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| Old goat. Image by Webdiary artist Martin Davies. www.daviesart.com |
Peter Costello has already made the point that Labor’s leadership tussle has become a series of Big Brother. It’s unprecedented – there’s no pretence at all that the party is not a clueless, rudderless mess, and it’s stripped off and bared its tired old body and excuse for a soul. The purpose? To ask a jaded public through Caucus to tell it who to pick to sell the sorry excuse for a great party to the public!
Did you see the Nine News of Friday night, in which Beazley is filmed lobbying a backbencher? He repeated the trick the next day for all the cameras. Today, it’s Bob Hawke at the races, backing Beazley. Every day it’s Crean and Beazley in endless TV and radio interviews.
It’s easy to be desperately depressed by all this, as many Webdiarists are. It looks like disintegration in the Democrats soap opera mould, except that all this public unravelling is about who is best as selling the message, with little or nothing about what the bloody message is! At least there was an ideological basis to the Democrats meltdown, whether they should be a centre-left or centre-right party.
Labor, it’s clear, doesn’t think it can win the next election. All passion spent, it’s given up, so a couple of old hands do the rounds before the Caucus decides who is most likely to minimise the damage.
But why has Labor given up? The polls, despite all Labor’s self-destructive behaviour, aren’t showing Howard’s a shoe-in. On the contrary, they’re showing the public is volatile, and ready to shift allegiances despite Howard’s popularity. And what’s his popularity about, anyway? Could it have something to do with his strength and commitment to his beliefs?
There’s a newish management theory around which says that sometimes a big, established company needs a crisis to trigger renewal. The buzz these days in management theory is about values – working out what they are and inspiring employees and managers to make their decisions using them.
The way to do that is to revisit, indeed relive, the beginnings of a company and the values which saw it grow from nothing, and then to put them at the centre of the company’s philosophy. Values, after all, are enduring – it’s only their application which needs to be adapted to changing circumstances. The exercise is urgent in times of intense change, so the company doesn’t lose it’s way through its bureaucracy, the latest fads, and the inevitable distortions and corruptions that develop over the decades.
AMP is a great case in point. As a not-for-profit mutual, its reputation for integrity, conservative money management and security was built over decades. It had its policy owners interests at heart. Yet upon its listing on the exchange after demutualisation, these values – and in the process the priceless brand name built upon them – were abandoned in favour of constant, risk-laden growth, spurred by high management incentives tied to the short term share price. The company has been devastated by that switch.
As you know, I’ve gone on and on about Labor’s need to take the plunge and do it’s own version of Fightback!, the detailed statement of philosophy, ideology and policy that the Liberals embraced in their darkest hour. That document united the party and inspired its followers. It gave them a mission, and a cause they believed worth fighting for.
Labor appears determined to do no such thing until it’s exhausted every other possible means of gaining power, including a public popularity contest between two old friends. I can think of no more humiliating admission that the Party is bankrupt.
On the other hand, this exercise in transparency may be to the good, in the end, if the Labor faithful and potential Labor voters make it crystal clear they want substance, not spin. They also need to make it clear that they’re not interested in defeatist parties which lack the guts to work out their core principles and fight for them. It looks like the people are Labor’s last chance to overcome its identity crisis.
I argued back in April that Beazley was Labor’s best shot, mainly because of the international climate of fear (Time for Labor’s Fightback!), but on the basis that he’d learned from his mistakes. On the evidence to date, he hasn’t.
Beazley came into the Herald’s Canberra office on Friday afternoon to chew the fat about what he’d done. He’d already seen the following memo penned by Steve Gibbons, the Labor member for Bendigo, which stated the policy case for backing Crean:
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5th June 2003
To members of the federal Parliamentary Labor Party
Some observations on our direction and leadership
The next time our opponents do something like pulling $100 million out of the Public Education Sector and giving it to the wealthiest Private Education Sector – we should oppose it – because if we don’t, we will lose the next federal election just like we lost the last election..
The next time our opponents do something like providing a 30% Medicare rebate just for those who are fortunate enough to have private health insurance – we should oppose it – because if we don’t, we will lose the next election just like we lost the last election.
The next time our opponents do something like sending a squad of fully kitted SAS out to board a vessel of helpless refugees – we should oppose it – because if we don’t we will lose the next election just like we lost the last election.
The next time our opponents do something like supporting a unilateral invasion from one nation on another – without United Nations approval – we should oppose it – because if we don’t we will lose the next election just as convincingly as we lost the last election.
If we return a leader and those around him who were responsible for losing the last two elections, then we will probably lose the next three.
Does anyone seriously think that the electorate will say ‘Good on you Labor, you’re just like John Howard, so we will vote for you?”
It’s been my experience that when those swinging voters who may be inclined to vote conservative are faced with a real conservative party and a pretend conservative party, they will go for the real thing every time.
We have to set ourselves apart from our opponents and provide a genuine alternative.
Any political party that allows the News Limited group to determine who leads it can’t reasonably expect to win the confidence of the electorate.
These are the reasons I strongly support Simon Crean’s leadership.
We should keep to that well established and timeless principle of putting in place policies that ensure that each and every Australian, no matter who they are or where they came from, are able to function at their full potential. If we allow this principle to guide our political judgment, then we will have maximised our chances of winning the next election.
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This memo sets out the consequences of Beazley’s small target strategy. It was not simply, as our political commentators now claim, that Beazley put off announcing policy until the last minute. That was bad enough, as it allowed Howard to spend all the spare cash on things to help his political cause – and which Labor in small target mode always accepted to keep the target small, with the effect that there was nothing left to spend when the election came.
No, it was worse than that. Labor voted for legislation which began to destroy Medicare – its proudest achievement – and which advantaged elite schools at the expense of disadvantaged children.
When I put this to Beazley in the office, he explained his reasoning behind the schools decision. You’ll recall Labor spent a lot of time condemning this funding choice, yet when the time came voted for it. Beazley said the reason was “strategic” – to let the Coalition wear the odium, then take the money away from the elite schools if it got to power. He also said that Crean concurred in this course of action.
To seek to blame Crean for the failing shows Beazley still doesn’t know the meaning of leadership, that the buck stops with him. Crean appears to have learnt from Beazley’s failure, and adopted a front-foot approach.
But the real tragedy is that this Labor “strategy” forgot about what any political party is supposed to be in the game for – to effect outcomes. The outcome of this rollover was that schools with excellent facilities and teachers got money at the expense of chronically disadvantaged schools attended by disadvantaged children. (As expected, the price to attend an elite private school didn’t go down because of the extra cash, and instead went up, thus cutting out any argument that extra funding would give more people the chance to send their kids there. The same thing happened with the private health insurance rebate – far from stabilising, prices have skyrocketed, forcing people to opt out.)
Labor is supposed to believe in equal opportunity for all our children. Its strategy meant that it was prepared to betray that core principle for perceived political advantage, thus cruelling the chances of some of our most vulnerable children.
The strategy is also so naive as to beggar belief. Every politician knows that once a group or an individual gets something from government, its awfully difficult to take it back. This is part of the reason why Howard has so successfully implemented his agenda – Beazley’s small target strategy gave it to him on a plate, entrenching his supporter base.
A courageous opposition would have demanded that the $100 million go direct to the most disadvantaged schools in Australia – public and private. It would have trumpeted its belief that no matter who you are or where you come from, it is fundamental to the Australian ethos that each child gets a fair go. It could go further, proclaiming that this policy is a recipe for a stable, relaxed and comfortable Australia, and that it implements core Australian values.
Beazley’s small target strategy cost his Party more than a sellout of its basic principles. It also turned off solid Labor supporters, who stopped arguing the cause of their party in the pubs and clubs and lost all energy for the cause because it had disappeared. Modern Labor can’t inspire its true believers, let alone convince swinging voters. As Webdiarist Imi Bokor writes in his contribution today:
During election campaigns even ten years ago, tea-rooms, pubs, etc were abuzz with people arguing for the ALP’s cause, even if not uncritical of some of their policies or personnel. There was none of that during the last two elections. The best one could hear was that Howard had to go. But to the question “How would the ALP be significantly better, rather than just slower in implementing Howard’s policies?” the usual answer was an embarrassed silence, or a feeble “But anything is better than having to listen to Howard.” In other words, even the ALP’s supporters don’t believe in the ALP. So why should the uncommitted support the ALP when even the ALP supporters don’t believe in the ALP as it is?
I’m praying that before this appalling week is over for Labor, at least one of the two contenders will give a speech about what he believes Labor stands for, and make a commitment to run the opposition, then the government, according to those core beliefs.
As I wrote in Our yearning for a voice above politics, the day before Howard rubbed Costello’s nose in the dirt, the man and his vision are very vulnerable. Costello himself pointed to Howard’s core weakness when he quoted back Howard’s implicit lie after he was appointed deputy to Andrew Peacock – that he would not challenge for the leadership.
The children overboard scandal proved that Howard is willing to lie to win office. His lie that he was not committed to war is fresher, and the now compelling evidence that the governments of the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia lied about their intelligence on Saddam’s WMD’s further sullies Howard’s credibility. In my opinion. Howard’s idea to gut the Senate shows he is at a stage in his career where he’s over-reaching himself, in this case by blowing apart his solid reputation as a constitutional conservative.
Both Crean and Beazley need to drink a cup of courage, name Howard’s sins for what they are, and pledge to the Australian people that they will tell them the truth, and that when they can’t, for whatever reason, they will refuse to comment rather than lie. They need to prove the quality of this commitment with policies to clean up accountability in government big time, and to let the people into the political process, not lock them out of it.
They also need to drink the cup of faith in the justice of their cause and the overall judgement of the Australian people and tell them how they see it and why. Sure, opposing a rebate for private health insurance is a hard sell, but it’s a matter worthy of detailed public debate. The Australian people deserve to have the arguments put to them so they know the longer term implications of a short term benefit.
And most importantly, Crean and/or Beazley need to trust that even if the Australian people disagree with them, they’ll respect them for having the courage of unpopular convictions.
I don’t think Beazley has leant any of the lessons of his failures. The fact that he’s backed by two of the most cynical machine men in Labor politics – Stephen Smith and Wayne Swan, the same men who helped devise the small target strategy – tells its own story. The fact that he denies to this day that he had a small target strategy – a strategy admitted by everyone else in the Party, including its officials – is terrifying.
For mine, unless Beazley makes a very big speech this week containing very big admissions of error, very big statements of core principles and very big commitments to take Howard on where it really counts – on policy – he doesn’t deserve another chance.
A Crean win could be the making of the man. He showed he’s got it in him when he gave his breakthrough budget reply speech. If he wins this ballot, he’s got nothing to lose by going for it. True, he’s not a great “connector”, but then again, neither was Howard until he became Prime Minister.
C’mon Beazley, prove you’ve got what it takes. Please.
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Today’s contributors to the leadership debate are Chris Zanek (a former Webdiary star making his comeback under cover of a nom de plume), John Carson, David Davis, Robert Nicoll, John Stickle, Imi Bokorand Peter Kelly. To end, a piece by SIEV-X whistleblower Tony Kevin on the contender’s records on the SIEV-X scandal.
Since Labor’s Big Brother is this week’s compulsory viewing, I’ll run as many of your contributions as possible for the rest of the week. I’d especially like your ideas on what core Labor values really are. It would be good if you could advise which party you support, so we all get a context.
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The Beazley Bubble
by Chris Zanek
As safe as houses they say. But recently I’ve been wondering just how safe houses are. How can a fragile fifty year old shell of asbestos cement and roofing tin three hours walk from the nearest train station really be worth thirty years of mortgage poverty? The Economist magazine says it’s a bubble and many domestic analysts agree.
I’ve been wondering about Kim Beazley too. Are those polling numbers just a bubble? All his talk about securing a future for the folks at their kitchen tables, the folks with their overstretched pay packets, their bills, and their fridge magnets makes him sound like a real estate agent. Crean’s public opinion numbers are as limp as the stock market the Beazley people say. By contrast Kim’s polling numbers look like bricks and mortar – a safe bet in an uncertain world.
But is the Beazley bubble about to burst? Maybe it’s time to short sell the big fella and buy up some Creanite loyalty while it’s going cheap. Or maybe there’s some asset class nobody’s bought into yet – something young with long term growth potential.
But then again, you shouldn’t listen to me. I’m the guy who said Howard was a dead cat bouncing… a rocket propelled cat with six lives to go was more like it.
So like everyone else without a stake in the market I’ll be sitting on the sidelines waiting to see how it all goes down. And down is where somebody’s headed. When the knives start to fall it’s time to watch your back.
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John Carson in Copacabana, NSW
My memories of the Beazley leadership are of a weak man who completely lost his way. His tactic on most issues was to criticise aspects of the policy of the Howard government and then, in order to avoid exposing himself to criticism from the government, to adopt the government’s policy as his own, perhaps with minor qualifications. This happened on the GST, on the capital gains tax, on the subsidy to private health funds, and on asylum seekers.
Regarding asylum seekers, I remember one incident in particular. In the sinking of the SIEV-X the mother from one family survived but her three daughters drowned. Her husband was the holder of a temporary protection visa in Australia, which meant he could not leave Australia to comfort his grieving wife without forfeiting his right to return. The Howard government refused to grant him special permission to visit his wife and Kim Beazley explicitly supported this decision. Even from the perspective of someone who felt strongly that illegal immigration needed to be deterred, this was an astonishingly inflexible and callous position to adopt. After all, by the granting of the temporary protection visa, the husband had been judged to be a genuine refugee.
In his concession speech after his second election loss, Beazley had the following to say:
“We have a nation with a capacity for a generosity of heart. Like any nation, there are dark angels in our nation but there are also good angels as well. And the task and challenge for those of us in politics is to bring out the generosity that resides in the soul of the ordinary Australian, that generosity of heart, so that we as a nation turn to each other and not against each other in the circumstances which [we] have.”
I can vividly recall my disgust at hearing these words. Did he not realise that he had done the exact opposite by supporting the Howard government’s refugee policy? Was he that lacking in self-awareness? Or did he believe that the expression of a few noble sentiments in defeat made up for the absence of such sentiments while he was leader?
Beazley has proved that he is not up to the job as leader. He should not be given a second chance. Simon Crean has shown some admirable strength on occasion and the ALP vote seems to be holding up, even if the voters don’t like Crean himself. He is certainly a better choice than Beazley. It is to be hoped, however, that some other candidates will present themselves.
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David Davis in Switzerland
The leadership situation in the Labor Party is a joke. Some of the stuff both Beazley and Crean have been saying has been truly laughable. Beazley carries on as if he was an enormous success when he was leader. The only time I ever saw him deliver in a convincing manner was when he made his concession speech on election night. That one seemed to have conviction.
I reckon that came about because the nightmare was over for him. He was exhilarated because it was over. Most of the time he simply can’t be bothered with it because he truly is lazy and complacent. For the rest of his leadership period he was the kind of guy who was difficult to dislike but he could never have been regarded as inspirational or particularly original. I suppose that made him the opposite of Keating and why for some he was a welcome change.
As for Crean, no one wanted him in the first place. No one in the electorate that is. Ever since he was elected leader he hasn’t said much of interest. I never particularly liked him but the situation is so pathetic now that I actually find myself feeling sorry for him!
Think of that first Hawke government and the talent they had back then. Now fast forward to now. What a mess they are in.
As for Costello, I can’t figure out his surprise. There simply isn’t a reason for John Howard to hand over. Howard is popular, he is healthy. The problem with Costello is that he only appeals to people like me. I think he’s terrific and I would love to see him as PM. The problem is I’m atypical and don’t fit that beloved “Howard Battler” category that is so important to winning the elections. Appealing to people like me is worthless (in an electoral sense). His smaller L Liberal values will not get people switching from Labor or the Greens and they can only serve to alienate the “Howard Battler” group.
There will continue to be no comfortable home for economic and social liberals. Labor is a “me too” party, the Greens are too “out there” and the Democrats died some time ago.
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Robert Nicoll
From my position outside in the electorate, neither candidate for the Labor leadership ballot coming up is likely to appeal. Beazley had his chance, twice. Crean hasn’t come up with the goods. It’s time for someone who isn’t tainted with the past two elections and the current furore.
Coming up with good policy does not fit as fair dinkum for these two who avoided it for so long – it doesn’t appear real. Bring on a fresh face to implement the sound policies proposed in the budget-reply speech, and it will be taken as fair dinkum.
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John Stickle in Daglish, WA
Kim Beazley as a Lazarus-like leader? A leader who curled up into a ball like a hibernating bear during the last election campaign and declined to annunciate clear, accountable policies. I’d strike him of my cadastre of potential leaders.
The Labor Party has a proud history of politicians and statesmen who had a real job amongst average Australian wage earners before entering politics. Where are they now? Today we get apparatchiks who start their working life with the intention to become a politician and work their way through the rarified environment of trade union offices, electorate offices or political think tanks.
But then we get the politicians we deserve, a very depressing thought.
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Imi Bokor
You are right when you wrote in Labor’s least-unpopular election that the ALP “betrayed its followers” and that we need “a genuine, hard-fought alternative”.
The ALP needs to ask itself: If a voter is in favour of “economic rationalism” – an oxymoron par excellence – why would (s)he vote for Johnnie-come-lately wannabees rather than the established experts? If a voter is opposed to “economic rationalism” why would (s)he vote for self-confessed proponents of it? It’s a case of “Heads they win. Tails we lose.”
The statistics speak clearly. The last three Federal elections have seen the ALP’s support plummet to – and remain at – historic lows. It is NOT a question of who is the ALP’s candidate for the Prime Ministership.The problem does NOT lie with the PR facilities available. One simple observation gives the game away:
During election campaigns even ten years ago, tea-rooms, pubs, etc were abuzz with people arguing for the ALP’s cause, even if not uncritical of some of their policies or personnel. There was none of that during the last two elections. The best one could hear was that Howard had to go. But to the question “How would the ALP be significantly better, rather than just slower in implementing Howard’s policies?” the usual answer was an embarrassed silence, or a feeble “But anything is better than having to listen to Howard.”
In other words, even the ALP’s supporters don’t believe in the ALP. So why should the uncommitted support the ALP when even the ALP supporters don’t believe in the ALP as it is?
As to those with a commitment to the sorts of ideals and aims which were the basis of the ALP’s support until the Hawke-Keating years, the question the ALP needs to ask itself is: Why should any previous supporter of the ALP’s policies vote for the ALP when the enduring legacy of the Hawke-Keating years is to have made Malcolm Fraser look like a socialist?
These questions all have an obvious answer, and would not be needed to be asked if the ALP were serious.
I am confident that the coalition would have lost the last two elections if the number of “informal votes” could have been halved. I am confident that a large proportion of informal votes is from electors who refuse to choose between Tweedledum and Tweedledee, and don’t wish to pay a fine.
No PR-company’s opinion poll will reflect these simple home truths. The Democrats also fell victim to such “market research”. Before the last election, I spoke with NSW Democrats Vicki Bourne about the danger she was in. Vicki explained that the “party strategists” had done the “market research” and were confident that it would be a close victory for the Democrats in the fight against the Greens for the last Senate seat. I replied that while having Natasha Stott-Despoja as leader would certainly help a great deal, she had too little time to regain the confidence of the Democrat supporters, and that her only effect would be to make the rout look like a mere defeat. I had listened to (by then former) Democrat voters and the overwhelming view was a sense of betrayal, specifically on the GST and Industrial Relations.
Well, you know what happened at the elections, and you see what has happened since the Democrats dumped Stott-Despoja. The ALP does to seem to realise that it is in an analogous situation, with NO potential leader to regain the lost ground.
Stott-Despoja’s appeal lay in her adhering to principles. Her principal handicaps were that she was young, an attractive woman, intelligent, vivacious and articulate. (This is a sad reflection on the Australian electorate!)
The ALP has no serious prospect until and unless it returns to what used to be the basic platform for its policies for about 100 years. Until then, it’ll continue to battle to maintain 30-33% of the primary vote, at best.
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Peter Kelly
I am not surprised by Howard’s decision. In late 2001 I said that Howard will be PM for at least another 10 years and I still believe this is likely, as much as I abhor his politics and his vision of Australia. I think the Tampa affair will go down as the event that most replicates the Petrov affair in the 50s, an affair that was masterly manipulated to good effect by Menzies and denied Labor any chance of winning government for at least 10 years. In the event, Labor did not attain office for another 20 years.
Then, it was “reds under the bed” and the “yellow peril”; the fear of communism, based in part on xenophobia, that split the Labor vote and the party. In 2001, it was and still is, a fear of refugees, also based in part on xenophobia and it will keep Labor from office for at least a decade. The sight of a carcass floating down the river with smoking ruins lining the river bank describes the Labor Party today.
Labor is damned however it responds and though the issue may become a sleeper, world events which give rise to the refugee issue will not cease and it can always be rekindled in time for an election. Howard can do this better than anyone else in the Liberal Party.
The Liberal government may have a soft under belly on domestic issues but who cares about budget deficits when “reffos” are going to “rape your wives, dirty the neighborhood, and crowd you out of your own home”. And Labor is unable to articulate domestic issues because Labor has lost its nerve and its credibility to act as a cohesive opposition. In short it has no sense of purpose and responds to the glare of scrutiny like a deer caught in the head lights.
I believe Howard is vain enough, and history aware enough, to at least want to be the second longest serving PM in Australia’s history, and he is in a position where he can choose to do this and then add some, there being no effective opposition. The Liberal Party cannot lose with Howard but it can possibly lose with Peter Costello and any other possible Liberal leader.
I have to agree that Beazley is the best chance that Labor has of gaining office, but if Beasley is the best hope Labor has then this is a sad statement on the state of the party. Labor has little chance of winning office with Beazley and no chance without him.
But who will vote for Labor? As much as I despise the Howard government I could not ever bring myself to vote for Labor. And Beasley would be a much too conservative PM for my liking. I see no chance of Labor changing the type of organisation it is today – a poll nervous, image conscious, small target, form over substance, top down machine capable of anything, up to and including, selling out refugees for votes. It is no longer my party. I only care because the alternative is, and has been, truly horrendous. Back to the 50s style censorship, and xenophobia, combined with brutal corporate friendly economics, from which the public gaze has been diverted with the efficiency of Herman Goering towards those “those who will harm us”.
The refugee issue comes down to a shyster pointing out with one hand those people over there who will harm you, while dipping the other hand into the pocket of the xenophobicly distracted.
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SIEV-X, Kim Beazley and Simon Crean
by Tony Kevin
For people who care about establishing truth and accountability for the deaths of 353 people on SIEV X, the current leadership challenge in Labor is of profound importance. It is also profoundly important to all Australians, whether ALP members or not (I am not), because it will define the political alternative to Howard that we are offered at the next election.
The SIEV-X story is a major litmus test in defining what Australia is now and what kind of Australia we will pass on to our children. If we as a nation and a political culture do not have the collective guts to face up to our national security authorities’ possible shared responsibility for the deaths of 353 innocent victims, mostly women and kids, whose only “crime” was to seek peacefully a safe refuge and new home in Australia, then there is little hope for our nation or for its much-vaunted “values”.
So let’s look at the current and past profiles on SIEV X of Kim Beazley and Simon Crean.
Beazley initially reacted strongly and humanely to the breaking news of the SIEV-X tragedy on 23 October 2001. He condemned it as a policy failure by the Howard government, in that they had not achieved effective arrangements with Indonesia to stop such asylum-seeker boats from leaving Indonesia. He said Labor’s regional diplomacy would have been more effective in stopping the problem at source.
When Howard reacted scathingly, claiming that Beazley was trying to score political points over a human tragedy, Beazley quickly went silent on the sinking . No doubt this was part of Labor’s prevailing “small target” electoral strategy. Since 18 September, when Labor agreed to pass all the anti-boat people immigration bills re-presented by Howard to Parliament, “the fight had gone out of Labor” (Dark Victory, Marr and Wilkinson, pages 155-156). In a comment to Marr and Wilkinson, Beazley recalls this phase of border protection:
“Nobody had been killed or beaten up or hurt in any way .. beyond a bit of jostling there hadn’t been anything of a particularly underworld character.”
This was 15 days into Operation Relex and three weeks after the tragic drama of the Palapas rescue by MV Tampa. The 400 people crowded onto the stricken “Palapa” had already narrowly escaped capsizing and drowning in an overnight storm, while Australia’s Coastwatch air surveillance had for 22 hours deliberately ignored their obvious distress signals. After MV Tampa’s rescue, their human rights had been grossly abused by Australian authorities, under the appalled gaze of a watching world. The first three SIEVs in Operation Relex had already been intercepted and the asylum-seekers on board treated cruelly and abusively by Australian Navy vessels at Ashmore Reef and on the troopship “Manoora” .
Of course most of this (except for Tampa) was still being kept secret from the public at the time. It dribbled out later, over a very long period. But we know from the “unthrown children inquiry” that from the time the election was called on October 5, Beazley as Leader of the Opposition in the caretaker election period was getting regular defence briefings from the Chief of the Defence Force, Admiral Chris Barrie. Operation Relex was the ADF’s top priority at the time, so one can assume that Beazley was being kept in the picture by Navy on how it saw Operation Relex as going. To judge by his comment quoted above, it was all pretty much OK by him.
Not only this: under normal arrangements for the election period, Beazley or his security-cleared staff would have been offered a selection of key national security and defence related cables each day. This means he almost certainly was briefed on the crucial 23 October 2001 cable from the Australian Embassy in Jakarta (released on 4 February 2003) reporting that SIEV X had sunk “up to 8 degrees south latitude” (which a glance at any map would show was far south of Sunda Strait, and well inside the announced Operation Relex area of operations), and “in the Indonesian search and rescue zone” (which extends to south of Christmas Island, ie covers the whole of the Operation Relex zone) .Yet at no stage did Beazley challenge Howards blatant public misrepresentations starting on 23 October that the boat had sunk “in Indonesian waters” and therefore “was not Australia’s responsibility”. Unless I am wrong on this, there seems a good chance that Beazley knew from the beginning these were lies.
According to Dark Victory (pages 242-243), Beazley kept silent when Neville Wran spoke passionately to a Party fundraiser in Sydney on 25 October on the tragedy of SIEV-X. Beazley declined to call on Howard to allow Sondos Ismail’s bereaved husband Ahmed Al-Zalimi to fly from Australia to Indonesia to comfort her over the loss of their three little daughters Zhra, Fatima and Eman. He did not want another front page lost to the drowned children. He said, “I was not going to give the government another days worth of debate on the subject.” (Dark Victory, page 243).
Dark Victory has many index references to Beazley, but perhaps these words on the final days of the election campaign best sum up M and W’s views, which concurs with my recollections of the period (pages 274-275):
“Beazley was convinced that every word he spoke about the asylum-seekers only helped John Howard’s election prospects. He was right because he had spent the whole campaign locked in step with Howards border protection policies.
“Beazley and his staff were angry that the press was once again dominated by stories from Operation Relex. They deeply resented church attacks on the party’s refugee policy and what they saw as the left-wing moralists in the party criticising their leader. Beazley’s rhetoric had often been as strident as Howard’s against queue jumpers and those “criminals who take advantage of our generosity”. He had tried to neutralise Howard on border protection while talking about the real issues .. jobs, health, education.”
Nineteen months later, it is clear that Beazley and his advisers still do not get it. The Labor Party knows now that Howard’s defence and other public service officials misled the unthrown children inquiry over many months, leading to a flawed exoneration of Australian authorities conduct over SIEV-X (see ALP Senator Cook, 5 February 2003, Senate Hansard pages 293-294).
ALP Senators Faulkner and Collins have pursued assiduously the subterfuges and deceptions in Government testimony since that inquiry report, and started to uncover what was happening in the AFP people smuggling disruption program. They know there are many very worrying “smoking guns” here. The Senate opposition parties and independents passed two major motions on SIEV-X on 10 and 11 December 2002.
Yet for 19 months, Beazley has not to my knowledge said a word on any of these matters. His office never replied to my repeated offers to brief him on SIEV-X. Now, when he again stands for Labor leadership, his June 6 press conference contains not a single word on such matters. His press conference strikes me as his 2001 campaign revisited. He played on the mantra word “security”, apparently assuming once again that he is talking to the same frightened and xenophobic Australian public as in October 2001. It is dog-whistle politics again, based on a strategy: “I can get us over the line into government, as long as I don’t have to talk about moral issues or refugees”.
The trouble is that Howard with his now corrupted and compliant national security apparatus, not to mention a cynically supportive Murdoch press, has the power to fine-tune the national security agenda to cook up whatever scare suits him, when it suits him. If Howard wants to frighten the electorate with another phoney border protection or terrorism scare campaign, he has the resources to bring this on. Beazley as a leader still clinging to his small-target strategy would face his 2001 agony all over again, trying desperately to get voters to focus on the “real” issues, while morally principled voters again deserted a silent Labor in disgust for the smaller opposition parties, and Howard again seduced confused voters with siren songs of national security.
Beazley would have no defence against such tactics, having again boxed himself in. In playing by Howard’s rules, Beazley would always be beaten by Howard. Beazley still naively imagines the next election may be a level playing field; but with Howard there, it will not be. It is now too late for Beazley to change course on this, even if he wanted to (and there is no sign from his June 6 media conference that he does).
Crean is very different. He is morally untainted by the refugee issue: he was not publicly prominent in this area up to October 2001. He dropped the unimpressive Con Sciacca and appointed Julia Gillard as a capable new migration shadow minister. She has proceeded cautiously, but she and Crean rightly went on the attack over children in detention. She brilliantly skewered Ruddock in Parliament last week over corrupted migration processes. Crean has given free rein to Labor Senators to pursue the truth on SIEV-X and to work with other parties for the crucial December 2002 Senate motions. He sustained with great courage a principled position on the unlawful Iraq invasion, and held off heavyhanded US Embassy pressure in a dignified way . His party has protested the cruel and unlawful detention without charge or trial of two Australian citizens by the US military in Cuba. He has in recent days sent a moving and appropriate message to the Jannah SIEV-X victims memorial website:
“The death of 353 people, mostly women and children, on the SIEV X was a shocking tragedy. The Labor Party joins with others in expressing our deepest sorrow and regret that this event occurred, particularly so close to Australia. It is a reminder that the evil trade in people smuggling is dangerous and unpredictable. Together we must work harder to put an end to people smuggling, and to hold those responsible for the SIEV X sinking accountable. This episode only strengthens our resolve to ensure that international human rights are respected and upheld.”
Simon Crean is thus laying the basis, albeit carefully, for a different kind of Labor politics that the electorate will see and appreciate.
Beazley has done none of these things. SIEV-X is off his screen. I don’t think he understands why it matters. I think that his view of Australia’s national security may be, at bottom, as limited and flawed as is Howards. It is all “boys with toys” stuff.
Neither Beazley nor Howard seems to understands that national security has to start with one basic idea – Australians should behave with decency towards our fellow human beings, whatever their race, religion, nationality, or present circumstances. Howard’s government violates that idea every day by its actions and rhetoric. Beazley violates it by his deafening silences. Crean is showing that this is an ideal he aspires to as Labor’s leader.
That is why I pray that Crean holds the Labor leadership, and that he will have a chance after this challenge to consolidate Labor’s alternative views on moral issues that matter, as well as on “the real issues” of jobs health and education. And I hope his parliamentary party as a whole will get down finally to supporting him.