Conscience vote exposes Luke Foley and Labor Left
If ever someone put me off joining the Labor Party, it's Luke Foley.
To be fair, he's in a queue of Labor politicians behaving as if they don't have consciences.
Why are our voices not the ones Labor MP Luke Foley is hearing when he's exercising his decision to vote against marriage equality? Photo: Dallas Kilponen
But Foley, the man who wants to usurp John Robertson as leader of the parliamentary NSW Labor Party, infuriated so many rank and file members last week he may be lucky to get the chance to ever become leader.
Foley, former secretary of the NSW and ACT Australian Services Union; a former assistant general secretary of NSW Labor; and the man parachuted into replace Ian Macdonald in the Legislative Council, did the dishonourable thing last week when he voted against marriage equality in the upper house.
He wasn't the only Labor member of the upper house to do that – he was joined by others, including Shaoquett Moselmane and Ernest Wong.
But Foley should be different. Very different. Moselmane and Wong are on the Right. And Foley is on the Left. Or says he is.
When I say on the Left, Luke Foley leads the Left faction in the NSW parliamentary Labor Party. By any measure – and as a leader of that faction - he should have unbreakable progressive values and be able to demonstrate those values – not just to his colleagues in the party but to the residents of NSW who want to be able to vote for difference.
The majority of Australians are for marriage equality – the figure is steady at around 65 per cent no matter who is doing the polling or for whom the polling is done. And Foley doesn't even have a seat of angry Bible Belters on whom to pin his fear.
While I accept the piss-weak Labor Party has said that while its platform is for marriage equality, individual politicians can exercise a conscience vote. Here's my question. What does it take to form the conscience of a politician? Where's the responsibility to the voters? And why are our voices not the ones Luke Foley is hearing when he's exercising his decision to vote against marriage equality.
In the last week, I've spoken to a number of senior figures on the Left in NSW. Partly to vent, partly to investigate. Some were sanctimonious – and I'll paraphrase here: Luke is an honourable man and it's a conscience vote. Others less so. Again, a paraphrase: I won't tell you what I think of him because I want to tell him to his face.
But each and every one of those people was not able to tell me the answer to the next very important question for a progressive feminist – how will Luke Foley vote on Zoe's Law, the bill designed to introduce the concept of fetal personhood?
Perhaps this will shake the answer out of him.
The Left ticket for the upper house will be organised well before the next state conference in June. And the decision about who sits where on that ticket will be based on the votes of rank and file members and the unions – as well as the parliamentary Left faction. There is no question that the unions who supported Foley to his current position are utterly infuriated by his individualism, which lines him up with Labor Right.
There's been at least one person urging Foley's expulsion from the Left ticket – and yet another saying that he should sign up to the Right, since it's clear he doesn't have core Left values.
So Luke Foley, cast as the messiah of the Labor Left, has one last chance to show which side of progressive politics he is on. If he votes for Zoe's Law, he may just find he won't get another chance.
Jenna Price is a keen student of the Labor Left but is not a party member.