Existential angst for a rudderless ALP gang

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This was published 13 years ago

Existential angst for a rudderless ALP gang

By Martin Flanagan

THE Labor Party was formed around the same time, and from similar conditions, as the Collingwood Football Club. Collingwood's originating mythology made it the most powerful team in the first half of the 20th century.

By the 1950s and '60s, its rigid trade union rule that all players were paid alike was causing it grief. By 1999, the club was broke and on the bottom of the ladder.

It's back at the top of the pile now, its president, Eddie McGuire, having made two big decisions. One was to eliminate racism from his club. The other was to leave its home ground. By so doing, McGuire has put himself in line to be judged by those who follow the history of the club and the game itself, but Eddie is guided by a simple saying: "If you don't stand for something, you stand for nothing."

The Labor Party is at the point of finding out what it stands for now that its relationship to its originating mythology is unclear.

The statement from the Labor side that most resonated for me came from former West Australian state Labor minister Alannah MacTiernan, who failed in her bid for the seat of Canning: ''Until we have a change in that whole culture about the way we run campaigns, until we transcend the reliance on a set of political cliches that come from the West Wing brigade going over to America doing their courses and coming back all wise about politics, we're not going to get anywhere … We do all the hard work with policy, and then we hand it all over to these so-called professionals, who do us a disservice by all this negative campaigning."

Julia Gillard forbade Mark Arbib from going on the increasingly influential Q&A, which is the closest we have to the old town-hall meeting, where the candidates stood up on stage and the audience booed and hissed. In Q&A they are answerable to a generally intelligent audience. Gillard's view is understandable in that she must have a semblance of unity in her party, but she acted at some cost. Arbib should answer to the people for what he did.

Two others involved in the plot to get rid of Kevin Rudd were the ubiquitous Bill Shorten and his successor as national secretary of the AWU, Paul Howes. Monday's Australian Story followed Howes from around the time of the coup to the election. The result was like a Harold Pinter play opening on to ever greater emptiness.

The argument within Labor is about who is to blame for the loss - the people who sacked Rudd or the people who leaked during the campaign. What they need to realise is that the public despise both sides of the arguments alike. It's an argument about power, not about what needs doing.

Meanwhile, the independents were telling the public exactly what they think needs doing and, in Rob Oakeshott, we finally had the example of a lateral thinker.

Political thought in this country was horribly constipated before this election. Oakeshott comes from outside the square on almost everything. Put Rudd in an Abbott government, he says. There was polite laughter from Abbott and the press, but in the public mind it raises the question - why not? Then he does it again with ''boat people'', questioning the term itself.

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The people have got a sniff of power. There's another way of doing this parliament thing. Adam Bandt, the Greens member for Melbourne, has presented as a steady character capable of firm and clear expression. The risk for Labor, if there is another election soon, is an exodus of support to the Greens and independents.

The best thing about the 2010 election was Andrew Wilkie's success in Denison. Wilkie, a former lieutenant-colonel and Liberal Party member, was the intelligence officer who revealed that the Howard government's statements prior to the invasion of Iraq were at odds with the intelligence the government was receiving. For this, he was persecuted, the government branding him "unstable". In 2004, when he ran against John Howard as a Green in Bennelong, he was harassed by members of the Exclusive Brethren, a religious sect that strongly supported Howard and with whom Howard admitted meeting.

On Thursday, Abbott was reported to have apologised to Wilkie for the Howard government's vilification of him. But the story also said Abbott still supported the Iraq war. Why? The whole point of Wilkie's leak was that the pretext for the invasion relied on by the government of which Abbott was a minister was a sham.

Nine journalist Laurie Oakes, who reported the early stories on Wilkie, described him on election night as "a man of honour and integrity". It's good to know such people are still around. In fact, democracy is just a succession of them.

Martin Flanagan is a senior writer.

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