict between the State Labor government of William Holman
and the trade unions. The bitter conflict over conscription brought all
the other conflicts to a head, and the unions organised jointly to
increase their power in the ALP and to discipline the Premier Holman
and the Prime Minister Hughes, with the conscription issue at the
cutting edge of this conflict. The initiative was taken by the
Australian Workers Union (AWU) which had emerged as the largest union.
The first big setback to Labor’s electoral rise was the
Conscription
Split of 1916, which cost Labor a NSW state government, as well as the
Federal government. In the subsequent 1917 NSW election, the split
State election, Labor was defeated, being reduced to 33 seats.
Nevertheless, despite the defection to the conservatives of State
Premier Holman, and Prime Minister Hughes, Labor retained 43 per cent
of the vote, despite the jingoistic atmosphere of the First World War.
As was to become usual in swings against Labor, Labor lost most seats
in the bush and the suburbs, but it still held the Illawarra and
Newcastle mining seats, and its inner City industrial seats, which
still had a larger than average proportion of Catholics.
1920s Labor recovery
In 1920, the conservatives decided to introduce a system of
proportional representation in the Lower House, with electorates of
five members in the City, and three in the bush. Much to the surprise
of the conservatives, this new system benefited Labor, because it
evened out the effect of the large concentration of Labor votes in
industrial areas. In many industrial areas, Labor got three or four
seats, and even in the outer suburbs, and the Sydney North Shore, it
got at least one. The Labor vote only went up about 1 per cent from
1917, but it achieved government under John Storey, with a majority of
one, with the support of a Socialist Labor independent from Broken
Hill, Percy Brookfield. (Brookfield set as the price of his support for
the Storey government, that the government had to find a formula for
the release of the twelve IWW prisoners framed in 1917 by the
conservative government, on the allegation that they were trying to
burn down Sydney. Storey found a formula, and the necessary judge for a
royal commission, and the IWW men were released to scenes of much labor
movement emotion. See Sydney’s Burning by Ian Turner.)
The configuration of NSW politics remained similar throughout
the
1920s. Proportional representation was ditched by the conservative
Government which was elected in 1922. Labor got 38.5 per cent of the
vote in 1922, 46 per cent in 1925 (producing the election of the first
Lang Government), and 45 per cent in 1927. (In this election the Lang
Government was defeated.) Throughout the 1920s there was a further
conservative Protestant mobilisation against Labor, with the added
curiosity that Jack Lang, the State Labor parliamentary leader, was
painted as a tool of both “Romanism” and the “Trades Hall Reds”, who
had, after the success of the Russian Revolution, become the other
bogey of conservative politics.
Compulsory voting
In 1929, a rationally self-interested combination between
Labor and
the Country Party, led to the adoption of compulsory voting. By now the
electorate had increased to 1,440,785. The electoral arrangements had
become much less restrictive, and a common roll existed, without the
necessity of getting a voter’s right, once you were on the roll. (The
percentage voting shot up from 82.54 per cent to 94.94 per cent. From
the introduction of compulsory voting, the standard voting return in
NSW came to be between 95 per cent and 97 per cent, which is the
highest in the world, in marked contrast with the United States, where
about half those eligible are on the role, and of these only 70 per
cent vote. In non compulsory Britain the voter turnout is usually far
lower than Australia, and has dropped recently into the fifty percents.)
The
Labor vote in NSW shot up to 55 per cent, and the second Lang
Government was elected, in the teeth of the blizzard of the developing
world Depression. Labor won most of the outer suburban seats and many
country seats.
Depression turbulence
Lang attempted to defend and protect the people of NSW from
the
worst impact of the Depression, but he did so in a limited electoralist
way, being not inclined to lead the social revolution required in the
circumstances of the Depression. As a result he was chopped to pieces,
politically speaking, in the turbulent political cross currents of the
period. He remained an enormously popular figure personally, however.
In 1932 the Tory Governor, Phillip Game summarily dismissed Lang’s
Government, and in an orgy of conservative mobilisation, Labor was
defeated in the subsequent election. The pattern was similar to the
1917 Conscription Split election. Labor lost all its seats in the bush,
all its seats in the suburbs, but held on in the mining seats around
Newcastle, the Illawarra, and the inner suburban industrial seats.
Nevertheless, the Labor vote remained pretty high. The Lang party got
40.2 per cent of the vote. The breakaway Federal Labor Party got 4.25
per cent, and the Communist Party got 0.92 per cent. The combined labor
movement vote was 45.37 per cent. Once again, the decisive swing
against Labor was amongst the “aspirational voters” in the suburbs. The
1935 and 1938 elections followed a similar pattern. The combined State
Labor, Federal Labor and Communist vote went up to 49.93 per cent in
1935, but slipped back to 39.28 per cent in 1938.
The 1941 McKell state election. The beginning of NSW Labor
electoral hegemony, which continued until 1965.
The 1941 election was one of the most interesting and
significant in
NSW history. With the onset of the Second World War, the conservative
forces in Australian politics were in disarray, and a popular mood
developed for Labor governments. At the moment of the state election,
the Lang group, by now a minority in the ALP, were part of the Official
ALP, but the majority of the state ALP executive, which had come under
the organisational influence of the Communist Party, split away, to
form a new party in that NSW election, the “State Labor Party”. (In the
Federal election, which happened very close to the state election,
there was actually a three-way split, in which Official Labor got about
40 per cent, Lang Labor got about 10 per cent and the Communist led
“State Labor Party” got about 4 per cent. Despite this three-way split,
the Curtin Federal Labor government was comfortably elected on the
preferences of the other two Labor groups.)
In the state election, one feature, was the careful selection,
by
McKell, the new State ALP parliamentary leader, of country Labor
candidates, who were prominent figures in their local area, “horses for
courses”. There was a massive swing to Labor. In an enrollment of
1,684,781, Labor got 50.79 per cent, “State Labor” got 5.64 per cent,
Independent Labor got 2.27 per cent, and in terms of seats, after
preferences from State Labor and Independent Labor, there was an
overwhelming Labor parliamentary majority. Labor won all the
significant industrial seats throughout the state, and a majority of
country and suburban seats. A similar pattern was repeated in 1944 and
1947, though not quite so pronounced as in 1941. In 1950, there was a
swing against Labor, but Labor held on to government narrowly. The
combined Labor, Independent Labor, and Communist vote was 50.5 per
cent. In 1953, however, there was a dramatic swing back to Labor, with
the Labor vote going up to 55.02 per cent and a Communist vote of 1.38
per cent. In The People's Choice the following table is
presented of the 1950 and 1953 elections, which is revealing.
Region Seats won by Labor
1960 1953
Inner Sydney 9/9 7/7
Sydney suburbs 17*/39 24/41
Western country 9*/19 21/19
Central country 0/12 0/12
Mining-industrial 13/15 13/15
* Includes one independent Labor
The elections in 1956, 1959 and 1962 were all elections in
which
Labor hung on to office, with between 49 per cent and 51 per cent of
the preferred vote. These elections were affected by two new factors,
the great Labor Split, and the demographic impact of mass migration,
which combined with the tendency of the Anglo and Catholic working
class to move to the suburbs, including the outer suburbs. This period
also included the first beginnings of the phenomenon of gentrification
in inner City areas, which in Sydney commenced in Paddington. Shirley
Fitzgerald’s Sydney book, Peter Spearritts Sydney book, and the
spin-off books on Sydney’s suburbs, all describe these processes well.
The Labor Split in NSW was comparatively contained, by contrast with
the massive split in Queensland and Victoria. The break-away, Catholic
dominated DLP, only got a smallish vote, between 2 per cent and 4 per
cent. It appealed mainly to middle class, upwardly socially mobile
Catholics in suburban areas. The DLP was a dramatic break with past ALP
breakaways, like “Lang Labor” and “State Labor”, most of whose
preferences went back to Labor. The overwhelming majority of DLP
preferences went to the Liberals, which was a small contributing factor
to the closeness of some of the elections in this period, but not
decisively so, because the DLP vote was comparatively small compared to
other states. In the event, the only one of these elections where the
DLP vote made the critical difference was the 1965 election, which
brought the ALP electoral hegemony in NSW to an end, and which the
Coalition won very narrowly.
The effect of changing demographics. The impact of mass
migration
on electoral politics, and the influence of the first beginnings of
inner urban gentrification
Post-war mass migration in Australia commenced in a
substantial way
in 1947. It included initially a significant British component, but the
new feature for Australia was the substantial Non English Speaking
Background (NESB) component. Post War mass migration began to have a
major impact on NSW electoral politics from about 1950 onwards, and the
impact of migration on electoral politics has expanded exponentially
since the 1950s.
The first wave of NESB mass migration was from Greece, Italy,
Malta,
Holland, Germany, and other European countries. The Greeks and Italians
largely voted Labor. The Eastern Europeans voted Liberal, and most
other nationalities split on similar lines to the existing Australian
electorate. In inner city industrial suburbs, like Marrickville, Surry
Hills, Leichhardt and Bankstown, the new migrant populations largely
replaced the Anglo and Irish Catholic populations, who moved to the
outer suburbs, but these inner suburban seats remained safe Labor
seats, because the bulk of the migrants who settled in them were as
loyal to the Labor side of politics as the people they replaced. In the
Australian context, new migrants rapidly became unionised, and their
social location at the bottom of the economic tree, predisposed them to
the Labor side of electoral politics, in a similar way to the Irish
Catholics of previous generations The 1950s, the 1960s, and the 1970s
were the high point of Australian trade unionism, and trade union
density peaked in the late 1970s at over 50 per cent of the workforce.
For this whole period recent migrants were an enormous proportion of
the unionised section of the working class, although they had less
representation and impact at the level of union leadership, above the
point of shop steward. Migrants were an increasing and significant
proportion of shop stewards.
In the 1950s, the 1960s, and the 1970s the pattern developed,
that inner suburban areas of dense recent NESB settlement, were also
areas with a higher than average proportion of trade unionists, and
were overwhelmingly safe Labor seats.
The beginnings of inner urban gentrification
The first gentrification in Australia commenced in the inner
Sydney
suburb of Paddington, at that time largely inhabited by industrial
workers, who lived in pleasant old terrace houses, originally built for
the middle classes in the 1880s.
The gentrification in Paddington wreaked its toll on the Labor
side of politics, and the colourful waterfront identity, tally clerk
Tom Morey, eventually lost his seat of Bligh to the Liberals, as the
waterfront and other workers in Paddington sold their pleasant terraces
to rich professionals, the beginnings of a trend which was to
eventually have considerable demographic and electoral impact, in other
inner City areas. Tom Morey (who was a mate of mine) actually hung on
an election or two, against this trend, through the force of his
personality, and the colourful nature of his campaigning.
It is important to note that this early gentrification took
place in a suburb very convenient to the City, where the housing stock
largely consisted of down-at-heel, but basically very functional, and
potentially elegant and spectacular terrace houses. (One of the oddball
ironies of Sydney history is that the wonderful old terrace house in
Heely Street, Paddington, which was for his whole period in parliament,
both the home and electoral office of Eddie Ward, the redoubtable
leader of the left in the Labor Party in the federal parliament, is now
the home and office of the born-again right wing ideologue, Keith
Windschuttle.)
At this early stage of gentrification, the professionals who
bought the houses, were overwhelmingly traditional Liberal voters, and
the wide extension of university education into significant sections of
the working class, had not seriously commenced. The development of a
statistically important section of tertiary educated people, who
supported Labor or the Greens electorally, was something that developed
in a later period, and commenced with the radicalisation stemming from
opposition to the Vietnam War in the middle 1960s. In the earlier
period, the impact of gentrification was to swing seats away from Labor
to the Coalition.
Liberals win the 1965 elections
The 1965 elections were the end of an era. In the atmosphere
of
jingo hysteria at the beginnings of the Vietnam War, the Liberals
narrowly won the 1965 election. Nevertheless, the Labor vote remained
reasonably high, at 43.3 per cent, the Communist vote was 0.64 per
cent, the DLP vote was 2.11 per cent and Labor still held the inner
suburban industrial seats, the Newcastle and Illawarra mining seats,
and a number of suburban and country seats. The number on the roll was
now 2,256,568. The result in the 1968 election was almost exactly the
same, percentage-wise as 1965. In the 1971 election, the result was a
cliff-hanger, with the Labor vote going up to 47 per cent, but the
Liberals scraped back into government. In 1973 it slipped back to 43
per cent, but a new phenomenon was the emergence of the Australia
Party, the predecessor to the Democrats, who got 4.21 per cent, and a
large proportion of whose preferences went to Labor. The basic NSW and
Australian electoral pattern re-asserted itself in this period. The
impact of mass migration changed the form slightly, but not the
fundamentals of this pattern. All the areas of high concentrations of
industrial workers and unionists, in Sydney, Newcastle and Illawarra,
tended to be safe Labor seats, with the new element that these seats in
Sydney and the Illawarra were coincidentally seats with a high
concentration of NESB migrants. Labor also held a number of suburban
seats, and a number of country seats. The swing seats tended to be a
couple of seats of inner city gentrification, and outer suburban seats,
“aspirational voters” again.
It’s worth noting that during this whole period, the Labor
vote
remained quite high, even with Labor in opposition, and it’s not
difficult to detect that a pattern was emerging in which two factors
combined to shore up the Labor vote. One was the tendency of the last
group of migrants off the plane to vote Labor, and the fairly rapid
growth of a substantial section of the, then exponentially exploding,
tertiary educated section of the population, to vote Labor, Democrat
and Green. This period saw the demise of the DLP as the ostensible
centre party of Australian politics, directing its preferences to the
Liberals, and its replacement by the Democrats, and eventually the
Greens as the ostensible centre parties, with the majority of their
preferences going to Labor. The Greens, in particular, have skilfully
achieved the situation where they get a large vote to the left of the
ALP, but also get some votes from people, who seem to locate the Greens
between Labor and Liberal.
The use of a modernised Marxist sociology to illuminate
electoral patterns
The People’s Choice is an extraordinarily useful book
in
every way that pertains to the history of electoral politics in NSW,
but it obviously does not attempt to go to deeply into the sociology of
this electoral history, which it recounts so vividly. To properly
interpret and understand the broader implications of this narrative, it
is useful to have a sociological standpoint, and to bring to bear the
Bureau of Census and Statistics information, on the electoral pattern.
In another essay, one polemicising about the “New Class” rhetoric of
some right wing pundits, I develop a rudimentary sociological model of
modern Australian society.
The two most useful census documents for this inquiry are Australian
Social Trends 1999 and the Social Atlas for each capital
city, and I will use the 1996 Sydney Social Atlas as my working
example. On page 83 of Social Trends 1999
you get the ABS classification of qualifications.which divides post
school qualifications into the following five: “bachelor degree and
above”, “undergraduate diploma”, “associate diploma”, “skilled
vocational qualification”, “basic vocational qualification”. For
purposes of describing people who have a university degree or
equivalent, it seems sensible to group the first two together as
representing a university degree. In the first census where degrees
were tabulated, 1966, 1.5 per cent of the population over 15 years had
degrees. In 1976, 3 per cent had degrees. By 1996, Katharine Betts
gives the figure of 10.2 per cent, but she seems to be wrong, as the
Bureau gives the figure of 12.8 per cent. In addition, the Bureau give
a figure of 8.8 per cent for people with undergraduate diplomas and
associate diplomas together. For simplicity’s sake, we may assume half
the 8.8 per cent for each category, which means that in 1996, according
to the Bureau, approximately 17.2 per cent of the adult population had
a university degree. By 1998, according to the Bureau, the figure had
become 14.5 per cent plus 7.9 per cent, which takes the number with a
university degree up to 18.4 per cent of the adult population, a very
high figure indeed.
Another framework useful in relation to the educational
qualifications of the population, are the figures for the raw number of
tertiary students. In 1912, when the Australian population was 4.5
million, there were a tiny 3,672 tertiary students. In 1938, when the
population was approximately 6.5 million, students were still a tiny
12,126. In 1966, when the population was 11.7 million, the number of
students had risen to 91,272. Thirty years later, when the population
had increased about 50 per cent, to about 18 million, the number of
tertiary students had soared seven fold to 634,094.
Women predominate amongst graduates in the health, education,
and society and culture fields
In the Census Bureau’s documentation there is a very detailed
breakdown of “People with post-school qualifications, by type of
qualification” by both age and sex. They reveal a very sharp increase
in the number of women with university qualifications, who now number
about the same as men, and who are concentrated in such areas as
teaching, the health industry, social work and also, to some degree, in
commerce and business. The number of female primary teachers went up
between 1988 and 1998 from 71.7 per cent to 77.5 per cent. The number
of female secondary teachers went up from 48.3 per cent to 53.5 per
cent, and the number of women teaching in higher education went up from
27.3 per cent to 35.1 per cent.
In 1996 227,000 people had bachelor degrees or higher in
business
and administration. 35.7 per cent of them were women. 213,600 had
university degrees in health. 66.2 per cent of them were women. 357,800
had university degrees in the delightful ABS classification called
“Society and Culture”, defined as “Economics, law, behaviour, welfare,
languages, religion and philosophy, librarianship, visual and
performing arts, geography, communication, recreation and leisure, and
policing”. 54.8 per cent of them were women. In engineering, however,
with 120,100 only 8.4 per cent were women.
The great numerical explosion of people with university
degrees was a product of the Whitlam period educational reforms.
The extremely useful “Australian Social Trends 1999” book has
a
detailed breakdown of the age composition of people with university
degrees. Part of this table is reproduced here.
Proportions with degrees, 1996
Age Bachelor degree Associate or
or higher % undergraduate
diploma %
Males 15-24 4.2 2.4
25-24 14.6 5.9
35-44 16.2 6.9
45-54 13.5 7.0
55+ 6.6 4.4
Total 10.8 5.2
Females 15-24 6.8 4.6
25-24 16.6 8.5
35-44 15.3 9.5
45-54 10.7 8.6
55+ 3.6 4.5
Total 10.1 6.9
The extraordinary increase in both men and women with degrees
in the
age group 25 to 54 clearly illustrates the magnitude of the explosion
of tertiary education from about 1974 onwards. This forcefully
underlines the very important point that this was the period when women
soared from being a very small portion of the people with university
degrees to rough numerical equality with men. It is fascinating to note
the rage of conservative mysoginists like Michael Thompson against the
Whitlam period of free education. Possibly the rough equality in
educational achievement gained by women in this period is one of the
features that infuriates them.
What emerges most strikingly from these statistics, is the
enormous growth in the proportion of the whole adult population with
university degrees. The very size and diversity of this group makes an
absurdity of the conservative rhetoric that they comprise, as a whole,
an elite “new class”. It is important to bring to bear other available
statistical information to get a picture of what is really the
Australian class formation at the moment and how this vastly increased
group of university graduates fit into it. This is where an
investigation of the information contained in the “Social Atlas” comes
in, particularly if you superimpose on this information, the fairly
elementary and obvious information provided by the statistics of
electoral behaviour in federal and state elections. The Social Atlas
tells you that people with degrees are heavily concentrated in Sydney
on the North Shore, most of the Eastern suburbs, and in a belt in the
inner Western suburbs. There are smaller concentrations in the
Sutherland shire, the Georges River area, and the Blue Mountains. If
you go, however, to the useful separate category that was provided in
the 1991 “Social Atlas”, called “Managers and Administrators”, you find
that this coincides almost exactly with the map of “high income
earners”. Both these maps, however, coincide only in part with the map
of people with university qualifications. Most of the people in the
southern part of the Eastern suburbs and in the Inner Western suburbs,
with university degrees, are thus neither “managers or administrators”
or “high income earners” as defined by the ABS. I submit that, quite
obviously, these graduates are by and large the ones working in
teaching, health, social work, etc. Coincidentally, the divide in
political voting behaviour is on almost exactly the same geographical
lines amongst graduates as the apparent geographical divide between
“high income earners” and “managers and administrators” and the rest of
the population. The southern Eastern suburbs and the Inner West vote
overwhelmingly Labor or Green etc. The North Shore, Wentworth, the
Georges River area, etc, all vote solidly Liberal. Any serious
investigation of all these statistical tools shows that a real
economic, political, and class division exists within the ranks of
university graduates, not between graduates and the rest of the
population.
Census information, combined with election results, gives a rough but
informative insight into the current Australian class structure.
The “Social Atlas” provides a wealth of useful information.
There are maps of the distribution of migrants of different
backgrounds, and these maps are very informative. Most non English
speaking migrants are concentrated in the Eastern suburbs, the Inner
Western suburbs, and the middle Western suburbs. The pattern of people
with trade qualifications is the obverse of the pattern of people with
university degrees. Many people with trade qualifications are
concentrated in the southern part of the Eastern suburbs and the
further Western suburbs, but quite a few are also concentrated in the
Sutherland shire and areas like Hornsby and the northern beaches. An
overview of all the statistical information available gives a breakdown
of the class structure of the Sydney population on broadly the
following lines.
At the very top of Australian society there is a powerful
ruling
class, which interlocks with a power elite, if you prefer that form of
words. This group is very small. It, however, exercises direct
ideological influence and hegemony over a broader group who show up in
the statistics as “managers and administrators” and “high income
earners”, and these two maps in the “Social Atlas” are almost
completely coincidental. For statistical purposes, it is useful to
group the core power elite and/or ruling class and the aforementioned
two groups, together, as statistical Group One.
Statistical Group Two are very distinctly represented in the
“Social
Atlas” by the section of the map of university graduates, who are
excluded from the map of “high income earners” and “managers and
administrators”. These lower paid university graduates comprise
university staff, teachers, health workers, many public servants, minor
bureaucrats in welfare organisations, and other such people. They are
concentrated heavily in the Inner Western suburbs and the southern part
of the Eastern suburbs. A very large number of these people are
upwardly mobile people of Irish Catholic or older European migrant
background, and include many people who don’t state a religious belief
in the census. They are overwhelmingly Labor voters, though some vote
for the Greens and the Democrats, in addition to the minority who vote
Liberal..
Statistical Group Three are the most diverse group. They are
scattered all over Sydney, except in the areas of very high incomes on
the North Shore, and in the northern Eastern suburbs. They include such
people as clerical workers, proprietors and workers in small retail
businesses, bank workers, computer workers, call centre workers and
finance industry workers. They also include many self employed
tradesmen. They range from low incomes to quite high incomes and are of
very diverse ethnicity, Anglo, Irish Catholic, European migrant and
even including self employed recent migrants. A significant part of
this group vote Labor, but some also vote Liberal, and the biggest
number of swinging voters is concentrated in this group. The ruling
class attempt to exercise ideological hegemony over this group,
particularly through television and the tabloid press, and a lot of the
current reactionary populism of the right is an attempt to influence
this group electorally.
Statistical Group Four include the blue collar section of the
working class and the unemployed. Though manufacturing industry has
declined somewhat, the blue collar section of the working class is
still a very decisive section of the population. This group is now
composed overwhelmingly of recent NESB migrants. This section of
society is concentrated in the middle Western suburbs, which are also
the areas of recent migrant concentration and relatively high
unemployment. This group overwhelmingly vote Labor in elections.
Even a cursory overview of the correlation between the
information
provided in the census publications and electoral results confirms the
general thrust of the above breakup and analysis. This four level
description of Australian society is realistic and useful for a variety
of purposes.
In my view, the dominant class division in Australian society
is
between the ruling class, with enormous economic and political power,
who exercise very great ideological influence and hegemony over the
“high income earner” and “managers and administrators” statistical
group one, and the rest of the population. This four level division of
Australian society holds for all the major capital cities and for the
Illawarra, Newcastle, Whyalla, Launceston and Geelong, with the
qualification that the smaller capitals and the provincial towns have a
much lower NESB component in Statistical Group Four, the blue collar
section of the working class. Rural and provincial Australia contains
some elements of this division, but a concrete analysis of rural and
provincial Australia has to incorporate a number of other factors, and
I will deal with rural and provincial Australia in another chapter of
this book.
The period 1976 to the year 2002
This was a period of significant changes in Australian
society, that
have a bearing on NSW electoral history. This period, from the fall of
the Whitlam government until now, saw the working out of a number of
trends. The composition of the Australian population changed
dramatically in ethnic terms. Australia as a whole, in 2002, has the
following kind of ethnic profile. Our 19.5 million people break down
roughly as follows: There are 600,000 people of mainly Aboriginal,
South Sea Islander, Torres Strait Island and Maori cultural
identification. There are about 1.5 million people of mainly Asian
identification. There are 3.7 million people of Irish Catholic
identification. There are 5.7 million people of mainly non British,
European or Middle Eastern identification. The total of the above is
about 11 million people. There are also about 8.5 million people of
British, Scottish or Welsh cultural identification, and they are now a
minority. The Middle Eastern and Asian components are the product of
the last twenty-five years of mass migration. Intergroup ethnic
intermarriage is a major feature of modern Australian society. Some
groups like Australians of Greek, Italian and Middle Eastern origin,
tend to marry within their own communities, even into the second
generation, but intermarriage amongst all the other groups is expanding
exponentially, particularly intermarriage between Aboriginal people and
Europeans, and intermarriage between Asian people and Europeans.
The rapidly changing ethnic mix has had quite a considerable
bearing on electoral politics. Anecdotal evidence suggests that many
North Asian professional people swung to the Liberals in the 1996
Federal election, but swung dramatically against the Liberals in the
1998 Federal election, because of the Liberals’ adaptation to the
racism of Pauline Hanson. Most recent NESB migrants, however, repeat
the historic pattern of the underprivileged, and vote solidly Labor,
and this has been reflected over the whole period from 1976 until now.
The middle inner west suburban electorates, with a high concentration
of NESB migrants, and trade unionists, are still safe Labor seats.
Areas of older second generation NESB migration, like the St. George
area, and the Earlwood area, are still reasonably safe Labor seats,
though their income profile is somewhat higher than the mid inner west
seats, and it seems that the more well established second generation
Greeks, Macedonians and Italians, generally vote Labor, though some are
occasionally swinging voters. Even a cursory overview of electoral
trends, cross checked with the ABS statistics on migration and
ethnicity, shows a strong identity between migrant ethnicity, and Labor
voting throughout this period. Another feature of electoral politics is
an overwhelming Labor vote amongst Aboriginals, and other people of
colour from the South Pacific.
NESB migrant ethnicity and the Republic referendum
A similar identity between NESB migrant ethnicity and
republicanism
shows up in any serious analysis of the result of the Republic
Referendum (about which I have written a short analytical piece). In
the recent election, dominated by the hysteria over the Tampa crisis
and terrorism, the worst swings against Labor were in areas of
predominantly Anglo ethnicity. The demographic pattern of NSW is now
quite complex. Sydney and the urban Illawarra have a disproportionately
high concentration of NESB background Australians, whereas the rest of
NSW has a far smaller NESB component. These days, Sydney and the
Illawarra between them, have about 4.7 million of the total 6.3 million
population of NSW, a far greater proportion than in 1900.
If you take the NSW population as a whole, non Anglo
identified
people are over half the population, but they are nudging 60 per cent
of the population in the Sydney region and the Illawarra, and are only
about 20 per cent of the population elsewhere. Rural Australia now has
about a 10 per cent migrant component, but the other 90 per cent in
most non coastal rural areas, are still divided between Catholics and
Protestants, roughly the way they were in the 19th Century, with some
inland areas like the South West Slopes, Bathurst and Bourke, having
higher proportions of Catholics, and other areas like New England
having higher proportions of Protestants. In times of swings to Labor
in the bush, often the areas with fair sized Catholic concentrations,
are the areas that swing to Labor. Ethnicity and religion, in the
modern period, have a complex and subtle impact on electoral politics.
Another feature of the recent electoral period, is the changed
composition of the coastal country seats in NSW. For about the first 60
years of the century, those areas, then mainly made up of small
farmers, few of whom employed much labor, with a lower than the State
average percentage of Catholics, were rock hard electoral strongholds
of the conservatives. In the last 30 years, the rapid population growth
of cities like Lismore, Kempsey and Grafton, with people who have moved
from Sydney and Brisbane, and the settlement of city people on the land
in rural areas, combined with the growth of provincial university
colleges in some towns, has dramatically changed the electoral pattern
in coastal seats. The far North Coast seats, from Grafton to the
Queensland border, now alternate between the conservatives and Labor,
and the margin between the conservatives and Labor is narrowing in the
other coastal rural seats.
The democratisation of tertiary education, and inner city
gentrification, as electoral factors
Almost all the inner urban areas in Australia have now been
gentrified, in the sense that the housing stock has been substantially
renovated, and housing values in these areas have dramatically
increased, with the consequent acquisition of the houses by people with
higher incomes. In addition, the constant tendency of the last 50
years, for the number of people in each dwelling to decline, has been
offset in inner city areas, by a dramatic urban intensification, with
the building of additional home units and apartments. If you take a
line between Cronulla and, say, Homebush, across Sydney – to the East
of this line, almost any vacant or underused site you can swing a cat
on, now has units, and this trend is continuing. Another factor that
has some impact on electoral politics is Sydney housing prices. Sydney
houses now have a much higher price than any other city in Australia.
This is of great significance in a social situation in which between 60
per cent and 70 per cent of residences are owned by the occupants, or
are being paid off.
The gentrification pattern in the old industrial area of the
Illawarra, south of Sydney, is of considerable interest. The northern
suburbs of Wollongong are the old mining villages, which were the site
of many class battles in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
The Port Kembla steelworks, built in the late 1920s, south of
Wollongong, had their heyday from the 1950s to the 1970s, and the whole
region grew from about 100,000 people to about 300,000 today, during
the first wave of mass migration from non-English-speaking countries,
which included, in the Illawarra, Italy, Greece, Macedonia and Latin
America.
In the 1990s the workforce of the steelworks was cut to a
quarter of
its peak, and employment in the area shifted into service industries,
education, building, tourism, etc, but there was also quite high
unemployment. This can be seen visually from Bulli Lookout, the
traditional place where you overlook the South Coast, driving from
Sydney -- the old pall of smoke that used to dominate the dramatic
landscape is vastly reduced. (This environmental effect is even more
spectacular in the other old industrial area, north of Sydney,
Newcastle, where the steelworks closed completely. On a recent visit to
Newcastle, to a book fair, my friend and I could not work out what was
different, until driving out of the city. On a clear winter's day, the
air was completely clear, an extraordinary contrast with past visits to
that grimy old industrial city.)
From Helensburg to central Wollongong, the visually exciting
mining
villages, and almost all the land below the escarpment, have been built
on and gentrified. A significant part of the population in this area
now works in Sydney, commuting every day, mostly by fast train. The
professional segment of the population in the Illawarra now lives in
the northern suburbs. The Census Bureau statistics show that incomes in
the northern suburbs of he Illawarra are significantly higher than in
the southern suburbs.
These suburbs have remained fairly safe Labor seats, but with
an
enormous new social layer Green vote, as well, a similar demographic to
the inner-western suburbs of Sydney. The densely populated industrial
suburbs south of Wollongong, where the NESB migrants of the 1950s-70s
and their children live, remain overwhelmingly safe Labor seats, with a
much smaller Green vote than the northern suburbs.
The gentrification of the northern suburbs of Wollongong, and
the
consequent rise in the Green vote, is the underlying demographic reason
for the significant drop in the Labor vote recently, for the Mayor of
Wollongong, and in the seat of Cunningham, which takes in the northern
suburbs.
In rural areas of NSW, the relationship between ostensible
income
levels, and electoral behaviour, is not as straightforward as in most
urban areas
Paradoxically, there is no longer an absolutely simple
straight line
between ostensible incomes, education and voting behaviour. It seems
clear from voting patterns in the recent period, that the poorer people
in the areas of high recent NESB, and high trade union concentration,
continue to vote Labor. In rural areas, it’s not quite so
straightforward.
As Phil Raskall’s useful research about postcodes constantly
underlines, there are postcode areas in rural NSW with, according to
taxation records, the lowest incomes, which vote for the National
Party, and show high One Nation votes. Partly this is explained by the
fact that farming families, who have significant assets in land and
equipment, often legitimately end up with low incomes for taxation
purposes, and also those postcode areas contain a substantial number of
rural unemployed and poorer retired people. Ostensible income
statistics at the bottom end, are a fairly good guide to Labor voting
electoral behaviour in urban areas, but in the bush they are sometimes
associated with non Labor voting patterns.
Despite similar incomes, and comparable educational profiles,
people on the Lower North Shore, and in the Inner West of Sydney tend
to vote differently to each other
At the other end of the income and occupational spectrum, the
end of
people with higher incomes, and more tertiary education, voting
behaviour has become more complex. It’s paradoxical that the inner
West, and the inner Eastern Suburbs, have quite a similar income
profile to the Lower North Shore, and quite similar occupational
profiles, with both regions having some high income, dense tertiary
education hot spots, and a generally higher income and educational
profile, than the more overwhelming Labor seats where recent NESB
voters predominate. Yet in the Inner West and the Inner Eastern
Suburbs, there is a pronounced general electoral inclination towards
the Labor Party. On the other hand, the Lower North Shore exhibits a
pronounced electoral bias towards the Liberals. Both areas throw up
fairly substantial Green and Democrat votes.
What seems to be at work here, is a certain residential
self-selection, amongst what, for convenience, one can call the “new
social layers”. There is a whole segment of modern society, often
tertiary educated people, who, in the strictest sense of Marxist
sociology, are not capitalists, because they sell their labour power,
and don’t own much productive capital, but in terms of ideology, often
don’t identify with the working class, as an organised social force.
These people frequently seem to self select in terms of where they
live. Often the ones who work in the finance industry, and up and
coming, rather underpaid, but ambitious juniors in law offices,
accounting firms, etc, etc, who are Liberal voters, find the Lower
North Shore more congenial, whereas people who work in education,
health and the public service, and are often a little “hipper”, and who
tend to vote Labor or Green, find the inner West and the inner East
more congenial.
Those differences, which are rather subtle, show up in
divergent
electoral behaviour some of the time. These days the “aspirational
voters” who, as I’ve established, are an old phenomenon, not a new one,
are, in fact, divided amongst themselves, in a number of directions. On
questions like racism, migration and the Republic, the Liberal voting
ones, and the Labor and Green voting ones, have similar, more civilised
attitudes, which infuriates atavistic conservatives in Australian
society, but on economic and social issues they have quite divergent
views, which very frequently leads to opposed electoral behaviour.
A considerable amount of confusion has arisen, in recent
discussion
of electoral trends and electoral politics, and the opposite voting
behaviour of the Inner West and the Lower North Shore, lies at the
heart of some of this confusion. These days much electoral comment
relies heavily on polling, and focus groups, which are made up of
people selected in swing seats, whose flucturating moods and attitudes
are charted over longer or shorter periods. The problem with both polls
and focus groups, which are possibly a reasonable guide for changes in
mood in swing seats, is that they don’t usually incorporate a
consideration of the underlying demographic social, ethnic, religious
and income factors which also bear on electoral behaviour. This
tendency, of polls, and superficial observation of electoral moods
(considered without addressing underlying social and demographic
factors) to produce an inaccurate picture, has reached a peak several
times lately. After several recent Labor electoral defeats, so-called
Exit Polls were used by the mass media to suggest a dramatic swing in
which a majority of blue collar workers had allegedly voted for the
Liberals. (This confused and inaccurate information was seized upon by
some hopeful sectarians on the far left, who took it up uncritically,
as support for their totally metaphysical perspective, of themselves
presenting an effective electoral alternative to Labor and the Greens.)
The problem with the superficiality of this kind of analysis of
electoral politics is obvious. In the elections where Labor lost, it
still comfortably held the core seats of inner suburban Sydney and the
Illawarra, where blue collar and NESB migrants predominate, and it
still held the Newcastle seats. If the blue collar workers had swung in
their majority against Labor, where did the Labor votes come from? This
polling, focus group, method of interpreting electoral behaviour, often
gets it wrong, because of a neglect of underlying empirical sociology.
The history of NSW elections in People’s Choice, if
studied
carefully, shows that major swings between the Labor and conservative
side of politics, tend to go up and down the economic and social scale.
In major swings against Labor, the outer suburban seats fall to the
conservatives, and in major swings to Labor, like for instance, the
“Wranslides” of 1978 and 1981, they fall to Labor. In 1978 and 1981,
even some of the lower North Shore seats, Manly and Wakehurst, fell to
Labor, and North Sydney was captured by a slightly left of centre
Independent. The subtle self selection and differentiation amongst the
“new social layers”, between the Inner West and the Lower North Shore,
that I note in this article, are by no means absolute, and they don’t
fundamentally alter the hard spine, of a class division in electoral
politics, which the electoral history in People’s Choice makes
quite apparent, right up to the present.
Religious self-identification, age, and sexual orientation,
as factors in electoral behaviour
These three factors intertwine with the occupational and
educational
factors just discussed. Over recent years polling, after all elections,
has constantly thrown up a pattern in which the oldest cohort of the
population, the cohort over 65, seem to have by far the strongest
tendency to vote conservative. This is not surprising, when you
consider that this cohort of the population is ethnically less diverse
than younger cohorts. This over 65 cohort has a far lower component of
tertiary educated people, for the obvious reason that the explosion of
tertiary education, only really commenced in the middle 1960s. It is
also a well known demographic fact that people who have been industrial
workers for most of their working lives, have a shorter lifespan, than
the middle and upper classes, which tends to skew the composition of
the cohort over 65 in the direction of people who have been
conservative voters all their lives.
It is also clear that many people in this cohort, having
commenced
their lives, and had their life experience moulded in the Menzies
years, have a certain nostalgia for the conservative values of that
era. This strong bias of the older cohort towards the conservative
parties, is, in the medium and long term, bad news for the
conservatives, as this cohort will be reduced over time, by natural
causes. Nevertheless, longer life spans mediate the disappearance of
this older cohort (of which the writer has just become part), and this
reduction will take place gradually, so their electoral impact, though
decreasing, will continue.
It is important to note also, that the impact of age on
electoral
patterns is different in Sydney, and the rest of NSW. There is a
pronounced trend for young people from country areas to move to the
city, because of the lack of job opportunities in the bush, and there
is also a tendency for older Australians to retire to non metropolitan
coastal areas, and both these trends show up in electoral patterns.
Sexual orientation and electoral behaviour
The impact of sexual orientation on electoral behaviour is
harder to
pinpoint, for the obvious reason that there are almost no statistics,
and that polling in this area is a bit difficult, to say the least,
and, in practice, little polling has been done. Nevertheless, it is
quite clear that there are areas of inner suburban Sydney with a high
concentration of gay males and lesbian women, and a lower concentration
in suburban and country areas, for the obvious reason that residual
prejudice in country and suburban areas tends to influence gay people
to migrate to areas where acceptance of their sexual orientation is
greater. Areas with a high concentration of gay men and lesbian women
seem to coincide with those areas of tertiary educated, relatively well
paid people, who vote Labor or Green. However, some evidence suggests
that there is a distinct group of gay males who vote conservatively.
Other anecdotal evidence suggests that gay men and women are a
significant part of the vote for Clover Moore, the independent for
Bligh.
Changes in religious identification, as an electoral factor
In 1901 census figures showed 70 per cent self identification
with
at least nominal Protestant religion, 25 per cent Catholics and 5 per
cent Jews, other non Christians, non-stating or atheists. By the year
2001, census figures showed a most dramatic collapse in Protestant
nominal religious identification, from 70 per cent to 30 per cent.
The
Catholics have gone up to almost 30 per cent. Orthodox, Lutherans and
other non Anglo Protestant Christians are about 5 per cent. Non
Christian religions are about 10 per cent, and no religious belief, or
religious belief not stated, has gone up to a rather large 25 per cent
of the population. Like age, ethnicity and educational levels, with
which, to some extent, it is associated, religious identification
diverges dramatically between Sydney and the rest of NSW, and even
between the inner city and the outer suburbs. Protestant religious
identification is far higher in the outer suburbs of Sydney and rural
NSW. Catholics, Orthodox and non Christians are proportionately much
higher in the mid Western seats of Sydney, with a pronounced Labor
voting tendency, and in the Illawarra. Non believers are heavily
concentrated in the inner West and inner East, and to some extent the
lower North Shore of Sydney. Non religious belief seems to be strongly
associated statistically with tertiary education.
When you associate all these factors together, a pattern
begins to
emerge. It seems highly likely that in the modern era, there is a
natural Labor-Green electoral majority amongst Catholics, Orthodox, non
Christians and non believers, and this underlying demographic reality
is an enormous difficulty for the conservative parties. This is part of
the underlying background to how Labor bounced back so quickly after
the defeat of the unpopular Keating government in 1996, and why the
Labor vote held up so relatively strongly in the recent Federal
election, despite the chauvinist hysteria of the conservatives, about
the September 11 terrorist attack, and about refugees. This is also the
underlying demographic reality behind the universal hegemony of
Laborites and Greens in all the eight State and Territory governments.
The electoral pattern from 1976 until now
In the early 1970s, the right wing State Labor machine
machine, led
by John Ducker, deliberately organised the election to State Labor
parliamentary leadership, of a secular, small “l” Liberal figure,
barrister, Neville Wran, on the principle that he was likely to be a
charismatic figure in NSW electoral politics. This tactic was
spectacularly successful, and just a few months after the devastating
defeat of Gough Whitlam in the December 1975 election, the Wran Labor
government was elected, by one seat, in the May 1976 NSW election, to
the surprise of most political pundits. The old NSW electoral pattern
re-asserted itself, the Labor vote went back up to 49.8 per cent, and
Labor won the inner West industrial seats, the Newcastle and Illawarra
seats, and some suburban and country seats.
This was an unusual election, in that there were almost no
electoral
alternatives to Labor and the conservatives, and non Labor and
conservative candidates got a tiny 4 per cent of the vote. The
Communist Party and the DLP both disappeared electorally.
The 1978 and 1981 “Wranslides”
Both these elections registered an enormous swing to Labor. In
1978
the Labor vote was 57.7 per cent, the Communist vote was 0.3 per cent,
the Socialist Workers vote was 0.2 per cent, and the Australian
Democrats vote was 2.7 per cent, giving Labor a 60 per cent preferred
vote, and 63 seats out of 99. On this occasion
Labor won most of
the outer suburban Sydney seats. In 1981 there was a similar result,
Labor won 55.73 per cent, and the Democrats 2.43 per cent. Despite a
slight drop in the Labor vote, Labor’s number of seats increased to 69,
out of the 99 available. Again Labor won almost all of the outer
suburban seats. The enrollment in 1981 was 3,212,657 and the percentage
who voted was a very high 97.96 per cent.
There was a swing against Labor in 1984. The Labor vote
dropped back to 48.75 per cent, the Democrats got 2.85 per cent and
independents got 5.08 per cent, but in terms of seats, Labor still won
comfortably, holding a number of the outer suburban and country seats,
as well as its core inner suburban seats, and the Newcastle and
Illawarra seats.
The 1988 Election. Labor defeated by a big swing. The
“Greiner effect” and the gun issue
In 1988, the State election results were disastrous for the
ALP.
Wran retired from the Premiership shortly before the election, for
reasons that are still not entirely clear. He may have been fearful of
the electoral consequences of an ICAC enquiry into certain matters, in
which he was ultimately completely exonerated. He retired at an ALP
State Conference, which gave rise to the rather spectacular vision of
the various powerful figures in the dominant ALP faction, debating who
his successor would be, under the Sydney Town Hall stage, the
traditional place for factional negotiation at ALP State Conferences.
The forceful, powerful, but electorally uncharismatic
Secretary of
the Labor Council of NSW, Barrie Unsworth, asserted his claim to ALP
parliamentary leadership, and was successful. But from that point on,
the 1988 elections were all downhill for the ALP. For Unsworth to
become leader, Brian Bannon had to stand down for him in the previously
safe Labor seat of Rockdale, but in the necessary by-election for
Rockdale, Unsworth only won the seat after an agonising cliff-hanger,
by a handful of votes.
The Wran and Unsworth governments had antagonised the core
industrial base of the ALP, by savagely cutting back workers
compensation rights, leading to the expulsion of popular long time
South Coast leftist, George Petersen, from the ALP, for opposing the
legislation in the parliament. The Hawke Federal Labor government was
going through an unpopular phase, and to cap it all, Unsworth decided
to introduce laws, greatly restricting access to long barrelled guns,
which offended rural people and sporting shooters. The gun lobby, which
was powerful in outer suburban seats, country seats, and even the
traditional non urban industrial seats in Newcastle and the Illawarra,
campaigned strongly against Labor. The swing against Labor was a
massive 10 per cent and the Labor vote dropped to 38.49 per cent. The
Democrats also slumped back to 1.81 per cent. Labor was almost wiped
out in the bush. It was wiped out in the outer suburban areas and in
all the marginal suburban seats. It suffered severe reverses in the
Newcastle industrial area, where a number of independents beat Labor in
hitherto safe Labor seats, clearly because of the gun and workers
compensation issues. Nevertheless, Labor retained its core Sydney and
Illawarra seats, 43 seats out of 109, with seven independents.
In 1991, there was a bit of a swing back to Labor. With 10
fewer
seats, Labor went up from 43 to 46 seats. Labor won back the Newcastle
seats that it lost in 1998. The Labor percentage went back up to 39.05
per cent, and the Democrats went up dramatically, to 5.36 per cent. The
Greens began to emerge with 0.54 per cent, and a new right wing force,
the Call to Australia Party, began to occupy the ecological niche
previously occupied by the DLP, getting 1.19 per cent. Throughout the
early 1990s the Liberals were led by Nick Greiner, who because of his
Hungarian migrant background and his mixed Catholic and Jewish origins,
gave the Liberals a certain appeal for a short period, to people of
NESB background, but this appeal disappeared rapidly after Greiner’s
demise, and Howard’s leadership of the Federal Liberal Party reasserted
the Anglo backwardness endemic in the conservative parties. The new
Labor leader, after Unsworth, Bob Carr, wasn’t particularly
charismatic, but surprisingly to some, the electorate warmed to him
quite rapidly.
The 1995 election
In this election Labor bounced back to scrape in with 50 seats
out
of 99, and three independents. Labor got 41.26 per cent of the vote,
the Australian Democrats got 2.85 per cent, the Greens got 2.57 per
cent, the No Aircraft Noise Party got 0.95 per cent. Of the two right
wing niche parties, the Call to Australia got 1.44 per cent and the
Australians Against Further Immigration got 1.11 per cent. Independents
got 4.69 per cent and won three seats. Labor won back a few more outer
suburban and country seats, to give it the majority it needed to govern.
The 1999 election
By the 1999 election, the number on the roll had grown to
3,736,079.
Labor won a dramatic victory in terms of seats, to get 55 seats against
the Coalition’s 33, and five independents. The Labor vote only went up
marginally, to 42.2 per cent. The most notable feature of this election
was that it took place at about the high water mark of Pauline Hanson’s
conservative populist One Nation Party, and that Party got 7.5 per cent
of the vote and another right wing group, the Christian Democrats, got
1.5 per cent. (Pollsters tended to the view that perhaps two thirds of
this 9 per cent had previously voted Liberal and one third had
previously voted Labor. The One Nation vote was overwhelmingly
concentrated in the outer suburbs and non Sydney areas.) Optional
preferential voting, a system adopted in 1979, helped produce an effect
that the breakaway vote from the Liberals damaged the coalition two
party preferred vote. On the other side of the ledger, the Greens got
3.9 per cent, the Democrats got 3.3 per cent and Unity got 1.1 per
cent, as well as independents getting 5.1 per cent. A rather higher
propostion of the preferences of these groups were counted, even
despite optional preferential voting, and those preferences favoured
Labor. (This larger flow on of preference voters from the Greens,
Democrats and Unity, strongly suggests a social circumstance, which can
clearly be inferred in other ways, that the general educational level
of Green, Democrat and Unity voters, is somewhat higher than that of
voters for right wing populist parties, because the Green, Democrat and
Unity voters obviously understand the voting system better.)
In the 1999 election, which can be regarded as an average kind
of
election, in the new demographic and electoral circumstances in
Australia, Labor won the Newcastle seats, the Illawarra seats and the
inner suburban seats of Sydney, and won also a large portion of the
outer suburban seats and country seats. Most of the independents
elected, won country seats off the Coalition.
The NSW Upper House (Legislative Council) from 1981 to 1999.
Its
transformation from Tory-dominated, reactionary, appointed chamber, to
ultra-democratic house of the people
Neville Wran’s great contribution to NSW politics, was the
transformation of the NSW Legislative Council, the Upper House. An
attempt to abolish that bizarre appointed institution, by referendum in
the 1960s, was defeated because of a fierce campaign by the Tory media,
and it remained a stronghold of reaction. Much to the amazement of all
political observers, Neville Wran, in a political role for which he
will always be remembered with affection, by democrats and
progressives, used his political clout and charisma, at the height of
his authority due to the “Wranslide” of 1978, to democratise this
curious institution. Wran managed to persuade 82.6 per cent of the
voters to vote Yes in a referendum to the question, “Do you approve of
the Bill entitled a Bill for an Act to Provide for the Election of
Members of the Legislative Council directly by the people.” This
provided for the replacement of the appointed members, over three
elections, by elected members, elected by a system of proportional
representation, in blocks of 15, the elections to be held
simultaneously with lower house elections.
An overview of Upper House elections from 1978 until 1999
In the first election for the Upper House in 1978, Labor got a
massive vote of 54.91 per cent (to win 9 seats), to the Liberals’ 6.
The democrats got 2.78 per cent, and the Communist candidate, the
charismatic media personality Jack Mundey, the former leader of the
Builders Laborers and the Green Bans, who was lucky enough to draw
first position on the ballot paper, got 2.91 per cent, and was in the
hunt for the 15th position, though he just missed out. The Marijuana
Party got 0.91 per cent, and a right wing group, the
Family Action Group, got 1.31 per cent.
In the 1981 election, the Labor vote fell to 51.78 per cent,
to give
Labor 8 seats, the Liberals suffered a dramatic drop to 33.77 per cent,
to get 5 seats, and on the right of politics, Fred Nile’s Call to
Australia party got the whole of the Liberal drop, to get 9.11 per cent
and 1 seat. The Democrats got 4.03 per cent and won 1 seat.
In 1984 the Labor vote dropped further, to 46.88 per cent, to
give
Labor 7 seats. The Liberals went back up a bit to 42.61 per cent. The
Democrats got 3.15 per cent, and the Call to Australia got 6.09 per
cent (for 1 seat).
In 1988, the Labor vote fell dramatically to 37.51 per cent
(for 6
seats). The Democrats got 2.7 per cent and won 1 seat, and small
parties like the Humanists, Environment and Nuclear Disarmament groups,
on the left side of politics, got 3.95 per cent. The Liberal vote was
rather high at 46.15 per cent, and they won 7 seats.
In 1991, Labor got 37.29 per cent (for 6 seats), the Democrats
went
up dramatically to 6.7 per cent (for 1 seat), the Greens, at their
first appearance, got 3.32 per cent, and the No Toxic Incinerator
group, on the left side, got 0.58 per cent. On the conservative side,
the Liberals got 45.34 per cent (for 7 seats), the Call to Australia
got 6.7 per cent (for 1 seat), and other right wing populists got 2.65
per cent.
In 1995, a new system was adopted. The number in the House was
reduced to 42, and elections were held for half this number every four
years, to coincide with elections for the Lower House, which now had
fixed four year terms The effect of this was to reduce the quota to a
bit less than 5 per cent.
In this election, the names of parties were listed on the
ballot
paper, with the possibility of an “above the line” vote, selecting the
party ticket favoured, which had the effect of casting preference
votes, from that ticket, for the pattern of preferences registered by
each party with the Electoral Office. As a result of these new
arrangements, smarties on both sides of politics, registered a pile of
micro parties, with little membership, but with names designed to
attract particular constituencies.
The constellations of party preferences produced some
surprising
results. As might be anticipated in such a situation, the ALP vote
dropped a little further to 35.25 per cent and the Liberal vote dropped
even more, to 38.49 per cent. The Greens got 3.75 per cent (and 1
seat), the Democrats got 3.21 per cent (and 1 seat), John Tingle’s
Shooters’ Party, which had somewhat more tangible existance than most
of the micro parties, got 2.84 per cent (for 1 seat), the Call to
Australia vote dropped dramatically, their vote being scattered amongst
other right wing micro parties, but they still got 3.01 per cent (and 1
seat). The most unpredictable result was a micro party with the
attractive name of “A Better Future for Our Children” got 1.28 per
cent, but built up to a sufficient proportion of a quota, by shrewd
preference swaps, to win the last seat.
1999. The Tablecloth ballot paper
In the 1999 Upper House election, the tendencies inherent in
the new
arrangements, worked themselves out in the most spectacular way. The
Labor vote held up well, at 37.3 per cent (for 8 seats). The
Liberal/National vote plummetted to 27.4 per cent (for 6 seats). A very
large number of the voters on the conservative side of politics
obviously voted for right wing micro parties with appealing names. The
ballot paper was so large that the media dubbed it the “Tablecloth”.
The largest new right wing party was One Nation, which got 6.3 per cent
(and 1 seat). The renamed Call to Australia party, now the Christian
Democrats, got 3.2 per cent (for 1 seat). Mainly right wing micro
parties got about 10 per cent of the vote between them, and something
called the Outdoor Recreation party, elected 1 Upper House member on a
tiny 0.2 per cent of the vote, by means of ingenious preference swaps.
The Democrats got 4 per cent (and 1 seat), the Greens got 2.9 per cent
(and 1 seat), and two leftist micro parties, Reform the Legal System,
and Unity, got 1 per cent each, and each elected one member by
judicious preference swaps. The Shooters Party got 1.7 per cent, but
missed out, and a grouping called the Progressive Labor Party, with
almost no campaigning or membership, got a rather large 1.6 per cent,
clearly on the basis of name confusion with the ALP, but missed out on
a seat.
The complex nature of the 1999 election led to significant
changes
in the Electoral Act. A rigorous arrangement, whereby parties are
required to have at least 750 real members, tested by the Electoral
Office, was introduced. The non public registration of parties’
preferences was eliminated. The nett result of these changes is to
dramatically reduce the number of micro parties which are registered
for next year’s Upper House election.
An overview of the changes in electoral politics in NSW, from
1901 until now
The first obvious change, is the dramatic broadening and
democratisation of the electorate, from 300,000 odd to 3.8 million odd,
almost thirteen times, in a period when the State’s population has only
gone up a little less than five times. Another dramatic change is the
shift from the country to the city. In 1901 Sydney was only about one
third of the State’s population, and today it is about two thirds.
During this period, the voting age was reduced to 18 years, which
generally favours Labor or the Greens, because the youngest cohort in
recent times has generally leaned to the progressive side in electoral
politics.
All these changes have weakened the electoral influence of the
conservative side of politics.
The nature of electoral campaigning has changed over the
hundred
years. The impact of public meetings has dramatically diminished.
Elections now are fought largely on TV, and to a lesser extent, through
radio and newspapers, with a heavy focus on the leaders of the
political parties, which tends to weaken the local element in electoral
politics, though the local element comes back dramatically, even in
these circumstances, from time to time. The swing against Labor in 1988
produced a large number of Independents, mainly in the Hunter region,
and the swing against the Coalition in 1999, produced another cluster
of local Independents, mainly in the country.
Government funding for election campaigns has also had a
significant
impact. Political parties receive some government funding for every
vote polled, which obviously tends to reinforce the campaigning
possibilities of the major parties, in this age of expensive television
advertisements.
The ethnicity of the electorate has been transformed by mass
migration, but the broad class division between the two sides in
electoral politics has remained
For quite a while, conservative pundits have repeated a
mantra, that
Labor has lost its traditional working class vote. Right wingers in the
labor movement have also taken up this dirge. Socialist sectarians,
who’ve become stuck in the eccentric rut of opposing Labor and Green
parties electorally, but who only get a derisory vote themselves, also
grasp at straws, attempting to convince themselves that the core Labor
vote is no longer significant.
Certainly, the sociology of Australian society has changed
dramatically, in the period under discussion, but no serious empirical
investigation of the interface between sociology and electoral
behaviour, of the sort in which I have just engaged, gives rise to any
reasonable conclusion that the core Labor working class vote no longer
exists. The character of the working class has unquestionably changed,
with a relative decline of manufacturing industry, and the transfer of
workers to more skilled service areas, coincidental with a massive
increase in the number of workers who have tertiary education. In the
last 20 years the “footprint” of trade unionism has declined from a
little over 50 per cent, to a little under 30 per cent of the working
population, partly for a conjunctural ideological reason, the Accord
and the amalgamation of unions into large monoliths, more remote from
their memberships, and partly because new areas of work are
intrinsically a bit harder to organise, and the people working in many
of them, are subject to an incessant ideological barrage stressing
individualism, etc. This drop in trade union density and influence, has
bottomed out. The strenuous efforts of the ruling class to push the
unions out of the Labor Party, underlines the importance and potential
danger of the union-Labor Party link, from the point of view of the
ruling class. The battle to defend and maintain the ALP trade union
link, and thereby preserve the working class basis of the Labor Party,
is still continuing as I write.
The main new feature of this electoral situation is the
emergence,
primarily in the, now elected, Upper House, of the Greens, who are
politically to the left of Labor (but achieve the neat electoral device
of locating themselves both to the left of labor, and in the centre)
and the Democrats, both of which parties get their votes overwhelmingly
from tertiary educated people, who make up the “new social layers”. On
the right of politics, the emergence of a, mainly rural based, right
wing populist formation, the One Nation Party, is an electoral problem
more for the Coalition than it is for Labor.
From about 1910, electoral politics in NSW has been a
relatively
clear map of class. Industrial workers, trade unionists, poorer
farmers, most Catholics and some sections of the middle class, voted
Labor in 1910. In 1999, NSW politics is still a map of class.
Industrial workers, organised trade unionists, Catholics, non
believers, non Christians and NESB migrants, in their substantial
majority, vote Labor. The main difference in electoral politics lies in
the rapid and continuing growth of the intermediate group or, in
shorthand terms, the “new social layers”. This group is primarily
divided between the Labor and conservative side of politics, but a
significant section of this group also vote for the Greens and the
Democrats. From my standpoint, as a Marxist, primarily interested in
working class mobilisation in the broader sense, the sociology of
electoral politics in this State, up until now, underlines the
importance of Marxists having a serious orientation towards the Labor
Party, trade union continuum, and also, in a secondary way, towards the
Greens.
Federal election results in NSW
It is possible to do a similar inquiry into Federal election
results
in NSW over the period. The results of such an investigation are
similar, though sometimes the circumstances are different, because of
speedy changes in the political cycle, and the fact that State and
Federal elections take place at different points in this cycle.
The most striking example of such a speedy change in the
political
cycle, was the election victory of Wran in the 1976 NSW State election,
only six months after the defeat of Whitlam in 1975. Despite shifts in
the political cycle, the underlying demographic and social trends which
I have pointed to throughout this article, have also had a major impact
on Federal electoral politics in NSW.
Self-interested, or just plain ignorant, neglect of empirical
sociology as a factor in commentary on electoral politics is rather
widespread
On the conservative side of politics, and in the media, there
is a
pronounced bias towards neglect of serious empirical sociology, in
commentary on electoral politics. The same sort of stupidity is
repeated by some on the far left, who grasp at straws, to attempt to
buttress electoral pretensions that, empirically speaking, have no
future at all. From a Marxist point of view, my primary objection to
this myopic independent socialist electoral strategy, is that it is a
powerful obstacle to Marxists engaging in their main tasks, which ought
to be, exerting direct influence in the labor movement, the working
class and amongst the leftward leaning section of the “new social
layers”.
The ferocious “exposure” rhetoric, directed both at the
leadership
and supporters of the two major electoral representatives of the
progressive side of Australian society, Labor and the Greens, which
flows from the desire to achieve the Sysyphean task of carving out an
electoral space in opposition to Labor and the Greens, has become a
powerful obstacle to those “Marxists” exercising any influence at all
on Labor and the Greens. The groups in the Socialist Alliance have used
their smallish but quite effective machine, and their very considerable
energy, to become the only far left group registered for the NSW state
elections. It is possible to predict, with reasonable certainty, the
electoral result of those efforts. They will get a vote in the region
of the result achieved by the Democratic Socialist Electoral Alliance,
the only far left group registered in the Upper House in 1995, 0.25 per
cent, maybe a little more, maybe a little less.
The three volumes of the “People’s Choice” are rather
expensive, but
they are well worth the money, for anyone with an interest in electoral
politics in Australia, from any point of view really, but particularly
for socialists who take electoral politics seriously, as one of the
major indicators of the forces at work in society.
August 2002
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