Tell us something we don’t already know

Anyone who has ever read anything on here or follows me on Twitter knows I was an ALP apparatchik. I worked as a media adviser to five Ministers and a Premier of NSW. For the better part of the last decade, I had a peanut gallery view of what is now known as, ‘the NSW disease’.

Following the #NSWisconsin disgrace, I was considering becoming a financial member of the ALP again, despite the fact that I can’t abide what I see as policy missteps and the inability to articulate a message – any message – consistently, thoughtfully and while keeping our hands still.

I was very close to giving Sussex Street my money again because at last, here was an enemy without. Premier Barry O’Farrell had given me a reason to say, ‘this is wrong, and I am willing to swallow every bit of bile and help pay, through my membership dues, for a sustained campaign against this law.’ I was so close until I read this. It’s easy to demonise Joe Tripodi. I can’t stand him for two reasons: he’s really smart, but didn’t use his brains to make good public policy. Instead, he dragged behind former Minister and MLC, Eddie Obeid, preferring to cultivate patronage and influence, all for the title of ‘kingmaker’. Secondly, I’ve seen him smile and stab people in the back. Most of them, his close ‘mates’, some, ‘enemies’ he helped ascend to the dizzying heights of Governor Macquarie Tower. So when I read that he would stay on the rules committee, my heart sank and I left my money in the bank, because it reminded me how much I hate the generally unelected, largely unaccountable ‘factional’ players who make it their mission in life to build up and then tear down elected leaders; fill Caucus with people you would not ask to make a bed, let alone Cabinet; a recipe which reads, ‘hey voters, we’re the ALP and we are not fit to govern the state / country’. The list is long. It is filled with names that, unless they are from NSW, I’m largely familiar with. What I am familiar with, is their modus operandi. I’m sure I could swap Joe de Bruyn and Don Farrell for Russ Collison and Mark Arbib and come out with the same answer.

I read the entirety of Senator John Faulkner’s Wran Lecture last night with great interest. The patrician Faulkner looks like the anti-Tripodi. Furiously intelligent (never go to a Faulkner trivia night and challenge an answer); ‘prime ministerial confidante’; ‘respected elder’; statesman. Last night, I read the speech and called him ‘a giant’. I highly recommend his 2005 Henry Parkes Oration, which takes a much broader swipe at the malaise affecting Australian politics. The faintest whiff that the ALP is about to set its hair on fire is enough to make the news. When John Faulkner launches a stinging rebuke / critique / attack, it sets the news agenda for the day. Pretty much everyone loves it because it fits the narrative that the Prime Minister is the Socialist Left’s Lucrezia Borgia and the shoguns (tired of warlords) all look like Paul Howes. Actually, Paul Howes doesn’t look much like Paul Howes these days. I digress: I agree with a great deal of what Senator Faulkner says: the party desperately needs reform; there should be debate at state and national conferences; branch membership requires revitalisation and those who are joining – especially through Young Labor – are doing so because they want to duel with ideas, not numbers; to serve the Party, not some jumped up bag of wind parading as a false liege.

That said I am going to call Senator Faulkner on a few points. By your own admission, you, Senator, are a bloody hypocrite. You have been a NSW Senator for 23 years. What did you do before the Party – not the people – sent you down the Hume Highway for so long? You were Assistant General Secretary of the NSW Branch of the Australian Labor Party and worked for NSW Minister for Sport and Recreation, Ken Booth MP, following two years spent as a special education teacher. Your official bio is a little light on the detail provided in your Wikipedia entry, Senator, you define factional warlord and apparatchik as much as Joe Tripodi does. Tripodi worked as an economist at the Reserve Bank of Australia for as long as you taught. He then went to the Labor Council and into the Bear Pit. You both entered the party as teenagers; you both went through the party machine before entering Parliament. One difference: Joe was elected by the people of Fairfield. Your name was put on a ticket and sent to the printers. As I said, I can’t stand Joe, but don’t hover somewhere above the fray like a bespectacled Moses when you have supped from the same cup and exerted more influence over a longer time.

Lead, don’t follow, public opinion, you say? Yet the longevity of Australian political leaders such as Bob Hawke and John Howard is in large part due to their uncanny ability to read the mood of the electorate. It is a rare talent that radiates, ‘the leader knows what they are doing and it is what I want’, both within the party and outside it. It is not something they dialled-a-mate for. In my opinion, the perception that Howard had outstayed his welcome – that he had lost ‘touch’ – played a big role in his defeat. Hawke? Well, Keating simply had what Costello did not: the internal fortitude to want the leadership so badly he risked wrecking it to obtain it. Listen to members, supporters and MPs, you say? Yet when Kevin Rudd ran government through a kitchen cabinet of four; when he established innumerate committees, endlessly consulted and produced white papers and nothing happened; that was when the polls went to the wall and the faceless men got on the phones. There was plenty of listening, plenty of dithering and nothing happening. You were in that Caucus meeting, where the elected leader of the nation was replaced without a vote of MPs, you miserable, gormless bunch. @KRuddPM knew he didn’t have the numbers, addressed the Caucus one final time as leader, and emerged @KRuddMP.

Let MPs speak their minds in the name of diversity. Fine. I don’t think there are many people in the party who would be terribly pleased with the clusterfuck that is the Government’s … what … it’s not even a policy … the clusterfuck that is the Government’s latest idea about how asylum seekers should be processed, and yet, with the exception of Fremantle MP Melissa Parke, none has stated their dissent. But here’s the thing: brave, dissenting Melissa had not even spoken to the Minister for Immigration when she went public. It beggars belief. Let MPs say what they want? Amen. Get them five minutes with the Minister at the same time so they can have a chat first. On second thought, if you can’t be bothered having the discussion internally, if you have not grabbed Chris Bowen after a division and said, ‘look, I’m not happy about this, I need to speak to you’; if you have not had the gumption to even attempt to piss inside the tent, why should I listen to you piss on it from outside?

Senator Faulkner wants vigorous debate at party conferences and in the branches. He also advocates a say for ‘progressive-minded’ people, who are falling into the arms of third party organisations. Who are they? The ALP is not Get Up. It’s a political party. You can’t just put your name to one online petition, or even draft one, and ignore the other 30 issues of the day because you don’t care about them as much. Well, you can – you’re a citizen and you can do that if you like. But have to give a damn about stuff you’re not interested in when you’re a member of a party. Did I care when I door-knocked suburbs during the 2007 NSW election that the issues raised by voters were almost always council-related? No. Because the candidate needed to know about the cracked pavement, so that when they were elected they could pressure council to get it fixed, and if they didn’t, you could talk to concerned residents, go to the local paper – do something! I am sure people would flock to ALP branches, line-up to get the best seats at conference and participate in full-throated, exciting debates. About the things they’re interested in. Then when it’s time to talk about the not so interesting to them stuff – see you later? Supporters of the ALP? We exist. We’re called voters. Here’s what I want. I want a Caucus where backbenchers get as much time with Ministers and the PM as independents do. If they can’t get a hearing, or are fobbed off by the apparatchiks, then have an almighty spray. After all, the government is only one heart attack away from an election – now is the best time to speak your mind. Senator Faulkner just has – again,

Senator, you are there. You are a powerful figure – so powerful your speech has dominated the news agenda today. You’ve been talking about reforming the party for years. We have review, after review, after review. You co-authored the last one, so act! Stop telling us something we don’t already know.

NSWisconsin

In previous posts on the state on NSW politics, I largely focused on what I knew best – the decade I had spent as a Labor staffer.

Today, I turn my attention to the O’Farrell government, because today, my worst fears about the crushing victory Premier Barry O’Farrell secured in March 2011 have been realised.

For the first time since the early 1900s, a NSW Government has used a guillotine motion to effectively gag debate in the Legislative Council (Upper House) on its reforms to public sector wage increases.

The Premier claims, in a facile, lazy way that he is being allowed to get away with by all in the press gallery, bar the ABC’s Quentin Dempster, that he is simply following Labor’s public sector wages policy. This is not true.

While my former boss, then-Premier Morris Iemma, signed a memorandum in 2007 to set wage increases at 2.5 per cent, at no time did Labor seek the extraordinary powers now at Premier O’Farrell’s disposal.

Firstly, the new laws remove judicial discretion. The NSW Industrial Relations Commission, led by Boland J. was not consulted on the intent of the legislation, which effectively strips the IRC of interpretation of the law when disputes come before it. Rather than weighing up the totality of the case, the IRC will now simply dispatch the law. It is no longer judging a wages case on its merits but rubber stamping the O’Farrell Government’s policy. The question must be asked: whither the IRC? Why bother preserving an institution which has been gutted.

Secondly, the Premier’s assertion that he is just following on from what his Labor predecessors intended is a furphy. As the NSW Public Sector Wages Policy 2007 makes plain, while the Government intended to maintain real wage increases at 2.5 per cent per annum, at no stage were challenges to the policy, through the independent umpire (the IRC), or even the Executive Branch of Government, banned. If Ministers could demonstrate, via the Public Sector Workforce Office and NSW Treasury, that departments and State Owned Corporations within their purview, had a case for an increase above the 2.5 per cent, they could take that to Budget Committee for consideration. The only caveat on this was that no offer was to be made until this process had been adhered to.

Thirdly, nothing prevented a public sector union from going to the IRC and seeking an increase above the 2.5 per cent. The IRC had the power to say no, but it reserved the right to say yes. The IRC, not the Government of the day, was entitled to consider a case on its merits. Now, the IRC doesn’t even have the powers of FairWork Australia to settle a dispute. It is no longer an umpire. It is merely the scoreboard.

Perhaps the great triumph for the O’Farrell Government has been to divide & conquer public sector workers. In a message delivered at 4.01pm via Twitter yesterday, the Police Association of NSW stated:

Sending good vibes to those members of the Upper House who believe in a fair and just IR system for police and all others

By the 5pm news, it became clear that the O’Farrell Government was not going to take on the police. They would be exempt from the 2.5 per cent rule. This was a move straight out of the Wisconsin, USA playbook, where Governor Scott Walker took on the unions, effectively delivering an 8 per cent pay cut through attacks on benefits. Police were exempted from the legislation. This is plain divide and conquer by Premier O’Farrell. The Police Association hurriedly tweeted:

Rest assured police will continue to stand beside all other public sector workers to fight this unfair IR legislation.

I personally pleaded with the Police Association not to be swayed by the clear political machinations being dealt their way. I do not wish our police ill; far from it. I do believe in solidarity, particularly when it comes to our frontline workers such as the fire brigades, ambulance staff, nurses and teachers. The message I sent was clear:

Premier O’Farrell plays ‘divide & conquer’, excluding police from #nswisconsin. @PoliceAssocNSW, pls stand w/ nurses, teachers, say no!

Obviously, the Police Association is charged with doing the best thing by its members, & that would not entail knocking back the Government’s offer. Sadly, they are the expedient pawns in a political stunt. Public servants working in offices go on strike – what a bunch of whingers. Teachers go on strike, they are a bloody nuisance. Nurses have a stop work meeting – inconvenient but manageable. Fire fighters do the same – they’re hardly going to let a house burn down; but if the police went out, the population of NSW (excuse the pun) wouldn’t cop it. The Government would be blamed, & punished.

As the Fire Brigade Employees Union (FBEU)’s Jim Casey tweeted the Police Association:

Police stand by the rest of public sector. I’ve had my share of bad days with the coppers, but this isn’t one of them. #nswisconsin #solidarity

There is a march against the new laws at 12,30pm, outside NSW Parliament on Macquarie Street, Sydney. I am going to my former place of employment to say no to political chicanery, to say I do not accept an unwarranted attack on the Industrial Relations Commission as an arbiter of the law, to say ‘damn you’, Premier O’Farrell.

Welcome to your world, NSW.

There will be blood – Part II

So, wonks, we can delete our Virtual Tally Room apps (bravo to the NSW Electoral Commission on that one); scrub the hashtag from memory; congratulate, commiserate, complain. With the final spots in the LegCo called this morning – it’s all over for another four years.

As a former Labor government staffer, I take my hat off to former Premier Kristina Keneally for getting out of bed every day. The same goes for the campaign team. Election campaigns are exhausting & difficult when you know you’re going to win (2003) and when you believe you will win (2007). When you are on a hiding to nothing, it must have been difficult to muster the will to live. I am also proud that despite a near universal hatred of the party, the ALP fielded candidates in every one of the 93 Legislative Assembly seats, people who stood up knowing the electorate wants to take a cricket bat to the party & you’re the new ball. 

It’s also no time to be churlish: Premier O’Farrell has won a thumping majority. There has been plenty of commentary flying around that he only had to stay on his feet to move into Level 40, Governor Macquarie Tower, but that’s really not true. O’Farrell & a few members of his opposition team (most notably “I’m only speaking to Gladys” Berejklian) did work hard at making themselves visible and exploiting Labor Government weaknesses in key portfolios; adopting the vomit principle to the perception of spin over substance & a ‘decisions for donations’ culture resonated with people when key projects were announced, delayed, reannounced, included in ‘record infrastructure spending’ Budget statements & promised anew. The new Premier may have run the smallest target campaign in history (I know where he stands on Part 3A of the Planning Act, but that’s about it) but he ran it faultlessly. The ALP was unable to make a dent in O’Farrell’s tight kitchen cabinet; & the religious right was largely obscured from view. The ALP ran full-tilt negative while the chief salesperson smiled. O’Farrell remained authentic while promising to restore NSW to first among equals, deliver better services and reverse the infrastructure deficit crippling growth.

The Greens won their first lower house seat and increased their numbers in the upper house. Congratulations. Unfortunately, they don’t hold the balance of power. They are just as set for a long, cold four years as the ALP and the lower house independents. I haven’t run through my seat-by-seat predictions, but my 14-20 ALP MPs has ended up being very close to the mark. Some seats I had given up (Keira, Cabramatta, Marrickville) were held; others (Monaro, Balmain, Granville) that I had hoped would be retained were lost, valiantly by quality candidates, all competent Ministers. Walking into the Bear Pit facing 70-odd Government MPs will require every ounce of steel each ALP MP can muster. They dished it out for 16 years and there is no way Government MPs will let them forget it. The lustre of the independents has worn off. The Nationals hate Richard Torbay with a passion; the Liberals will be eyeing off Sydney with Clover Moore surely in her last term and if they play their cards right in the Hunter, they will be in with a shot at wresting Lake Macquarie from Greg Piper’s hands in four years. They will also have their eye on Balmain. It will be interesting to see whether the tradition of granting independents one question a week will continue, & whether that courtesy will be extended to The Greens’ Jamie Parker.

As for the LegCo, where do you want to start? As I feared, the ALP’s four lost seats split conservative in the whole: one for The Shooters, one for the CDP and one for The Nationals. The final count – 19 for the LNP; 14 for the ALP; 5 for The Greens, 2 each for the Shooters & the CDP. The Government does not hold a majority; they will, as every Minister I worked for, have to negotiate with the cross-benchers and brief the Opposition. How the Government navigates the LegCo will be interesting. The Premier has stated he will not bow to minority interests, so a ‘ban the burqa’ Bill may not be on the cards … however, many see the sidelining of Environment shadow spokesperson, Catherine Cusack, from the Ministry as a sop to the Shooters, & if you look at several ’social justice’ issues: the Medically Supervised Injecting Room; same-sex adoption; equalisation of the age of consent; occupational health and safety; stem-cell research; transgender discrimination; affordable housing … where will the Government, with 70 members in the LA, a further 19 in the LC come to a landing? Will the Premier let the ‘minority interests’ in the Liberal and Nationals’ party rooms (let alone the minor parties) go unheard?

Make no mistake: those interests exist. The Rev. Fred Nile has introduced three bills on abortion information since 2006 (each of them allowed to lapse); four attempts to ban alcohol advertising; and three goes at repealing anti-discrimination amendments outlawing vilification of homosexuals. That is just a sample you can find filed under the letter ’A’. The Shooters? For starters, they want to open National Parks for hunting. Also, school children to be taught the way of the gun. The Nationals will want serious reform of (perhaps repeal) of almost all land use laws. Our marine parks will probably go. Then there is the right-wing of the Liberal Party. It may be a broad church, the Liberal Party, but there is plenty of room for Christian conservatives.

Courting the Labor caucus was akin to herding cats. Premier O’Farrell may need a lesson in taming tigers to keep his backbenchers happy. A great many of them are fresh faces. They have won electorates which would previously been thought unthinkable. They will all want to be seen to be delivering for the people who voted for them. The Nationals (or Agrarian Socialists) will be aggrieved at losing a Cabinet spot & desperate to show voters they are not along for the ride but carry real punch. That said, the Liberals did the heavy lifting, winning six out of eight seats in the Hunter, all of the Central Coast and a swathe of Western Sydney seats. The Liberal party won the election; the Nationals reclaimed seats they used to hold.

The good news: clearly, for a social progressive, the failure of Pauline Hanson to gain a seat on the red leather benches for eight years, and the repudiation of Family First (The Rev Dr Gordon Moyes unsuccessful in his attempt to fight Nile from the outside) are good outcomes. Mind you, Pauline has a point about being disadvantaged by optional-preferential above the line voting. She almost got across the line today because the political landscape is so poisonous her past was rarely discussed – she was treated more like the ‘Dancing With The Stars Pauline’ than the lazy bigot she is. The election of Jeremy Buckingham will hopefully rally those who believe in climate change and live west of the Great Dividing Range and demonstrate a progressive agenda is not the preserve of the inner-city latté sippers or Byron Bay.

Believe it or not, there is some good news for the ALP – if they play it right. The Premier, in my view, has made a few mistakes straight out of the gate. He has set out his stall with the clubs and pubs over the poker machine reforms. He has given portfolios to some old warhorses in a fairly obvious gold watch pension plan, but also because there are very few people in the Government with prior experience as Government MPs, let alone as Ministers. In the words of his own media release, he elevated Victor Dominello and Robyn Parker to the ministry because of electoral results, not their competence or incompetence. Being a good Minister is bloody difficult. I take my hat off to anyone who stands at the despatch box during Question Time. There are a myriad of issues, systems and people who can stuff your day before it’s begun. While the Government will be able to blame Labor for the entirety of its first term and get away with most of it, O’Farrell has cultivated a perception that he can ‘fix’ NSW. Good luck with meeting the inevitable expectation gap.

Most seriously and unnecessary, Premier O’Farrell has wrought political humiliation on his Treasurer, Mike Baird. Not only is Baird ranked below George Souris on the Ministerial list by seniority, his legislative load has been significantly stripped and handed over to the Minister for Finance and Services, Greg Pearce. Appointing Michael Daley to Shadow both Pearce and Baird is a tactical win for John Robertson. Firstly, Daley is an excellent Parliamentary performer. He can look at the financial state of affairs in its entirety. Mike Baird is going to sit in the ninth spot on the front bench. In Bear Pit terms, that is Siberia. Prepping for Question Time is going to be difficult given that his office will rely on briefs from the office of a man who has essentially usurped his power. Left to his own devices by his leader, Baird handled the election costings announcement abysmally. How is he going to put together, let alone take questions on a mini-Budget in May without control of many of the Acts and agencies which bring in revenue? It is ridiculous. Ministerial offices and departments can descend quite easily to a kind of internecine warfare that could play to the ALP’s advantage. If I were running parliamentary tactics, I would ask Mike Baird five questions every sitting day until he cracks. He can be targeted as the weak link in the Government, simply because he has been put in that position by his own Premier. Opposition in large is about taking scalps. Take Baird’s first, and fast. Then wait and see how things shake out. Who starts leaking. Who is befriended at the Members Bar. Who doesn’t feel the love. Who has been overlooked, or dumped. The sitting members who haven’t won a ministerial suite never will; thwarted ambition is difficult to swallow. With a Government that barely fits into the Parkes room, ructions are inevitable unless O’Farrell and his staff keep a very tight leash and give a lot of love.

The other positive? The decimation of the ALP might just get it through their thick skulls: that utter bastardry does not make for a healthy, respected party, let alone good government.

I wish them all well. At the moment, I reserve my contempt for the 131,218 people who took the time to go to a polling place & put a blank LegCo ballot into the box. Congratulations. You won the 20th seat by a mile.