Leaders, long shots and losers: Why the ALP needs powerful leaders to survive

Labor mostly characterised as the alternative government – needs giants like Whitlam, Hawke and Keating – if they are ever going to have chance of winning the next election, writes Wooley.

I SOMETIMES get it wrong and so was chuffed that over the past two columns my crystal ball got it right; ScoMo would go to Glasgow and the Joyce Gang of small-time outlaws would eventually rejoin the Coalition (Coal-ition?) posse.

For a price, of course. They get another deputy sheriff’s star and who knows what else we haven’t been told about. ScoMo should consider giving a science or environment portfolio to the Nats’ newly promoted Keith Pitt. He has a good grasp of the subject. Last week in Parliament he declared: “Find me a solar panel that works in the dark.”

But miracles happen and now Keith is a net zero born again believer and clearly the man for the job. He worked as an electrical engineer at Bundaberg Sugar Ltd where he would have learned all about sweeteners, which in a National Party seat is all you need to know to get re-elected.

Yes. I know the governance of Australia isn’t a laughing matter. Look what happened this week to the Australian cartooning legend Michael Leunig at the Melbourne Age.

His crime was to liken Victorian resistance to mandatory vaccination to the fight for democracy in Tiananmen Square.

Leunig’s cartoon compared his classic bemused little everyman character with the iconic “tank man” who stood in front of People’s Liberation Army tanks in 1989 in the protest that ended in a massacre. Leunig drew his lone protester confronting a giant loaded syringe. The cartoon was rejected by The Age which announced it was “trialling new cartoonists”.

Leunig was gone.

Cartooning is a dangerous business. Look what happened to Larry Pickering and to the French satirical mag Charlie Hebdo. Least said the better.

It’s a good thing I can’t draw anything but abrupt conclusions. And, no, I am not opposed to mandatory inoculation, up to a point.

But Leunig’s jab did give me pause for thought, which is the social purpose of satire, no matter how dark or dangerous.

Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce is holding the reins while Prime Minister Scott Morrison is overseas. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Back to safer ground and the quicksand solidity of Aussie opinion polls. You don’t need a crystal ball when political history starts repeating. When ScoMo opened his paper on Monday morning, did he start praying for another miracle?

This week the prophet from Newspoll spake and verily should our leader be sore afraid and filled with holy dread? The Coalition had slumped to its lowest level of approval in the present term of the Morrison government, falling two points, down to 35 per cent.

Some less than impartial seers prophesied the fall of the House of ScoMo. With the primary vote for the Coalition at 35 per cent and for Labor at 38 per cent a few pundits were suggesting that had an election been held last weekend Albo would have made it to the Lodge.

“Leftie rubbish. Say it ain’t so!” I hear Tories cry. And, yes, safely, I do dare to agree that “It ain’t so”.

The current ALP needs more leaders of the ilk of the powerful, charismatic, former prime ministers Bob Hawke and Paul Keating, according to Charles Wooley.

Well, reasonably safely, because, as I suggested, we have been here before. ScoMo was in an almost identical position prior to the 2019 election with the Coalition on the same primary vote of 35 per cent. Back then Labor was favoured at 41 per cent (as opposed to 38 per cent now) and Bill and Chloe Shorten were measuring up new curtains for the Lodge.

The strangest thing was, back then, it looked like Australians were going to elect a highly unpopular man to be their prime minister. Bill, with a negative satisfaction level deeper than the Beaconsfield mine, was the winner everyone expected but no one wanted — and in the end no one got.

It will likely be the same next time round because ScoMo is way ahead of Albo as preferred PM.

Morrison at 48 per cent as “better prime minister” to Albanese’s 34 per cent has a greater lead than last time; then with 44 per cent to Shorten’s 36 per cent.

It’s just numbers. Let’s say it in words: the sad truth is that Albo doesn’t impress. With the most remote outside chance he might prove a tolerable prime minister. He might even grow in the job to become a great prime minister. But he doesn’t have what it takes to get there in the first place.

Former Prime Minister Gough Whitlam is also widely regarded as one of the ALP’s greatest leaders.

Nor did ScoMo, but by stabbing Turnbull he didn’t have to get popularly elected first time around.

The Liberals as the natural party of government often succeed with ordinary leaders. Labor, mostly characterised as the alternative government, needs giants like Whitlam, Hawke and Keating.

Albo is not of that stature. He is said to be a nice bloke, but Australia doesn’t know him and on current indications doesn’t want to.

With this week’s Newspoll, despite the Nationals’ disgraceful extorting of the Australian electorate, this far out ScoMo still looks a winner.

He only needs to negotiate the Glasgow minefield and save the planet (or look like he wants to) while from a long distance keeping the Joyce Gang on a tight rein, managing the reopening of the nation without giving everyone the Delta strain, renting post haste some nuclear subs from our American friends and not taking a Hawaiian holiday on the way back home.

And hoping that Barnaby doesn’t stuff up while he’s away. It’s that easy.

Much easier than picking a Melbourne Cup winner, but while I am on a roll, why not?

My spy on the track, Merv, assures me that just as ScoMo might be expected to romp home for a second time, so too is the Irish raider, last year’s Cup winner, Twilight Payment, a likely look.

The name has a nice political ring to it. It evokes the kind of shady electoral pork-barrelling with which we are all too familiar these days, and not just in federal politics.

My bloke in the know also fancies the favourite, Incentivise. It is close to the dreadful one-word slogan “Incentivation” with which John Howard lost the race in the 1987 election. Howard called it wrongly saying, “Incentivation will be the clarion call for all Australians.”

PM Bob Hawke said: “It sounds like something you do to cats.”

Merv reckons Twilight Payment is his each-way pick and, although he really fancies the favourite, he tells me, “I’d need more of an ‘incentive’ than the $2 the bookies have on offer to invest my hard-earned!”

I defer to Merv on the mysteries of the track but, when it comes to punting on the federal election, I can advise if you don’t fancy ScoMo, you could put an each-way bet on Albo.

I reckon he’s dead cert to win a place: probably second.

Tail wagging the dog over climate

RARELY in the history of pronunciation has a hyphen been so important and so divisive — as in Coal-ition.

The federal government speaks of itself as the Coalition.

But within government ranks, a small out of control sectional interest group exercises a power massively disproportionate to its numbers.

That group of National Party members might be better pronounced as the Coal-ition.

And the tragedy for the conservative side of politics is that the Liberals believe they cannot have any control of the House of Representatives without the help of the 16 Nationals.

That’s hardly control. That is minority government.

Unless they field their own candidates at the next election the Liberals will be forever beaten up by their handful of unruly country cousins.

The National Party has been allowed to shamelessly rort Australian politics and the taxpayer for more than half a century. In our federal parliament it represents a mere 13 per cent of the electorate but too often the National Party has been the tail that wags the dog.

This recalcitrant rural rump of conservative politicians evolved from earlier Australian agrarian socialists and still preserves the traditional Australian farming business philosophy of “privatising the profits and socialising the losses”.

CANBERRA, AUSTRALIA - NewsWire Photos OCTOBER 21, 2021: Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Barnaby Joyce during Question Time in the House of Representatives in Parliament House Canberra. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Gary Ramage

Which they did superbly well with drought relief when it was dry and flood relief when it was wet, with superphosphate bounties, land clearing incentives and all manner of handouts from Coalition governments which were otherwise happy to watch the disappearance of not just the car industry but a host of Australian manufacturing.

Every farm was sacred but not so every factory.

Now of course every coal mine is sacred but not so the environment.

Although you might reasonably think that despite flood and drought relief, the environment would be vitally important to farmers.

The National Party is now holding Australia to further ransom and extortion by demanding who knows yet how many billions of dollars of taxpayers money before they might appear to grudgingly concede science is halfway right about coal.

Meanwhile it’s a case of, “We’ve got your Mother Earth and if you don’t pay up the old girl’s gonna get it.”

The National Party’s price for tolerating the science of climate change is a greedy play for the massive featherbedding of a handful of regional electorates.

It also requires the highest order of ignorance. Along with a fair dollop of dishonesty.

Repeatedly it is argued that Australia emits only 1.3 per cent of global CO2 emissions. So why wreck the coal industry in this country?

What they don’t tell you is that the global environmental impact of Australian coal is shipped overseas. We are the world’s second biggest coal exporter after Indonesia, last year shipping out what amounts to double our national emissions and more than the entire emissions of Germany, Europe’s largest emitter.

The Nationals might get away with misleading some Australians (“we only dug it up, we didn’t burn it”) but our allies and trading partners at Glasgow know the real picture and accordingly, if we don’t sign up, they might enforce punitive taxes and tariffs on our rural exports.

The Nats could then have to decide whether they represent farmers or coal miners.

Some Nationals are clearly most at home on social media. In that crackpot world whether it’s about the dangers of inoculation or the harmlessness of global warming, no amount of reasoned argument and observable science can ever change the most incorrigible pre-Copernican mindset.

Not that too many of the belligerent social media mob have ever heard of Copernicus.

But having encountered them, I suspect that the climate deniers and the anti-vaxxers are members of the same old Flat Earth Tribe who somehow weathered the circumnavigation of the Earth by Magellan back in 1519.

“He wasn’t on the level. He forged his charts.”

Thanks to Mark Zuckerberg, globally this tiny vocal minority has been given an ignorant, strident and disproportionately powerful voice. That it is also a semiliterate voice was reinforced by an online comment on the back of my column last week, that Glasgow was “a farse”.

It would be funny, if not so depressing.

George Christensen speaking on the Mackay Waterfront Project., September 21, 2021. Picture: Lillian Watkins

Which is why we should find some consolation that the largely anonymous mob and some of their political demagogues like the National’s anti-vaxxer climate denier George Christensen are a just tiny minority.

In 2019 Scott Morrison spoke of the ‘quiet Australians’ who occupy the vast and sensible political middle ground of the national electorate. He was reiterating a political truth as old as Menzies’ forgotten people and as recent as John Howard’s battlers.

Extensive opinion polling (though why would the adversely quarrelsome countenance other opinions?) shows by far that most Australians support vaccination just as they support emission reduction targets.

It is just a pity the quiet Australians are so quiet.

The shameless and extortionate behaviour of the National Party this week in the lead up to Glasgow has provoked a rethink by a generation of reporters who loved to cover the so called Wombat Trail.

Me included.

Like so many journalists over the years I have found reporting the antics of the National Party, and the old Country Party from whence it sprung, an endless source of amusement.

The gross improprieties, the rorts and the outrageous lies were always forgiven by the media because unlike most Australian politicians, at least the Nats weren’t boring.

It was always a delight to travel to Queensland and follow the antics of the grandfather of bellicose bumpkin politics, that state’s longest serving Premier, Johannes Bjelke-Petersen.

I wasn’t the only reporter who thought it merely hilarious when Joh told us, “The greatest thing that could happen in Queensland and the nation is when we get rid of all media. Then we could live in peace and tranquillity.”

Premier of Queensland Joh Bjelke Petersen . Sir Johannes "Joh" Bjelke-Petersen.

He never understood (or pretended not to) the traditional role the free press plays in western democracy.

Nor did Joh understand the fundamental democratic theory of the Separation of Powers. An intuitive dictator cunningly disguised as a bumbling stammering hayseed country politician, Joh genuinely appeared not to get the idea that the government of the day should be held separate from the police and from the judiciary.

While he was directing his coppers to beat up protesters and his judges to lock them away, Joh was asked in a television interview, did he not understand the political doctrine of Separation of Powers?

Joh replied to his bemused interviewer, “What do you mean the, the, the separation of powers. No, no, no. I’ve never heard of that one. You’ve been spending too much time down, down, down there in Canberra where you know some of them, a lot of them, won’t, wont, they, they won’t even swear on a Bible. Did you know that?”

Joh described press conferences as “feeding the chooks” and he would attempt to divert questioning by throwing the wheat far and wide. But on this occasion the serious young reporter stuck to his question and tried to teach Political Science 101 to the Premier of Queensland. He painstakingly explained why the government should not be the lawmaker, the police and the judge and jury all rolled into one. But back in the eighties that was a notion as alien to Joh as it would be today to President Xi.

Federal ministers Barnaby Joyce, Matt Canavan and David Gillispie visit the Mandalong Coal Mine at Morriset and the Vales Point Power Station at Lake Macquarie. Barnaby Joyce stands at the entrance after taking a tour of the underground mine. Picture: Toby Zerna

Joh protested, “But, but, but that is very silly. You, you, you, why would you fight with, with, with one hand tied behind your back. Look I’m the Premier of Queensland and I make the laws so why wouldn’t I enforce them? Why, why, wouldn’t I do that?”

Joh had a private jet, courtesy of the Queensland taxpayer and once when I was heading west from Brisbane, on what looked like a three-day drive, the Premier kindly offered me a lift.

In flight, I asked him about questions raised in the Queensland Parliament concerning the cost of the plane and he told me, “Look out there. You can see it’s a big state and I’m the Premier of Queensland. What do they want? Do, do, do they expect me to walk?”

Decades later such words live on. Nationals Senator Matt Canavan might’ve had an outback Bachelor and Spinsters Ball moment this week. He described ScoMo’s emissions reduction target in classic country-cornball Joh-speak. “I’m in a position of being asked to marry a girl that I haven’t met yet. I believe we should get to know someone seriously before you take that leap.”

This week it was as if Joh has been reincarnated, as some yokel version of the Dalai Lama; bringing back to life all the old fairground jiggery-pokery and outdated illusions of the golden age to inspire the discordant 21st Century politics of Barnaby Joyce and his merry men.

It’s such a pity that somehow the old act is not so funny this time around.

The Mercury was right to publish the photo and the name of Tim Gunn, the so called “covidiot” responsible for the three-day lockdown of Southern Tasmania.

There was some demurring from Public Health on the point of medical ethics concerning patient confidentiality. I checked that with this column’s medical adviser, Dr Syntax and I quote only the printable parts of his irate response. “Well for a start, doctors are obliged only to protect medical confidentiality unless, and I stress ‘unless’ doing so presents a risk to the lives of either the patient or the public. Knowing who he is and his vaccination status and what he was up to, I reckon he doesn’t qualify for anything but getting the book chucked at him.”

Tim Gunn taken from his Facebook page.

This newspaper’s political writer David Killick is at his best when goaded, as he was this week when criticised by the Launceston Examiner for the identification of Gunn.

David fired back, “It is a rare thing indeed for a newspaper to fight so vehemently to keep the public in the dark.” He reminded readers of the old journalistic saying. “News is the stuff someone wants to keep out of the paper. The rest is advertising.”

Killick recommended a change of career for his northern critic. “If the editorial writer at the Examiner wants to repeat what folk in authority say without question there are plenty of openings for spin doctors,” Killick not so gently suggested.

Indeed, in Tasmania there are more people who describe themselves as journalists working in government and public relations than in journalism. But that shouldn’t hamper those in the real business of reporting so long as Killick’s advice to the Examiner is followed: “Ask some hard questions, take a stand, fight for your readers. Tell them something important they don’t know. Worry about being right, not being popular. Someone has to do it.”

A parting shot. One of the best reasons for releasing Tim Gunn’s name and picture is that he is reckless and careless. Given Tasmania’s less than competent quarantine security, if he escapes again, this time everyone will see him coming. He better wear a mask.