Its policy positions include party democratisation, economic interventionism, progressive tax reform, refugee rights, gender equality and same-sex marriage.

This created a power vacuum which allowed the Left to take control of the Federal Executive and Victorian state branch, while its opponents were preserved elsewhere.

[14] Tom Uren described the left of the Labor Party Caucus upon his election to Parliament in the late 1950s as "a loosely knit grouping ... consist[ing] mostly of anti-Catholics, although some members were militants or socialists".

Despite an increasing level of organisation in the grassroots party, this was not reflected within the Parliamentary caucus: Ken Fry noted that when he was elected to Parliament in 1974, meetings of left MPs were irregular and they responded to events in an ad hoc manner.

In New South Wales, the Steering Committee (which later became known as the Socialist Left in 1989) made advances in branches across the state in the late 1970s and early 1980s under the leadership of Peter Baldwin, initially in the suburbs of Sydney before spreading to the inner cities.

Left influence was also restricted by the ALP's binding pledge committing legislators to accept caucus discipline, allowing members little freedom to dissent.

For example, in Newcastle Bryce Gaudry was deselected in favour of the Right's Jodi McKay, following which about 130 members resigned or were expelled from the city's ALP branches, previously the largest in the state.

[17] Lindsay Tanner, writing in the early 1990s, argued that the principal "axis of division" with the ALP cut across the traditional left-right divide, namely the opposition of "rationalists" and "traditionalists", with the former supporting the Prices and Incomes Accord and union mergers, and abandoning or watering down their commitment to traditional Labor objectives such as public ownership, non-interventionism in foreign policy, and maintenance of working-class living standards, whilst the latter were negative towards the Accord, opposed to union mergers, sympathetic toward economic autarky, and attached to traditional Labor policy objectives.