Joe Hildebrand: Why Mark Speakman's 'nice and decent' leadership was doomed to fail
While decency has its place in politics, Mark Speakman's tenure as NSW Opposition Leader proves nice guys don't always make effective warriors, writes Joe Hildebrand.
In one of his many memorable parliamentary performances, former NSW treasurer Michael Egan quoted a sage piece of political advice from his father.
“Never kick a dog when it’s down,” his old man told him. “Unless it’s showing signs of getting back up again.”
And so I hope Mark Speakman sees this column as a vote of confidence in his ability to recover from his current prostration, because there will certainly be some kicking to come.
There is, to be fair, no worse job in politics than being the inaugural opposition leader of a defeated former government.
You are, by definition, the antithesis of the people’s choice, and it is your sole effective purpose to tell the people they got it wrong.
But even bad jobs can be done well, and this is what Speakman spectacularly – or rather unspectacularly – failed to do.
No one can question the enormity of the task he faced, but he failed to make even that slightest inroad into the government’s popularity, which only grew under his watch.
It’s a bit like declaring you’re going to conquer Everest and then failing to make it to base camp.
If the secret to eating an elephant is one bite at a time, this was an elephant that was growing fatter every day while Speakman was staring at his cutlery.
There are many ways of assailing a first-term government, but the one way not to do it is gently.
Look at Tony Abbott’s relentless assault on the Rudd-Gillard government that drove it from a landslide to minority in 2010.
Or Bill Shorten’s equally brutal campaign against Abbott and Turnbull that almost did the same thing in 2016. Like Speakman, Shorten wasn’t particularly keen on taking the reins of his party after a landslide defeat, knowing that it was more likely than not a hospital pass.
But he dug his heels in and rode at a gallop, almost snatching the unlikeliest of victories. Speakman, by contrast, seemed to trot aimlessly around the park.
If this sounds cruel, it is not meant to be. Speakman is by all accounts a very nice and decent man, and there is not enough niceness and decency in politics, but there is no place for aimlessness.
Of course, the major reason for his failure is the same reason for his counterpart’s success.
Premier Chris Minns, like the august Treasurer Michael Egan, is an unabashed pragmatist in the proudest tradition of the NSW Labor Right. He has seized the political centre in this state, and Speakman, as a moderate Liberal centrist, was essentially left with no lands to lord over, no armies to raise.
His conservative critics will say – and did – that this is why he needed to pull the party to the right and present a clear ideological point of difference to voters. At least he would have pleased somebody.
But this was not in his nature, and nor was it the answer.
An effective opposition leader does not need to be ideological, nor even ideologically coherent. By definition, they do not have the majority on their side, and so instead of engaging in pitched battle, they need to adopt guerilla warfare.
One of the few benefits of opposition is that you do not need to come up with solutions, only problems.
An opposition leader is not a general but a ninja: Identify and pierce all the government’s weak spots from every possible angle – left, right, up, down – and hope that the elephant collapses under the bloodletting of a thousand cuts.
Then you can finally sit down and eat it. But this art of war was clearly foreign to Speakman, so much so that in his final months, he didn’t even realise that he was the elephant.
It is an urban myth that you can see the Great Wall of China from the moon, but Speakman spent months standing right in front of the edifice and still didn’t notice it was there.
The only thing that kept him in office as long as he held it was Kellie Sloane’s remarkable forbearance and decency in refusing to roll him months earlier for the sake of loyalty and party unity.
This will deliver Sloane vital goodwill across the factions as she seeks to reforge the Liberal Party from its scattered ashes.
And it proves that decency in politics can indeed be a strength instead of a weakness when the right people know how to wield it.
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Originally published as Joe Hildebrand: Why Mark Speakman's 'nice and decent' leadership was doomed to fail
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