|
|
|
Book Review
| John Wanna and Paul Williams (eds), Yes, Premier: Labor Leadership in Australia's States and Territories, University of NSW Press, Sydney, 2005. pp. 273. $39.95 paper.
|
| 'Alas, the fates were against me!' Gough Whitlam used to give this explanation for the misadventures in his early career which prevented him from becoming, variously, Lord Mayor of Sydney, President of the Sutherland Shire or Premier of New South Wales. |
1
|
|
Yes, Premier is a lively account of how the fates smiled on eight Labor leaders, although at least one of them, Bob Carr, cursed the fate that doomed him to be leader of the New South Wales Labor Party. However, as Dr David Clune shows in his splendid essay, he came to accept it and even to enjoy it. These 'brief lives' remind us powerfully of the role of chance, flukes and accident in the most successful political careers. |
2
|
|
Historians and speechwriters are addicted to grand themes and theses. Political scientists know better. The biographical essays in Yes, Premier and the two analyses in the Introduction and Conclusion by the editors make it clear that there is no over-arching theory to explain the political phenomenon of the last decade; the national ascendancy of the Howard coalition against Labor's clean sweep in the States and Territories. The neat formula that the Australian electorate has made a decision, in a kind of volente generale, that the Liberals should run the economy and foreign policy, while Labor should deliver the public services, evaporates in the light of how these Premiers and Chief Secretaries actually attained and retained power. |
3
|
|
The striking feature common to most of these careers is the narrowness of the first win and the strength of the wins that followed. Although this is not new in the States, for instance in New South Wales where Askin (1965 to 1974) and Wran (1976 to 1986) first came in by a whisker, it contrasts with Labor's Federal experience, where Whitlam, Hawke and Keating never repeated the scale of their first win. |
4
|
|
Carr may be taken as the archetype. As David Clune writes, he became Labor leader in New South Wales because 'he was the last man standing' after the 1988 cataclysm. The most unexpected result of the 25 Federal and New South Wales elections in which I have been involved was the 1991 State election, when Carr drove Greiner to a hung Parliament. All the mistakes Greiner made thereafter flowed from that result. Even so, the predictions for 1995 were all John Fahey's way and the headlines on election eve were 'Carr crash' and 'Carr-nage'. This was the election in which, after Gareth Evans said that Carr had 'the perfect face for radio', the NSW general secretary, John Della Bosca, solved the problem by filming Carr's TV commercials as if he were doing radio talk-back; the earphones re-proportioned Carr's features; it seemed to have worked. In the final analysis, however, Labor won its one-seat majority because of skilful electoral work on the ground in a handful of marginal seats. |
5
|
Carr's 1991 achievement and Steve Brack's equally unexpected win over Kennett in 1999 may be taken to give some support to the theory of 'division of labour' between the Liberals in the Commonwealth and Labor in the States. There was, in the two big states, a fierce backlash against the neo-liberalism as practised by Greiner and Kennett. But I think the totality of the record, as recounted in these essays, denies us such neat and, as social democrats, gratifying explanations. Wanna and Williams sum up their own approach (p. 254):
We begin from the empirical. We point to patterns in how they made it to the top position, how they inherited power and how they became the victors – and remain survivors. We argue that whereas former State leaders, when faced with problems, often had a cushion of favourable electoral malapportionment and generally were less intensively scrutinised, the current batch do not enjoy such fortunes. There is less political insulation from investigation today, scrutiny is ongoing (not just from the media, but also from independent commissions, courts and special investigators) and electoral outcomes are today much fairer. State leaders now need to use their wits and have a capacity to reinvent themselves if they are to survive ... skills in crisis management have emerged as a political must-have for state and territory leaders.
Among these skills, they list: communication skills; cautious pragmatism; anticipation of public responses to decisions; the cultivation of 'ordinary populism'. I endorse most of this, although I question whether, even in combination, they represent a new type of politician. I doubt if Dunstan, Wran or Cain would have thought they were under less scrutiny than their successors; and much of this could be read as a description, say, of Neville Wran himself. What is new, however, is the simultaneous appearance of Labor leaders in every State possessing these necessary skills in such abundance. |
6
|
|
They also share a common professionalism in the development of policy. For all the heart-burning about the blurring of party differences and the absence of big issues, (although I should have thought there was room for ardour aplenty in Australian politics today, more so than at any period in my time) policy-making has never been more important or more complex. |
7
|
|
The failure to recognise this is one of the main reasons behind the decline in the fine art of opposition at the State level. This failure is the basic reason why the various State oppositions have been unable to capitalise on the manifest shortcomings of the governments they oppose. It is far easier now to change your leader than to develop a policy. In 2006, the Brisbane Liberals thought they could exploit Peter Beattie's vulnerability on health and hospitals by making a doctor their leader. |
8
|
|
Three of the Premiers (Bob Carr, Geoff Gallop and the late Jim Bacon) have gone and three (Peter Beattie, Steve Bracks and Mike Rann) have won solid victories since publication. Whatever the result in New South Wales, Yes, Premier will retain its value as an account of how these Labor leaders created, if not an era, a significant phase in Australian politics. Apart from anything else, their political success explains why John Howard became the most centralist Prime Minister Australia has ever had. |
9
|
| | | | |
| The Whitlam Institute |
GRAHAM FREUDENBERG | |
|
Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.
|