This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

Factional deals to determine preselections are “backroom buffoonery” that is holding the Labor party back, the outgoing party president, Mark Butler, has said.

In a speech to the Victorian Fabian society on Monday, Butler warned that Labor was at best “treading water”, with membership slipping and a decreased capacity to organise mass campaigns.

Labor’s federal climate change spokesman, a member of the left faction, called for democratic reforms to allow party members to vote for important positions including state leaders, Senate candidates and vacancies.

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Butler said that after two years as president the changes he championed in 2015 had been “blocked by factional leaders at the national conference and various state conferences”.

“I’m sorry to say that ours remains a party that gives ordinary members fewer rights than any other Labor or social democratic party I can think of,” he said.

Butler said that members must be allowed to vote for Senate and Legislative Council candidates, positions which “remain a last bastion of backroom dealing by self-appointed factional warlords” in some states. Similarly, casual vacancies should not be filled by “highly centralised factional processes”.

In this term of parliament Senate vacancies have been filled by Bill Shorten’s preferred candidate Kimberley Kitching in Victoria, and in New South Wales the way has been cleared for the former premier Kristina Keneally to take a vacancy.

Butler singled out a proposed factional realignment in Victoria which would have given a new bloc control over a new federal lower house seat as an example of “backroom buffoonery [that] does not reflect a healthy party organisation” because the location and makeup of the seat had not yet been determined.

Butler said the party organisation “is certainly not dying [but] the most generous description I can think of is that we’re treading water”.

He said the party’s membership of 50,000 had “disturbingly” declined by more than 6% since its peak in 2015 and in a country of 25 million people it could not “credibly claim to be a mass-membership party”.

“We need to be honest that the party itself is no longer capable of organising a substantial on-the-ground campaign, beyond elections,” he said.

Labor had played only a supporting role to the unions’ 2007 Your Rights at Work campaign and “can’t compare in scale to the organising capacity today of groups like GetUp”.

Labor has consistently led Malcolm Turnbull’s Coalition government in the polls since it was narrowly re-elected in July 2016, but Butler noted that large leads for Kevin Rudd and Mark Latham in 2007 and 2004 shrank or disappeared by election day.

“Now, there are reasons for all of those shifts in the numbers,” he said. “But they all point to a danger of complacency about any election, including the next one.”

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Butler also warned that the party’s Senate vote had dropped below 30% for the first since 1903 as the Greens, the Nick Xenophon Team and One Nation won an increasing share.

He called for creation of a new category of “registered supporters” who would be allowed to vote alongside members in important party ballots. He said that would reflect the way many people chose to take part in progressive politics and would make the party more representative.

Comparing the ALP with its British counterpart, he noted Labour had grown to be the largest political party in Europe off the back of a reform agenda and was “probably about 11 times as big” as the ALP .

Responding to the view that Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour had moved too far to the left, Butler said the ALP caucus had a 50% say in the election of its federal leader, meaning a leftward shift was not an “unavoidable” consequence of reforms. Moderate voices would have to “organise better” than their British counterparts.

The “orthodox view that reform equals Corbyn equals electoral oblivion” had been challenged by the 2017 result in which Labour increased its primary vote by 10% and deprived Theresa May of a majority.

Defending his record at a doorstop on Tuesday, Shorten said party membership had increased under his leadership from 42,000 to 56,000. He added that Butler was “right that we’ve got to keep pushing to involve people”.

Shorten said “the Labor party needs to do better” and he was “keen to do more” but to restore faith in democracy the party should be talking about “issues that everyday Australians are concerned with” such as the cost of living.