My Take: The Left’s troubles with unity

Ever since the very first political party, approximately 1500 years ago, the issue of unity, has been a key part of the battle for power. In Australia, with the most recent Labor government from 2007-13, we saw disunity raise its ugly head with two elected Prime Ministers knocked from the party leadership, some of which due to bad poll numbers, but mostly because of selfish traitors, namely Simon Crean and Bill Shorten who put their own promotion ahead of the team and it’s ability to govern and gain support. At 2013 Federal election, Labor was smashed winning just 55 seats to the more unified Coalition’s 90, much of this was put down to the crippling disunity that destroyed its reputation and dropped Labor’s first preference vote to its lowest point since 1934. The Coalition has had its disunity troubles too, namely recently when Malcolm Turnbull attacked Prime Minister Abbott’s best media buddies Andrew Bolt and Alan Jones, but their troubles are nothing like Labor’s.
While this lack of unity behind political leaders is a major issue, my take is that the bigger issue is the unity or disunity on policy issues, otherwise known as ideology. Again, Labor comes across to me as a party that aims stridently for ideological unity, an impossible idea when your party has 44,000 independently thinking members. This has led to two main factions, the Left and Right and further factions have sprung from these. In recent years, these factions have been in a bitter brawl, with the Right faction generally dominant. The difficulty for the Left is that on the conservative side of politics there are certain policy views that a large majority share, like low taxes, capitalism, low spending on services and small government. Now, of course, there are differences, but they are the exceptions not the rule. There are so many different positions, for higher taxes for the rich, for lower taxes for all, for small-l liberalism, for democratic socialism and so on. On the Left, differences are the rule, not the exceptions. This is why unity of thought will always be difficult, particularly for left-wing organisations. Why doesn’t the Left, like Socialist Alternative, value their differences and not try to always unify with a party that is similarish, because in modern left-wing politics, purity of thought should be everything.