Labor’s Left has the prime minister, the numbers and formidable control of the party machinery. What it lacks is a program for changing Australia. After decades spent accumulating power, the bigger question is what that power is now for.

Australian Labor has arrived at one of the strangest moments in its history. The Left has finally captured the commanding heights of the party, yet appears less capable than ever of explaining what it wants to do with them.

Anthony Albanese is a lifelong creature of the NSW Left. The federal parliamentary caucus now has a narrow Left majority. The Left also holds a narrow majority at Labor’s National Conference. Albanese dominates the parliamentary party, faces no serious internal challenger and presides over a remarkably disciplined government.

By the old arithmetic of Labor politics, this ought to be the high-water mark of the Labor Left.

Yet where is the corresponding high-water mark of Left policy?

That is the fascinating question raised by Jason Koutsoukis in the Saturday Paper in his article on Albanese’s factional dominance. The colourful stories of enemies dispatched, scores remembered and rivals marginalised make entertaining political journalism. Albanese has clearly become extraordinarily powerful. However, it is also the factions over which he exercises that power that have changed.

Once, Labor’s factions represented competing conceptions of political economy as well as competing networks of unions, politicians and party officials. They certainly distributed preselections and jobs. They certainly engaged in brutal machine politics. But behind the machinery were arguments about what Labor was for.

Public ownership mattered. Economic planning mattered. Industrial democracy mattered. Redistribution mattered. Union power mattered. The relationship between capital and labour mattered. Australian independence in foreign policy mattered.

Those debates were never as pure as subsequent nostalgia suggests. Nevertheless, they represented competing conceptions of society.

What has survived most successfully is the machinery.

The contemporary........

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