The fallout from the destruction of the Labor Party in NSW today will be almost nuclear. The once-mighty ALP has been smashed to bits in what was regarded as its home state, the place where it had held power for 52 of the past 70 years, the place from whence the NSW Right had dominated the party’s national factional landscape, making and breaking both premiers and prime ministers.
Both the party and the faction have now been reduced almost to the status of a marginal fringe organisation.
The faction which gave the country pragmatic hard men such as Graham Richardson and Paul Keating is now likely to be headed by a largely unknown figure called Noreen Hay, whose only real flirtation with fame involved her unwitting presence at the downfall of former NSW police minister Matt Brown, sacked just three days into his tenure for dancing in his green underpants at a party at Parliament House, during which he jokingly pretended to mount Ms Hay’s chest.
Ms Hay has been fighting for her political life this past month in - of all places - the Illawarra. The region is home to the gritty towns of Port Kembla, Dapto and Wollongong – places which have never voted anything other than Labor in their life.
Ousted premier Kristina Keneally spent much of her time campaigning there, and also in the Hunter Valley, over the past six weeks. It was the most dramatic illustration of how seriously dire things had become for the ALP, that in some of the toughest towns and suburbs of Australia, blue collar voters were siding with the party of the North Shore.
Graham Richardson has predicted that the magnitude of the Liberals’ win has set Labor up for not one, not two, but three terms in opposition. That’s 12 years.
Today’s NSW election was notable for many reasons. One of its many curious features was the dearth of Labor Party volunteers handing out how to vote cards at polling booths around the state.
I asked one MP whether their absence suggested any embarrassment on their part.
“I wouldn’t say embarrassment,” he said. “I would say deep and abiding shame, revulsion, disgust. But no, I wouldn’t say embarrassment.”
Labor’s treatment of its rank-and-file membership over the past two terms has closely mirrored the contempt in which it has often seemed to hold the voting public. NSW Labor became famous, or infamous, for holding what are known under party rules as section n.40 pre-selections, where local candidates are steamrolled by favoured mates from outside, parachuted into electorates at the behest of head office.
The inner-west seat of Drummoyne is a good example. It had been held by Angela D’Amore, who was shoe-horned in as a friend and relative of some of the most disliked factional operators in the party. She wound up before the Independent Commission Against Corruption amid allegations of rorting her electoral entitlements. At the 11th hour, with no chance of victory, the party supremos cynically handed pre-selection to a well-liked local mayor, Aneglo Tsirekas, who could and should have been given the seat years ago but didn’t play the right factional games.
One party veteran who has spoken out lucidly and forcefully about Labor’s failures is Rodney Cavalier, a former NSW Government Minister whose recent book Power Crisis documents the destruction of Morris Iemma’s premiership. In his book Cavalier examines how power has become an end in itself for some people within the party, and spin, focus group testing and message-management has become a substitute for policy.
Cavalier told me on Friday that the successive changing of leaders in the space of just one term, from Morris Iemma to Nathan Rees to Kristina Keneally and her hapless Treasurer Eric Roozendaal, had put the party in an increasingly unpopular position.
“Morris was leading us to a defeat, Nathan was leading us to a rout, but Kristina and Eric have taken us to a cataclysm,” Cavalier says.
Despite this cataclysm, Cavalier believes the test for the party is what it does next.
“It’s not the defeat that will put us out of business, but our reaction to such a stunning and thoroughly deserved defeat,” he says.
The blood-letting and finger-pointing was just starting during the count last night and will continue in earnest in the coming days and weeks. Much is already being made of Kristina Keneally’s tactically regrettable chirpiness at the prospect of an improbable Labor win. It was obvious to any observer that the voters had had an absolute gutful of the NSW Labor Government, and that it was only the ineptitude of the Liberals in 2003 which saved Labor from an earlier defeat. This meant that the 2011 poll was driven not just by fury over another four years of scandals and mismanagement, but a pent-up sense of anger that the voters didn’t turf them out when they had the chance in 2007. A bit like Keating’s lucky federal win in 1993 courtesy of John Hewson’s poorly-executed Fightback! Campaign, which let the Liberals snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
Party figures say that Keneally should have realised that an overwhelming majority of voters had made up their minds and were waiting with baseball bats for polling day. Her best line was to urge voters not to hand “a blank cheque” to Barry O’Farrell and the Liberals. She muddied this message by saying that she was in it to win it, that she thought Labor could win, which had the galvanising effect of making fed-up voters fall in behind the Libs.
Fall in they did. In their hundreds of thousands.
And the biggest danger for the Liberals is the size of their majority. To this end NSW Labor has written the how-to manual for the conservatives on how not to behave in office.
If they act as Labor did, and believe that power belongs to them and is an end in itself, they will deserve the same level of voter acrimony which was meted out to the ALP yesterday.
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@AndrewCatsaras Agreed. Kills more people than AIDS. Yet tolerated. Meanwhile: Good Insiders piece again Andrew.
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