NSW Labor: Has SA Rann Labor caught disease?

SA Premier Mike Rann in full flight.


Author: Rodney Cavalier ALP historian, former NSW Labor minister and author of Power Crisis: The Self-Destruction of a State Labor Party.

SO much of the commentary by those who regard themselves as friends of Labor is predicated on an arrogance accumulated over 70 years that we, who are Labor, will win elections and govern except when we do not have our act together. The Liberals and Nationals are occasional players who come on the stage only when our performance drops and promptly vacate when we are ready.

So many want to believe the electorate is waiting for Labor to get its act together. I suggest March 26 is different.

The model of governance for NSW Labor devised by Bill McKell (premier, 1941-47) was broken during these four years past. The model will not be rebuilt, the pieces are lost. There are many authors of this destruction; no one is innocent. A Labor government proceeded with a measure not supported by any significant force in the Labor movement. McKell's model expressly avoided open conflict while he employed persuasion to turn the ranks around. If he could not persuade, he did not proceed.

The McKell model was followed by each of his successors unto the modern era: Neville Wran and Bob Carr did not proceed with measures lacking support from the party that had made their careers and their governments possible.

Labor has been in power for 52 of the 70 years since McKell remade NSW Labor. Not just in power but effective. In the 23 general elections held in that time Labor won 16 and was competitive in all but three. Loss of office in 1965 and 1988 did not change the colour of the ocean. This year has. For 70 years Labor was a party somewhere in the 40 per cents vying for government. Now its ceiling is in the 30s, slipping into the 20s. Three out of four NSW voters rejected Labor. The election was a cataclysm, unprecedented anywhere in Australia since the establishment of the two-party system in 1910.

This is a party all but wiped out in the Hunter and hanging on in the Illawarra, a few suburbs in the inner ring of Sydney and its western fringe. Labor holds not one country seat. In 18 seats it came third or worse, with a primary vote in the teens or single digits. It could not have been worse.

There is no silver lining except in the totality of defeat. There can be no hiding, no pretence, no hope that a pendulum swing will bring Labor back. If Barry O'Farrell follows his instincts, governs from the centre, spends and borrows to spend, Labor has a long wait before it is back in the game, like the decade after 1965 when Bob Askin fulfilled his election promises and broadly governed well. Askin is the model for this new government, not Nick Greiner, not Jeff Kennett. Behave like you have 10 years, reform steadily, deliver on what you have promised, avoid corruption and scandal and you will get 10 years. For starters.

NSW Labor began its degeneration with candidate selection in 2003. Imposition became the norm. The obviously inadequate were protected from the ALP membership. The Labor caucus failed to renew. A question for the darkest hours is how a government that began with Carr, Andrew Refshauge, Michael Egan, Craig Knowles, Jeff Shaw, Bob Debus and other good people, a government that picked up John Watkins and Morris Iemma along the way, could finish as it did: the worst NSW has seen. Labor came back from 1965 and 1988 but it had no cause to dissociate itself from the record of what had gone before. The next Labor premier will need to have credibly dissociated himself or herself from the final years of this show.

The only precedent for a defeat of this dimension is 1932 when NSW Labor offered two parties in the wake of the governor's dismissal of the Lang government. Labor polled, wait for it, 44.6 per cent, some 20 percentage points in front of where Labor is now. If you take comfort from Labor's recovery only nine years later, look at what happened in those nine years: Labor lost twice more emphatically; John Curtin, federal Labor leader, devoted some part of every day to the destruction of Jack Lang and Langism; federal intervention broke the rulers of the NSW branch. Backed by federal authority, McKell toppled Lang. McKell represented a complete break from all that had gone before; he campaigned against what Labor had been as much as the government of the day.

In the past 16 years about 130 ALP branches have folded. Most of the rest are phantoms, paper frauds that could not pass a breath-on-the-mirror test. The consequence was obvious on polling day: the land mass of NSW

lacked Labor people to staff booths. It was not possible to paper the cracks with the salaried political class, not even with an injection from interstate. The absentees had the honesty to tell us: "I am just not working for this outfit."

What are the prospects for meaningful ALP reform? None, actually. Within weeks it will be business as usual. Giving meaning to ALP membership involves a serious involvement in forming policy and candidate selection. Empowering the membership means disempowering union officials. Not some light-hearted frolic that adjusts on the margins the absolute control of this party that affiliated unions exercise. Reform requires a destruction so complete that the votes controlled by union officials on the floor of an annual conference reduces to the 8 per cent unions represent in the NSW workforce.

That is not going to happen; if it did, most of the administrative committee would be out of business and most of the MLCs and senators. So, too, the members of the ALP National Executive, who must not escape blame as co-conspirators in this cataclysm. The executive endorsed candidates without any base in the party and protected the horrors perpetrated by the NSW machine. Real reform means exposing every MP to review and replacement by party members. None of this will happen. Labor's culture of entitlement is rotten through and through. Those with the power to reform are the beneficiaries of what is.

Source --- The Australian