Australia’s Labor Party Must Return to Working-Class Values
Once the left of the Australian Labor Party was committed to working-class politics. To avoid collapse, Labor must return to that legacy — but today’s Labor Left is more committed to neoliberalism and serving US foreign policy.
Doug Cameron speaks during the 2018 Australian Labor Party National Conference on December 16, 2018, in Adelaide, Australia. (Mark Brake / Getty Images)
In 2019, Australian Labor Party (ALP) senator Doug Cameron summed up his eleven-year senate career with characteristic candor. “It all comes down to one thing: socialism,” he said.
Cameron’s words — and the commitment underlying them — stem from his career as a blue-collar unionist in the Hunter Valley, an industrial hub in New South Wales. Unlike his more urbane ALP colleagues, Cameron’s working-class demeanor resonated with Labor’s trade-union base. After all, he cut his political teeth working in shipyards, car plants, and power stations.
In 1973, on his first day at work, Cameron joined the Amalgamated Metal Workers and Shipwrights Union (AMWSU). A decade later, he was elected as an AMWSU organizer for the Hunter Valley before rising quickly through the union’s ranks. A series of amalgamations saw the AMWSU become the Australian Manufacturing Workers’ Union (AMWU), and from 1996 to 2007, Doug Cameron served as its national secretary.
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