Caught in the web

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This was published 13 years ago

Caught in the web

By Melissa Fyfe

Mary Delahunty's memoir gives some scathing insights into the modern political machine.

MARY Delahunty was on her hands and knees, bent over a tub of warm water, washing the feet of her elderly and recently widowed father. ''Madam Minister,'' she reflects in her soon-to-be-released memoirs, ''would never have imagined herself on her hands and knees this way.''

Illustration: Michael Connolly

Illustration: Michael Connolly

It's a telling line in Delahunty's book Public Life, Private Grief. It's a self-reflective nod to her foibles, to lofty habits that earned her the nickname Queen Mary among Labor colleagues. And it's also a moment of reckoning when, post-politics, the former education and planning minister began to make time for ''loss and need … to stop and listen to the unspoken tug of grief''.

Delahunty's book, released tomorrow, unmasks Queen Mary. It traces the crippling loss to cancer of her husband and soulmate, Melbourne journalist Jock Rankin, and how she copes, or fails to cope, while living a pressure-cooker public life as a Bracks government minister. With a journalist's eye, the book records her experience of politics and reveals much about the state of modern Labor governments and the Victorian parliamentary system.

The public record shows Mary Delahunty's story is a classic tale of the star political recruit who fizzled. John Brumby recruited the award-winning ABC journalist in 1998. But by 2006, the factions had undermined her, the party fell out of love with her, and Delahunty had gone from education minister, to planning, to arts and women's affairs. Next likely stop: the backbench. She resigned for the sake of her ''general health''.

The public, meanwhile, formed the impression of a blundering minister. Remembered not for her ministerial successes - such as setting up the Victorian Institute of Teaching - Delahunty instead became a subject of satire. She accidentally read an eight-month-old speech to Parliament and supported an arts project to paint 43 elm trees blue (''Blue trees! What the hell were you thinking?'' she writes in her memoir). She admits in the book that after the 2002 death of Rankin she was on autopilot, suppressing overwhelming grief and clinically depressed.

While her memory of ministerial duties are often foggy and soft, her reflections on politics are forensically sharp. She loved being a minister, found the job exciting, enjoyed the seduction of power and relished policymaking as ''a satisfying business to be in''. But much of the other business of politics left her bored and uninspired. She was not a fan of question time, describing it as petty, insular, demeaning and ''rarely illuminating''.

Indeed, the broader business of Parliament, she says, is very dull. ''Good debate was scarce, and engaging oratory almost totally absent,'' she writes of her time in Spring Street. During particularly tedious speeches she kept herself alert by practising pelvic floor muscle exercises in the chamber - ''four or five squeezes in between the obligatory 'hear, hear' if it was our side doing the droning, or 'shame, shame' if it was the other side''.

The ministerial life she depicts is the political version of a sausage factory. ''Too much of politics is surrendered to bad speeches: time-absorbing cant in the chamber, flaccid platitudes in public forums and 'forked tongue' exchanges in caucus or corridors. Some days my diary had me doing up to five speeches. How many of them were any good?'' she wonders.

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Revealingly she describes being in government as ''quietly corrupting''. It's not just the comfy cars and obliging drivers, she says, but the ''tiny corrosive compromises that threaten to ease you away from your moral tethering''. What caused her most moral discomfort was signing off, with cabinet, on the Commonwealth's anti-terrorism laws curbing civil liberties. Delahunty felt it clashed with why she entered politics: to rebuild the civil architecture dismantled by Jeff Kennett.

She talks of ''modern managerial governments'' and does not name the Brumby/Bracks government but the imputation is clearly there. She could have thrown in the Rudd/Gillard government and the Howard government while she was at it.

Modern politics, she says, warns against the folly of governments that pursue the public benefit against ''well-larded sectional interests, whether it's climate policy opposed by the mighty mining lobby or more police powers screamed for in a tabloid media campaign''.

''The purpose of modern managerial government is to stay in government,'' Delahunty writes. ''It manages risk, mollifies noisy or powerful stakeholders … and carefully crafts a plan for unending incumbency.'' Sound familiar, Mr Brumby? Julia? Kev?

We know Delahunty was no fan of the Labor factions. When they had their knives out for her in 2005 she complained of the faceless men who were trying to unseat her from Northcote. In the book, she skewers them as ''black political spiders'' who were trying to shunt her ''so they could glide on to the green leather'' of the frontbench.

Nowhere in the book is she keen on naming names (sadly) but she describes the factional players as a mix of ''pumped-up'' party officials, a ''clutch'' of advisers, ministers, union heavyweights, ''wannabe'' MPs and ''have-been'' ministers, all with ''a crow's merciless plunder of anything that stumbles''.

Their weapon of choice, she says, is the media leak. And they engage in an ''odious'' fellowship, a ''grubby togetherness'' that prefers the thrust and parry of the party numbers game to ''any thought of civic service''. Ouch.

Delahunty clearly believes that Bracks and Brumby have led good governments, but hers is not, on the whole, an inspiring and hopeful dissertation on modern government and the Victorian Labor Party. Many in the party will dismiss Delahunty's criticisms. Fine, blame the factions, they say, but it was factional power that arranged her parachute into Northcote and early promotion.

Many will also argue her analysis means little from a person who was given all the opportunities to shine but, they believed, was way out of her depth. But these things should not diminish her insights into the political process. She was an outsider, but in many ways that makes her view of the inside more valuable.

Melissa Fyfe is The Sunday Age's state politics reporter. You can follow her at twitter.com/melfyfe

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