Pining for stability, Labor backs Beazley

January 23, 2005
<i>Illustration:</i> Phil Burgoyne

Illustration: Phil Burgoyne

A has-been and two wannabes have been battling over what could be a job to lose to Peter Costello, or John Howard, in 2007, writes Michelle Grattan.

The tree of knowledge at Barcaldine in Queensland, site of the Labor Party's birth, has come through trying times to survive. Peter Beattie announced the good news on Friday.

The ailments and problems that afflicted the tree sound a bit like those of federal Labor: termites, dying branches, soil compaction around its base, attacks by insects. The experts removed dead wood and gave it nutrients.

Now the tree has been fixed up. ALP federal members are hoping something of the same can be done for the party.

Since the Keating government burned at the polls in 1996, Labor has had three leaders. Kim Beazley gave the job up gracefully after two defeats; Simon Crean was executed slowly and painfully; Mark Latham imploded extraordinarily, driven out by illness and party angst. The briefly intense love affair between Latham and his colleagues ended so badly that he didn't even wait around to say goodbye. Less than a week after he was holding Labor in suspense about his future, he is out of the Parliament. That at least avoids an awkward moment at Friday's caucus - at the price of a Werriwa byelection.


Of course, aspirants don't look at it that way. The promise of power is always seductive.

But as Kevin Rudd recounted in the ALP's 2001 centenary book True Believers the "reality check" is the caucus room's photos of previous caucuses and leaders. "You look at the pictures of those who made it and those who didn't, and you think 'This is a very unpredictable business'," he said then.


The future's unpredictability was in Rudd's mind yesterday as he worked his way around caucus to assess his support.

If Rudd ran and polled badly, he would be seen as a fraud who had talked up his prospects.

It was abundantly clear that Rudd, who has so far not entered the race formally, could not win Friday's ballot. He had to decide whether to stake a claim for the future or make a good fellow of himself by giving Bomber Beazley a straight run. He was coming under enormous pressure from his own faction, the Right, which is strongly behind Beazley, to step back graciously. Most of Rudd's support is coming from outside the Right, yet it is the Right on which Rudd will ultimately have to depend for his long-term political advancement.

A back-off by Rudd would put strong pressure on Julia Gillard, the other aspirant testing the water, to do the same.

A depressed Rudd knew anything but a strong vote would leave him looking exposed. Some caucus members want to see a contest. Others aren't keen on the idea of another week of the party's internal differences on display. If Rudd ran and polled badly, he would be seen as a fraud who had talked up his prospects. But if he retreated, he would be seen as a wimp who did the same last time. An unpleasant predicament for a man known for his healthy ego. But last night retreat looked the most sensible option.

Gillard's backers, who are led by former leader Simon Crean, know she can't win either. They have been trying to use the contest to get her up another rung on the ladder of political opportunity.

They pushed the idea on Friday that the best outcome would be a Beazley-Gillard combination, which would have meant forcing deputy leader Jenny Macklin to stand aside. But Macklin was having none of that, and neither was Beazley who has been emphasising that he has no intention of coming to the leadership ensnared by deals.

Beazley is confident but he has been working intensively. Last time he didn't lobby enough personally; he's not making that mistake again. But as well as this, powerful factional forces have been mobilised for him, forming a fighting machine that has in the past couple of days totally outgunned the lighter, looser Rudd campaign that lacks a base. The Right and Left in NSW have joined forces to back Beazley, a deal consummated by the NSW officers on Thursday. This assured Beazley of all but a handful of NSW votes, which number 25 in the 87-member caucus.

In his spiel to caucus members, Beazley is arguing that Labor has to put a floor under its vote - which requires an experienced leader - and then build on that. As they were courted by the candidates, caucus members were grappling with the same question that exercised them in the late 2003 ballot between Beazley and Latham: should they go for what they knew or try something different? The Latham disaster hasn't frightened everyone off change, but it has made a lot of people very cautious. Even those who came in the last election aren't too adventurous - six of eight new MPs are being counted for Beazley.

Beazley won't be drawn publicly on any detail of how he would change Labor's approach or what parts of Lathamism he would dump. (How would he finesse the policy of withdrawing troops from Iraq?)

He just says Labor must "simplify and clarify and put constant argument into our policies so they live in people's minds, rather than have our big policies disappear the next day".

It's obvious he's criticising Latham's failed approach of holding back policies until the election campaign. This confused people, and led to one policy cannibalising another as they tumbled out on top of each other. But the man condemned for the small-target strategy is also admitting that bold big-target policies have their place, when there is plenty of time to properly explain them and they are laced into well understood Labor values.

Beazley is not campaigning on policy content, but rather on how it is argued. So the question about just how different Beazley would be - from Latham, from the Government - is the great unanswered one.

Gillard, in contrast, issued a militant policy salvo last week. The leadership question, she said, was about "Labor's future direction and policy vision". Labor should be "stridently out there advocating an independent foreign policy," and "bold social policy".

Rudd's pitch has been for the caucus members not to be frightened of generational change by the Latham experience - they just got the wrong bloke last time. He told one newspaper that his "takeout" from those wanting him to run was that "what they're seeking is not tinkering at the edges on questions of tax and education, for example, but fundamental reform for the decade ahead". Goodness knows what this means.

In his talking to some caucus colleagues, the emphasis seems to have been rather different. Rudd has reportedly said that the party needs to move to the centre, finding a more moderate view than some of the Latham policies.

Rudd's main pitch, however, has been that Labor should not go back to the future, as well as the need for it to put the vitriol of the last few years behind it.

But the Beazley counterline about the primacy of experience is the one that has bitten more, although Labor MPs are anxious to make the point that being experienced means learning from that experience.

Some caucus members are being frank in the feedback they are giving Beazley, who is also keen to demonstrate he really does have that necessary "ticker". They want him to be sharper in differentiating and presenting Labor to the electorate. And they say he must broaden his sources of advice. They don't want a repeat of what they saw as him being prisoner of a Right factional cabal led by Wayne Swan and Stephen Smith. (Ironically, thanks to Mark Latham, these two now have the most powerful shadow ministries.)

Beazley says: "I've learned I need to be more consultative." Pressed on what this means, he suggests "it probably means using caucus committees more - getting out and campaigning alongside them". For example, he says, taking the defence committee when he was campaigning in Townsville. But - and this is what his colleagues really want to hear - more consultation also means "when planning strategies (using) the breadth of the front bench and not a narrow group of it". When he was leader, Beazley had Labor's two-party preferred vote in front for much of the time. John Stirton, from ACNielsen, says that in 56 per cent of the 61 Nielsen polls in Beazley's time Labor had a two-party lead. Howard led as preferred PM in 84 per cent of the 57 polls asking this question, but Beazley was also the only Labor leader ever to get ahead of Howard as preferred PM, and did so for four months in a row in 2001. Like Latham and Crean, Beazley was unable to get the needed lift in the ALP primary vote (the average under Beazley was 39 per cent, under Latham 40 per cent and Crean 35 per cent).

The Beazley forces would be putting some store in a change to a Costello leadership to give Beazley maximum chance of pulling off the electoral victory that has eluded him. The Government simply notes Labor's failed targeting of Costello in 2004.