The state of the NSW Labor Party

The NSW Labor party has not been in state government since Kristina Keneally was ousted in March 2011. Since then, the party has deteriorated even further and NSW Labor now tails the Liberal-National party, with state leader Chris Minns and the shadow cabinet silent on their election policies which won’t be released until Christmas. This is a repeat of the federal Labor Party’s ‘small target’ strategy, an attempt to shorten the attack period on their policies and monitor public opinion on the Perrotet government and its potential crises. 

Chris Minns hails from the right wing faction of the party, which has deep alliances of the conservative unions such as Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees Association (SDA), Australian Workers’ Union (AWU), the Transport Workers Union (TWU), and the Health Services Union (HSU). These unions have been successful in lobbying Labor to maintain conservative positions on same-sex marriage and abortion, as well as negotiating myriad unfavourable EBAs in their industries. This influence has drawn the state Labor Party to the right, and even further from the interests of workers in NSW. 

So what do NSW Labor really represent, and what can we expect in the March 2023 election? 

Public sector

In the public sector, the Labor government was responsible for implementing the 2.5 percent annual cap on wage increases in 2008. Most public sector unions have been actively striking and taking industrial action to fight this wage cap, which is still in place. 

In response to the RTBU’s current campaign, Chris Minns has declared on 2GB radio that his party “don’t support these strikes… further strikes are just going to antagonise the transport public.” Minns has also opposed efforts to legislate safe staff-patient ratios for nurses in public hospitals, only recently backflipping to make the issue an ALP election policy. This is a shameful political ploy, holding the urgent demands of nurses and midwives to ransom in return for the union’s support in Labor’s election campaign, when the changes could have been legislated months ago. Labor representatives have also been conspicuously absent from Teachers Federation rallies outside parliament house, and the party has offered no support for the union’s campaign despite the government’s hardline approach to negotiations. Minns has also not committed to ending the pay cap of his predecessors and prefers a “productivity-based bargaining” approach, which would tie pay rises to increased exploitation. With no support for strikes and no policy reform on offer, it is clear that the ALP is not able to deliver the change that workers are demanding across the public sector. Workers should instead continue to fight independently of the Labor Party during and after the election. Safe staffing ratios in hospitals, better recruitment in health and education, safer trains and standards on the rail network, and most importantly, a pay rise above the wage cap and inflation are critical reforms, and will only come through a prolonged and militant union campaign. 

Climate change policy

Unlike their federal equivalent, NSW Labor is not even able to greenwash its climate credentials with a sub-par emissions reduction policy. As it stands, the NSW ALP are committed to approving new coal and gas across the state if they form government next year.

This is a failure that has immediate and serious consequences. The new Perrottet budget recently announced the $130m Critical Minerals Activation Fund for the NSW mining sector, and several major projects have been recently approved by the NSW Government. These include: an extension of the Whitehaven Coal Narrabri Underground coal mine, the Kurri Kurri gas power plant, and the Hunter Gas Pipeline, and the Narrabri Gas Project. These projects have not been opposed at any stage by Labor despite major popular opposition and legal challenges to these approvals. The climate will not be made an election issue by the NSW ALP, as they are indebted to the donations of the fossil fuel industry, and the false assumption that working-class communities are all fervently pro-coal. 

This is why we have been organising to protest the NSW ALP Conference in October 2022, with climate action a key pillar of the campaign. If Labor is to have any credibility on this issue, they must adopt a platform of real zero by 2050, no new fossil fuel projects and job transition for the current mining and non-renewable energy workers into the renewable energy sector. Of course, we do not hold out high hopes, and expect a state Labor government to act as willing patrons of Morrison’s legacy, the so-called ‘gas-fired recovery’.  

Queer rights

NSW Labor is outflanked by the Greens and even the ‘teal’ independents on queer issues, with Sydney MLC Alex Greenwich developing an “Omnibus Equality Bill” in the lead up to the state election, while Labor has almost no clear position on major queer rights issues. Labor’s failure here is no surprise, considering the strength of the right-wing union bureaucracies of the SDA, the HSU and the Police Association within the party, who have historically made efforts to position the ALP against abortion rights and marriage equality. 

The conservative influence of right-wing union bureaucracies can also be seen in more recent debates around the dangerous amendments to the NSW Religious Freedoms and Equality Bill that were proposed by Mark Latham in 2020. These amendments would have cleared the way for discrimination by religious organisations in employment and service provision, and for hateful conduct by individuals in public (so long as it was justified by religion). The NSW Labor Party only backflipped on its support for this bill once its federal equivalent was dropped by the Liberals, and once the NSW Government had also withdrawn its support for Latham’s amendments. ALP members of Latham’s parliamentary committee, and the party more broadly, initially supported the amendments, with only the Greens and Alex Greenwich dissenting to the committee’s findings. 

Latham’s second attempt at legislating discrimination, the “Education Legislation Amendment (Parental Rights) Bill”, is still before the parliament. Labor have not committed to opposing this incredibly harmful bill either, despite its potential to seriously harm trans and gender diverse students and staff in NSW schools. 

Housing

Successive state governments have moved to reduce the overall stock of public housing in NSW by removing residents from their homes under the guise of renovation, while selling off the majority of these public housing sites to the private market for ‘redevelopment’.

This policy has become the neoliberal orthodoxy in NSW. While the Liberal government has actively facilitated these sell-offs through their ‘Communities Plus’ program, the Labor Party has failed to challenge the fundamental issues with the ‘social housing’ industry and the logic of a ‘self-funding’ Land and Housing Corporation (the department which builds and maintains public housing in NSW). The fact that LAHC is expected to finance public housing not through public funding but through ‘asset recycling’ is the core of the issue, as it justifies the sale of rezoned public land to developers, and the outsourcing of housing development, maintenance and management to not-for-profit companies called community housing providers (CHPs). 

The Waterloo public housing estate, an historic site with a large proportion of Aboriginal residents and hundreds of long-term tenants, is currently the centre of a major fight against this model. The redevelopment would see the site increase from under 800 public housing dwellings to over three thousand units, with nearly two thirds of these new units going to the private market and the remainder being handed to CHPs. Similar developments are slated for Glebe, Eveleigh, Pyrmont, Riverwood, and regional estates like Coffs Harbour. 

As has been argued by housing tenants themselves, this model causes major disruption to communities for almost no public benefit, and enables “privatisation by stealth” through the outsourcing of important public infrastructure. The NSW Shadow Housing Minister, Rose Jackson, has made only vague commitments to ‘improved maintenance’ and funding for energy efficiency retrofitting in social housing, yet no policies which address the need for tens of thousands more public housing dwellings per year, and an end to all forced evictions. 

Anti-colonial movement

In 2021 alone, 16 people from various Indigenous nations in NSW died in prison or police custody – double the previous record from 1997.

Labor needs to look beyond the superficial gesture of the national First Nations Voice referendum (proposed for 2023) and offer material support for Indigenous communities. NSW Labor has never condemned the actions of police and corrective services, or offered support for the families of those who have died in custody. In fact, the NSW ALP has consistently worked to increase the powers and funding of the NSW Police Force during their terms in office. 

In 2002, Labor Premier Bob Carr introduced the Terrorism (Police Powers) Act, which gave unprecedented, authoritarian (and unchallengeable) powers to the Police Minister. His successor, Morris Iemma, built additional police stations that cost $53.8 million and awarded a long-term contract to the private sector to manage about $700 million worth of police properties. The last NSW Labor Premier, Kristina Kenneally, actively defended what was then the biggest police force in the southern hemisphere by refusing to cut the bloated police budget during an economic downturn

It is highly doubtful that Chris Minns will depart from the legacy of his predecessors on funding for police and prisons, and it is likely his party will continue to actively strengthen the colonial project in this state.

Anti-protest laws

The state government has been responsible for passing some of the most repressive anti-protest laws in the country, with the recent passing of the Roads and Crimes Legislation Amendment Act 2022. These laws are a grave threat to the right to protest and strikes, with penalties of up to $22,000, two-years imprisonment, or both. The laws have emboldened police and encouraged increased police brutality and violence towards climate activists in particular. 

If the Labor Party does not commit to reversing these laws immediately after forming government, they will be overseeing one of the harshest and most repressive state governments in the country, where protest is essentially illegal without the express permission of the police.

Conclusion

The NSW Labor Party has nothing to offer workers, students, and communities in this state. We should be prepared to intensify each of our campaigns under a potential ALP state government come March next year. This means supporting workers in all unions, but especially the public sector, to escalate their activity and resist the efforts of officials who attempt to redirect energy towards the ALP’s election campaign. 

We do not need Labor’s election policy platform to tell us where to place our hope for change. We need only look to their record on recent issues to see the influence of conservative union bureaucracies on party policy. The NSW ALP, like its federal counterpart, is no representative of the working class.