By Phillip Coorey
The bravest speech a politician gives is often his or her last. As the remainder of the 12 outgoing senators gave their valedictories last week before Friday's changeover in the red room, there was no shortage of parting advice.
The South Australian Labor senator Annette Hurley, a former state Labor deputy leader, told her colleagues - to cheers from the Coalition benches - that ''we now need to have a serious look at nuclear energy''.
''Regardless of any emissions trading scheme, the futures of our energy sources of oil, gas and coal are not as positive as they used to be,'' she said.
The NSW Labor senator Steve Hutchins had one last swing at his former NSW Right colleagues John Robertson and Eric Roozendaal, accusing them of terminally damaging the Labor brand in NSW and of being the principal cause of the four most shameful years in the party's history.
The South Australian veteran Liberal Alan Ferguson, a former Senate president, took aim at the abuse of standing orders and called for a complete overhaul of question time in both houses. He said the disingenuous nature of loaded questions and non-answers contrasted poorly with the equivalents in Britain, New Zealand and Canada. ''We have in the Australian Parliament the worst question time of any parliament throughout the world that uses the Westminster system,'' he said. ''I have never seen a more farcical waste of time in my life.''
Speaking before Ferguson was his good friend Nick Minchin who, by dint of who he is, was always going to prove newsworthy. He candidly and humorously listed his successes and failures, the latter including his regret that he did not push harder to have John Howard stand aside in March 2006, his 10th anniversary in power, and hand over to Peter Costello.
Minchin had wanted to say something more controversial in his speech but refrained because he feared it would have been used as ammunition in the heated behind-the-scenes battle for the Liberal Party federal presidency, in which Minchin was intimately involved. He was the numbers man for Alan Stockdale, who on Saturday staved off a challenge by Peter Reith.
Otherwise, he would have used his valedictory speech to repeat a long-held view that the Liberal Party should follow Labor and formally adopt factions.
While the moderate and conservative wings of the Liberal Party are often referred to as factions, they are more like personality cults. Minchin, who has been the leading conservative for so many years, believes this to be cancerous because of the personal nature of disputes that erupt.
Formalised factional groupings would enable disputes to be based on ideology rather than personality.
''The Liberal Party should recognise that in an organisation like ours, there are going to be groupings of one sort or another,'' Minchin told this writer. ''We should acknowledge the reality of essentially having a conservative wing and a moderate wing.''
There has long been resistance in the Liberal Party to the concept because Liberal philosophy places a premium on individualism. But Minchin has allies, especially on the right.
Concetta Fierravanti-Wells backed the concept when farewelling Minchin last week. ''Many in the Liberal Party seek to deny the existence of factions; they are, however, a fact of life in the Liberal Party,'' the NSW Liberal senator said.
''Indeed, we were born with the Liberal and conservative philosophies. You often repeated that we should formalise our factions. I agree. We could have saved ourselves a lot of angst along the way.''
Minchin acknowledges factions have a bad name because of the way they have been abused at times within the ALP, but overall they are a beneficial system for settling policy disputes, communicating backbench sentiment to the leader, and even easing pressure on the leader.
''Our party has a problem because it was built around Menzies and it's terribly and unduly leader-oriented,'' he said. ''Leaders do not like structures like this; they want all the authority . . . [But] factions can be a check on their egos and abuse of power.''
Minchin was regarded as being close to Howard but in reality their relationship was at times strained and became more so as time wore on.
''Howard saw everything I did through the prism of factionalism and every action and statement as the produce of my conservative factional base,'' Minchin said. ''My views were often discounted as a result.''
This frustrated Minchin because, he said, his advice to Howard was motivated always by what he thought was good politically for the government, rather than being factionally driven.
By having formalised factions, such misunderstanding would have been eliminated.
Subsequently, by the time Minchin thought Howard should go, Howard was not listening to him.
Phillip Coorey is The Sydney Morning Herald's chief political correspondent.
Follow the National Times on Twitter: @NationalTimesAU