Mumble: Liberals itch for someone like Martin Ferguson to lead Labor

Former Cabinet Minister Martin Ferguson is in the Labor Party’s doghouse, and might possibly be expelled.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of electricity privatisation, opposition to it was the chief element of the ALP’s election strategy in NSW last month, and Ferguson’s decision to give the Liberals permission to run a clip of him in their election advertisements was very naughty.

You might argue good on him for sticking to his principles, but when people join political parties, and reach professional heights because of membership, it imposes on them some obligations.

Everyone loves an honest, tell-it-like-it-is political maverick — as long as they’re on the other side.

Searching for an approximate equivalence across the aisle, the closest recent example is perhaps John Hewson and Malcolm Fraser, along with about 140 others, publicly pledging support for an emissions trading scheme in 2011, despite the federal party campaigning strongly against any form of carbon pricing. Fraser had already quit the Liberals, but Hewson apparently remained and remains a member.

How would the party have felt if Hewson had appeared in a pro-carbon price advertisement at the 2013 election? To many it would have been the last straw.

Ferguson comes from solid Labor stock; his father Jack was an important, respected figure in NSW Labor, being integral to Neville Wran’s elevation to the parliamentary leadership and serving as Deputy Premier under him from 1976 to 1984.

When Simon Crean entered federal parliament in 1990, Ferguson replaced him as ACTU President.

Then six years later after Mar’n succeeded Brian Howe in the federal electorate of Batman, the Howard government ridiculed him, making fun of his speech impediment, like everyone seems to (including me, just now) and citing him as a prime example of everything that’s wrong with modern Labor: from a dynasty, inbred, no life experience, the dead hand of unionism.

John Howard, Peter Costello and their ministers depicted the Hawke-Keating years much like the current government does the Rudd-Gillard ones: a period during which an atrocious government almost ruined the country, leaving an awful mess to clean up. It was after Howard’s defeat in 2007, or perhaps in the term before that, that Hawke and Keating began to enjoy a bipartisan rehabilitation as courageous economic modernisers — mostly, one suspects, as a device with which to find their successors sadly lacking.

During the Gillard years, Ferguson was Liberal Party supporters’ favourite Labor person — “this guy should be leader!”—(Crean came second) largely because he was rumoured to be climate change sceptical and gave the impression of being socially conservative. When he announced his retirement in 2013 Tony Abbott eulogised him excessively.

Martin was a fellow of great decency, a true Labor party man, son of the soil, throwback to the days when the party represented the workers, the battlers, not inner city trendoids.

Some of those mouthing these criticisms of the modern ALP seem to think they’re onto something new, but they’re very old hat, having been levelled at least as far back as the Hawke and Keating governments. And they won five elections.

Gough Whitlam is usually the villain in this faux nostalgia, polluting Australia’s oldest party with fashionable causes such as feminism, Aboriginal land rights and support for the arts.

Kim Beazley Senior’s 1970 words to the West Australian state conference often get a run:

“When I joined the Labor Party, it contained the cream of the working class. But as I look about me now all I see are the dregs of the middle class. And what I want to know is when you middle class perverts are going to stop using the Labor Party as a spiritual spittoon.”

Two years later, the “dregs” and “perverts” took Beazley’s party to its first victory in 23 years.

Whitlam made Labor electorally competitive. Between federation and his becoming leader in 1967, the ALP struggled to win one federal election in five; since then the tally has been about fifty-fifty. Australia’s working-class or blue-collar vote (whatever you call it and however you define it) collapses further and further over the decades, and any party that exclusively, or even predominately, represented its interests would struggle to receive support in the high teens.

What, from the Liberal Party’s point of view, would be not to like about that?

And it’s understandable that Coalition supporters have an itching to see Labor led by someone with a whiff of the 1950s like Martin Ferguson — or perhaps his brother Laurie, also in federal parliament, next to whom Martin is thoroughly modern.

Labor would never win an election. Politics would be fun and easy again.