Primaries everywhere

Some interest in the introduction of primaries within the ALP, whereby ALP supporters would register as ALP supporters and then be entitled to vote in ballots to select ALP candidates. Supporters include Andrew Leigh , Corin McCarthy and Geoff Drechsler. In 1931 Peter Board, educationalist and All for Australia League activist, argued for primaries. It is difficult to imagine a more shell-like organisation than the contemporary ALP, but I have my doubts. Primaries in the US are perhaps dependent on the fact that the executive is not elected by parliament. MPs vote independently far more than in Australia although there has been a long-tern trend towards more bloc voting and under Bush the Republicans have mostly been rallied as a disciplined force, with some identifying a quasi-parliamentary system emerging. But if aspirant Labor MPs made different appeals to Labor voters to gain their support how would these voters feel when 'their' MPs voted a caucus line? Labor endorsement in inner-city Sydney or Melbourne would require a different position on refugee policy than that which might be adopted by a pragmatic caucus majority. It could be argued Tasmania and the ACT with multi-member electorates already allow voters to choose between competing candidates, does it make a huge difference. In the US success in a primary contest usually requires money to appeal to thousands of voters and to persuade them to bother going to the polls, interestingly this does enable unions to exercise substantial influence on the choice of Democrat candidates as in the recent California primary. Can IT entrepreneurs and teacher unions craft a way for the Democrats to appeal to the white working-class? Odd too that 3rd way centrists, like McCarthy, would support primaries, because they are likely to favour party activists who bother to turn out to vote. Labor MPs who supported the party's policy on asylum-seekers in 2001 might under a primary system have suffered the same fate as it seems Joe Liebermann will in Connecticut, where recent polls show him trailing his anti-war opponent Ned Lamont. Labor's problems are not just structural rather as Stuart Macintyre argued in 1991 they are with the party's social base and ideology.