Broad Left Conference, 1986: The swan song of the Australian left?

Across Easter weekend in March, 1986, Sydney bustled with left-wing activists. Five hundred environmentalists gathered at the University of Sydney for the Getting Together conference. More than double that number, however, were down the road at the New South Wales Institute of Technology for the Broad Left Conference (BLC). This paper explores the political and intellectual significance of the latter. It details the coming together prominent communist party and trade union leaders who sought to unite a divided left. The BLC offers a case study through which to consider the role that the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) played in the left’s intellectual culture even into the 1980s. The paper posits the BLC as the swan song of a vibrant left intellectual culture which could convincingly claim to have some influence on Australian Labor Party (ALP) government thinking, and asks whether it was the beginning of the end for the CPA. The CPA worked on the conference with communist leaders of two major trade unions: Laurie Carmichael (a prominent Australian Manufacturing Workers’ Union (AMWU) official on the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) executive), and the national secretary of the Building Workers’ Industrial Union (BWIU), Tom McDonald. Three hundred left activists responded to the call to sponsor the conference, including future prime minister, Anthony Albanese. Conference attendees took stock of the left’s position three years into the transformative Hawke government whose policies divided the left. The breadth of the topics covered at the conference and the calibre of the speakers were impressive: prominent New Left activist and historian, Humphrey McQueen, gave a paper on the New Right; Carmichael offered insight on the economic context as a key negotiator of the Prices and Incomes Accord; five years before her election to the New South Wales Legislative Council, ALP member, academic and unionist Meredith Burgmann tackled the relationship between social movements, trade unions, and the Labor government. The conference reached beyond communist activists and trade union officials. It reflected the intellectual relationship between communists and the ALP Left. The Hawke government was represented by Brian Howe, the minister for social security. He was critical of his own government in his speech to the opening session: ‘This new-look social democratic animal has no real future. Like so many hybrids, it’s a mule.’ Howe argued that a vibrant and organised broad left was ‘critical to keeping Labor governments honest – and in power’. This was among the major roles that the left, of which the CPA was a core organisational component, played throughout the 1970s and 1980s. The Broad Left Conference was the last manifestation of a post-1945 left tradition that absorbed elements from a wide range of intellectual and political traditions, bringing together prominent public intellectuals, leaders of powerful unions, ALP politicians and ministers, communists, and, from the 1970s, social movement activists. What followed the Broad Left Conference, with the foundation of a New Left Party in 1991 and the corresponding dissolution of the CPA, was a shadow of its former self.