Voters lose to ALP celebs

LABOR'S habit of recruiting candidates with no local knowledge is bad news for the constituency.

The ALP's latest celebrity candidate, Maxine McKew, has a distinguished CV, working for decades as a presenter with the ABC, the ALP's media arm, and more recently as a star columnist for The Bulletin, the Packer family's little-read weekly. Former NSW premier Bob Carr was the last politician to put such a CV – indeed, an almost identical resume – before the voters, and we know how well his earlier work experiences served the people of NSW. McKew, who has been parachuted into politics as the ALP's candidate for Prime Minister John Howard's seat of Bennelong after joining the Labor Party earlier this month, follows celebrities such as Peter Garrett and Cheryl Kernot to the ALP brand. Garrett, once paid to keep his mouth open, has now been asked by the party to keep it shut, particularly when asked about reconciling his old anti-US position with the ALP's new attempt to present itself as an ally the US might prefer to the conservative government. At least Kernot can claim her position with the Democrats was compromised by her temporary infatuation with former Labor foreign minister Gareth Evans before she made the ultimate lover's leap. McKew's move seals the ABC's reputation as the ALP's prime media recruitment pool, with the Northern Territory's Chief Minister Clare Martin, the embattled WA Premier Alan Carpenter and the former Victorian Arts Minister Mary Delahunty among recent alumnae. Martin has shown herself chronically unable to deal with the appalling problems which beset Aborigine Australians in her territory, Carpenter has been forced to sack three ministers over the past nine months and his ministry faces further allegations of misconduct and impropriety, while Delahunty remains tainted by the disclosure she was presented with an annual pension of $100,000 despite falling short of the eligibility period by four years. MPs must serve at least 12 years before they are eligible for a full parliamentary pension, but they can apply to have the normal qualifying period waived on the grounds that their exit was involuntary. Delahunty applied to the trustees of the parliamentary superannuation fund for a medical discharge but, incongruously, she was still a minister of the Crown, with the responsibilities that carries, when she was apparently so ill she needed a medical discharge. McKew, already referring to herself in the third person yesterday, was probably earning about $100,000 a year for her one-day a week appearance on the ABC's Lateline program. Opposition education spokesman Stephen Smith said yesterday McKew "has had a long-standing interest in the future of our country and I think that will be attractive to the people of Bennelong". Bennelong voters should weigh up her "substantive interest" in Australia's future, as exemplified in remarks she made the day after watching the delusional former Opposition leader Mark Latham launch his disastrous Medicare Gold policy a week before the 2004 federal election. "For the first time I got a real sense of the inevitability of the Latham ascension," she said. "And I say that as something of a Latham sceptic because I saw him fall in a hole in the middle of the year. Yesterday, I saw someone who, if he does not make it on October 9 (the election date) – and I think he may – he will make it. I think Latham's time could be coming quite soon." A majority of Australian voters with the interests of their nation at heart ensured that would never happen. Celebrity-obsessed Labor officials had hoped to shoehorn McKew into a safe seat before the notion to challenge in Bennelong arose, but grassroots ALP voters made it clear they were not interested in a carpetbagger. Even her idol, Latham, wrote in his notorious diary that the ALP's NSW general secretary Mark Arbib told him over lunch in 2004 that McKew would have been fantastic but "said she couldn't stand living in Cabramatta or Liverpool". "So Maxine wants to be a Labor MP, but can't stand the sight or smell of Labor voters, hey?" Latham wrote. McKew has said she confronted Arbib about the diary entry but he denied the issue was ever raised. Perhaps the suburbs of Bennelong are not such a step down from harbourside Mosman where McKew lives with her partner Bob Hogg, former national secretary of the ALP. But the voters of Bennelong would do well to consider McKew's view that the next election is "really a once-in-a-generation decision about the kind of country we have, about how we want to use the present prosperity" and ask themselves whether they would have enjoyed "the present prosperity" if Latham, or any of the other Labor leaders McKew and her fellow ABC staffers have barracked for over the years, had ever won office. Before the ALP boosted this dilettante into Bennelong, local plumber and Parramatta city councillor Pierre Esber had hoped his local experience might mean something to his fellow Bennelong residents. He has been bitterly disappointed by his party's decision to overlook his candidacy. Labor's embrace of yet another celebrity ensures he will not be the last unhappy person in Bennelong.