Peter Baldwin

Peter Baldwin is an Australian former politician. He was an Australian Labor Party member of the Australian House of Representatives from 1983 to 1998.

Baldwin was born in Aldershot, England. His family moved to Australia in 1958.He attended Normanhurst Boys' High School in Sydney, and later received a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering from the University of Sydney and a Bachelor of Arts from Macquarie University.[1]

Baldwin was a member of the New South Wales Legislative Council from 1975 to 1982. In the 1970s he was prominent as a left-wing activist in the Australian Labor Party (ALP), in which position he sought to break the grip over the corrupt right-wing machine that controlled many Labor subdivisions in and near central Sydney. In the course of his campaign, he uncovered substantial and illegal doctoring of the party's account books in the Enmore branch of the ALP.

Australian Left Review

Australian Left Review magazine 145 November 1992.

EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD Tony Aspromourgos, Carol Bacchi, Peter Baldwin, Anna Booth, Peter Botsman, Jennie George, Barry Hindess, Paul Hirst, Ian Hunter, John Langmore, Sylvia Lawson, Stuart MacIntyre, Race Mathews, Meaghan Morris, McKenzie Wark.

Socialist Left

Anthony Albanese cut his teeth in Labor’s ruthless New South Wales (NSW) Head Office. Every federal ALP leader in living memory has been from the party’s right. By contrast, Albanese hails from what is referred to internally as the “hard” wing of the NSW Socialist Left faction.

In the early 1980s, led by the future MP for Sydney, Peter Baldwin, rank-and-file members of the Left — at the time called the Steering Committee — waged branch warfare against the ruling right-wing machine.

Paul Keating, then the party’s president, intervened, warning of a Bennite revolt that could destroy the ALP. He described inner-city members as people who “believe in wider nature strips, more trees and [who want to] go back to making wicker baskets in Balmain.” Keating was also worried that the left current was quickly taking over from the ALP’s Catholic old guard.

The “Balmain Basket Weavers” were on the radical left. They were also highly organized — and throughout the late ’70s and early ’80s, they were winning, taking over, and transforming inner-city party machines that had been right-wing for half a century.

The Left scored its greatest triumph when Baldwin won a vote to deselect the right-aligned member for Sydney, Les McMahon, and took his place in federal parliament. Baldwin’s platform echoed that of Tony Benn in the British Labour Party. He promised to revive the “dead letter” of the ALP’s commitment to socializing the means of production by advocating for the nationalization of industry as part of the next Labor government’s program. He argued that industrial democracy would be crucial to this goal.

Once Baldwin opened the floodgates, members of the socialist caucus in Sydney’s inner west replaced every right-wing MP, one by one, until they had all been driven out. The Socialist Left crusade was victorious in NSW. The Baldwinites then set their sights on the party as a whole, and encouraged the Left to organize a grassroots-led democratic revolution in every state branch. Their goal was to transform the ALP, from below, into a socialist party.

These successes did not last. On November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, and the NSW Steering Committee changed its name to the NSW Socialist Left. At the same time, Anthony Albanese, the driving force behind a now-dominant sub-faction known as the “Hard Left,” took over the Socialist Left as a whole, overthrowing the Baldwinites. The Hard Left has dominated the faction ever since.

With the support of unions formerly associated with the Communist Party of Australia, Albanese’s “hard-left” moniker appeared to be legitimate.

The Hard Left was opposed by the rather less fortunately named Soft Left, as the Baldwinites were now dubbed. The real difference between the two sub-factions lay in their sources of power. The oppositional Soft Left was run from the bottom-up by a legion of suburban branch activists, while Albanese’s Hard Left cohered around an aristocracy of union secretaries, political staffers, lobbyists, and student politicians, mainly graduates from the elite University of Sydney.

The Hard Left consolidated their clique’s power at the expense of rank-and-file members.