The Labor Leadership

Jan. 2005

If Mark Latham's illness is job-threatening, and it looks like it might be, or his political capital is all used up, and it looks like it might be, the Labor Party has leadership alternatives enough. Clare Martin, Bob Carr, Mike Rann, Steve Bracks, Peter Beattie are five of them. Each has increased Labor's vote over successive elections. Each has the skills, the patience, the youth, the shrewd advisers they need. At least one of them I believe would accept a draft.

So I believe would Kim Beazley. He has the advantages of ministerial experience, name recognition, likeability, vast intelligence and leadership strengths that Latham lacked. He always led a united party, always won the debates and in 1997 when there was no war stacked up against him won seventeen seats and retrieved his astonished party from oblivion. He could do this again. If Crean was Labor's Hewson, and Latham Labor's Downer, Beazley, the seasoned old warhorse, thrice written off, is Labor's Howard. He could probably beat Howard (in 1997 he won 400,000 more votes than him) and certainly slaughter Costello, Abbott or Turnbull.

Rudd, Swan, Smith, Tanner and Gillard lack his advantage of ministerial experience, which really counts. Menzies, Curtin, Chifley, Holt, Fraser, Keating and Howard were seasoned ministers when they won the Lodge at election, Whitlam for twelve years either leader or deputy leader and Hawke an implacable powerful political presence for previous decades. Hewson and Latham, however, were both novices and lost. And so it usually goes in the Westminster system. Baldwin, Churchill, Attlee, Eden, Macmillan, Heath, Wilson, Thatcher and Major had Cabinet experience. Kinnock did not. Nor did Blair, but Thatcher obligingly poisoned her party's prospects to help him out.

Swan, Rudd, Smith and Tanner are capable men, all young enough to get there in two terms. Each unlike Latham is accessible to advice and skilled at compromise. The party would unite behind any one of them. But not behind Gillard, I think, whose political instincts are lousy. She loyally shored up Crean for the year it took to make Labor a joke. A better woman woluld be Carmen Lawrence, who has brains, heart, eloquence, nous and ministerial experience.

John Dawkins has these things too and might accept a draft. Likewise John Button. Bob Hawke. Neville Wran. Barry Jones. John Bannon. Bob Debus. Andrew Refshauge. Wayne Goss. Joan Kirner. John Faulkner. Labor is full of talent and in no eventual trouble. It holds eight states and territories. Fifty-five percent of Australians have voted Labor in the last three years.

The Liberal Party, however, may soon be in very big trouble indeed. They backed a war that killed as many children as the tsunami for a reason now proved false. They ignored the torturers of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo now on trial. They imperilled the Bakhtiyari children -- born and unborn -- a gaoling offense in South Australia and the Hague. They libelled Mamdouh Habib, who can now sue Howard, Ruddock and Downer for millions. They libelled David Hicks who if he lives may also. They sabotaged Kyoto, which thereafter prevailed without them. They trusted George Bush, the biggest idiot of our time, and thereby endangered Australians everywhere. They stand indicted as friends of torture, illegal war, environmental catastrophe and the tormenting of the Bakhtiyari children with (I believe) cooked evidence. If that sad suffering family reaches their true home village they can sue too, and the film of their saga win Oscars. If they die on the way -- and they might -- Vanstone may go to prison, or so I am told, in Adelaide or The Hague.

Is the Labor Party in big trouble? Well, momentarily, yes. Is the Liberal Party, like Britain's Tories, in bigger eventual trouble? You wait and see.