The ALP's branch membership has declined dramatically in recent decades, and power within the party has become more concentrated with union and factional heavyweights. Some (by no means all) of those senior officials are highly critical of the party's membership. Essentially, these union officials believe union affiliation is necessary to ensure the ALP remains middle of the road, electable and connected to the real world of working people.
Here are some indicative quotes (from my thesis) from senior national union officials with long involvement in the ALP:
The NSW ALP has 14,800 members and 8,000 of those are retired people, housewives and students. Almost all of them retired. There’s only about 2,500 party members who are members of affiliated trade unions.
I do to some extent think that clearly the connection with the unions enables the ALP to be in closer contact with the community
Mate, I went to a branch the other week. They’re mad, the rank and file of our party apart from the people who are careerists looking to run for parliament are fucking mental. If they were determining … So you look at the rank and file membership of the party. You’ve got at least a third nationally are stacks, so a third aren’t real members, a third are just people who have serious like the party is kind of their social security and a third are people like me, that are part of the party they are not going to be active and all that.
If you talk to some of the key decision-makers in the Labor Party there is a bit of mythology around that the Labor Party would like to rid itself of the union influence they will actually tell you if you took the union delegations out of the national and state conferences then the maddies would be running the place.
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