The reaction was immediate. ‘The gloves are off,’ declared Murray, threatening to cut the support the Randwick Labor Club automatically provided to the local member without even convening a board meeting to discuss this unprecedented action. The cardboard cut-outs proliferated and a public rally to denounce the government’s plans was scheduled to take place at Souths Juniors, the Taj Mahal of gambling meccas in the local area.
The umbilical cord between the clubs and the party was now clearly visible. Most of the leaders of the pro-pokies push were current or former Labor office-bearers. The clubs were generous donors to candidates. In fact, a ClubsNSW representative had given me an envelope containing a cheque made out to my electorate at an early meet-the-candidates event for NSW MPs. When I realised what it was I gave it back.
A number of local Labor colleagues joined the rally and when the time came for me to take the stage at Souths, facing a sea of angry faces bussed in and holding ready-made signs saying ‘Hands off our club’ and the like, my isolation was complete.
Support for the proposals in the Caucus had moved from lukewarm to freezing: a rational position given that most members in NSW seats were battling to hold their vote in an already-hostile political environment. Rudd was reported to have sent a signal to the clubs that, if returned to the leadership, he’d take a softer line, despite having earlier confessed to hating poker machines. The Australian Hotels Association, meanwhile, sent letters to school principals listing the projects they funded, but double counted some to make their contribution seem more generous.
Labor was too reliant on the clubs—some of which were their own—for patronage and support. The political will to see such a difficult issue through simply wasn’t strong enough to withstand the weight of opposition, including from within. The reform sputtered out, with weak legislation introduced that would achieve nothing. It could not have ended any other way.
A subsequent straw poll of Kingsford Smith voters found a majority in favour of the reforms and against poker machines. There is still plenty of support for sensible anti-gambling measures in the suburbs.
Later on, the Randwick Labor Club—the spiritual home and headquarters of Labor in the area since former member Lionel Bowen’s mother had founded the club in 1963—removed ‘Labor’ from its title to become the Randwick Club.
Later still, I informed Ken Murray I wouldn’t accept any donations from the club for the upcoming election. It wasn’t pride or payback; I just felt ill at the thought that a once-great political institution had fallen so far. I didn’t want to be part of its further decline.
…
There were still plenty of good people around willing to stand their ground and act on their values, but would they continue to choose Labor? As our second term ground on, it was becoming harder to tell.
Some branch meetings of party members suggested it was all over. Monday nights were set aside for these gatherings, even though it was the one night of the week people preferred to stay in, and despite my suggestion that branches might stagger their meetings so they didn’t all take place on the same evening. And so my routine when home in Sydney was simple: drive across the electorate at breakneck speed and try to visit as many meetings as I could before they packed up and turned in for the night.
I’d start at the southern end and work north, beginning at an ugly 1960s-style community centre in Matraville that had seen better days. A tired-looking punching bag hung in the front room, and leaves and litter blown in from the street lay in piles along the corridors.
In the meeting room, a handful of middle-aged, down-at-heel members, part of Botany mayor Ron Hoenig’s machine, would sit glumly, waiting for the local member to arrive. Through the prism of the past week’s talkback wisdom, spiced with their ingrained prejudices, they’d listen to my report, including the latest twists and turns concerning refugees, the fate of budget measures and whatever else was making news: arms crossed, brows furrowed, heads occasionally nodding. Arguments would sporadically break out across the table. Some nights people were so desperate to get home there would be no questions for me at all. The smell of a decaying political corpse hung heavy in the air, all the more so as the branch secretary worked at the morgue.
Then I’d set off to a Catholic school hall in Maroubra, home to the biggest branch in the electorate, run by two party godfathers, Ken Murray and Johno Johnson. Bob Carr was also a member. Between serving as NSW premier and as a senator in the federal parliament, he showed up one night to argue the toss on nuclear power (Bob was in favour) when I was giving the member’s report.
After we volleyed points back and forth for ten minutes to no discernible end, the branch president called us to order with a reminder to the faithful who’d come out on a cold Monday night that, in any other circumstances, ‘You’d have to pay big dollars to hear a debate like this, so please thank Bob and Peter for their contribution.’ Faint applause.
Typical issues of the week would again be traversed: Afghanistan, biosecurity, David Hicks, disability policy, the intricacies of the proposed school funding model, the Obama visit and an assortment of other topics. Some members of this branch had taken exception to my stance on gay marriage; one had even sent a letter via the media detailing the reasons why gay marriage was a threat to our way of life and demanding a rethink on my part or else. ‘Garrett faces a mutiny’ the local rag screamed before it hit the recycling box—the member in question was in thrall to a church that had lost sight of its mission.
The questions were usually perfunctory, occasionally pointed if a nerve like gay marriage had been touched. But debate was contained, the meeting was always well run, the membership books were closely guarded and the machine rolled on.
Then I’d dash out and tear up to the School of Arts hall at Coogee, to a branch populated by party activists, long-time union members and a smattering of professionals.
Here the branch meeting was alive and cooking, with members active in local issues and closely following the national debate. The spirit of genuine inquiry I encountered here was an elixir as I addressed thoughtful questions concerning the education reforms and the progress of election promises. Passions ran high and the question-and-answer session would usually veer off into a free-ranging discussion on how to achieve a fairer nation and what progress Labor was making in that task.
The heart of the party was still beating. I could feel its pulse in this room, and in a handful of others across the electorate. It helped keep me blazing away day in and day out, waging crazy peace, attending to the things I had some control over and not fixating too long over those I didn’t.
…
This energising pulse was difficult to find at the biennial ALP National Conference held in December 2011 at the Sydney Convention Centre.
In theory, the conference was Labor’s pre-eminent decision-making body, a place where the whole party got together to decide its future direction and sign off on policy. In practice it had become a ritual event with decisions determined in advance by the factions and powerful voting blocs controlled by the union movement.
On the agenda for this meeting was a motion moved by Julia Gillard to relax party policy and allow sales of uranium to India, notwithstanding its continuing refusal to sign the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, known as the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), or give any real guarantee that Australian uranium wouldn’t end up as part of India’s nuclear weapons program.
The conference wouldn’t roll the leader and the numbers had been locked in, although the vote was closer than expected. Three cabinet ministers opposed to the change—myself, Stephen Conroy and Anthony Albanese—took to the stage to argue the no case. David Bradbury and a couple of other activists had snuck into the hall and were heckling from the wings.
The rejoinder from those pushing to change the policy was that adequate safeguards would be part of any agreement. These were hollow words given the history of uranium exports, but all the more so as the final agreement—conclu
ded in 2014 by the Abbott government—didn’t include any substantial controls, and India skipped away laughing.
This was yet another example of how negligent senior Australian politicians can be on such an important issue, and how urgent it now is to push for a nuclear weapons treaty to eradicate the threat of these monstrous armaments once and for all.
…
After defeats like this, it was important to focus on the positive changes we were making. For the majority of our second term of government, we were fixed on the school funding changes. Whether parliament was sitting or not, wherever I happened to be, there would be daily meetings or phone hook-ups to track the progress of the Gonski/early childhood education reforms campaign.
A departmental task force, led by secretary Lisa Paul, was responsible for refining the model and conducting the bulk of negotiations—no mean task. In time a second task force involving the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet would become involved as well. Working from information laid out on a huge matrix running over multiple pages, various components of the task would be discussed and analysed with senior officials, and actions determined. This included media strategy, timelines for the outreach campaign, progress of legislation and negotiations, public appearances and so on, and was revised and updated daily. This was the only way to keep abreast of the many-headed beast we needed to tame.
In the midst of this activity an urgent issue arose seemingly from nowhere, in a brief sent up from the department without any prior warning—an occupational hazard faced by ministers since time immemorial. It concerned a case that had been taken to the Human Rights Commission by Tobias Nganbe, an elder and teacher from the Wadeye community, one of the largest towns in the Northern Territory, and a place where Midnight Oil had played aeons ago. Nganbe had argued that the Commonwealth government, the Northern Territory administration and the Northern Territory Catholic Education Office were guilty of historical neglect of the community, resulting in chronic underfunding of their schools. And he had a point. The Wadeye claim was now outstanding, and was being pursued by Melbourne law firm Arnold Bloch Leibler, which had provided its services pro bono and could now sniff victory.
I met with a delegation Nganbe led down to Canberra, which included a familiar face—William Parmbuk, the skinny gig-crasher and anti-alcohol activist, now in his early forties and still active in community affairs at Wadeye. These leaders weren’t belligerent, although they had every right to feel aggrieved, but their patience had worn thin and they wanted resolution. So did I, and after numerous discussions to see how we could rejig available resources and source some extra funds, I visited Wadeye determined to work something out.
Flying in, I could see below us a patchwork of tracks leading to a huddle of roofs, with a single road winding eastwards across the vast expanse that surrounds the town. Remote it might be, but Wadeye deserved to have its voice heard, and we would need to use the short time we had well.
As was often the case, the only way to push things through was to ask departmental officials to leave the meeting, and with the air cleared of complex language and caution, I promised Tobias that the government would make amends, that a genuine commitment to the community and the programs that worked on the ground would now be forthcoming. With that undertaking in place I was sure we had a good chance of settling the case.
Eighteen months later we signed the agreement at a special ceremony in Melbourne, characterised by senior Age journalist Michael Gordon as ‘the shaking leg of happiness’.
Tobias Nganbe, exhausted by the struggle, smiled at me and said, ‘Now we can move ahead.’
My last visit to Wadeye was to commemorate the signing and inspect a new boarding school that had just been completed with Commonwealth support. We stayed overnight, sleeping in shipping containers that had been turned into modest accommodation. A concert had been scheduled to coincide with our visit but I only lasted an hour. Lying on a camp stretcher I could just hear the opening chords of ‘Beds’ echoing off the walls of the new community hall, and then William took the mike and started singing with great gusto. I fell asleep before the second verse.
The next morning we posed together for photos on the site of the stage where we’d danced together twenty-eight years earlier, before I rushed back to Canberra. There we were doing a different kind of dance, a daily corroboree with our sleeves rolled up that would take us through to the end.
35
ARE WE THERE YET?
THE DIARY I carried around with me was for the most part filled with meeting reminders, interspersed sporadically with random notes. I tried to at least make brief entries recording the weather, as the tundra kept evaporating and glaciers were melting before our eyes. Dangerous climate change hadn’t gone away. Every couple of days there was another article or a further piece of research: climate chaos, arguably the biggest and most confronting issue of our times, still there.
So it was a red-letter day when finally, in Labor’s second term, the first faltering steps to reduce carbon pollution were taken. At early cabinet meetings I’d warned my colleagues that the very modest targets being proposed wouldn’t keep global warming in check. Still, we had to start somewhere. The beauty of the scheme was that it penalised big polluters, and used the revenue to support low-emissions businesses and technologies. That in turn would stimulate a climate-friendly economy and generate employment.
The climate bills were finally put to the vote by the prime minister on 13 September 2011: forty-three years after ACF’s Habitat magazine had featured the greenhouse effect on its front page, seventeen years after climate change was first addressed in policy by Labor, and seven years after I stood up for the first time in Caucus and urged the party to develop a strong climate change policy.
The week before the bill became law, scientists had pointed out that with greenhouse pollution continuing to increase, coral reefs—those wondrous, multicoloured reservoirs of ocean life—would be the first entire ecosystem to be destroyed by climate change, and it could happen in our lifetime.
A few scribbled lines in the diary read: ‘I’m hurting. I know what good things humans are capable of, and at the same time how incapable of acting in the planet’s and our interests we still are.’
Throughout the second term a redneck wonderland, urged on by the News Limited tabloids and given constant succour by the Coalition, had been in full flight. Tony Abbott welcomed first the ‘no carbon tax rally’ and later the ‘convoy of no confidence’ to Canberra. This was the so-called ‘people’s revolt’, spawned by the shock jocks and parasites who spewed dumb hate and saw the climate change debate as a cover for extremists, gays and greenies to take over the world.
Standing in front of signs calling Gillard a witch, Abbott was at home with the crowd. While he wouldn’t endorse everything they said, he could ‘understand’ their frustration and so the tone was set for the remainder of the government’s term.
Kevin Rudd, who’d been appointed foreign minister by Gillard, later announced from New York that he was resigning and coming home ‘in the interests of the country’. It would only be a matter of time before Rudd mounted several challenges for the leadership, and the eyes of the Canberra press pack were perpetually squinting in his direction.
At close quarters it was too frustrating to watch: a tragic drama on repeat, while the core business of government, and a positive narrative that went with our reforms, was swept under the carpet. In the midst of the sourness permeating the political debate and lack of confidence in Labor’s project, it was important that we kept the flame burning on the home front. So in Kingsford Smith we organised a rally for a Clean Energy Future, and marched to Coogee Beach with a solid turnout and an absence of malice—a positive sign that there still was a wellspring of support for strong climate action.
More than ever, it seemed to me that getting the education agenda embedded was critical, for in the long run our polity—all of us—needed to grow up. A better-educated populace might see through the maj
or delusions that were holding Australia back: that climate change was a chimera; that the good times would keep on rolling; that in a global economy we could become isolationists when it suited us; that our region—with the rise of China—was benign; that we could have continued economic growth without seriously damaging our way of life; and, finally, that governments were responsible for everything that went wrong and had to provide for everybody, not only the poor and infirm, at all times.
The talk of the end of history, and the funeral rites commentators increasingly performed on democracy, were so much tosh: just witness the growing presence of civil society in many countries, and the increase in the number of democracies as well. While the major parties clearly needed rejuvenation, government would continue to be the central force in the political system. But the entitlement addiction that government had facilitated and that Australians had fallen prey to needed to be cured, so systemic change—that might create short-term losers but benefit everybody in the long run—could begin.
Part of the learning that a better education encompassed would be for every student to know something of how the current political system works. I got behind the Constitution Education Fund, led by my old friend the novelist and republican Tom Keneally, and Kerry Jones, an avowed monarchist who’d worked with Tony Abbott to derail the last push for a republic. Together they had developed excellent education materials for the classroom to deepen young people’s understanding of Australia’s democratic system, focusing on the constitution, on the premise that if we don’t understand it, we’ll neglect it.
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