By PAUL MILLAR
Geelong Trades Hall Council secretary Tim Gooden believes a push by Federal Opposition leader Bill Shorten to distance the Labor Party from unions will have no effect on membership.
Mr Shorten is pushing for radical reforms to rules governing his party in a bid to boost membership and reduce the influence of factional powerbrokers.
A key factor in his drastic overhaul is dropping rules that party members must also be union members.
Mr Gooden, who is not a member of the Labor Party, said the “machinations of the Labor Party do not worry me too much”.
“People often make out that the unions have too much influence on the Labor Party, I think the Labor Party sometimes has too much influence on the unions,” he said.
Mr Gooden believed a weakening of the link between the party and the unions might even boost membership.
“What the Labor Party does is entirely up to them, it (union membership) might go up.”
The union leader, however, did point out that it was the workers and their leaders who created the platform for the creation of the Labor Party.
“It was the workers who stood workers as candidates for parliament and when they started to win seats they formed the Labor Party,” Mr Gooden said.
The Opposition leader’s proposed revamp of party rules is a gamble he believed he had to take, even though the union movement is a major funding source for the Labor Party.
“We cannot say Labor is ready to serve until we change,” Mr Shorten said.
The Labor Party currently has around 40,000 members, 660 less than the membership of the Geelong Football Club.
Mr Shorten wants to increase that number to 100,000 and believes any failure to push through the change will affect the party’s ability to regain government.
He said to do that Labor must rebuild as a membership-based party, not a faction-based one.
“If we are truly serious about modernising the Labor Party, we need to modernise our relationship with the union movement,” he said.
