Travelling half way around the world to find acommunity much like the one you left behind is a strange experience. I wasinvited to speak at the third annual Brisbane Social Forum, which was heldin this city of one million on Australia’s magnificent east coast.

Oddly enough they wanted to hear about the New Politics Initiative — a current inthe NDP that calls for participatory democracy and closer relationship withsocial movements. Matt Collins, a young trade union staffer, who readsrabble.ca and follows Canadian left-wing politics was wondering how the NPImanaged to have so much influence in such a short time.

The social forum itself was a mixture of labour, environmental and student groups in avariety of settings from plenary, to workshop, to open space circles. Thetopics were mostly Australian. There has been a huge refugee rightsmovement here to stop the automatic detention of refugees.

Julian Burnside, a key leader of that struggle was the opening speaker. In fact, Matt was one of the key leaders of Labour for Refugees, the first cross-factionalmovement ever organized in the highly factional Australian Labour Party.

Structured factionalism seems to be a key feature of the entire Australianleft including the student movement. That means that people meet infactions and democracy is basically a negotiation between or among factions.

The Labour Party has been the governing party here in many of the states andon the national level, most recently in 1996. It is quite conservativecompared with the NDP and is permanently divided into at least two factions — the Labour Right and the Socialist Left. Unions are divided between the two asare everyone else. These groups meet as factions and bind their members tovotes, usually on party elections.

While my talk on participatory democracyand breaking down sectarianism on the left was quite well received at thesocial forum, later in the week at a Labour Left meeting it was as if I werespeaking a different language.

The Brisbane Social Forum is one of the onlyevents that cuts across that factionalism and does so deliberately. It wasorganized almost entirely by young people with the oldest organizer being 40years old and most in their 20s. It seems like a way to bring the newpolitics of the anti-globalization movement into Australia’s left. TheSocial Forum structure allowed young people who are trying to break with thefactional politics of the left to create a space where things are donedifferently and with considerable success.

While 300 people attended the forum, it was lively, engaged and interesting. Sydney, a larger city, also has a yearly social forum in November but it is apparently not as successful in including a variety of people from the left as is the forum in Brisbane.

Judy Rebick

Judy Rebick

Judy Rebick is one of Canada’s best-known feminists. She was the founding publisher of rabble.ca , wrote our advice column auntie.com and was co-host of one of our first podcasts called Reel Women....