Progressive intellectuals have poisoned the well for Labor

When Shann and Eggleston made their observations the union movement was substantially drawn from men working in the manufacturing sector, which in turn was largely shielded from the value‑added logic of global market competition due to significant tariff and other trade barriers.

However, a range of cross‑cutting economic and social changes were to play a significant role in altering the character of Labor's membership and operations, with spillover effects for its policy outlook over time.

Some of these factors included structural change in manufacturing, a strengthening services sector and growing government, rising female labour force participation, increasing access to university education, and the emergence of secular, post‑modernist outlooks on issues concerning environmentalism, gender equity, citizenship and sexuality.

While the manufacturing union movement still plays its pivotal role in funding, party organisation and political preselection to this day, this traditional working class base within Labor has made way, to a greater or lesser extent, for an emergent, 'progressive' intellectual class.

Some of the previous old guard viewed the rise of the intellectual classes in the Labor Party with suspicion or derision. Clyde Cameron would sometimes compare his early years as a shearer favourably against those of services sector backgrounds, while Kim Beazley Senior once facetiously remarked, 'When I joined the Labor Party, it contained the cream of the working class; now it contains the dregs of the middle class.'

But even the cynical old guard could do little but accommodate the new chattering kids on the ALP block. After all, membership of major political parties has been on the decline over many years, so best to bring the bookwormish intellectual breed under the Labor wing.

In general terms the policy stance of the new Labor intellectual cohort includes the reinforcement of state control over economic activity, albeit dressed in the garb of market jargon (for example, a 'carbon price'), and a social agenda of cultural and social reprogramming of public attitudes through legislation, NGO funding or standardised school curricula.

This policy agenda of ALP's intellectual classes, which arguably has more in common with Bob Brown than Joe De Bruyn, is likely to come at the continuing cost of Labor losing political support from the mainstream working and aspirational classes of Australian society. This is because workers and aspirationals alike prefer economic growth to stagnation, loathe policies that hurt the hip pocket, and resent political correctness and its enforcement through government law or funding.

To put simply, phenomena such as 'Howard's Battlers' or 'Abbott's Army,' could represent a more permanent addition to the Coalition voting pool at both federal and state levels at the increasing expense of Labor the longer the noveau intellectuals hold sway within the ALP.

To a degree more significant than most realise, the long term fortunes of the Labor Party will also be conditioned by choices made by current and future Liberal National Coalition governments.

The progressive intellectual arm of the modern Labor movement largely accumulates its power and influence today largely as a consequence of its previous Gramsci‑like 'march through the institutions' of government administrations, hospitals, schools and universities, not to mention the union representative bodies for these respective institutions.

These personnel are largely paid by the taxpayer but are in a state of ideological animosity toward a serving Coalition government of the day. This poses certain risks for non‑Labor governments, and opportunities for future Labor governments, if left unaddressed.