THE AUSTRALIAN GOVERNMENT HAS released its Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Bill and it's not very good, and can't really work. But that's not what interests me about it. That this bit of legislation has been such a prominent part of the government agenda is, I think, a sign of a move away from Labor's role as a State party.

A 'State Party' is a political science concept.¹ State Parties are political parties in genuine multi-party democracies which have as their foundational interest the interests of the State in which they're constituted, and whose core concerns overlap with those of the State they're in, to the point that they're hard to imagine existing outside the context of that State. They rarely want to fundamentally change the political arrangements, but rather to manage power within existing ones. They're to be distinguished against parties with sectional interests (of workers, of a bourgeoisie, of ethnic/racial groups, of religious groups, or specific business or cartel interests) which are interests held against the State, parties that are the 'natural party of Government' which simply happen to win a lot, parties which have interests that cross States (like the early 20thC Communist Party, or pro-Russian parties in former Soviet countries), and State Parties of single-Party non-democracies (like the modern Chinese Communist Party which is older and more powerful than the PRC, or the Baath style shadow-parties any number of other sordid single-party Republics).

Australian Labor began as a sectional Party of workers and trade unionists, but around 1916-1917 for reasons which are beyond this blog post, switched to having, as its core interest, Australia; or at least its own vision of that. The modern Coalition is an amalgam of one State Party in the post-Menzies Liberal Party, and one smaller non-State sectional one, which has the 'regions' as its core interest. One Nation despite its name is not a State Party, but an ideological one at its (very incompetent) core. Clive Palmer's various bids have only his own business interest at heart. The Greens most interestingly are in tension: on one hand they're firmly in a tradition of anti-State activism, most comfortable in opposition to bad changes, but on the other they're representative of the genuine concerns of the regulatory, higher-education focused, expertise-led State, and their voters show it.

States which feature State Parties in their governance also tend to develop public service cultures in symbiosis with the political environment. Our various levels of public service are fiercely independent (mostly), but they all have a very keen sense of how to work with the different styles of government as they come and go. Yes, Minister. In the United States, with its two extraordinarily well-developed State Parties, there are almost two public services, who swap in and out according to the demands of the election winners... or at least, at the time of writing, watch this space.

Why is it interesting? A State Party succeeds because it's very good at leveraging the core competencies of the State in whose context it exists. Our State Parties have different ideas of what the Federal and State governments should do, whether it's infrastructure development, or free trade, or war, or whatever, but until now they've been extremely well-connected to the actual means of how these things, and haven't pushed the State to do things it's incapable of doing. The social media bill is a really glaring example of the use of State power for something that's simply unfeasible: there's a breakdown, I think, of Labor as a State Party understanding what is and isn't possible, and also of the public service, which must understand, being able to communicate to it. So what kind of organisation will Labor be if not a State Party? I have no idea.

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