Rats occupy a prominent place in the folklore of the Australian Labor Party. Joe Cook, Billy Hughes, Joseph Lyons—the list of traitors to the labour cause is long and ignominious. In recent years a name has been added to this list, that of the Queensland ALP Senator Malcolm Colston. Some argue that Colston is 'the worst of the lot' in the history of Labor rats because, unlike the others whose betrayals stemmed from allegiances to 'higher' causes, Colston was, quite simply, greedy. Others believe that all Labor rats are, to varying degrees, the victims of duchessing or seduction by 'the high life'. This paper explores the circumstances of Colston's betrayal, finding that, although exceptionally vulnerable to duchessing, he was a product of changing attitudes to the role of the parliamentarian. His story supports the view that rattings occur in specific historical contexts and for varying reasons. These differences are ironed out in hindsight, as the individual rattings become part of the 'tradition' of the Labor rat for contemporary, organisational purposes. In time, 'the worst of the lot' is likely to become just another Labor rat.

The Labor rat is an enduring phenomenon in the mythology of the Australian Labor Party (ALP). Rats appear to betray the party for a variety of reasons but they all have at least one thing in common: once their story has entered Labor folklore they tend to remain unforgiven. The subject of this paper, the late Queensland Senator Dr Malcolm Colston (1938-2003) is no exception to this; ten years on from his betrayal of the party the mere mention of Colston's name is enough to provoke a surprisingly bitter level of invective from senior ALP figures.^[1]

     At the time of his betrayal in 1996, the political commentator Gerard Henderson had no compunction in adding Colston's name to the list of Labor rats. In Henderson's view, however, Colston was a special case. Observing that most of those on his list 'had a cause, real or imagined, which led them to break with their ALP past', Henderson argued that Colston had no such commitment to a higher cause—for example, patriotism or religious conviction—to explain his betrayal.^[2] He was, quite simply, greedy, and his venality made him worse than the other rats; for some he remains the worst of the lot.^[3] Others demur. They believe that all Labor rats, including Colston, are victims of duchessing, even those whose ratting is usually put down to a higher motivation, for example religion for the DLPers or patriotism for Billy Hughes.^[4] The Victorian ALP Senator Kim Carr believes that from the moment labour representatives enter parliament a range of temptations can begin to compromise their commitment to the labour cause. He asks the pertinent and perhaps unanswerable question 'How does a social democratic politician reconcile with the forces that uphold the status quo?' The taking of bribes is the crudest form of compromise but there are more insidious entanglements waiting to trap the naïve and unsuspecting representative, and to challenge their political integrity. The representative is introduced to important and powerful people, who then use flattery to try to draw the ingénue into the web, perhaps telling them how intelligent they are and that their talents are wasted on the backbench.^[5] Most resist but those who capitulate—the Holmans and the Colstons—take their place in the pantheon of rats.^[6]

     This paper explores the circumstances of Colston's betrayal, asking: What motivated him? What effects did his betrayal have on the ALP, the federal parliament and Australian politics in general? Was he the worst of the lot, or just another victim of the 'inevitable' corrupting influence of political life? Underlying these questions are others more fundamental to the enduring nature of the Labor rat. What purpose, if any, does the idea of the Labor rat serve in Australian political life? Why do rats endure?

Born in 1938, Mal Colston's political ambitions emerged at an early age, influenced by his father and by the family's financial struggles. He joined the ALP at the age of 19, and held a variety of branch positions before nominating unsuccessfully for Senate selection at 23. After teaching in several primary schools, he completed a doctorate in educational psychology at the University of Queensland. He tried twice more to enter the Senate, and wrote a book based on his experiences, entitled, ironically as it would turn out, The Odd One Out. Colston was finally elected to the Senate in the double dissolution election at the end of 1975. He had come to prominence earlier in the year when the Queensland Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen refused to give him a vacant Senate seat to which he was entitled. An ALP senator, Bert Milliner, had died, and political convention demanded that a person from the same party should fill the vacant position. The ALP proposed Colston but Bjelke-Petersen, wishing to smash the federal Labor government, put in his own candidate, a nonentity named Albert (Pat) Field, amidst claims that Colston had been the chief suspect in an arson attack at a school where he was teaching in 1962, an allegation that was never proven.^[7] Outraged at Bjelke-Petersen's behaviour, the ALP raised Colston to the top of its Queensland list, ensuring his election later in the year. In the words of ALP Senator Kim Carr, it was a profound irony that Colston—'the agent of crass political betrayal' in 1996—should have been the victim of similar behaviour two decades earlier.^[8]

     Over the next twenty years, Colston chaired the occasional committee, contributing little in the Senate besides some constitutional reforms, and becoming increasingly resentful about his failure to progress. When Kim Carr entered the Senate in 1993, he found Colston to be 'personally embittered', and the experience of meeting him served as a sharp reminder to the new senator to stay true to his labour roots. Colston confided to Carr that he wished he had gone further: he was clearly frustrated that he had not attained front-bench status, or made his mark in some other way. Colston also advised the new senator on how he might make the most of the financial benefits offered by a Senate seat.^[9] Colston's interest in his financial remuneration was well known: he had a reputation for being tight-fisted and for trying to feather his nest, and a number of his staff had fallen out with him over the issue. In 1985 his rorting came to the notice of the ALP when his wife complained that he had given airline tickets issued in her name and paid for by the Commonwealth to another woman.^[10] Despite receiving advice to take the matter to the Australian Federal Police, the party decided not to act, and continued to tolerate Colston's rorting of the system, preferring to hang onto his Senate seat. His venality did impact on his career, however. When he approached John Faulkner, the leader of the ALP in the Senate and Minister for Territories, asking to be appointed as Administrator of Norfolk Island, Faulkner refused. Faulkner had heard about Colston's rorting, and felt he had not earned the appointment.^[11] Nevertheless, the ALP was prepared to live with Colston's indiscretions until the winter of 1996 when they finally made the party vulnerable to its enemies.

     The newly-elected Howard government had a raft of legislative changes it wanted to pass through the Senate, including workplace 'reforms', the part-privatisation of Telstra, changes in cross-media ownership rules and wide-scale cuts to government programs. On Monday 19 August more than 20,000 unionists from around Australia descended on Canberra to protest against the government's Workplace Relations Bill. On the morning of the following day, Budget Day, Tuesday 20 August, Mal Colston resigned from the ALP, stating in his letter of resignation that he would respect his traditional Labor background while recognising that the recently elected Howard Government had a mandate 'to implement certain measures'.^[12] Later that day, after he had been elected to the position of Deputy President of the Senate and Chairman of Committees with the support of the Howard government, Colston noted that some observers might be asking where his loyalties now lay in the chamber. 'My loyalties', he answered, 'will not be directed to any particular party or group of parties. Rather, my loyalties will be directed to the Senate and to you, Madame President'.^[13]

     Until that morning, Colston's loyalty had barely been questioned. He was an ALP man: a member of the party for 38 years and a Queensland senator for the past 21 of those years. When ALP leader Kim Beazley heard of the senator's resignation, he was dumbfounded: no one had suspected Colston was so unhappy. Some people knew that he was frustrated by his lack of advancement in parliament: he had made no effort to hide it. He was particularly bitter about the ALP's failure to nominate him for the post of Deputy President of the Senate; the party had preferred to nominate the New South Wales Senator Sue West. Realising that he might become a problem in the future, Beazley gave Colston the chair of an extra committee worth $8000 a year just two months before his resignation.^[14] The move to appease him had clearly failed.

     The ALP underestimated the extent of Colston's ambition; although some members suspected his duplicity, no one did anything about it until he betrayed them.^[15] When he resigned from the party, there was general surprise at how closely he had been working with the government. Everyone knew that he was friendly with the Independent Senator Brian Harradine (himself a Labor rat of many years standing) but no one seemed to be aware of his meetings with Coalition Senator Susan Knowles. Paul Daley, the Sunday Age's correspondent in the Canberra press gallery, was present in Beazley's office when the ALP leader heard of Colston's resignation and was immediately suspicious.^[16] Events in the Senate later that day showed that Daley's suspicions were justified. Proposed by Senator Knowles, who argued that he had clearly demonstrated his capacity for the task when he was the incumbent of the same position in 1990, Colston was elected to the position of the Deputy Presidency of the Senate with the support of the Coalition senators, himself, Brian Harradine, and the West Australian Greens senator, Dee Margetts. The election guaranteed that Colston would receive a pay rise of $16,024, the use of a government car and an additional staff member.^[17] By accepting the Deputy Presidency, Colston ratted on the Labor caucus. In the Australian parliamentary system there is no requirement for office holders to remove themselves from the party.^[18] Chairs, therefore, are part of the party: they are selected by caucus and are expected to represent the views of caucus.^[19] The Opposition was furious. In the Senate, John Faulkner announced that the Labor Party held very strong views about the circumstances surrounding Senator Colston's election, and that he did not intend demeaning the chamber or the occasion by expressing them. The day after his resignation, a 'shadow minister' saw Colston behind the wheel of a new model Fairlane: 'Here was the bastard right in front of me in his brand new shiny car. I couldn't believe he had collected it so quickly. I had seen Judas and his 30 pieces of silver. It made me feel ill'.^[20]

     In Carr's view this was a new kind of ratting—systematic, long-term corruption was unknown to the ALP before Colston. Moreover, for Carr, Colston's treachery was firmly of its time. Most Australians would have been satisfied with, even proud, of Colston's achievements in parliament: he had served the public for thirty years and, clearly no fool, he understood the arcane workings of the Senate better than most. Colston, however, felt that he had let his family down by not achieving more in parliament.^[21] Instead of looking for more ways of contributing, he under-estimated his abilities, viewing his career as a failure—an assessment that came from his distorted view of success.^[22] For Carr, this was a manifestation of the internalisation by the ALP of its enemy's (the Coalition's) analysis of success, as both parties pursued neo-liberal economic 'reform', during the 1980s and 1990s, and as parliamentary culture became increasingly commercialised.^[23] A commentator at the time of his betrayal identified how Colston fitted into the commercialisation of democracy: 'the time-serving nonentity who last week became deputy president...is wonderfully poised to stick his snout in the trough. Every bit of salary is not just money now but, as every Federal politician knows, much more money later in retirement'.^[24] When Daley spoke to Colston just before his rorting was exposed, he found him to be remorseless and in complete denial.

     Over the next days and weeks, Colston's resignation attracted unprecedented attention in the press. Beazley was forced to deny reports that Faulkner had sought legal advice about a possible breach of the Crimes Act (because Colston had resigned from the ALP to take a promotion), and insisted that the party would not seek a police investigation into Colston's actions. Beazley also defended his failure to address Colston's disenchantment after failing to receive the party's endorsement for the deputy presidency, stating that his peers had judged Colston 'as not having the ability to do that particular job'.^[25] The Government's Senate leader, Robert Hill, admitted that he had spoken to Colston before his defection about the state of politics in Australia, but denied that the government had done a deal with Colston in exchange for the deputy presidency.^[26] Hill claimed that the Labor Party was in disarray over the resignation.^[27] Beazley countered by saying that Colston had done 'magnificently well out of Labor and should have been content with his position in the party'.^[28]

     Colston soon demonstrated that he was not entirely the Coalition's toady by refusing to support the proposed Workplace Relations Bill, which would, amongst other things prevent secondary boycotts. According to Tim Pallas, ACTU assistant secretary, Colston said that his dead father would come back and haunt him if he voted for the Bill.^[29] In a letter to the Minister of Industrial Relations Peter Reith, however, he left the way open for 'any briefing you or your offices may be able to provide on future relevant occasions'.^[30]

     The vote for the partial privatisation of Telstra in December 1996 prompted the ALP to act against Colston. When he voted with the government, which allowed the sale of this—in the Labor view—irreplaceable national asset to go ahead, Colston had gone too far: some still suspect that the government might have paid him for his vote.^[31] In what some perceived as an unlikely alliance, Senators Faulkner, Ray and Carr became determined to expose Colston's greed, to embarrass him, and to force him to resign. Someone remembered the papers relating to Colston's earlier misdemeanours in the mid-1980s, and these were retrieved, not without difficulty, from an attic in Queensland.^[32] During the summer of 1997, Senators Carr and Ray constructed the case against Colston, leaking details of their investigation to the press. In mid-February a nervous Kim Beazley failed to support their investigation when questioned about it by the media. The allegations against Colston were referred to the Department of the Senate for investigation, and by early March it emerged that there was a case to answer for travel expenses that the senator had claimed in 1994 and 1995. The ALP senators launched their parliamentary attack in the first week of the autumn sitting. Senator Faulkner led the attack, calling for Colston to be withdrawn from the ANU Council and from the Parliamentary Retiring Allowances Trust. Colston countered by moving that the details of all travelling allowances paid to current and former senators between 1 January 1992 and 3 March 1997 should be tabled in the Senate.^[33] By mid March further examples of his travel rorting had emerged.^[34] Colston had 'mistakenly' claimed for 43 nights of accommodation in Canberra, Melbourne and Sydney, when he was in fact at home in Brisbane. He was also alleged to have rorted the Comcar service and to have misused his parliamentary entitlements, including postage. Colston called for an examination of all senators' travel claims then admitted that he had found irregularities in his own claims. His former office manager, Christine Smith took the blame for the mistakes, and Colston repaid the money.^[35]

     John Howard abandoned Colston in early April, referring irregularities in Colston's travel claims to the Australian Federal Police, and asking him to step down from the deputy presidency. The opposition called for a Senate inquiry into whether Colston had made a false statement to the Senate when he denied that he had rorted his travel allowances but the government opposed such an inquiry, arguing that it was unnecessary given the police investigation. Colston resolutely refused to step down, and, as he continued to draw his salary, public anger grew. By mid-April Colston had been admitted to hospital with the flu; Christine Smith had abandoned him, contradicting his statement in defence of his travel allowance claims, and claiming that she had worked with Colston and his son and media agent Douglas to fabricate the story in which she accepted the blame for the errors in the travel claims, which had led to Senator Colston improperly claiming some $7,000 in travelling allowances.^[36] Robert Hill remained confident that Colston would resign, and continued to block a Senate inquiry, which could have made Colston liable to a maximum penalty of six months in prison, arguing that the need for such an inquiry had been overridden by the police investigation. The Australian newspaper considered this to be 'a poor political reading' of the issue, judging that: 'The Government does not have to compromise its commitment to the presumption of innocence or due process to begin the task of rebuilding public trust'.^[37] There was little doubt that the reputation of the Senate was suffering over the affair. Writing in the Age, Paddy McGuinness asserted that the affair highlighted the general disrepute in which parliaments in Australia were presently held.^[38] Colston resigned from the position of the deputy presidency on 6 May 1997 at the suggestion of the President of the Senate but he remained a senator.^[39]

     In July 1998 the government proposed a Bill for the full privatisation of Telstra. It had been wooing both Senators Harradine and Colston, despite previously refusing the latter's vote. During the debate, Robert Ray drew attention to the government's hypocrisy over Colston's vote, and reminded everyone of the magnitude of his defection. He told the House that if the legislation was allowed to pass, the senators might hear a noise coming from Queensland: 'It will be Senator Colston's father turning in his grave knowing that his son has stabbed the Labor Party in the back, a Labor Party that his father loved. Like father, like son? Never!'^[40]

     On 10 July Colston disappeared from the Senate, apparently due to ill health. It emerged later that day that he had in fact flown to Brisbane to meet with John Howard to discuss his vote on the Telstra Bill.^[41] The following day John Faulkner led the attack against him in the Senate, using parliamentary privilege to sum up how the ALP felt about him:

I want to speak about someone who is venal. I want to speak about someone who is unscrupulous. I want to speak about someone who is mercenary. I want to speak about someone who is contemptible and despicable. I want to speak about someone who is the most useless and abominable representative the federal parliament has ever seen. That person is a person who last night skulked into this chamber, slimed into the chamber quite slowly to collect his TA cheque. That individual is Senator Malcolm Colston. I want to talk about him…^[42]

Colston himself spoke, registering his disquiet about the effects of the full sale of Telstra on his Queensland electorate. He subsequently voted against the Bill and with the ALP. The Bill was defeated and two-thirds of Telstra remained in public ownership.

     Colston retired from the Senate at the end of his term in June 1999. The fraud charges against him for travel rorting were dropped in 2001 due to his terminal illness, which rendered him unfit to stand trial.^[43] In 2002 the Sydney Morning Herald claimed that, despite suffering cancer of the bile duct, Colston had been seen at the local shopping centre, had been travelling to Canberra regularly to visit one of his sons at taxpayers' expense, and was director of a business that operated out of the family home in Brisbane.^[44]

     Mal Colston died in August 2003. The ABC's AM program contrasted the description offered by the senator's friend, Brian Harradine ('Mal Colston was a thoughtful, well informed and considerate man') with Robert Ray's notorious threat from 1997 ('Anyone who rats on the Labor Party will get exactly what this quisling Quasimodo from Queensland got'^[45]). The segment emphasised the impact the Colston affair had had on public perceptions of parliamentarians and their perks, calling Colston 'the poster boy for public scepticism about the privileges Australia provides its Federal politicians'. When asked what Colston's legacy to politics might be, historian Ross Fitzgerald replied: 'he wasn't important enough to leave a legacy'.^[46] Nevertheless, Colston's betrayal did affect a number of institutions, organisations and individuals in significant ways.

     It changed the way that parliamentarians' travel expenses were handled. Most politicians became more careful about what they were claiming. There was now much less flexibility; a higher level of bureaucracy emerged to check that the politicians were not persistently rorting the system.^[47] For some, the increased scrutiny simply made it harder to do their job because of the amount of time it took to fill out the forms. For others the consequences were devastating: ALP Senator Nick Sherry attempted suicide when his travel claims were questioned.^[48] Moreover, though the Coalition government might have thought at first that it had emerged rather well from the episode, having achieved the part-sale of Telstra in December 1996, eventually it would be embarrassed by the repercussions of its underhand activities in duchessing Senator Colston. The affair is seen by some as the first hint of corruption and dishonesty in Howard's government, and the first public demonstration that John Howard would stop at nothing to push through his agenda for 'reform'.^[49] The episode reinforced the view that the government was poor at administration and that any claims of honesty it made were invalid. The ironic tag 'Honest John' gained further resonance.^[50]

     As for the ALP, the episode had multiple and varied impacts. Some consider the effects on the party (and the country) to have been catastrophic in that it led to the loss of Telstra, an important government asset.^[51] In addition, the affair appears to have fuelled support for Pauline Hanson's racist and divisive One Nation political party, which then had a significant impact on the Labor vote, effectively allowing Howard to steal Labor's core constituency and keep the ALP out of office for more than a decade.^[52] At the time, the newspapers attracted a number of letters from the public that supported this analysis.^[53] The main players agree, though, that the ratting had a positive effect on the ALP, if only for a short time. It showed that the party had the capacity to fight together against a common enemy; that it was bigger than any rat.^[54] The Right's Robert Ray and the Left's Kim Carr worked closely together over time to bring Colston down, which served to reinforce solidarity. To quote Paul Daley: 'It was extraordinary that they were able to work so well together on this…Colston made them work together.'^[55] Carr interprets his alliance with Ray a little differently, preferring to emphasise the elements that unite Labor representatives with strong and varying factional allegiances.^[56]

     Today, the mention of Colston's name prompts remarkably consistent responses: only occasionally is there any divergence from Faulkner's colourful assessment. Daley recalls Colston as a 'lazy fat slob' but also remembers feeling a little sorry for him, a little concerned for his emotional well being as he weathered repeated attacks from the ALP. ^[57] Given the subsequent suicide attempt of Nick Sherry, Daley was probably right to be concerned. Kim Carr admits to being able to see the pathos in the situation: that, as Colston betrayed the ALP and the country, he also betrayed himself and everything he had stood for in his long parliamentary career.^[58] Overall though, the consensus from the ALP is that Colston deserved everything he got. By allowing the government to take control of Telstra and to reshape social policy in Australia, he had betrayed both the country and the ALP, the party who had put him into power.^[59]

Conclusion

Was Mal Colston the worst of the lot? One way of reading his betrayal is to see it as just another example of the paradox that faces all elected representatives of labour: that, charged with changing the status quo, they must try to do so from within existing parliamentary institutions. Although exceptionally vulnerable to duchessing—raised himself in straitened circumstances, he was overly concerned with providing financial stability for his own family—Colston was not the first victim of the process and he is unlikely to be the last: William Holman is an Australian example of a politician duchessed by the trappings of power, and Ramsey MacDonald, Philip Snowden, and John Burns are well known British examples of the same process.^[60]

     But such a reading will not suffice. Though all Labor representatives are under some degree of pressure to succumb to the temptations laid before them, most do not do so. Moreover, to perceive all rattings as essentially the same is to gloss over the very specific historical contexts in which they occur. Carr's understanding of Colston's betrayal as representative of its time is, in my view, more useful and acutely perceptive. Colston might have been unusually greedy but the prevailing parliamentary culture—increasingly commercialised, pragmatic and cynical—encouraged the ALP to turn a blind eye to, or sometimes even satisfy, that greed for as long as it suited them. When it no longer suited them, the senator found it necessary to rat.

     The passage of time irons out many of the contextual differences between rattings, and rats become, in hindsight, a homogenous group: the 'Other' to those members who remained or remain loyal. The stories of these rats become part of the Labor 'tradition' for specific, and contemporary, organisational purposes, offering explanations for failure or unthinkable loss: Colston's betrayal helps to explain the failure of ten long and dispiriting years in opposition and the devastating loss of Telstra through privatisation. Moreover, these stories re-emerge occasionally to warn those who might themselves be contemplating 'the well-timed rat', and to help build and maintain solidarity.^[61] In short, though they might occur in different contexts and for different reasons, rattings are always useful in hindsight, and in that sense they can be seen to form part of a tradition. As for Mal Colston, it is highly likely that, in time, 'the worst of the lot' will become just another Labor rat.