Political Corrections

with Mungo MacCallum

A decade for the emperor to fiddle

Many years ago when I asked Neville Wran why he wanted to be premier of New South Wales when his vision for the place seemed limited to the improvement of outdoor eating places, his answer was brief and to the point: "To keep the other buggers out," rasped Nifty.

And I suspect if you asked his successor and protégé Bob Carr the same question, when you subtracted the waffle about the honour of leading Australia's most vital state and the trust reposed in him by his wonderful colleagues and constituents, the answer would be pretty similar.

For the last couple of years at least, Carr seems to have been getting progressively more bored with the job, and what flashes of interest he has shown have been strictly limited to the city of Sydney.

In the bush, and in recent times in the towns as well, he has been perceived as arrogant and aloof, almost contemptuous of the electorate. His urbanity, once one of his great assets, seemed simply self-indulgent as the trains stopped running, the hospitals overflowed and a drought crippled the countryside.

His decision to quit while he was still ahead was undeniably smart politics, but he has left his hapless heir, the barely visible Morris Iemma, with an awful lot of repair work to do in the 20 months before the next election. And the fact that Iemma was installed by the faceless apparatchiks of Sussex Street against the clear wishes of both the parliamentary party and the public is not exactly a flying start.

Carr, of course, doesn't see it that way. While he lists some solid achievements in education and conservation (and one should not forget the courageous decision to open a supervised drug injecting centre) he appears to gain the most satisfaction simply from having presided over a long-running and largely scandal-free government - in other words, from winning elections.

This is, of course, the most crucial talent a politician can have: if you don't win office, you can't do anything. But there are those of us who wish that, having won office so often and so convincingly, Carr had done more with the opportunities it brought. South Australia's Don Dunstan, whom Carr belittles as a bit of a show pony, was both a successful politician and a great reformer. Bob Carr will be remembered more for his record 10 years in office than for any great benefits he brought to society.

His political epitaph might be similar to that the Earl of Rochester wrote for that merry monarch Charles II:

Here lies our sovereign lord the king

Whose promise none relies on.

He never said a foolish thing

Nor ever did a wise one.

And of course, here on the North Coast, Bob Carr will always be the bastard who took our train away.

Alexander Downer wants us all to be really, truly, proud and grateful for his untiring efforts which, he assures us, have single-handedly procured Australia an invitation to the East Asian summit meeting in October.

It has, he insists modestly, been very, very hard work, but he had to do it all by himself because a minister - especially one of his status and celebrity - counts for so much more than a mere official. Such lesser beings are all right for the routine tasks, like booking suitably prestigious cars and hotel rooms or mending the ladders in fishnet stockings, but when there's real work to be done, there can be absolutely no substitute for The Honourable Lord Alexander John Gosse Downer, KCMG (pending).

Okay, now back to reality.

There was only ever one obstacle to Australia receiving an invitation, and it was John Howard's petulant refusal to sign a regional non-aggression pact - the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation, as the ASEAN nations, the hosts of the summit, called it. Actually Howard was never all that keen on the summit anyway, because (a) it was Asian and (b) it didn't include America, and was therefore by definition worthless. But even when he was persuaded that it was a Good Idea, he was damned if he was going to sign any treaty, especially one that suggested he wasn't allowed to make a pre-emptive strike against the neighbours anytime he (or more importantly Washington) felt like it.

There was, of course, an easy way around this, as both Japan and South Korea, countries with similar ties to the United States, had already demonstrated; sign the treaty, but add the proviso that it should not be taken to abrogate any prior treaty obligations we might have, meaning ANZUS. But Howard remained pig-headed: even if the ASEAN treaty had no practical effect, a non-aggression pact was a silly, old-fashioned idea, and he didn't like it and he wasn't going to sign it and that was that.

The ASEAN nations dug their collective toes in. They wanted Australia to attend - even the formerly recalcitrant Malaysians agreed that the time had come to include the big white ocker from the south. But Howard had to acknowledge that it was their summit, and agree to their terms. And eventually, with no good grace, he did just that; but he took a lot of convincing.

And the man who did most of the convincing was none other than the aforementioned Lord Downer. So in a funny sort of way he is right; it was through his efforts that we got the invitation. He deserves a round of applause, but in deference to the Asians, we'll make it the sound of one hand clapping. We wouldn't want success to spoil him.