OPINION
1. That Labor is committed to reform
In the darkest moments, you can always find gallows humour. That was surely the intention of Sam Dastyari yesterday when he implied that he – general secretary of the NSW Labor Party, machine boss installed by the NSW Right – wanted to reform the ALP and bury factionalism within what's left of the parliamentary party.
Sam, maaaaayte, you had me going for a moment, bursting into peels of laughter, until I realised your call for reform and your appeal for unity over division was nothing but a rearguard action by an apparatchik in retreat.
You write of inviting disaffected Labor Party members back into the fold, and highlight the need for better quality candidates.
But nowhere do you mention the most important reform of all: internal party democracy.
Nowhere do you commit to the primacy of democratic preselections. Nowhere do you guarantee that these disaffected members, whom you are so eager to woo back, will have the right to hire and fire local candidates – including poor performing sitting members and ministers – at rank and file preselections every four years.
Nowhere do you assure members that a policy resolution that is moved by a local branch and that passes through a considerable number of tripwires – state and federal electorate councils, policy committees, state conferences and national conferences – will become binding party policy.
Your suggestion that ALP members walk the streets gathering signatures for a petition to parliament is just another example of using the rank and file for grunt work. It's all take and no give. In short, Sam, nowhere do you make it worthwhile for any citizen interested in public policy and committed to mainstream social democratic values to join the Labor Party.
If you were really serious about reform, here is a way you could achieve your three objectives – ending factionalism, respecting members and bringing more talent into the parliamentary party – in one swoop.
When Eddie Obeid retires from the Legislative Council as expected in the next few weeks, cancel your deal to install the former premier's chief of staff, Walt Secord, in the casual vacancy. That's right, break your promise. Your party had little trouble breaking promises to the electorate over power privatisation and public transport, so why honour a commitment to a Labor spin doctor?
Instead, conduct a rank and file ballot of all ALP members in NSW and allow them to choose Labor's replacement. Labor members of the upper house should bring with them a particular constituency or a specific talent. Mr Secord – affable as he is – brings neither. A broad rank and file ballot may bring forth the top economist or lawyer needed to match the considerable talent on Barry O'Farrell's frontbench and, now, backbench.
Such a move, Sam, would prove your reformist credentials.
2. Labor lost because John Robertson and the unions blocked the privatisation of the NSW power industry
Predictable as ever, the embittered former NSW premier, Morris Iemma, was out there yesterday arguing that John Robertson should not become the new leader of the Labor Party because, as secretary of Unions NSW, he led opposition to the sell-off of publicly owned electricity assets.
Iemma's self-serving narrative is beloved of right-wing columnists and editorial writers, who overlook one simple fact. The Labor government's problem did not begin when the ALP conference – which comprises delegates from unions and the party membership – voted against privatisation. The problem began when Morris Iemma and his treasurer, Michael Costa, flirted with privatisation in the first place.
An analysis of the opinion polls by the ABC election expert Antony Green for the NSW Parliamentary Library shows that in January 2008, as Iemma and Costa made plain their determination to privatise, Labor's poll ratings dipped to 34 per cent and continued heading south.
Remember, Iemma and Costa had no mandate whatsoever to sell off a publicly owned asset. Quite the opposite. Before the 2007 election, Iemma had given assurances he would not privatise. The pro-privatisation elites seem unable grasp the truth that opposition to privatisation was both deep and broad and that, on this occasion, John Robertson, the unions and the Labor rank and file reflected public opinion.
Nor do they understand that what ultimately doomed power privatisation was the decision of Barry O'Farrell and the Coalition to vote against it in parliament on sound economic and democratic grounds.
It was the decision of the Keneally government – urged on by Costa's successor as treasurer, Eric Roozendaal – to resurrect the privatisation, botch the deal, then prorogue parliament to prevent public scrutiny that turned a garden variety landslide into Saturday's rout.
It is an indisputable fact that in 1997, when then premier Bob Carr and his treasurer, Michael Egan, presented their own plan to privatise power, the Labor Party conference, by voting down the proposal, saved a poor-performing first-term government from defeat at the 1999 election. The Coalition's promise to sell power cost it dearly at that election, as Carr has acknowledged.
There is zero evidence that resistance to power privatisation cost Labor the election.
3. The Carr years were Camelot for Labor
On election night, a long-time Bob Carr staffer, Graham Wedderburn, suggested that any review of Labor's defeat should study only the last four years in power. He wanted to insulate the Carr government from scrutiny and criticism.
Now, credit where it's due. The Carr government can boast landmark achievements in the preservation of natural wilderness, superior literacy scores in public schools, and improvements in child protection. But on public transport and urban policy, the Carr government was an abject failure. Carr announced transport masterplans in 1998, 2001 and 2005, then discarded them all.
His ''Action for Transport 2010'' plan promised eight rail lines in Sydney but he delivered just one half of one project – the Chatswood-Epping half of the Chatswood-Parramatta line – $1 billion over budget and three years late. Carr now complains that had his 2005 plan been implemented by his successors, Labor would have been in better shape, ignoring the obvious irony: why didn't Carr implement his own 1998 and 2001 plans before quitting in 2005?
His bizarre proclamation in 2000 that ''Sydney is full'' became an excuse to under-invest in mass transit, as if urban congestion and ever-slowing commute times would deter new migrants.
If there was one issue that was emblematic of the failure of Labor's 16 years in office it was public transport – and for that the blame rests squarely with Bob Carr.
Andrew West is a senior reporter at The Sydney Morning Herald and the author of two books on Australian politics and culture, including a biography of the former NSW Premier, Bob Carr. Disclosure: Between 1985 and 1996, he was a member of the ALP
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