Shame on the backstabbers and liars in NSW Labor

Outgoing NSW Opposition Leader Jodi McKay speaks to the media. Picture: AAP

Jodi McKay might appear to have resigned from the NSW Labor leadership of her own volition but there can be no doubt her departure was accelerated by a sinister and disgracefully calibrated effort by colleagues to ensure her position remained untenable.

If these tactics sound familiar, they should; this is the same moth-eaten and notorious white-anting strategy that once made NSW Labor so utterly unelect­able. We were supposed to have been done with all of that: the toad-like powerbrokers; the Tripodis and Obeids; the repulsive factional tactics that turned the Labor caucus into a hothouse.

Yet here we are, sunk in another mess of backstabbers and liars falling over each other to reach at the crown, the spectacle of which is a free gift to the Berejiklian government, whose MPs are growing fat and lazy on the political spoils of the pandemic.

Let it be known that McKay’s detractors proceeded with great care and patience to build their case against her in recent months. They seized on dismal polling numbers and plunging satisfaction ratings to acquire momentum, and dined out with savage glee on Labor’s loss in the NSW Upper Hunter, another carefully plotted trigger-point.

Much like the agitators in the NSW Liberal Party, some of whom are just as eager to see the back of Gladys Berejiklian, Labor’s mutineers wanted McKay’s demise to appear bloodless. They led an operation to convince her to resign, increasing the pressure over six days until she delivered a teary resignation speech live on TV.

Within this speech, Ms McKay subvocalised an intractable problem with the NSW Labor Party: it offered no protection against a handful of detractors. Even if she had won leadership again and again, an absurd proposition, she would have still been undermined from here until the election.

Without scandals or severe policy failures to her record, the organised decay of her support and the caprice of the event makes her departure difficult to understand, harder to justify and almost Greek in its retelling. Galling, too, was the sight of some of her most fierce opponents taking to social media to laud the grace of her decision to resign.

Most despicable of all was the role of party officials who were aware of this coup. Bob Nanva, Labor’s general secretary, may not have sanctioned this plot. His fingerprints might not be anywhere near the murder weapon, but by doing nothing, by failing to address this mutiny, he allowed McKay to meet her bullet.

Whether it is Michael Daley or Chris Minns, the most obvious contenders to replace McKay, the question arising out of this week’s muck is whether Labor really has changed, or whether we have witnessed a shameful regression to the bin of political history.