The impending retirement from parliament of Mike Kelly, the member for Eden-Monaro, is a tragedy for the Labor Party and a significant loss for the nation.
A former army colonel who served in Somalia, Bosnia, East Timor and Iraq, Kelly was the highest ranked officer to represent the modern Labor Party in parliament.
His departure accelerates a dangerous trend for the party to lose its few people with real national security gravitas.
His failure in opposition or government to be given a senior national security portfolio is a tribute to the woeful impact of factionalism in the ALP.
In the last months of Kevin Rudd’s government in 2013, when then defence minister Stephen Smith had made it clear he was leaving parliament, Kelly was picked by Rudd to be defence minister if Labor had been returned.
Kelly lost his seat in 2013. His strength as a politician is evident in his winning Eden-Monaro in 2016 even though Labor lost that election, and then holding the seat in the coalition victory in 2019.
Each side of politics contains a senior former military officer whose strategic depth and wide experience mean they should have been defence minister – Kelly in Labor and former major general Jim Molan.
Both sides of politics were resolutely determined that the best man should not get the job.
Kelly joins a long line of Labor national security hard heads who have left the parliament in recent years. These include Stephen Conroy, David Feeney and Michael Danby, all from the Victorian Right
Kelly was part of the NSW Right which once had been the guardian of the party’s national security credentials but in recent years has been compromised by scandals arising from fund raising from sources associated with the Chinese government and by a general loss of coherence and direction in international affairs in the NSW Right.
If he had become defence spokesman, Kelly would have had some effect in changing the internal NSW Labor culture on national security.
The other big change for Labor is Bill Shorten, from the Victorian Right, being replaced as leader by Anthony Albanese, from the NSW Left.
Shorten was extremely tough minded on national security. He refused, for example, to allow the coalition government to ratify an extradition treaty with China which in retrospect would have been disastrous for Australia.
Albanese on the other hand has had almost nothing to say on national security and has provided no clear direction.
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