Book Review

Gary Gray came from a Labor family, and grew up as a committed supporter of the Party. One day, before he had joined it, a Liberal candidate came door-knocking. His father asked him in, gave him a whisky, talked with him for an hour, and got on so well with him that the Liberal helped him clean some leaves out of the guttering. Young Gray was outraged. ‘Why were you so nice to him?’ he asked his father. His father replied: ‘Just think. He’s wasted an hour with us, he’s got alcohol on his breath, and muck running down his sleeve. How many votes do you think he’ll win today?’	1
Gray told this story to the National Press Club in March 2000, just before he retired as National Secretary of the ALP. The Press Club luncheon is one of the events Evans reviews as a means of describing the ‘heart and soul’ of the contemporary ALP. Similarly, he scrutinizes some of Labor’s major set-pieces: the State Conference at the Sydney Town Hall which awarded Paul Keating Life Membership, and the Federal Conference at Wrest Point where Barry Jones bowed out. In addition, he reports on interviews with serving and defeated Members of Parliament, a Party historian, and a trade union organiser.	2
The writing is anecdotal, and the stories often funny, but the book has the serious purpose of identifying the problems that beset the Party: ‘Whitebread politicians’ ‘dumbed down’ by the media, who ‘run on empty’; the ‘wedge politics’ of Labor’s opponents that play on racism; the estrangement of the Party from the electors, factionalism, the trade union connection, unrepresentative pre-selection processes, and reliance on corporate finance.	3
Evans argues that the contemporary Labor Party must – as the historic Party had a century ago – ‘tell the new story’, which will help it ‘walk the bridge between the old Australia and the new’. But how is it to appeal to both the old ‘true believers’ – battered by the global capitalism which the Hawke/Keating governments invited in, but ‘forgot to explain why’ – and the younger upwardly mobile products of the new service industries? The Party must reform itself to become ‘more transparent, more publicly accountable and more open’. As to policy, he gives considerable space to John Della Bosca’s explanation of ‘Knowledge Nation’ as one which can appeal widely by offering something that both traditional and new Labor voters can profit from. This is a book that anyone interested in the ALP can read with enjoyment, and profit.	4
University of Wollongong JIM HAGAN

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