No-one had bothered to comment on the PM’s recent prognostications to his party room. He may have been making it up.

What bothered me and drove me to make this God awful [totally unsound and inverifiable] contention is the very real concern I have about what happens if Rudd loses this Election- at the next Election ?

Will the ‘damage’ done by Latham’s lame effort be repeated- More Coalition seats taking an unexpected shift toward ’safe’ space ? More voters opting for the [protest-oh bloody hell, their both hopeless] Greens ?
Family First getting a run at another Senate seat in 2010 ? And the ALPs chances of winning next time being improbable ?

Latham’s anti-logging thing did damage in TAS and parts of VIC and elsewhere – Bass, Braddon et al- but can the ALP win either back ? Hindmarsh, Swan, Bendigo, possible LOSSES–grrr !!! Corangamite, Kalgoorlie, Bennalong, no way– Bonner, Blair ? Ha !! Eden Monaro- perhaps; Wentworth, please God Wentworth, Im sick of his face on the TV;
Page, dont think so; Solomon ? perhaps; how depressing, scratching together a few ‘gain’ seats for the ALP.

Cross referencing between Adam Carrs seat by seat prognosis, rogue and other polls, The Poll Bludger, a 6 week solid analysis of 2001 and 2004 election results in fine detail, and the coal face I stare at out here in the bleachers here in sunny SE Brisvegas where i function as a social worker in a very prominant Federal Government department i conclude that any ning nong who wants to predict the outcome of this Election needs to be either Nostradamis love child, very good at reading tea leaves, or a bloody idealogue with a personal bent for one or other of the 2 contenders-that is, one you can safely ignore as ‘biased’.

Please win Mr Rudd, Im sick of looking at little Johnny and that smug faced Costello telling us with great pride that the share of the economic pie going to ‘the worker’ fell away and the share of the pie going to capital improved yet again. Its not us v them -stupid way to view it- adversarial approaches to capital-labour relations is just ignorant- just as ignorant as voting for one side or the other because of the colour of their ties , red or blue, or even [ewww] green. I worry for the next election if Rudd loses this one- yes loses. Imagine another 3 years of Howard/Costello- OMG-wheres my Prozac !!

The KPI stuff well what can I say. I agree with Chris without going his source. And yes in business and more so in Government it is mostly, um bingo rubbish. I have been a captive of this world too long they have infiltrated my brain.

Without the stupid jargon I got caught out on, my point is at the moment in the State I know best if membership drops, the powers that be probably don’t go to the office bearers and say “OMG membership has dropped WTF have you been doing?”

If they noticed odds are they’d say “Fantastic 200 less drongos this year, should be much neater as we move amendment to rule X to ensure that members must line up at Chicken Treat between 3.30 am and 4.00 am on the 27 June to renew there membership which only may be paid in West Coast Eagles Football Cards to the value of $100.” Just think how this measure will be fantastic to reduce branch stacking… ha ha ha … we wont have branches … ha ha ha.

I think this is the wrong direction. I don’t think the tide can be turned I’m too cynical and old for that but my most critical point is there are, I know I meet them, people who should be in the Labor Party, they believe what we believe and many live it and put it into action even better than us, but we have to go to them and listen to them and promise to try to do better. But we don’t we sit back thankful the branch meeting finished in 10 mintues and hope the Admin committee don’t notice we have the full cast of cheers signed up as members for next year.

KPI, KSC, ETWR, transformational leadership – it doesn’t matter. If you go to the satire section of platowa.com, you will find about fourteen editions of Bull**** Bingo, provided by the hard-working cynics of Hampton Park Secondary College. Almost every one of the, perhaps 500, terms, comes from education, but they all have that meaningless businessspeak about them.

Yasmine,

I think you will enjoy them too, even if you are a believer.

Will you be the Marianne of the revolution? You’ve started down an exciting road.

Yasmine, well you may be right, it may be possible to bring about some recovery in branch membership, but this is swimming against the very strong tide of civic disengagement that has been flowing since suburbanisation, the postwar baby boom and TV killed off the old culture of civic participation. I wish you luck. I still think that primaries are a better solution to the problem of candidate selection than attempts to recruit more branch members.

(Someone has now told me what a KPI is. I thought it was a brand of fried chicken. My previous occupation was politics, so of course I know nothing of such things.)

Rewrite the rules : isn’t technically obscure, I think if you’d stayed awake at the State Conferences you’d have notice amendments to the rules probably happened at some point or another. Pretty traditional mover / seconder debate vote stuff.

If you are saying the powers that be just aren’t going to change, I’d probably agree with you, the numbers to do it aren’t there; but that doesn’t provide support for position.

Sorry if I was too brief, essentially if you give an incentive for increasing membership, ie, so that increased membership diluted the 50:50 rule over time, then it is an incentive to enrol branch members because if you grow the membership then the State Conference membership votes increase, no membership growth no increased vote no dilution.

That unions would probably form a large chunk of these branches and increased membership is quite irrelevant the votes have moved from the unions to political branches. Not rocket science, not in the interest of the powers that be but still a way to encourage rather than discourage membership.

It doesn’t really matter if I’ve been to State Conferences or not. I assume that was an intend slight which I will recover from in due course. Although wait I mentioned above the State Secretary at a recent State Confernce mentioning poll bludger … so I at least know they occur.

KPI’s and targets. You don’t understand organisations having goals and measuring the performance of staff against those goals? Are you serious? I guess I should know what you do for a living, but I don”t. I will say however if you can get me a job in the unmeasured untargeted world you inhabit please send me an application pack.

OK my apologies for using a business metaphor, in my circles Government and Organisations are told they are supposed to run like businesses, but then they have targets and performance measures, so I’ll apologise for living in the business world. All I mean is that the aim of the organisation is to add additional members it, in and of itself would be an improvement. If you then make measures of that and tell key people and staff they are going to be evaluated against those measures and performance and you have carrots and sticks at your disposal then you can actually acheive.

Finally my last point was to clearly identify two different focii and aim for them with different body’s and efforts. If a large blobby organisation has no goals or isn’t really sure what is goals are it is not really going to go anywhere. If you have two organisations both exclusively focused on winnning Government you’d have massively declining membership of …. oh wait didn’t we already do that?

I’m not trying to cut anything honey. I’m trying to suggest that the party I love has a organisational culture and structure that actively works against membership, rather than the other way around. It still is a great organisation, it still does great things and seems at the moment to have a great record of success baring Cth elections.

And if you key point is the powers that be aren’t going to give up power, and aren’t going to focus on getting more members and more input and deliver a better party you are almost certainly right. If you are suggesting this is either good or inevitable then I fundamentally disagree with you and would beg you to go and join some other party.

If your key thesis is that communities have no interest in their own community and politics I think you are wrong; and while high standards of living, relative peace and relative stability is going to reduce participation through increased satisfaction, I know in the communities I’m part of there are lots of passionate active people who should be in the Labor party but the Labor party needs to go to them and recruit them, they are not going to come to us.

For goodness sakes about half of the people that manned the booth I ran at the last Federal Election, standing in the hot sun were not even party members. Why would that be Adam? They care enough to stand in the sun and had out HTV’s for some factional hack who has barely visited the electorate and who they’ve never heard of but they don’t join the party? Not surprisingly the particular seat moved from relatively safe to massively safe based on the last effort.

My key thesis is that if we take serious steps to recruit them we are better off. No I don’t think it is going to happen, but I object strongly to any attitude that suggests we shouldn’t even try.