Journalism, as they say, is the first draft of history. This week Julia Gillard defended journalism and history might just reward her as a result.
On Monday, The Daily Telegraph splashed with what can only be modestly described as a ball-tearing yarn about some appalling alleged behaviour by repeat troublemaker Craig Thomson.
Not content with having approved thousands of dollars spent on hookers during his time as a union boss, nor the alleged misuse of union funds during his election campaign, nor even the use of ALP members’ money to pay his lawyers to bail him out, Thomson is accused of blowing up at a female charity worker who happened to be MC’ing a forum on the controversial pokies cap.
This was not, as they say in the spin business, good optics.
Several witnesses corroborated the story and thus it ran. The public interest case of a publicly elected MP abusing a member of the public at a public event debating a vitally important piece of public policy is so overwhelming as to be self-evident.
Yet on the same day that story was on the Telegraph’s front page, the Sydney MP John Murphy reportedly told the federal caucus he was “astounded and amazed” by some of the Tele’s coverage and that the time was “ripe” for an inquiry into the media.
The sentiment appears to correlate with some in the union movement who have suggested that the Tele coverage is part of some kind of hatchet job on Thomson.
This both ignores the fact that – gallingly – it was The Sydney Morning Herald who revealed his first great scandal, and the fact that if there is any hatchet at work on Thomson it’s the one he’s wielding himself.
But perhaps Murphy wasn’t referring to that day’s front page. Perhaps he objected to our coverage of the fearless stand he took in Federal Parliament on that fateful day in history when his wife received an allegedly inadequate portion of beef stroganoff from the parliamentary cafeteria.
(Those who do not remember this event may think that I am making some kind of absurdist joke. Sadly I am not and, even more tragically, neither was John Murphy.)
Murphy was obliged to apologise after the Stroganoff Speech, which was appropriately deemed both an appalling and appallingly humourless waste of the Parliament’s time.
But equally appropriately it has come to be a symbol of the grotesquely self-interested politician, so obsessed with his own trappings that he is blind to the impropriety of his own behaviour and any intelligent perspective on the world around him.
Thomson’s alleged threat that he was going to name the woman in Parliament has all the same hallmarks of this nauseating self-serving self-importance. Perhaps that struck a chord with Murphy on Monday morning.
To Gillard’s great credit she shut down Murphy’s blustering inside the caucus room but was was sadly unable to outside it.
On Tuesday he was again making an idiot of himself and trouble for the Government, when he aligned himself with the full spectrum of Labor’s kookier enemies - namely Bob Katter, Barnaby Joyce and Kevin Andrews - at a rally to oppose gay marriage.
Murphy had previously caused a bit of unwelcome publicity for the ALP over this difficult issue when he point blank said that he opposed gay marriage because the Muslims and Christians in his electorate did. In other words he was worried he would lose his seat over it.
Ironically he also said at the same time that he wanted a conscience vote on the issue, after openly suggesting that it was not his conscience but an electoral redistribution which had made up his own mind.
At the risk of using a term that might make Murphy a little uncomfortable, this is what’s known as “bending over for a pack of cigarettes”.
Murphy’s preoccupation with political popularity makes it even more interesting that in a single news day he managed to come out opposing both gay marriage and The Daily Telegraph.
This was a pretty weird thing for a vote-chasing politician to do. Not everybody who likes The Daily Telegraph also likes gay marriage but pretty much everyone in Sydney likes one or the other.
But notwithstanding Murphy’s touching concern for his own re-electability, the fact of the matter is the Government is falling apart and is doomed to lose the next election.
Indeed, in a rare bit of poetic justice one of the people who sent it on its way to oblivion – Rudd assassin David Feeney – may be a victim of the carnage that act precipitated, as the Victorian branch prepares itself for opposition.*
In fact, of course, the Government should be thinking about what it can do while it is still in power.
Gillard literally has nothing to lose anymore. There is no way she can win the next election and no amount of poll-driven policy making will change that.
But that fate is in a way liberating. The Government is so inescapably destined to lose the next election that it can afford to tear up the playbook and go for broke.
It has a chance now to push through progressive reforms that are deliverable only by a Government that is either in terminal decline or stratospherically popular.
The first and most important of these is the National Disability Insurance Scheme. What better way for a Government to be remembered than by saving the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of citizens struck down by fate and often living in the most miserable conditions.
But to be effective it must act now and act fast. No referring of the matter to another interminable COAG committee. The Prime Minister for her own sake and the nation’s must show some leadership and steer this through so that the skeleton of the scheme is up and running before the next election – not in a decade’s time.
Another key reform is one that Murphy himself has bumblingly led the PM to. Gay marriage, or a state-sanctioned civil union, is one of those things that the Government could leave as a legacy for at least part of its core support base. Something that in their defeat they can point to and say “Well at least we did this”.
And unlike the carbon tax or the pokies cap this would be something that the party could own as something it did of its own accord, and not at the end of a gun held by the Greens or Andrew Wilkie. It even comes with the two words that stir the heart of even the most conservative right-wing pragmatist: “revenue neutral”.
Yes, Julia Gillard has previously said doesn’t support same-sex marriage, but this is like watching Tony Abbott saying he believes in man-made climate change: The people who he’s really talking to know he doesn’t really believe it.
And anyway – not to put too fine a point on it – she’s changed her mind before.
The news that Penny Wong and her partner are having a baby was the perfect opportunity for Gillard to have a “fireside chat” with the public about how it had made her reconsider her own views; that her friend and colleague’s child ought not to suffer from the discrimination of having unwed or lesser bound parents; that while she remained opposed to using the term “marriage” per se she would move for official “civil union” provisions for same-sex couples.
Not only would many Liberal MPs support such a position in the Parliament, but if it costs her a single vote in the community she hasn’t already lost I will seriously eat the stroganoff myself.
Naturally, even while Gillard and her media advisers complain about not being able to get any clear air in the media, this giant oxygen mask went sailing by without them even raising an eyebrow. In fact they even managed to let it become an awkward kind of bad news story for them, given the PM’s obvious discomfort with both the issue and her own stance on it. Lord, there is some severe reverse alchemy happening in that office.
But now she is no longer at war with the media Gillard might just find that if she puts out a brave and genuine agenda it will be given a fair hearing by a press hungry for major policy action that isn’t an election backflip, a reappropriation of Rudd policy or the personal crusade of a wild-eyed Tasmanian.
This could be the circuit-breaker that gives the Government a new front to fight on and shows that Labor still believes in something – anything.
Ironically leaving it to Labor’s National Conference itself shows the opposite of this. It is a proud tradition of the ALP that the resolutions of its supreme policy making body are studiously ignored by the Government of the day. It would set a highly dangerous precedent if the motley collection of union heavies, Bolsheviks and Woodstock pilgrims who technically control the party actually got any genuine say in how it was run.**
Besides, it’s a no win: If Conference votes down gay marriage it will be another reform opportunity missed by a party jumping at shadows. If Conference supports it the party will have effectively left the PM behind on the issue. Either way she is locked out of the history books.
On the other hand, if she crashes through she will win her legacy; and if she goes down fighting on the floor of Parliament she will at least save her soul.
More importantly, however, she will have a chance – as Kerryn Phelps put it this week – to line up on the right side of history. It would be nice if the Gillard Government was remembered for something nobler than MPs who bawl out charity workers or use parliamentary privilege to complain about their lunch.
But key to both reforms is to make sure they are so deeply embedded in legislation they cannot be easily overturned or unpicked by the next hostile Government and that means acting fast and firm – two counter-intuitive concepts for Labor at the moment.
Julia Gillard may be running out of supporters at present but if she makes a few bold moves in the two years she has left she might just find she gets some in the future.
*Yes, you heard correctly. The same state branch that knifed the Prime Minister, lost a seat to the Greens in the federal election and then lost Government in the state election has decided its time to focus on getting booted out of office again in two years’ time. Seriously, if you ever want your house to burn down for insurance purposes just give it to the Victorian ALP and ask them to look after it for you. You’d be better off having a political party run by Mr Bean.
**See above.
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