By Alex Mitchell
Faced with electoral oblivion in just four months, the NSW Labor Party is looking to the hereafter and the task of rewriting its program, rebuilding its image and rediscovering its soul.
Having decided it cannot possibly win the election, that there is no chance of a hung parliament or of forming a coalition with the independents or Greens, Labor is reluctantly facing the need to conduct a post mortem on its rotting corpse.
Let's hope it doesn't follow the example of the battered Gillard government, which took the advice of two former NSW party general secretaries, Mark Arbib and Karl Bitar, and set up an elitist commission of inquiry into the federal election debacle.
The team is former Victorian premier Steve Bracks, former NSW premier Bob Carr and NSW senator John Faulkner. Note that there is no one from Queensland, where the ALP lost most seats, no female investigator, although women constitute half the electorate, and no one representing young voters, i.e. the future.
The inquiry reminded me of Talleyrand's quip after the restoration of the Bourbons to the throne of France in 1814: "They have learnt nothing and forgotten nothing."
An unconventional way of initiating a root-and-branch overhaul of the NSW ALP branch would be to encourage its departing servants to write political memoirs.
So far, 16 MPs plan to retire at the election on March 26 and all of them have an extraordinary story to tell. Most of them served between 10 and 20 years and they could explain what went wrong, when the rot started, why it all fell apart and who and what is to blame.
They could conclude with a section recommending changes to the party's internal democracy, finance, management, policy development and candidate selection.
Their extended essays would become compulsory reading. Who wouldn't want to read the reflections of Joe Tripodi, David Campbell, John Aquilina, Graham West, Paul Gibson, Diane Beamer, Barry Collier, Phil Koperberg, Alison Megarrity, Kerry Hickey, Grant McBride, Gerard Martin, Marie Andrews, Tony Stewart and two upper house MPs, Ian West and Christine Robertson?
They should be using their taxpayer-funded computers between now and their departure to record their experiences for the benefit of the party that gave them their careers and the voters who put them in office.
The official historian Bob Carr will write a hugely entertaining volume but no prizes for guessing the hero, and the villains are predictable – the unions, many of those named above and the media.