Labor Party

You know things are going seriously awry when the party of the workers starts blaming the workers.

But that’s exactly what’s happening within the ALP over the insulation rollout debacle.

Ignoring proceedings in the Labor State of NSW where bosses can be tried for industrial manslaughter, federal Labor is saying that the minister responsible for the rollout should be exonerated from blame in the deaths of four insulation installers.

Continue reading "Kevin Rudd stars in the final scene from Animal Farm" »

It’s reporting season for political parties in the 2008-09 financial year. Well in as much as political parties are forced to report in Australia.

The Government’s recent decision to stall its much publicised reform of the process means that parties still don’t have to report donations of less than $10,900.

Liberals Senator Michael Ronaldson has been jumping up and down this afternoon about union donations to the Labor Party, totalling a hefty $5.14 million Australia-wide.

Continue reading "Help us have a look at who’s funding our political parties" »

I have a dark confession to make. I love Tony Abbott.

Now don’t get me wrong. I wouldn’t vote for the loon while my bum pointed down but at least he’s interesting. Half Jesuit, half crazed Millwall supporter, with a religious philosophy of “share in the love of Jesus or I’ll smash your f***en face in”. He’s the hoot we had to have.

Politics in the grey cloud Rudd blathership is boring. A Rudd press conference is like an hour on the gym bike.

Continue reading "Half Jesuit, half hooligan, and a cure for Rudd’s tedium" »

Whether the recent federal Liberal party showdown over the now rejected Emissions Trading Scheme develops into a thoroughgoing schism only time will tell. Malcolm Turnbull’s robust description of new federal leader Tony Abbot’s climate change thinking is a crude reminder to those Liberals celebrating the weekend’s by-election results in Bradfield and Higgins: environmental politics is here to stay and cannot be swept under the carpet by short-term circuit-breakers.

As I argued in The Australian during August, the current schism between so-called ‘moderates’, small ‘l’ liberals gathered around Turnbull and Joe Hockey, and the conservatives of Abbot and Nick Minchin’s ilk has many of the hallmarks of the 1950s ALP split over communism which spawned the Democratic Labor Party and kept Labor from office for some two decades.

Most accounts of the farcical goings on in the federal Liberal’s party room over the past few weeks have highlighted this underlying ideological conflict. The conservative coup d’état against Turnbull resulted from a fundamental policy divide over climate change dovetailing with opposition to Turnbull’s divisive crash or crash through personality.

Continue reading "Liberals fighting a Labor Party which doesn’t exist" »

UPDATE 7.37pm: Rees gawn. Kristina Keneally won the ballot 47 to 21 and becomes the first female Premier of NSW.

JUST two days after Malcolm Turnbull’s tenacious and gutsy last stand as Liberal Leader, NSW Labor Premier Nathan Rees is turning in the performance of his political life as he doggedly slugs it out with the factions in a seemingly doomed bid to save his leadership.

Rees gave one of the best speeches by any Australian politician today. It may well be his last - when the Party Room meets at 6pm he is expected to lose his job. 17 MPs have signed a petition demanding his resignation. They include the hated factional heavyweights Joe Tripodi and Eddie Obeid, the domestically troubled John Della Bosca and former Police Minister Matt Brown, dumped just a week into the job after it emerged he’d stripped to his green undies at a parliamentary office party, mounted the chest of backbencher Noreen Hay, and shouted at her staffer daughter: “Look, I’m titty-f***ing your Mum!”

Nathan Rees has told these ornaments to public service that they can basically get stuffed. Have a read of what he said:

Continue reading "Rees the new star in festival of heroic losers" »

Denials do not get any more categorical or absolute than this - and as of his press conference an hour ago, Mike Rann is being hailed as Adelaide’s own Bill Clinton after looking straight into the camera and declaring that he did not have sexual relations with that woman.

But unlike Clinton’s twitchy and unconvincing handling of the Monica Lewinsky allegations, Rann came out all guns blazing, specifically denying key aspects of the bombshell interview by his former friend and parliamentary barmaid Michelle Chantelois, hammering the fact that she was paid bucketloads of cash to sell her story, and declaring that he will sue both Channel Seven and New Idea for peddling allegations which he says are categorically false.

Rann also seized on the fact that Channel Seven got a key part of its story wrong, in falsely asserting that Chantelois’s estranged husband Rick Phillips had not been charged with assault after he punched the Premier in the face with a rolled-up magazine in a chance encounter at the Adelaide Wine Centre last month.

Continue reading "Rann’s emphatic sex denial might not end this affair" »

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" »

This Wednesday, as we commemorate the sacrifice of countless Australians in war, we will also no doubt be reminded that November 11 has other significance in Australia’s journey.

It will be the 34th anniversary of the Dismissal, an act of infamy against a democratically-elected Government that is burned into our national consciousness, and into the ALP’s soul.

So each year, in addition to the Last Post played at war memorials around Australia, we see the TV replays of the famous scenes on Parliament steps, which have become almost a mantra for an era of change and conflict in Australian politics. 

Continue reading "The dismissal: our greatest act of political infamy" »

Anyone wondering why Kevin Rudd continues to defy political gravity could do well to consider the latest Essential Report that drills down into the issues of importance to Australian voters.

Like a human pogo stick, Rudd just keeps bouncing back: it doesn’t seem to matter what he’s hit with – global financial meltdown, environmental destruction, even an influx of asylum seekers.

No matter the political issue – and we have tested 13 of them – Rudd has the Opposition covered – even the traditional Liberal strong points of economic management and interest rates can not deliver Turnbull a win.

Continue reading "Our beloved Kevin Rudd is a human pogo stick" »

Liberal MP Peter Dutton should have known better than to whinge about support from the good people of Dickson – he could’ve asked his predecessor Cheryl Kernot about that one.

On election night 1998 - when it looked like her attempt to go from Democrat leader in the Senate to a Labor MP was going to end in spectacular failure - Kernot had a famous dummy spit live on the ABC about the quality of seat she had been given by the Labor Party :

“Well, I’ll just say this—Mary Delahunty is in Parliament,” referring to the fact that the Victorian MP had been given a safe seat when entering politics earlier that year. Of course, Kernot did end up pulling ahead that night and serving one term as the member for Dickson but got rolled three years later by none other than current opposition health spokesman Peter Dutton.

Continue reading "Who’d want to be the member for Dickson?" »

It sounds impossible, but NSW politics could be about to get a whole lot more interesting.

“More interesting” in the NSW context currently comes with a high degree of difficulty. It’s hard to imagine how you could top the recent combo of the John Della Bosca sex scandal and, three days later, the murky claims that slain property developer Michael McGurk recorded a “tape from the grave” before his execution implicating up to three Labor MPs in a corruption scandal.

But what might be about to happen will be spectacular never the less. It will only happen, however, if Nathan Rees acts with a combination of courage and abandon, in standing up to those elements within the party who are regarded by voters as a permanent stain on the government, doing so in the knowledge that he’s got nothing to lose as he’s doomed anyway.

Continue reading "Hit self-destruct: NSW Labor’s doomsday solution" »

If you ever suspected that our major political parties got their leaders mixed up on the way to Question Time, this week’s Essential Report will come as no surprise.

In a sign of life catching up with the punch-line, half the nation now thinks that our political parties are becoming closer ­ and the majority of them think it’s no bad thing.

The convergence of our major parties has not happened overnight, the rise of centrist politics around the world has been a hallmark of the post-Cold War consensus. But in Australia it has reached its zenith, where the last two leaders of the Liberal Party both openly flirted with their political opponents.

Continue reading "Pepsi v Coke - How to tell Labor from Liberal" »

Call me naïve if you will, but I believe the Prime Minister when he says he doesn’t want a double dissolution election.

“I have not the slightest intention of going to an early poll. I don’t think people like that. I think they want you to serve the term that you’ve been elected for,” he told 3aw’s Neil Mitchell yesterday.

The prospect of using the recent rejection of the ETS legislation in the Senate is being talked up as a double dissolution trigger among us trigger happy media folk but, strange as it might sound, a double dissolution election would be an unnecessary risk for a Government in cruise control.

Continue reading "Why Kevin Rudd doesn’t want a double d" »

When the delegates at the ALP National Conference sat down on Saturday to discuss the issue of same-sex marriage, there’s one question that should have loomed large in their minds: “Which side of history do you want to be on?”

Despite the result, same sex marriage is inevitable in Australia - and a quick analysis of two factors makes this blindingly obvious. The first is the international situation.  Seven countries have now introduced same-sex marriage, along will six states of the USA.  Just like so many other waves of social reform before it (giving women the vote, decriminalizing homosexuality, etc.) same-sex marriage will spread throughout the western, liberal democracies eventually reaching Australia.
 
The second factor that makes same-sex marriage inevitable is the demographics. 

Continue reading "Gay marriage - which side of history is Labor on?" »

I think that we in the ALP are better than our opponents in celebrating our history and honouring our own.

Whereas Malcolm Fraser is reviled by modern Liberals and the Democrats cannibalise their leadership, we revere our former Prime Ministers.

Past differences, old feuds and factional rivalries are forgotten as we celebrate success, and forget failures. I’ve seen, for instance, left-wing delegates cheer and give standing ovations to Paul Keating, their former nemesis. For us, Labor’s history is part of our present, and our future.

Continue reading "Honouring the greatest architect of consensus" »

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" »

What the public and the media want out of politicians are two very different things. The politicians whom journalists recall with misty-eyed affection tend to be those who had a sharp tongue both in public and in private, an uncontrollable ego, and were driven by such reformist zeal that they governed as if in a race against time to implement as much of their agenda as possible, regardless of the repurcussions.

If you ran a quick straw poll of any newsroom in the land, the favourites list would be topped by acid-tongued megalomaniacs such as Paul Keating or Jeff Kennett. It would also feature powderkegs such as Gough Whitlam, Nick Greiner or Don Dunstan who did so much in a short period that their governments fell apart because they had given scant thought to the political consequences of executing such a manic policy agenda.

Kevin Rudd would not make the list. Not even close.

Continue reading "Rudd’s boring, but he’s boring his way into history" »

The other day, I was asked on ABC television about the conviction of Gordon Nuttall, a former Queensland Labor state minister, for accepting secret payments of $360,000 from a businessman. This is one of the most serious cases of corruption ever recorded against a minister of the Crown in this country.

Nuttall is not the first former Queensland Labor minister caught out over recent years – another has been jailed for blackmail, and a third for paedophilia. I responded by saying there was a culture of favouritism and relationships with big business tainting the Queensland Government, which needed to be fixed.

Barrie Cassidy, a journalist for whom I have some regard, then came back with his “gotcha” question (and continued on after the interview). How could a Nationals’ leader complain about corruption in Queensland considering the Fitzgerald Inquiry at the time of the government of Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s National Party?

Continue reading "Qld Labor inherits corruption mantle from Nats’ dark past" »

Remember public policy debates?  Where once were national conversations we now find a wall of sound comprised of debate deadening sound bites. 

There is nothing to discuss about the merits or otherwise of pork barrelling in 2009 because we’re actually ‘building an education revolution’.  Similarly, opposition to debt is choosing to ‘do nothing’ in the face of a ‘rolling global financial crisis’. 

Throwing other people’s taxes at the dead and incarcerated is actually ‘decisive action to stay ahead of the curve’.  Questioning the Emissions Trading Scheme is to be a ‘Neanderthal’, a ‘sceptic’ and ‘denialist’ – the modern day equivalent of refusing to accept that the earth is round.

Continue reading "Our brains have been shrunk by the spin cycle" »