ALP's only agenda is retaining power

SURPRISE, surprise, federal Labor is apparently stuffed, was stuffed under former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and continues to be stuffed under Prime Minister Julia Gillard, and that is the near-unanimous view of ranks of senior Labor officials.

Let's start with the salvo fired by the former Labor minister and numbers man Graham Richardson. His remarks at the launch of Confessions Of A Faceless Man, the slender work of my fellow columnist Paul Howes, the head of Australia's biggest trade union, in Sydney on November 9. At that time, Richardson was still equivocating, posing the possibility there was a problem. As he said: "Now, and, if there is a weakness in the Gillard government, it's there still isn't an agenda. I think, four or five months on there's still no agenda. There needs to be one; there needs to be one pretty quickly." On Friday, he appeared to have settled the matter in his own mind, writing in The Australian that something was "amiss" with the Gillard government and noting its failure to address the attack on Labor's vote by the Greens, a party he notes is "gradually being taken over by some extreme left-wing types". Richardson bluntly stated the obvious challenge which Labor is avoiding addressing, writing: "During the campaign and since she got the job there have been serious errors. These errors indicate Gillard's political antenna sometimes doesn't pick up dangerous signs on its radar. Those mistakes should have been picked up by her staff and discarded before they hit her desk. Rudd allowed himself to be surrounded by a Praetorian Guard, young staff through whom everything was filtered. "No one was game to tell Rudd anything was wrong. If his staff thought it meant criticism of them, even Cabinet ministers couldn't get through the door." The core of Richardson's argument: "There are real faults in the Gillard office that need to be fixed and soon." And here's Howes in his own book: "Swings to the Greens and the disillusionment of the ALP base were caused by Labor's 'unwillingness to provide real leadership'. Labor could do worse than learn from the experience of John Howard's prime ministership. While I find just about everything that he stood for and did in office to be reprehensible, he understood power, the electorate, and how to effect change. "No one can deny that, during Howard's 11 years in office, he radically changed the power structures in this country to ensure that his conservative agenda was adopted." Howard should put that extract on the jacket of the next print-run of his memoir, Lazarus Rising. Greg Combet, Gillard's Climate Change Minister, joined the conga line of Labor critics when he launched the hopey-wishy book All That's Left: What Labor Should Stand For, on November 1. Combet lashed out at the focus-group driven style of the ALP's head office, and by extension federal secretary Karl Bitar, a product of the NSW machine responsible for delivering the dysfunctional revolving-door government which has crippled the State over the past 15 years. "Good policy based upon sound values should not be subordinated to research about community opinion. We have a responsibility to lead not follow. "(Focus groups and polling should) not compel the party to abandon its values," Combet said. To these observations, add the earlier remarks of Labor senator Doug Cameron who in an October 25 interview with 2UE noted that: "Differences of opinion can help to bring strong policy and I think that's missing in the party at the moment. "There are many people within the Labor Party holding strong, progressive points of view and progressive voters don't know this. Everything is focused on the spin and on the take of the day and longer-term strategic policy positions suffer. I described it yesterday as like having a political lobotomy. "You know, you can't think on issues because it breaches a party rule or it breaches a policy position. That's not good for the party. We are zombie MPs." What a slogan: Labor, the party of lobotomised zombie MPs. But the theme is a constant, as Labor senator John Faulkner underscored when he launched Power Crisis, former NSW Labor minister Rodney Cavalier's book on the ALP's intellectual collapse, on November 4. "Modern Labor is struggling with the perception we are very long on cunning, and very short on courage. All the political cunning in the world can't substitute for courage, for leadership," he cautioned. "Let's not forget that having the courage of your convictions requires not only courage but conviction." They're the sort of characteristics Howes admitted to admiring in Howard, but he's on the other side of the political divide. Howes also put in a pitch for more left-leaning think-tanks, no doubt to be funded by the Labor Government, but no amount of institutes can help the intellectually bankrupt. The message from the Labor insiders about their own party is clear: contemporary Labor is bereft of any philosophical core, it is gutless and is focused only on gaining and holding power. Labor's own critics have been far more trenchant in their criticisms of their own party than any of the purported card-carrying members of the extreme right-wing cabal the Left's conspiracy theorists happily defame. The Left-Right divide is in peril as commonsense leads thoughtful Labor to acknowledge the strength of the inherent values of their opponents.