By Shaun Carney
In the middle of 2003, John Howard, in his eighth year as prime minister, was travelling well. Having increased his majority at the previous election, he was facing his second Labor opponent as prime minister, Simon Crean, for whom things were going poorly. The Labor leader was not popular with voters and the man he'd replaced, Kim Beazley, was agitating to return to the leadership.
Although Crean was in trouble, the federal caucus was reluctant to remove him without giving him the opportunity to lead the ALP to an election, so there was a chance he might survive to the 2004 poll. But from the moment he had taken over as leader in late 2001, Crean had some important enemies within the Labor Party.
Crean, a Victorian, had pledged to open up the party and change its structure. For the right-wing faction in New South Wales, this was not just heresy but a threat to its power to be resisted at all costs. Within only a few weeks of Crean's elevation, the leading NSW unionist, John Robertson, cast doubt on the new leader's political prospects.
The NSW Right had run the federal Labor leadership for more than five years under the Perth-based Beazley, and it wanted to regain control by reinstalling him. Former speaker Leo McLeay, a long-standing foot soldier of the NSW Right machine, had become a sort of doorkeeper for Beazley during his first stint as leader. Later on, one of Beazley's first pledges, on becoming Labor leader for a second time in 2005, was to set up a second home in - where else? - Sydney.
The attack on Crean lasted for six months and involved two leadership spills. At a crucial point, the then secretary of Labor's NSW branch, Eric Roozendaal, produced private polling on Crean and took it to Parliament House in Canberra, where he waved it under the noses of federal MPs who had been refusing to swing over to Beazley.
This is where Howard comes in. Roozendaal's visit to Parliament had been widely publicised. He had even allowed himself to be photographed, ostentatiously swinging his briefcase full of the polling material.
Howard, for whom Crean's unpopularity was a godsend, was appalled. Privately, he expressed sympathy for Crean and described Roozendaal's jaunt to Canberra as one of the most appalling acts of disloyalty and sabotage he'd witnessed - and he'd seen a few. Even the bloke who had the most to gain by seeing Crean go down was sickened.
The purpose of this history? First, the argument that Labor's rout in last Saturday's NSW election had its roots in the party's 2008 conflagration over electricity privatisation denies a pathological sickness deep in the heart of the NSW Right. The destructive, controlling behaviour - the obsessive intriguing, the tendency towards vengeance, the brazen misuse of party resources - goes back a long way before 2008.
Whole careers have been based on this stuff; Robertson and Roozendaal were both ministers in the Keneally government that was so comprehensively thrashed last weekend. And Robertson is now NSW Labor leader.
The NSW machine's credo is that the winner takes all. The logical conclusion of this idea in a competitive field such as electoral politics is that it is better to have 100 per cent of nothing than to accept 50 per cent of something and share the rest. And what the NSW Right has now is 100 per cent of nothing - a very small nothing.
The second point is that this political sickness has never been quarantined to NSW. It cannot be when one third of the seats in the House of Representatives are in that state and the machine's key players are so determined to use their methods in Canberra.
The post-election commentary has fixated on the specific consequences for the Gillard government and its carbon tax policy. Perhaps the carbon tax proposal took another point or two off NSW Labor's already dreadful support levels, but that is unlikely to mean all that much for the federal ALP.
When it comes to the carbon tax, it's how the public will view the policy in 2013, when the next federal election is due, that will really count, not last Saturday in one state election. All manner of things could happen to change public opinion before then - especially whatever financial compensation the government offers to households and industry.
More ominous for federal Labor from the NSW result is what it said about the ALP's direct connection with the public - its status as a genuine community organisation. Party officials say that Labor struggled to summon enough volunteers to hand out how-to-vote cards in all but two of the 93 seats in the state lower house: Balmain and Marrickville, where community-style campaigning was the focus.
This tells us all we need to know about the Labor Party as an organisation in NSW. After all the years of preferment and strong-arming and deals, it has been stripped almost bare. The branch structure is a joke and public involvement is perilously close to non-existent.
The party's condition in NSW is merely a more extreme version of what is taking place within Labor across the country. The recent internal review of Labor's 2010 federal election performance suggested that the national ALP membership is about 45,000. A solid majority of that number are stacked (that is, fake) or inactive members. That really is parlous, given that Labor is in charge of the national government.
The Liberal Party, by contrast, has got its act together. All the evidence is that its relationship with its base is stronger and more vibrant. This is a time when the conservative impulse - the determination to preserve the society and defend it from the ravages of its political opponents - can prevail.
Julia Gillard finds herself facing a unique challenge as a Labor prime minister, having to outline and expound Labor values in the modern context from a position of power, while in the biggest state the party is in ruins.
What choice does she have? The ALP nationally is in danger of falling apart. This is why in a succession of recent well-crafted speeches she has been working so hard to define its goals and to distinguish it from the Greens, with whom it is in competition for the non-Coalition vote. Her message is directed primarily at wavering Labor supporters rather than the wider public.
Gillard cannot turn to the biggest faction in the biggest state for guidance or for ideas. An appearance on Monday's edition of the ABC's 7.30 by the Minister for Sport, Mark Arbib, the most high-profile NSW Right member in the federal government, reflected the intellectual bankruptcy of the grouping. Arbib's message, in the wake of Labor's NSW devastation, was a variation of ''let's move on'' - a copout that can only hurt the ALP.
Shaun Carney is an associate editor of The Age.