By Shaun Carney
The "whatever it takes" school of Labor politics has been shut down by Saturday's massacre in NSW.
A generation ago, the New South Wales Right grouping within the Labor Party was considered a political outfit par excellence. In Labor's miserable months after the Whitlam collapse, it had demonstrated that the ALP could still win elections when Neville Wran took office in 1976. Within the Hawke government, the most talented politician ever produced by the NSW Right, Paul Keating, played a stellar role and eventually won the prime ministership.
The NSW Right no longer has Gillard's undivided attention.Credit: Andrew Meares
The faction's chief backroom operator during that time, Graham Richardson, who refined and deployed new and effective forms of electoral campaigning, became a national figure in his own right. He encapsulated his - and his faction's - modus operandi in the title of his memoir: Whatever It Takes. When the ruthless manner of the NSW Right worked, it was a thing to behold. When it did not work, which was the case for at least the last four years of the Iemma-Rees-Keneally government, it was a joke, an embarrassment, a disgrace.
On Saturday, the voters of NSW killed the Labor Right's view of politics, a style that obsesses about the short term, eschews hard decisions in favour of populism and favours intrigue for its own sake. They then gave it a pauper's burial and danced on the grave. And then they threw a party, which is likely to go on for many years.
Of course, the NSW Right itself lives on. But do its members understand that their way of campaigning, communicating and negotiating are dead? This is the vital question when the 2011 NSW election result is assessed for its national significance.
Although the political machine that operates out of Sydney's Sussex Street has wielded enormous influence for decades, its capacity to produce high-quality national leaders from its own ranks has been very poor. Keating stands alone as the only top-rank leader the faction has given the ALP. And when Keating wanted to become leader in 1991 and sought to unseat Bob Hawke, he could not count on his own grouping at the outset.
The NSW Right was initially sticking with Hawke, displaying another key part of its way of doing business: identifying a powerful figure in another section of the party - in Hawke's case, the Victorian Right - and then locking in behind them in exchange for various favours. The pattern continued with Kim Beazley, a Western Australian, with Kevin Rudd, a Queenslander, and, most incredibly, with Victorian left-winger Julia Gillard.
The NSW Right made and then unmade Rudd as Labor leader. Then it moved on to Gillard. The central player in these manoeuvres was Mark Arbib, a former NSW state secretary, now a federal minister.
Gillard's initial liaison with the NSW Right was a Faustian pact. She embraced its political methods: an exhaustive and unyielding reliance on focus-group research that eventually converts political leaders into followers and shreds credibility.
Guided by another ex-NSW party secretary Karl Bitar, who had been elevated to the federal secretary's post, Gillard lost last year's election but managed to hang on by securing the support of independents Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott.
There are signs that after six months of doing things the NSW Right's way, Gillard is heading off in a different direction. Two months ago, she pushed out her chief of staff Amanda Lampe, who, as a former press secretary to ex-NSW premier Bob Carr, was steeped in the ways of the NSW Right, in favour of a Victorian, Ben Hubbard. Earlier this month, Bitar also got the chop.
The NSW Right has appeared unfazed, even with the state election annihilation imminent. Along with other right-wing elements of the party, it has proposed installing the Queensland secretary, Anthony Chisholm, backed by the Australian Workers Union, in Bitar's place. Because Queensland faces an election within the next 12 months, the idea is that Chisholm would perform both jobs simultaneously, with the national secretary's office being moved to Sydney.
On Saturday, the voters of NSW killed the Labor Right's view of politics, a style that obsesses about the short term, eschews hard decisions in favour of populism and favours intrigue for its own sake
This is reminiscent of the 2007 plan by John Robertson, then the head of Unions NSW, to take over as secretary of the ACTU after the departure of Greg Combet. Robertson, a leading NSW Right player, was looking to move the ACTU secretariat, which has operated out of Melbourne since its inception in the 1920s, to Sydney. When Joe de Bruyn, the head of the ACTU's biggest affiliate, the shop workers union, learnt of this, he knew exactly what it would mean: a reverse takeover of the ACTU by Unions NSW.
De Bruyn killed the idea and blackballed Robertson. His union ambitions thwarted, Robertson subsequently entered the NSW Parliament. On Saturday, he won the seat of Blacktown and is the front runner to assume the leadership of what is left of the state Labor caucus.
There will be plenty of analysis about what the NSW result means for the Gillard government. The truth is, no one can say for certain. Maybe a boil for Labor has been lanced, maybe not. What we do know is that at the federal election only seven months ago, when the state Labor government in NSW was well and truly shot and headed for Saturday's monumental drubbing, the ALP under Gillard won 48.8 per cent of the vote after preferences and got enough marginal seats in Sydney to allow it to keep governing. On Saturday, state Labor achieved about 36 per cent.
The ''whatever it takes'' school of Labor politics has been shut down. The surviving alumni will need to learn how to be contrite and pick up a whole new way of political conduct. All Gillard needs to do is to ignore everything they tell her.
Shaun Carney is associate editor of The Age.