Factions

The joke when Peter Costello was trying in vain to cobble together a viable leadership push was that he had enough supporters to fill a Tarago van. Kevin Rudd probably has around the same level of support – Kev’s van might also be fitted with a trailer to carry a few extra bods up the back – but it in numerical terms it is far from being an unstoppable juggernaut which will steamroll Julia Gillard out of the top job.

It’s the numbers that matter in politics. In the absence of good numbers, aspiring leaders fall back on psychology. History suggests it offers no sure path to the leadership. Quite the opposite.

Peter Costello was a bit like the dorky guy at the school disco who hung around in the corner hoping a girl would ask him to dance.

Continue reading "Memo Kev: Pee or get off the pot" »

A few weeks after he was clouted in the face with a rolled-up wine magazine, and on the same day that Channel Seven ran salacious allegations about his relationship with former parliamentary waitress Michelle Chantelois, Mike Rann wrote an article about the sex lives of pandas for our opinion website The Punch.

The timing was somewhat awkward. Rann, an early adopter of Twitter and one of the first politicians to use blogging as a new and direct way of talking to the voters, was spruiking the arrival of breeding pandas Wang Wang and Funi at the Adelaide Zoo. He explained how male pandas were sexually lethargic, difficult to arouse, and how zoos overseas had resorted to showing them films of mating pandas in a bid to fire them up.

Our website, driven as it is by robust and comic interaction with the readers, decided it would be best to hold the column for a while. Not out of any desire to protect the Premier – whatever scandals he was involved in were his problem, not ours – but because the job of keeping the reader’s comments within the boundaries of taste and libel would be impossible.

Continue reading "On message, even when up to his neck in it" »

Political tragics live for the moments when leaders let the mask slip; when the acting stops and the houselights come on and a bit of humanity shines through. We love when they slip up, or speak out, or decide to go out in a blaze of glory. We love it when there’s a surprise in the script.

After almost ten years in power, with almost ten days to go, SA Premier Mike Rann has raised the curtain on his final act before he hands power to incoming Premier Jay Weatherill, and the show is promising to be sensational, inspirational, celebrational. Or like a kind of torture.

Mr Rann has kicked off with a dazzling endorsement of gay marriage, and there are sure to be more big performances before it’s time to take off the makeup and dim the lights.

Continue reading "Are all our politicians either puppets or Muppets?" »

If the whispering campaign aimed at driving Malcolm Turnbull out of politics succeeds, it will have two effects.

It will make the parliament a whole lot stupider and it will make the opposition less representative of the broad spectrum of conservative opinion, cementing the perception that, under Tony Abbott, this party has become much more right-wing than any outfit John Howard ever presided over.

The campaign against Turnbull and the dearth of voices rallying to his defence underscores the supine and ineffectual quality of the moderate faction within the Liberal Party.

Continue reading "Turnbull whisperers turning Libs into a right wing cult" »

Political leaders, be they premiers or prime ministers, need protection - especially during the tough times when the polls look sick, and the backbench can get nervy.

‘Twas ever thus. Bob Hawke could rely on the dominance and iron discipline of the Right faction. Factional heavyweights like Graham Richardson and Robert Ray controlled the numbers ensuring nothing untoward occurred.

It was a highly effective arrangement with only one major weakness. When some of those closest to him swapped sides it was game over. That’s politics. The King is dead, long live the King.

Continue reading "Keep voters close, and your political allies even closer" »

Editor’s note: This is an extract from Rodney Cavalier’s forthcoming book Power Crisis, an explosive account of the self-destruction of the NSW Labor government, which has seen a turnover of four premiers in five years. Former NSW Education Minister Cavalier (once described by a left-wing Teachers Federation official as “the rudest, most pugnacious individual to hold office”), provides a warts and all account of the downfall of Premiers Iemma and Rees as well as the best analysis so far of how NSW Labor’s inexorable decline.

Nathan Rees began the final day of his leadership with a press conference.

He and his staff thought long and hard about what he might say. The line taken came of the instant; wrapping it in words took a while longer. Having decided against a studied silence, the contents of what Rees felt compelled to say will enjoy a long afterlife:

“I will not hand the government of New South Wales over to Obeid, Tripodi or Sartor. Should I not be premier by the end of this day, let there be no doubt in the community’s mind, no doubt, that any challenger will be a puppet of Eddie Obeid and Joe Tripodi. That is the reality. That is the choice at stake today. The decision now lies in the hands of my Caucus colleagues.”

Continue reading "Execution: How NSW Labor knocked off a Premier" »

There are more former ministers in the NSW Government than there are ministers. Fourteen of them to be exact.

One of them is in Long Bay for plying youths with heroin and having sex with them in his parliamentary office.

The other 13 aren’t bad people. They’re just guilty of a combination of hubris, sloth, incompetence and stupidity, and stand as examples of what can happen when a government has been in power for so long that it can’t remember what it was originally there for.

Continue reading "The nobility of public life, in a sea of squalor" »

The collapse in support for the ALP last night could Labor to the wilderness, and is a harbinger for Labor defeats in NSW and Queensland where the swing to the Coalition last night was devastating. As the ALP begins its period of introspection, it must reflect on one important fact. Namely, the damage the party has done to itself in the eyes of many voters over its conduct this past few months, by allowing unchecked factional ambition to turn politics on its head.

There are some professions which invite nothing other than mistrust and scorn. They include used car salesmen, journalism (whoops) and, of course, politicians.

But when it comes to politics, there is now a sub-species of politician who has been catapulted onto the national stage and enjoys a superior level of public disgust.

Continue reading "Bad time to be a faceless factional hack" »

There would be greater reason to celebrate our first female Prime Minister, were it not for Labor factional warlords using a woman as a last resort.

With the streamers still settling in Labor ranks and Emilys List members around the country popping champagne corks at the anointment (not election) of our first female PM, it’s worth reflecting on a few other “historic firsts”.

What about the “first” female State Premiers?  Think Carmen Lawrence in WA, Joan Kirner in Victoria, Kristina Keneally in NSW and Anna Bligh in Qld.  All were installed, not elected, all were handed a poisoned chalice, all were used as a last resort, all were part of and inherited dysfunctional, rotten-at-the-core Labor Governments.

Continue reading "Historic first, or just a re-run of history" »

Today Kevin Rudd is set to fight for his political life, and the chances are he will lose.

How did this happen? How does a man who was the most popular Prime Minister since Bob Hawke just eight months ago, now face the humiliation of being deposed by his colleagues before the end of his first term?

Last night’s factional execution gives as much of an insight into how Kevin Rudd rose to power as it does this political disaster he now finds himself in. The problem was this: he was never really an Australian Labor Party leader in the true sense of the word.

Continue reading "Rudd’s last stand" »

Nathan Rees’s move to ambush the Labor factions and go directly to his Party Conference for the power to appoint his Cabinet was audacious. In my 30 years as an ALP member I can barely recall a gutsier attempt to reclaim the high ground. It will at least temporarily stop the rot for NSW Labor – and if he follows on with more unilateral displays of strength it may actually start turning things around.

By taking control of Cabinet appointments Rees did more than achieve a short term political objective – he made a critically important long-term reform to culture of the ALP in NSW.

For too long factionalism has stunted Labor’s ability to nurture and develop the best talent the Party has to offer.

Continue reading "The mouse that roared may have changed Labor forever" »

UPDATE: Nathan Rees has sacked Joe Tripodi and Ian Macdonald from Cabinet.

In political terms the equivalent of a nuclear bomb has just gone off in Sydney. It has immediate ramifications for some of the most hated figures in the deeply unpopular NSW Government.

But it has massive national long-term implications, as it will determine whether Labor leaders have the right to choose their own ministry, rather than have their frontbench foisted upon them by the factions.

In a gutsy gamble, NSW Premier Nathan Rees has gone for the doomsday scenario revealed on The Punch some weeks ago by taking on the factions and winning rank-and-file party approval to form his own Cabinet by dumping unpopular or treacherous ministers. And Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard has just strongly backed Rees in her speech to the NSW ALP, and Kevin Rudd has done so in a press conference at APEC.

Continue reading "Rees’ gutsy gamble rewrites the rules of Labor politics" »

King Taufa’ahau Tupou IV had extraordinarily big hands. They were imposing and strong – they were safe. They were the kind of hands that could be relied upon to dispense justice and steer the ship of state.

As the King of Tonga he made it into the Guinness Book of Records as the heaviest monarch ever, topping the scales at 209kg. To be big in Tonga was to be important and in a land of big people the King was clearly the biggest.

As a Labor child of the eighties the King confirmed my own observations of power.

Continue reading "Fall of the heavyweights: how the salad set took over Labor" »