Black Armband History
John Howard's stubborn refusal to offer an apology for the policies that failed our indiginous people was disgraceful and reason enough on its own to finally flush the unflushable one around the S-bend. But he or whoever coined the phrase "black arm band view of history" was on to something. The new National curriculum in History has a fundamental weakness and it is a result of the black arm band which many of our educators seem to wear.
We teach or are meant to teach Australian History as if it were simply the history of the large island (and don't forget the smaller ones) that constitute the Commonwealth of Australia. When I was at school Australian History began with Dirk Hartog (1616), then nothing until 1770 and then after 1788. In the meantime we learned about what had been going on in the places from whence Hartog, Cook and Phillip came. That's to say we learned about the history of the people who descended from those who arrived in 1788. The omission of Aboriginal history was a mistake but perhaps an understandable one. Not only was it not valued, it wasn't known. It still isn't known really, without records (aside from what is interpreted from art) and some sadly limited oral history the history of the time before European settlement is blurred to say the least.
Now we include the time before the arrival of Cook (I think calling it an invasion is silly). But in our guilt ridden rush to give no further offense to anyone, including more recent arrivals from non-european countries we gloss over or ignore the history and thus the cultural background of the group that still make up the bulk of our population. The heritage of the child at school in Dublin or London (not so sure about London these days) is still pretty close to the cultural heritage of kids at school in any Australian town. It's an Anglo history and our anglo guilt makes us push it aside.
It matters because it was from a study of the history of our anglo heritage that we derived our anglo values. The black arm bandits use anglo values as a term of derision now but it's anglo values of freedom of speech and freedom of assembly and freedom of association that have given them that liberty.
There's said to be a crisis of "values" in our schools and public schools were famously accused of failing to teach Australian values. The response was to try to deconstruct defined values into their component parts and them teach them like mathematical formulae. This was one of our sillier ideas.
Hidden among the stuff that we used to learn in History was a highly effective hidden curriculum in values. There were heroes (this word is used in its non-gender specific context folks) who did great and brave things. There were triumphs of the rights of individuals over the state like Magna Carta, the Reform Bills, the ship money case. There were ancient examples of the roots of our democracy like Themistocles in Athens and there were more modern exemplars too from Keir Hardie to Emily Pankhurst.
Throw all that away and what's left. About maybe 5% of our cultural heritage. It's an interesting 5% but it's still a very shitty deal, as they say at Goldman Sachs.
Thursday, June 24, 2010
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
The Bosses are back.
Who the hell is Mark Arbib? The first news of a change of PM on the ABC last night was that Mark Arbib had swung his support to Julia Gillard. If the name seems familiar it's because he's one of the geniuses of the NSW right that gave us first Nathan Rees and then Kristina Hairspray.
In retrospect the most significant recent indicator that things were getting close was the story about Simon Crean asking his departmental officials to keep their ears to the ground about government policy because he didn't know what was going on. He knew very well that the story would be out within minutes and he knew what harm it would do, if Julia thinks he's going to be loyal to her she's nowhere near as smart as people think she is. Crean reminds me of a Whitlam saying, referring I think to Sam Jones, "the trouble with Sam is that he's stricken with a conflict of disloyalties". Anyway Crean's a sideshow.
The real show is that the unions and the faction bosses have given up on the Rudd experiment and gone back to the business of running things. It won't be the Rudd kitchen cabinet anymore, it will be the machine as it was in the Hawke days. Big deals done at the top and the rest of us will just go along.
It's sad because I think Kim Beazley is the best Prime Minister we never had (as was his father). Julia Gillard is going to have to do an awful lot to win my vote and that's not even counting the speech therapy to get rid of that awful voice, as melodious as the sound of cutting up a corrugated iron dunny with a chainsaw. I wonder if those backers of hers on the left noticed the strong support she has among the writers of the Australian edition of The Spectator. They like her because she stands up to the evil teacher unions and possibly because she's also not Kevin Rudd.
The jury's probably still out but for my money if she doesn't make a move in the right direction on emissions trading and she doesn't stick to the resource super profits tax that everyone from Ross Gittins to the IMF thinks is a rational and necessary move then I'm not voting for the clowns. I'll vote Green or Independent and give no preferences.
The voters will probably give her a fair go, and she'll exploit that by going early if she can. Interesting times but I can't see anything inspiring anywhere in any direction. Is Malcom Fraser too old at 80 to make a comeback??
Who the hell is Mark Arbib? The first news of a change of PM on the ABC last night was that Mark Arbib had swung his support to Julia Gillard. If the name seems familiar it's because he's one of the geniuses of the NSW right that gave us first Nathan Rees and then Kristina Hairspray.
In retrospect the most significant recent indicator that things were getting close was the story about Simon Crean asking his departmental officials to keep their ears to the ground about government policy because he didn't know what was going on. He knew very well that the story would be out within minutes and he knew what harm it would do, if Julia thinks he's going to be loyal to her she's nowhere near as smart as people think she is. Crean reminds me of a Whitlam saying, referring I think to Sam Jones, "the trouble with Sam is that he's stricken with a conflict of disloyalties". Anyway Crean's a sideshow.
The real show is that the unions and the faction bosses have given up on the Rudd experiment and gone back to the business of running things. It won't be the Rudd kitchen cabinet anymore, it will be the machine as it was in the Hawke days. Big deals done at the top and the rest of us will just go along.
It's sad because I think Kim Beazley is the best Prime Minister we never had (as was his father). Julia Gillard is going to have to do an awful lot to win my vote and that's not even counting the speech therapy to get rid of that awful voice, as melodious as the sound of cutting up a corrugated iron dunny with a chainsaw. I wonder if those backers of hers on the left noticed the strong support she has among the writers of the Australian edition of The Spectator. They like her because she stands up to the evil teacher unions and possibly because she's also not Kevin Rudd.
The jury's probably still out but for my money if she doesn't make a move in the right direction on emissions trading and she doesn't stick to the resource super profits tax that everyone from Ross Gittins to the IMF thinks is a rational and necessary move then I'm not voting for the clowns. I'll vote Green or Independent and give no preferences.
The voters will probably give her a fair go, and she'll exploit that by going early if she can. Interesting times but I can't see anything inspiring anywhere in any direction. Is Malcom Fraser too old at 80 to make a comeback??
Monday, June 21, 2010
this is a big story, buried down the page on the SMH website. Does it remind you of something you've read about before. like maybe in about 1964-5????
US commander unimpressed by Obama and Biden: report June 22, 2010 - 11:22AM
SMH 22/6/10
The US commander in Afghanistan mocks the vice president and denounces a top diplomat in a magazine interview released on Monday, while his aides speak dismissively of President Barack Obama.
Tensions between General Stanley McChrystal and the White House are on full display in an unflattering profile in Rolling Stone of the commander of US and NATO forces in the Afghan war.
McChrystal jokes sarcastically about preparing to answer a question referring to Vice President Joe Biden, known as a sceptic of the commander's war strategy.
"'Are you asking about Vice President Biden?' McChrystal says with a laugh. 'Who's that?"' the article quotes him as saying.
"'Biden?' suggests a top adviser. 'Did you say: Bite Me?"'
McChrystal tells the magazine that he felt "betrayed" by the US ambassador to Kabul, Karl Eikenberry, in a White House debate over war strategy last year.
Referring to a leaked internal memo from Eikenberry that questioned McChrystal's request for more troops, the commander suggested the ambassador had tried to protect himself for history's sake.
"I like Karl, I've known him for years, but they'd never said anything like that to us before," McChrystal tells the magazine.
"Here's one that covers his flank for the history books. Now if we fail, they can say, 'I told you so."'
Eikenberry, himself a former commander in Afghanistan, had written to the White House saying Afghan President Hamid Karzai was an unreliable partner and that a surge of troops could draw the United States into a open-ended quagmire.
The article revisits the friction between the White House and the military last northern autumn as Obama debated whether to grant McChrystal's request for tens of thousands of reinforcements.
Although Obama in the end granted most of what McChrystal asked for, the strategy review was a difficult time, the general tells the magazine.
"I found that time painful," McChrystal says. "I was selling an unsellable position."
An unnamed adviser to McChrystal alleges the general came away unimpressed after a meeting with Obama in the Oval Office a year ago, just after the president named him to take over in Afghanistan.
"It was a 10-minute photo op," the general's adviser says.
"Obama clearly didn't know anything about him, who he was ... he didn't seem very engaged.
"The boss was pretty disappointed," says the adviser.
The profile, titled "The Runaway General," portrays his aides as profane and intensely loyal to McChrystal, while arguing the general has seized control over the war on the military and diplomatic fronts.
The four-star general also derides the hard-charging top US envoy to the region, Richard Holbrooke, and complains about a dinner with an unnamed French minister during a visit to Paris.
"Oh, not another e-mail from Holbrooke," McChrystal says, looking at his messages on a mobile phone. "I don't even want to open it."
In a hotel room in Paris getting ready for a dinner with a French official, McChrystal says: "How'd I get screwed into going to this dinner?"
"The dinner comes with the position, sir," says his aide, Colonel Charlie Flynn.
"Hey, Charlie," McChrystal says, "does this come with the position?"
McChrystal gives him the middle finger.
AFP maur
US commander unimpressed by Obama and Biden: report June 22, 2010 - 11:22AM
SMH 22/6/10
The US commander in Afghanistan mocks the vice president and denounces a top diplomat in a magazine interview released on Monday, while his aides speak dismissively of President Barack Obama.
Tensions between General Stanley McChrystal and the White House are on full display in an unflattering profile in Rolling Stone of the commander of US and NATO forces in the Afghan war.
McChrystal jokes sarcastically about preparing to answer a question referring to Vice President Joe Biden, known as a sceptic of the commander's war strategy.
"'Are you asking about Vice President Biden?' McChrystal says with a laugh. 'Who's that?"' the article quotes him as saying.
"'Biden?' suggests a top adviser. 'Did you say: Bite Me?"'
McChrystal tells the magazine that he felt "betrayed" by the US ambassador to Kabul, Karl Eikenberry, in a White House debate over war strategy last year.
Referring to a leaked internal memo from Eikenberry that questioned McChrystal's request for more troops, the commander suggested the ambassador had tried to protect himself for history's sake.
"I like Karl, I've known him for years, but they'd never said anything like that to us before," McChrystal tells the magazine.
"Here's one that covers his flank for the history books. Now if we fail, they can say, 'I told you so."'
Eikenberry, himself a former commander in Afghanistan, had written to the White House saying Afghan President Hamid Karzai was an unreliable partner and that a surge of troops could draw the United States into a open-ended quagmire.
The article revisits the friction between the White House and the military last northern autumn as Obama debated whether to grant McChrystal's request for tens of thousands of reinforcements.
Although Obama in the end granted most of what McChrystal asked for, the strategy review was a difficult time, the general tells the magazine.
"I found that time painful," McChrystal says. "I was selling an unsellable position."
An unnamed adviser to McChrystal alleges the general came away unimpressed after a meeting with Obama in the Oval Office a year ago, just after the president named him to take over in Afghanistan.
"It was a 10-minute photo op," the general's adviser says.
"Obama clearly didn't know anything about him, who he was ... he didn't seem very engaged.
"The boss was pretty disappointed," says the adviser.
The profile, titled "The Runaway General," portrays his aides as profane and intensely loyal to McChrystal, while arguing the general has seized control over the war on the military and diplomatic fronts.
The four-star general also derides the hard-charging top US envoy to the region, Richard Holbrooke, and complains about a dinner with an unnamed French minister during a visit to Paris.
"Oh, not another e-mail from Holbrooke," McChrystal says, looking at his messages on a mobile phone. "I don't even want to open it."
In a hotel room in Paris getting ready for a dinner with a French official, McChrystal says: "How'd I get screwed into going to this dinner?"
"The dinner comes with the position, sir," says his aide, Colonel Charlie Flynn.
"Hey, Charlie," McChrystal says, "does this come with the position?"
McChrystal gives him the middle finger.
AFP maur
Sunday, June 20, 2010
Could Chifley win Labor preselection today?
By Rodney Cavalier
April 21, 2005
Address to the NSW Fabian Society seminar at Gleebooks on Wednesday April 20, 2005
Could Ben Chifley win a Labor preselection today? No.
Could a railwayman from Bathurst win preselection today? No.
Could a man or woman who works during the day or night in a job that involves getting dirty and perspiring and without access to a telephone during working hours win a preselection today? No.
Could a professional devoted to his practice and his clients - that is, willing to work long hours, including night and weekends in preparation and research - could such a person win a preselection today? No.
Who can win a preselection today?
In the absence of intervention at the level of the parliamentary leadership, preselection in seats which matter falls exclusively to the inhabitants of the political class. The political class embraces union officials, ministerial and parliamentary staffs and party employees.
Most of these people, certainly the aspirants for Parliament, are an operative for a faction. The ALP factional operatives are members of the only class which has survived into this century - the political class. They are a coherent grouping which fulfills all of the Marxist definitions of class: consciousness of each other, action in concert, action in self-interest.
The nucleus of the ALP political class is trade union control of the Labor Party. Although unions are reduced to 17 per cent of the workforce and falling, though they represent fewer than one in ten Australian voters and do not command the votes of even half of their own number, union control of the ALP governance is stronger now than ever - even though its formal representation at Conference is 50 per cent. Union control of the administration and the preselection oversight bodies is 100 per cent.
The old BHP culture did not approach the nepotism in some union offices of the de la Salle old boys, the IR undergraduates, the Labor Club at uni X coterie. The coming people are so often the sons and daughters of, married to or living with - or all three.
Unions are the creatures of faction, factions are the instruments of unions. They are indivisible. Break union control, the faction system breaks with it. Workers, note, are not a part of this equation.
The political class is a coterie. The coterie has its differences within - any such divisions are not about ideas or ideology. The factions have become executive placement agencies, disputes between them become serious only when they cannot agree on a placement. They are effectively united for themselves against the world. Otherwise rational adults will defend union control of the ALP, the sine qua non for their place in the sun. Most would not in a world based on merit. The monopoly has come to pass during our adult lives, it became irresistible after 1996 and the loss of Federal government. The decline begins with the otherwise glorious story of the rise and rise of R.J.L.Hawke.
Bob Hawke came from another generation. He was a Rhodes Scholar, cased by Albert Monk, entreated to enter the ACTU. Hawke had the good fortune to be learning at the feet of men who had lived a life, a life which embraced the trenches of the Great War, the deprivations of the 1930s, war and reconstruction. They had been young men in the False Dawn of 1917; not all thought it false, many were true believers in Marx and the perfectability of Man, they lived their commitment into their private lives, resolute in their contempt for private property and the accumulation of capital.
Young Hawke could listen and absorb, build on his reading, mature in his outlook. In having to speak the language of real workers and the men who represented real workers (real workers themselves for the most part), Hawke acquired his distinctive argot, an idiom and a manner which Australians found compelling, especially women.
The rise and rise of Bob Hawke, a career made outside the Parliament, sent a message most terrible to the ambitious. In no time at all a university background in union office became common place. So much so that the products or dropouts of university captured union after union. Having executed the capture they placed more and more of themselves as vacancies arose. Inside one generation the paid positions in unions were filling with men, then women, who had no connection with the industries and callings they were representing, placed there by people exactly like themselves. So many of the representatives of the workers have themselves scarcely any knowledge of work.
Simultaneously, a career and working life spent wholly inside the ALP political class became possible. The notion of a separate stream of ministerial staff is as recent as 1972. Gough thought it useful for his Minister for Transport to have an adviser or two - not ten or 12 - from outside the public service who knew something about planes and trains. Not someone to lend a hand to Luke or Mark in Fowler.
Add up the private staffs for State and Federal Members, upper and lower, ministers and frontbenchers, you will have a vast number of paid jobs at the disposal of the political class, jobs which serve to reinforce its grip on the party at all levels and throughout Sydney and its satellites. None existed pre-1972. None of the theories of ALP democracy have countenanced the existence of a standing army of employees inside the party itself.
People join factions these days because of opportunity and entreaty. The obvious comparison is with the market for footballers: the scouts offer position and opportunity. If the scouts get it right - that is they place the right people who then make good - then their own positions and their own segment of the political class is fortified. That competition between the placement agencies is all the swirl there is these days.
The segments of the coterie are indivisible: men and women move effortlessly between these occupations as opportunity arises or is denied. For most of them the ultimate is to crack a seat in Parliament. Within one generation Bob Hawke has become Steve Hutchins.
The phenomenon is not a conspiracy. It is what happens when a vibrant culture enters a vulnerable host. Like lantana in natural bushland.
What is the portrait of the modern Labor Member of Parliament? She is cased at university where she is achieving less than academic greatness. He will have demonstrated a willingness to follow a leader, not to step out of line. She will join an ALP branch where the postage and the mail-out is met by an MP. His first serious employment is with an MP. Or a Minister where she will know nought of the subject area of the Minister's portfolio. Or a union where he will not have worked in the industry covered by the union employing him. Or her.
She is preselected perhaps for where she lives, perhaps for somewhere she has no association; he has minimal or zero community record. Her campaign is managed by people supplied by Head Office, it is paid for by Head Office, its strategy is determined by Head Office.
Having been elected, he enters the caucus of the faction to which he owes everything; she votes as the leadership instructs, he confirms for another parliamentary term the hegemony of the processes that made her possible. When she delivers her Maiden Speech, it is probable that the staffer of a Minister will have written it. Someone who hopes to walk in her or his footsteps.
The processes of such advancement obviate the humanising essential for a successful adult life - what we call maturing in response to personal experience, intellectual growth, changes subtle in objective response to change in the world. When your outlook on politics is determined for you and your continuing advance depends on adhering to that determination, maturing does not come to pass.
In the natural world the equivalent is the cossetted existence of creatures born in a zoo, knowing no other environment. The cannot survive in the world. They lack the skills to hunt and kill their own. The most obvious consequence is how Federal Labor has lost the faculty of persuasion. Holding a poll to find out what the punters are thinking and then promise that finding as your own best thinking may be the core of what passes for philosophy in modern politics. It is the opposite of leadership.
The Labor Party has ceased to exist below. Its death is one of the great unreported stories of Australian politics. The nurturing of new members, once so vital in our growth, even more vital in passing on traditions of honour and service, is less likely than at any time in our history.
Labor has become a cartel party, essentially dependent on the unacknowledged largesse of the taxpayer. If MPs and Senators ceased to provide postage and stationery to branches in NSW, not fewer than 500 would perish by the end of next month at the latest.
A party does not have to be democratic to survive or prosper. The ALP for much of the time since 1916 is living proof of that. Self-perpetuating oligarchies are the norm for preferment within most parties around the world. The trick is for the established leadership to shake up the ladder which placed them there, to look beyond the obvious and the obsequious to bring in new talent. Boards of public companies have moved away from the nepotism that has become the norm for trade unions and the ALP. You have to be a super-optimist to believe that the members of the political class - occupying positions which represent their bread and butter and their passport to a glittering life - will upset the mechanisms which preserve them from a world based on merit.
Being in government is almost everything. There is no embracing ideology to sustain a Labor Party out of power, no light on the hill, no reserves of character or historical memory. You will note that exactly the same has occurred with the UK Conservative Party. Parties which build their governance on being the government have a crisis waiting for them when they forfeit the public service superstructure. Some of us were predicting this consequence by the early 1990s.
The Caucus which assembled after the election of 2004 is the weakest since Federation. I will defend that statement on any matrix of capacity anyone wishes to employ. The only contest for the appellation are the disasters of 1916 and 1931 when Labor Governments suffered wholesale defections and massive electoral defeats. In those disasters the party suffered massive losses of good people, crises of relevance, doubts about survival. What the party did not then suffer was a crisis in conviction.
No one will dare cite a comparison with 1975. Post-1975, the dimensions of defeat inspired defiance and a great rebuilding. Compare and contrast those earlier responses to defeat, compare and contrast who remained then and who remains now for the crusade required.
Out of the embers of 1975 Labor emerged with a critical mass of seriously able men who were there for the long haul - Bill Hayden, Lionel Bowen, John Button, Ralph Willis, Peter Morris, Peter Walsh, Mick Young, not to forget a very young, bloodthirsty Paul Keating. Where is anyone of that quality now? Other than those who were there already, pre-1996?
Labor stood still in 1977 in terms of seats, it was otherwise with the infusion of quality representation - Brian Howe, John Dawkins (returning after defeat), Barry Jones, Gareth Evans, John Brown, Neal Blewett. John Kerin followed in a by-election. In 1980, the equivalent to 2001 in our time, Michael Duffy and Kim Beazley entered the House. So did the immediate past President of the ACTU, a bloke by the name of Hawke.
Who among the front bench of 2004 would find a place in a Hawke-Keating Ministry even at no.27? Kim, certainly. How many others?
2004 was the third election after going down. The quality of the 2004 intake is embarrassing. The Liberal and National Parties have renewed their ranks, Labor has not. The lack of diversity in Labor's Federal ranks has at last achieved media comment.
We have become progressively weaker after each election since 1996. When you know who is jostling in the queues for coming preselections, you will know that the situation is going to get worse. Much worse.
In every other crisis of identity and electoral melancholy we have tended to draw on History, to note that the Labor Party is magnificent in adversity, to note the party is the most resilient creature in the Australian landscape.
Is there cause for such comfort now? Where exactly does modern Labor draw from? Once upon a time Labor could draw from all the factories in Australia and all the mines, the railways and ships and trucks, the waterfront, the gangs working in the open air. It could supplement that gene pool with a growing army of adherents in the liberal arts, teaching, the law and other professions, essentially anyone we might have characterised as progressive in a whole range of social issues, foreign policy, nationalism, civil liberties. Either directly or through the ranks of union officials, Labor could draw on the best out there for renewal.
Each such source of supply has dried up.
Unless the leadership at the machine level and the parliaments set about smashing the monopoly enjoyed by the political class the party is doomed. Rules changes are required which eliminate employees of the party and Ministers and parliamentarians from contesting selection ballots. The separate disaster of trade union officials should be addressed by legislation that requires each official to be drawn from the ranks of the working membership.
Impositions on the lines of Peter Garrett and Frank Sartor will occur more often during a transitional phase until the party membership rebuilds a catchment of candidates who can represent their fellow Australians and lead Australia's government. A good start will be candidates who are employees in productive employment where it is a dismissable offence during working hours to advance the cause of the ALP or your own preselection prospects.
At beginning of this address I posed questions which flow from the question which gives tonight its discussion. There is one other question. Would Chifley want Labor preselection today? I'll leave that answer to you.
By Rodney Cavalier
April 21, 2005
Address to the NSW Fabian Society seminar at Gleebooks on Wednesday April 20, 2005
Could Ben Chifley win a Labor preselection today? No.
Could a railwayman from Bathurst win preselection today? No.
Could a man or woman who works during the day or night in a job that involves getting dirty and perspiring and without access to a telephone during working hours win a preselection today? No.
Could a professional devoted to his practice and his clients - that is, willing to work long hours, including night and weekends in preparation and research - could such a person win a preselection today? No.
Who can win a preselection today?
In the absence of intervention at the level of the parliamentary leadership, preselection in seats which matter falls exclusively to the inhabitants of the political class. The political class embraces union officials, ministerial and parliamentary staffs and party employees.
Most of these people, certainly the aspirants for Parliament, are an operative for a faction. The ALP factional operatives are members of the only class which has survived into this century - the political class. They are a coherent grouping which fulfills all of the Marxist definitions of class: consciousness of each other, action in concert, action in self-interest.
The nucleus of the ALP political class is trade union control of the Labor Party. Although unions are reduced to 17 per cent of the workforce and falling, though they represent fewer than one in ten Australian voters and do not command the votes of even half of their own number, union control of the ALP governance is stronger now than ever - even though its formal representation at Conference is 50 per cent. Union control of the administration and the preselection oversight bodies is 100 per cent.
The old BHP culture did not approach the nepotism in some union offices of the de la Salle old boys, the IR undergraduates, the Labor Club at uni X coterie. The coming people are so often the sons and daughters of, married to or living with - or all three.
Unions are the creatures of faction, factions are the instruments of unions. They are indivisible. Break union control, the faction system breaks with it. Workers, note, are not a part of this equation.
The political class is a coterie. The coterie has its differences within - any such divisions are not about ideas or ideology. The factions have become executive placement agencies, disputes between them become serious only when they cannot agree on a placement. They are effectively united for themselves against the world. Otherwise rational adults will defend union control of the ALP, the sine qua non for their place in the sun. Most would not in a world based on merit. The monopoly has come to pass during our adult lives, it became irresistible after 1996 and the loss of Federal government. The decline begins with the otherwise glorious story of the rise and rise of R.J.L.Hawke.
Bob Hawke came from another generation. He was a Rhodes Scholar, cased by Albert Monk, entreated to enter the ACTU. Hawke had the good fortune to be learning at the feet of men who had lived a life, a life which embraced the trenches of the Great War, the deprivations of the 1930s, war and reconstruction. They had been young men in the False Dawn of 1917; not all thought it false, many were true believers in Marx and the perfectability of Man, they lived their commitment into their private lives, resolute in their contempt for private property and the accumulation of capital.
Young Hawke could listen and absorb, build on his reading, mature in his outlook. In having to speak the language of real workers and the men who represented real workers (real workers themselves for the most part), Hawke acquired his distinctive argot, an idiom and a manner which Australians found compelling, especially women.
The rise and rise of Bob Hawke, a career made outside the Parliament, sent a message most terrible to the ambitious. In no time at all a university background in union office became common place. So much so that the products or dropouts of university captured union after union. Having executed the capture they placed more and more of themselves as vacancies arose. Inside one generation the paid positions in unions were filling with men, then women, who had no connection with the industries and callings they were representing, placed there by people exactly like themselves. So many of the representatives of the workers have themselves scarcely any knowledge of work.
Simultaneously, a career and working life spent wholly inside the ALP political class became possible. The notion of a separate stream of ministerial staff is as recent as 1972. Gough thought it useful for his Minister for Transport to have an adviser or two - not ten or 12 - from outside the public service who knew something about planes and trains. Not someone to lend a hand to Luke or Mark in Fowler.
Add up the private staffs for State and Federal Members, upper and lower, ministers and frontbenchers, you will have a vast number of paid jobs at the disposal of the political class, jobs which serve to reinforce its grip on the party at all levels and throughout Sydney and its satellites. None existed pre-1972. None of the theories of ALP democracy have countenanced the existence of a standing army of employees inside the party itself.
People join factions these days because of opportunity and entreaty. The obvious comparison is with the market for footballers: the scouts offer position and opportunity. If the scouts get it right - that is they place the right people who then make good - then their own positions and their own segment of the political class is fortified. That competition between the placement agencies is all the swirl there is these days.
The segments of the coterie are indivisible: men and women move effortlessly between these occupations as opportunity arises or is denied. For most of them the ultimate is to crack a seat in Parliament. Within one generation Bob Hawke has become Steve Hutchins.
The phenomenon is not a conspiracy. It is what happens when a vibrant culture enters a vulnerable host. Like lantana in natural bushland.
What is the portrait of the modern Labor Member of Parliament? She is cased at university where she is achieving less than academic greatness. He will have demonstrated a willingness to follow a leader, not to step out of line. She will join an ALP branch where the postage and the mail-out is met by an MP. His first serious employment is with an MP. Or a Minister where she will know nought of the subject area of the Minister's portfolio. Or a union where he will not have worked in the industry covered by the union employing him. Or her.
She is preselected perhaps for where she lives, perhaps for somewhere she has no association; he has minimal or zero community record. Her campaign is managed by people supplied by Head Office, it is paid for by Head Office, its strategy is determined by Head Office.
Having been elected, he enters the caucus of the faction to which he owes everything; she votes as the leadership instructs, he confirms for another parliamentary term the hegemony of the processes that made her possible. When she delivers her Maiden Speech, it is probable that the staffer of a Minister will have written it. Someone who hopes to walk in her or his footsteps.
The processes of such advancement obviate the humanising essential for a successful adult life - what we call maturing in response to personal experience, intellectual growth, changes subtle in objective response to change in the world. When your outlook on politics is determined for you and your continuing advance depends on adhering to that determination, maturing does not come to pass.
In the natural world the equivalent is the cossetted existence of creatures born in a zoo, knowing no other environment. The cannot survive in the world. They lack the skills to hunt and kill their own. The most obvious consequence is how Federal Labor has lost the faculty of persuasion. Holding a poll to find out what the punters are thinking and then promise that finding as your own best thinking may be the core of what passes for philosophy in modern politics. It is the opposite of leadership.
The Labor Party has ceased to exist below. Its death is one of the great unreported stories of Australian politics. The nurturing of new members, once so vital in our growth, even more vital in passing on traditions of honour and service, is less likely than at any time in our history.
Labor has become a cartel party, essentially dependent on the unacknowledged largesse of the taxpayer. If MPs and Senators ceased to provide postage and stationery to branches in NSW, not fewer than 500 would perish by the end of next month at the latest.
A party does not have to be democratic to survive or prosper. The ALP for much of the time since 1916 is living proof of that. Self-perpetuating oligarchies are the norm for preferment within most parties around the world. The trick is for the established leadership to shake up the ladder which placed them there, to look beyond the obvious and the obsequious to bring in new talent. Boards of public companies have moved away from the nepotism that has become the norm for trade unions and the ALP. You have to be a super-optimist to believe that the members of the political class - occupying positions which represent their bread and butter and their passport to a glittering life - will upset the mechanisms which preserve them from a world based on merit.
Being in government is almost everything. There is no embracing ideology to sustain a Labor Party out of power, no light on the hill, no reserves of character or historical memory. You will note that exactly the same has occurred with the UK Conservative Party. Parties which build their governance on being the government have a crisis waiting for them when they forfeit the public service superstructure. Some of us were predicting this consequence by the early 1990s.
The Caucus which assembled after the election of 2004 is the weakest since Federation. I will defend that statement on any matrix of capacity anyone wishes to employ. The only contest for the appellation are the disasters of 1916 and 1931 when Labor Governments suffered wholesale defections and massive electoral defeats. In those disasters the party suffered massive losses of good people, crises of relevance, doubts about survival. What the party did not then suffer was a crisis in conviction.
No one will dare cite a comparison with 1975. Post-1975, the dimensions of defeat inspired defiance and a great rebuilding. Compare and contrast those earlier responses to defeat, compare and contrast who remained then and who remains now for the crusade required.
Out of the embers of 1975 Labor emerged with a critical mass of seriously able men who were there for the long haul - Bill Hayden, Lionel Bowen, John Button, Ralph Willis, Peter Morris, Peter Walsh, Mick Young, not to forget a very young, bloodthirsty Paul Keating. Where is anyone of that quality now? Other than those who were there already, pre-1996?
Labor stood still in 1977 in terms of seats, it was otherwise with the infusion of quality representation - Brian Howe, John Dawkins (returning after defeat), Barry Jones, Gareth Evans, John Brown, Neal Blewett. John Kerin followed in a by-election. In 1980, the equivalent to 2001 in our time, Michael Duffy and Kim Beazley entered the House. So did the immediate past President of the ACTU, a bloke by the name of Hawke.
Who among the front bench of 2004 would find a place in a Hawke-Keating Ministry even at no.27? Kim, certainly. How many others?
2004 was the third election after going down. The quality of the 2004 intake is embarrassing. The Liberal and National Parties have renewed their ranks, Labor has not. The lack of diversity in Labor's Federal ranks has at last achieved media comment.
We have become progressively weaker after each election since 1996. When you know who is jostling in the queues for coming preselections, you will know that the situation is going to get worse. Much worse.
In every other crisis of identity and electoral melancholy we have tended to draw on History, to note that the Labor Party is magnificent in adversity, to note the party is the most resilient creature in the Australian landscape.
Is there cause for such comfort now? Where exactly does modern Labor draw from? Once upon a time Labor could draw from all the factories in Australia and all the mines, the railways and ships and trucks, the waterfront, the gangs working in the open air. It could supplement that gene pool with a growing army of adherents in the liberal arts, teaching, the law and other professions, essentially anyone we might have characterised as progressive in a whole range of social issues, foreign policy, nationalism, civil liberties. Either directly or through the ranks of union officials, Labor could draw on the best out there for renewal.
Each such source of supply has dried up.
Unless the leadership at the machine level and the parliaments set about smashing the monopoly enjoyed by the political class the party is doomed. Rules changes are required which eliminate employees of the party and Ministers and parliamentarians from contesting selection ballots. The separate disaster of trade union officials should be addressed by legislation that requires each official to be drawn from the ranks of the working membership.
Impositions on the lines of Peter Garrett and Frank Sartor will occur more often during a transitional phase until the party membership rebuilds a catchment of candidates who can represent their fellow Australians and lead Australia's government. A good start will be candidates who are employees in productive employment where it is a dismissable offence during working hours to advance the cause of the ALP or your own preselection prospects.
At beginning of this address I posed questions which flow from the question which gives tonight its discussion. There is one other question. Would Chifley want Labor preselection today? I'll leave that answer to you.
More on what's wrong with Labor in NSW
I guess this might sound like sour grapes because there was a time, back in the 80s when I was a warrior of the NSW right of the ALP. I believed that we had the talent and the philosophy and I still think that I was right. John Ducker was Secretary of the Labor Council and his assistant was Barrie Unsworth, the Industrial officer was John McBean. The General Secretary of the ALP was Geoff Cahill, a weak and shifty figure with a very limited future (and probably a sign of what was to come) but his off sider was Graeme Richardson who proved a very fast learner. They were smart, talented, ruthless and in my view straight shooters. They knew what they wanted but they also knew why they wanted it. All had come "from the tools". They had worked for a living and all in their own way wanted to make things better for the people Labor represents.
Unfortunately they also had an underlying weakness in that they valued loyalty above EVERYTHING. Richardson was the most open about it when he said that the real test of a member of the right was that "you will be with us even when we are wrong".
I failed that test several times. In fact I can only think of one time when I passed it. As Secretary of the Education and Science Policy Committee I had signed off on a policy that would make private schools publicly accountable for every cent they had, from both government and private sources. I had moved it in the policy committee and I was very happy to see it in Labor policy but the private school lobby was not so happy. I don't know where it originated but pressure began for me to alter the wording of the policy that had been agreed before it went to the party's annual conference. It was just before the election of the Hawke Government and the pressure came from very high indeed. Finally I had a call from John Dawkins the shadow minister appealing to me to get the issue of the policital agenda and to trust the coming Labor Govenment. Stupidly I did as I was asked and copped it on the chin at the conference. The altered policy committee report was (of course) passed.
Later that year the Hawke Government sold out public education to keep the private school lobby happy. I went on AM and said so, and got called a disloyal c--- for my troubles. I've been a disloyal c---- ever since.
For 25 years they have promoted blindly loyal branch stackers and this is sadly true of both the left and the right. I'll add a fine article by Rod Cavalier to this blog, if I can ever find it again, lamenting the decline of the left into a faint shadow. No one believes in anything anymore. It's all very sad.
I guess this might sound like sour grapes because there was a time, back in the 80s when I was a warrior of the NSW right of the ALP. I believed that we had the talent and the philosophy and I still think that I was right. John Ducker was Secretary of the Labor Council and his assistant was Barrie Unsworth, the Industrial officer was John McBean. The General Secretary of the ALP was Geoff Cahill, a weak and shifty figure with a very limited future (and probably a sign of what was to come) but his off sider was Graeme Richardson who proved a very fast learner. They were smart, talented, ruthless and in my view straight shooters. They knew what they wanted but they also knew why they wanted it. All had come "from the tools". They had worked for a living and all in their own way wanted to make things better for the people Labor represents.
Unfortunately they also had an underlying weakness in that they valued loyalty above EVERYTHING. Richardson was the most open about it when he said that the real test of a member of the right was that "you will be with us even when we are wrong".
I failed that test several times. In fact I can only think of one time when I passed it. As Secretary of the Education and Science Policy Committee I had signed off on a policy that would make private schools publicly accountable for every cent they had, from both government and private sources. I had moved it in the policy committee and I was very happy to see it in Labor policy but the private school lobby was not so happy. I don't know where it originated but pressure began for me to alter the wording of the policy that had been agreed before it went to the party's annual conference. It was just before the election of the Hawke Government and the pressure came from very high indeed. Finally I had a call from John Dawkins the shadow minister appealing to me to get the issue of the policital agenda and to trust the coming Labor Govenment. Stupidly I did as I was asked and copped it on the chin at the conference. The altered policy committee report was (of course) passed.
Later that year the Hawke Government sold out public education to keep the private school lobby happy. I went on AM and said so, and got called a disloyal c--- for my troubles. I've been a disloyal c---- ever since.
For 25 years they have promoted blindly loyal branch stackers and this is sadly true of both the left and the right. I'll add a fine article by Rod Cavalier to this blog, if I can ever find it again, lamenting the decline of the left into a faint shadow. No one believes in anything anymore. It's all very sad.
Andrew West has hit the nail on the head with this article in the SMH. Well all apart from the bit where he alludes to Joe Tripodi looking good in a suit.
Mass political party no more - just a haven for careerists ANDREW WEST
June 21, 2010
ANALYSIS
JOHN ROBERTSON is one of the smartest strategists in Labor politics - an authentic, self-educated blue-collar man with the wits to understand the thinking of the electorate. He was the author of the grassroots ''Your Rights At Work'' campaign that was instrumental in toppling the Howard government.
So he was either delusional or disingenuous yesterday when he said the unprecedented 25 per cent-plus swing away from Labor in the heartland seat of Penrith was largely because of voter anger with the former MP, Karyn Paluzzano, who quit after lying to the Independent Commission Against Corruption.
Deep down, surely he and the tiny handful of wise operatives that remain know that the rejection of the Keneally government reflects a widespread fury at the culture of corruption that pervades NSW Labor.
It is not always a criminal corruption. It is more an ethical corruption.
A recent newspaper column posited that NSW is being run by the same people who took over Young Labor in the early 1990s, only now, instead of squabbling over jobs in ministerial and union offices, they sit at the cabinet table. It was a clever, if incomplete, observation.
NSW Labor is defined by a mentality of entitlement and grievance - and has been for almost 40 years. Back in the late 1960s and 1970s, a coterie of Young Labor operatives, including Paul Keating, Bob Carr and Graham Richardson, sat around and divided up the world.
They believed because they craved seats in Parliament, and plotted a way there, they were entitled to such perks. The problem they struck is that people whose ambition outstripped their talent have followed.
This culture reached its apogee at the 2003 election, when the Fairfield MP Joe Tripodi and his then ally Eric Roozendaal, now treasurer but formerly the party's general secretary, assisted a cast of mates, relatives or relatives of mates into safe Labor seats.
Aside from the premier, the candidates included Tripodi's sister-in-law, Anglea D'Amore, Tanya Gadiel and Paluzzano. Already in Parliament were Tripodi's former fiance, Reba Meagher, and right-wing allies Matt Brown and Cherie Burton.
They, and their sponsors in the Labor machine, decided if you could prove yourself in the superficial arts of political organisation, such as screeching platitudes from a script at party conferences and looking good in a suit, you possessed the qualities necessary for a seat in Parliament.
Few could claim the confidence of a majority of their branch members or demonstrate deep roots in the communities they would represent. (Meagher arrived in western Sydney from the Sutherland Shire via the North Shore, and drove a BMW around her low-income electorate.)
Most tellingly, none came to Parliament having distinguished themselves in a profession, trade or career. And that is the problem with modern Labor. It has ceased to be a mass political party, with members who are also active in community groups. It has become a haven for careerists, where idealists are sniggered at as ''losers''. But who are the losers now?
Mass political party no more - just a haven for careerists ANDREW WEST
June 21, 2010
ANALYSIS
JOHN ROBERTSON is one of the smartest strategists in Labor politics - an authentic, self-educated blue-collar man with the wits to understand the thinking of the electorate. He was the author of the grassroots ''Your Rights At Work'' campaign that was instrumental in toppling the Howard government.
So he was either delusional or disingenuous yesterday when he said the unprecedented 25 per cent-plus swing away from Labor in the heartland seat of Penrith was largely because of voter anger with the former MP, Karyn Paluzzano, who quit after lying to the Independent Commission Against Corruption.
Deep down, surely he and the tiny handful of wise operatives that remain know that the rejection of the Keneally government reflects a widespread fury at the culture of corruption that pervades NSW Labor.
It is not always a criminal corruption. It is more an ethical corruption.
A recent newspaper column posited that NSW is being run by the same people who took over Young Labor in the early 1990s, only now, instead of squabbling over jobs in ministerial and union offices, they sit at the cabinet table. It was a clever, if incomplete, observation.
NSW Labor is defined by a mentality of entitlement and grievance - and has been for almost 40 years. Back in the late 1960s and 1970s, a coterie of Young Labor operatives, including Paul Keating, Bob Carr and Graham Richardson, sat around and divided up the world.
They believed because they craved seats in Parliament, and plotted a way there, they were entitled to such perks. The problem they struck is that people whose ambition outstripped their talent have followed.
This culture reached its apogee at the 2003 election, when the Fairfield MP Joe Tripodi and his then ally Eric Roozendaal, now treasurer but formerly the party's general secretary, assisted a cast of mates, relatives or relatives of mates into safe Labor seats.
Aside from the premier, the candidates included Tripodi's sister-in-law, Anglea D'Amore, Tanya Gadiel and Paluzzano. Already in Parliament were Tripodi's former fiance, Reba Meagher, and right-wing allies Matt Brown and Cherie Burton.
They, and their sponsors in the Labor machine, decided if you could prove yourself in the superficial arts of political organisation, such as screeching platitudes from a script at party conferences and looking good in a suit, you possessed the qualities necessary for a seat in Parliament.
Few could claim the confidence of a majority of their branch members or demonstrate deep roots in the communities they would represent. (Meagher arrived in western Sydney from the Sutherland Shire via the North Shore, and drove a BMW around her low-income electorate.)
Most tellingly, none came to Parliament having distinguished themselves in a profession, trade or career. And that is the problem with modern Labor. It has ceased to be a mass political party, with members who are also active in community groups. It has become a haven for careerists, where idealists are sniggered at as ''losers''. But who are the losers now?
Tuesday, June 8, 2010
Big Kev is Watching
A man with a photo-ID in a little plastic sleeve walked into our front yard this week and stopped the fellow who is laying some pavers for us (at an hourly rate) from working for a while. He wanted to demonstrate the evil of fruit flies as related to the guava tree in our garden. He was from the Department of Agriculture. He left a brochure and a card with instructions to call him.
How did they know we have a small guava tree? He was apparently driving up and down the street looking for people with fruit trees in their front gardens. Or maybe they use satellites.
The brochure warns me of huge fines if we fail to control fruit flies on our property. Since we don’t have side fences and I’m not sure about fly proof fences anyway I’m mystified as to how they’d prove that the flies came from our place rather than from next door but perhaps they have tiny radio transmitters fitted to the flies.
I had a heart attack last year. Too much gardening perhaps. I was taken to the public hospital but once they found that I had private insurance they shot me off to a private hospital where they said I would not have to wait as long for treatment. The food was better too. There was a letter waiting for me at home telling me that the NSW Department of Health had decided that I would definitely benefit from a rehabilitation program and that I would be contacted. A week or so later I got another letter admonishing me for not being in when the rehabilitation coordinator phoned to tell me when to come in to be rehabilitated. I’d gone for a walk. When I eventually went to meet her she told me a whole lot of stuff that I already knew. She suggested that I should go for regular walks. She asked me about my drinking habits. Now I considered emulating Jeffrey Bernard and saying “none of your fucking business” but why be crude so I said that I would have a few glasses of wine each evening. She told me that she would prefer it if I restricted myself to one glass. I should emphasise that this woman is not my wife or my mother. My wife would have supported the one glass rule but my dear mother certainly would have bristled at it.
Also in the mail at home was a parcel containing a bowel cancer test kit. The less said about this the better but it would appear that not being content with telling me how much I’m allowed to drink, what plants I have in my garden and what to do in my spare time the Commonwealth Government also want to peer up my bum.
How did they know we have a small guava tree? He was apparently driving up and down the street looking for people with fruit trees in their front gardens. Or maybe they use satellites.
The brochure warns me of huge fines if we fail to control fruit flies on our property. Since we don’t have side fences and I’m not sure about fly proof fences anyway I’m mystified as to how they’d prove that the flies came from our place rather than from next door but perhaps they have tiny radio transmitters fitted to the flies.
I had a heart attack last year. Too much gardening perhaps. I was taken to the public hospital but once they found that I had private insurance they shot me off to a private hospital where they said I would not have to wait as long for treatment. The food was better too. There was a letter waiting for me at home telling me that the NSW Department of Health had decided that I would definitely benefit from a rehabilitation program and that I would be contacted. A week or so later I got another letter admonishing me for not being in when the rehabilitation coordinator phoned to tell me when to come in to be rehabilitated. I’d gone for a walk. When I eventually went to meet her she told me a whole lot of stuff that I already knew. She suggested that I should go for regular walks. She asked me about my drinking habits. Now I considered emulating Jeffrey Bernard and saying “none of your fucking business” but why be crude so I said that I would have a few glasses of wine each evening. She told me that she would prefer it if I restricted myself to one glass. I should emphasise that this woman is not my wife or my mother. My wife would have supported the one glass rule but my dear mother certainly would have bristled at it.
Also in the mail at home was a parcel containing a bowel cancer test kit. The less said about this the better but it would appear that not being content with telling me how much I’m allowed to drink, what plants I have in my garden and what to do in my spare time the Commonwealth Government also want to peer up my bum.
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