Political Corrections

with Mungo MacCallum

Roosters crow again

The Labor Party has always prided itself on its resilience, and it's time to come out of the understandable post-election tristesse and show a bit.

Sure, the result was worse than most people expected, especially in the Senate; but it wasn't totally catastrophic. In the House of Representatives Labor lost eight seats to the Coalition and one (McMillan) through the redistribution. But it gained four from the Coalition and one (Cunningham) from the Greens.

The margin needed to win next time is certainly greater, and the party's primary vote failed to recover from the depths of 2001. But Labor has come back from far worse positions, for instance after the elections of 1966, and 1975-77; indeed, things are no bleaker now than they were when John Howard won in 1996. So it is time to stop the rending of garments and gnashing of teeth, to set aside the sackcloth and ashes and look to the future.

This applies particularly to the mess that has developed around Labor's front bench. As Oscar Wilde might have put it, to lose a couple of shadow ministers could be put down to misfortune; when the number gets up to half a dozen it starts to look like carelessness. And it is worse when the deserters include not only valued members of the old guard such as Kim Beazley and John Faulkner, but talented contemporaries of Mark Latham in Craig Emerson and, particularly, Lindsay Tanner.

Tanner, once thought of as a direct generational rival to Latham, is one of the best and clearest thinkers in a caucus which now contains more than its fair share of party hacks; he is also the one most eager to tackle the urgent task of restoring Labor's economic credentials. It is truly grotesque that Latham should have been so insouciant about losing Tanner, but to have fought so hard to preserve the clearly redundant Simon Crean.

And it was almost equally silly to have toyed for so long with the idea of giving another loyalist, Julia Gillard, the key treasury portfolio. Gillard has been a bullet performer and her chance at the top will come, but her time is not yet. With Tanner unavailable the only contenders with the background and experience were Wayne Swan, Stephen Smith and Kevin Rudd, the three "roosters" (in Latham's words) from the Beazley era. Latham may not relish the idea of having a potential (though at this stage still very distant) threat sitting beside him on the front bench, but he will have to make the best use of the limited material he has available, and with the faction bosses still intent on delivering him quite a lot of dead wood, this is far less than it ought to be.

And Latham himself must stop sulking and get on with it. Admittedly, he has a fair bit to sulk about, but he wanted the job. It is now time to show that he is serious about it and, in the words of his mighty mentor, to crash through or crash. A good place to start might be in his own office, which could do with a few hardened professionals prepared to tell him when he is going off he rails. Even if he doesn't want to listen, he should at least be aware that there is an alternative reality out there.

And speaking of sulking, have the conservatives ever produced a smugger or less gracious loser than the former Minister for Children, Larry Anthony? Anthony's response to his narrow but probably overdue defeat in the seat of Richmond was to pout that the electors didn't really deserve him anyway; if they were ungrateful enough to reject him after all he'd done for them, well, they'd find out soon enough what it was like out there in the cold, totally ignored by the government of which he was once a part.

Leaving aside the open contradiction of Howard's promise to govern for the losers as well as for the winners, this portrayed an extraordinary and arrogant rejection of the democratic process, perhaps resulting from the fact that three generations of Anthonys have held the seat for fully 55 of the 67 years since the first Larry squatted in it in 1937. And of course the National Party, through its local supremo Murray Lees, cried foul: why, a group calling itself Liberals for Forests, whose candidate did not even live in the electorate, had actually directed its preferences to Labor, thereby confusing honest voters who had believed they were voting for the real Liberals.

Well, maybe; but then Lees himself had authorised a newspaper ad incorporating the Greens Party logo and urging Greens voters to ignore official policy and put Labor last. Perfectly legal, of course, but it would have been nice if Lees had had the guts and honesty to acknowledge that the ad was the work of the National Party and not of disaffected local Greens, as it appeared. And then there was 2001, where the residents of all the local caravan parks woke on election day to find a leaflet warning them that Labor had a secret plan to relocate asylum seekers to their own caravan parks - the work of overenthusiastic supporters, according to Anthony, who of course knew nothing about it until later.

Sure, Larry; but what goes around comes around. Or, as Shakespeare put it more elegantly: And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges. See you down at Centrelink.