The Howard government’s past misdeeds, most of which seemed at the time to be consequence-free, are catching up with it. The AWB scandal is an obvious example, with the important observation that the “Children Overboard” episode ensured that no-one (other than those wanting to be duped, unfortunately a large group) believed the government’s initial denials of knowing anything about the whole business.

Perhaps more serious, in terms of its consequences for Australia’s national interests is the dispute with Indonesia over the granting of temporary protection visas to 42 Papuan “illegals” (the term popularised by former Immigration Minister and current Attorney-General Phllip Ruddock.

Under the international law that prevailed in the past, these people would have been asylum seekers, with a wide range of legal rights.[1] If their cases had proved successful, the government could reasonably claim to be bound by treaty obligations. Now however, “we will decide who comes here and under what circumstances”. People fleeing Saddam Hussein and the war in Afghanistan have been pushed back to sea, to take their chances, or subjected to close and critical scrutiny, in a process with the presumptions all stacked against them.

So, assuming a consistent process is taking place, the decision to grant visas to the Papuans amounts to a judgement that the Indonesian government is far worse than Saddam or the Taliban, so much so that their illegal arrival can be disregarded. Not surprisingly, the Indonesians are not taking this at all well.
‘
The best thing the government could do for Australia is to admit that its actions in 2001 were a desperate and cruel, but successful, political manoeuvre, aimed at winning votes from a panicked electorate, and that nothing it said or did at the time should be regarded as part of our true policy. Almost certainly, that is the message being conveyed privately to the Indonesians, but what’s needed is some sort of public apology, and this is not a government that’s good at saying “Sorry”.

fn1. The process of stripping back these rights was started by Labor, but extended massively by Ruddock and Howard.

The few commentators who were suggesting that the Howard government did not (at the least) know the general facts about Australia’s collusion with Saddam Hussein in stealing $300 million from the Oil-For-Food fund, and encourage the AWB quango to do ‘whatever it takes’ to push the deal through, have gone quiet after the latest revelation that our intelligence agencies knew all about the racket.

Is there a coherent defence of the Howard government’s actions in helping Saddam fund his regime, including its military, while calling for, and eventually participating in, war against him? I think there is, though not one we’re likely to see avowed openly.
Read More »

With the news that Kim Beazley now has the support of 18 per cent of Australian voters, relative to the solid, but still unimpressive, alternative of John Howard, hasn’t the time come to bring his sorry political career to an end?

After a ministerial career distinguished only by longevity, and a series of failures as Opposition leader, the one thing Beazley had going for him was his reputation as a good bloke. Whether or not this reputation was deserved in the past, Beazley has trashed it by his support for the vindictive purges organised by the Victorian Right against independents and Latham supporters. Typically for Beazley, having done the wrong thing, he couldn’t even deliver the goods, as Simon Crean managed to convince enough of the voters stacked in by Conroy that they should think for themselves.

My first preferences for a replacement are, not surprisingly, Kevin Rudd or Julia Gillard. But I’d settle for anyone (except Conroy, I guess) who could muster a majority of the Caucus.

One of the points coming up in discussion of the ALP faction issue is the claim that while factions are destructive in the Federal Party they have worked well at a state level. I think this is the reverse of the truth. The faction system worked reasonably well at the Federal level throughout the Hawke-Keating years. At the state level, the system has been poisonous and destructive ever since it took its current form around the time of the Split in the mid-50s.

Full-scale factionalism has been most dominant in Queensland, NSW and Victoria. In Queensland, the AWU and Old Guard factions kept Peter Beatty and the reformers out for years, promoting instead a succession of hacks and no-hopers, most notably Keith Wright, later convicted of sex offences against young girls.

The NSW Right has been similarly dismal, failing miserably to beat the corrupt Robin Askin and losing horribly whenever it put up one of its own favored sons as a leader or contender for any position of substance (Pat Hills, Barrie Unsworth, Michael Lee and almost certainly Morris Iemma as well). Labor in NSW has only succeeded when outsiders like Wran and Carr (a member of the Right, but not a Sussex St hack) have managed to get the top job.

Victorian factions have been a source of grief and disaster for fifty years, and obviously nothing has changed. From Santamaria & Kennelly[1] to Hartley to Conroy, whatever the ideology, the style hasn’t changed.

Labor’s performance at the state level is, and always has been, inversely proportional to the strength of the factions.

fn1. I always remember my father describing how, as a returned serviceman, he joined the ALP (along with my uncle) in the hope of doing something for the good of the working class, and how Pat Kennelly (the “Kingmaker”) led them to quit in disgust.

Reading the comments thread, I notice a few themes that seemed familiar, and checking back I found this post from 2004, which seemed worth reprinting

Given that Labor obviously has to do something more than wait for the housing bubble to burst, one simple (but not easy!) organisational step would be to abolish factions. That is, membership of any organised factional grouping ought to be treated like membership of a rival political party, as grounds for automatic expulsion. Of course, it would be impossible to prevent informal or secret factions from operating, as they do in all parties. But, to my knowledge, the only major political party anywhere in the world with a faction system comparable to Labor’s is the notoriously corrupt Liberal Democratic Party in Japan, and even here PM Koizumi is largely independent of the factions.

There was a time (from the 1950s split to sometime in the 1980s) when the factional groupings corresponded to ideological divisions. But that has long since ceased to be true. It’s probably true that the average member of the Left faction is a little more likely to favor a ‘progressive’ line on social issues than the average member of the Right and Centre, but that’s about the strength of it. Each of the major factions is subdivided into smaller groups, often little more than extended families, with their retainers and servants.

Nowadays, the factions exist because they exist. No-one is willing to bell the cat. However, this is the kind of thing Latham could take on, and perhaps even win. It would certainly be more in his line than Simon Crean’s lame achievement of changing the union voting ratio from 60 to 50 per cent[1].

fn1. While I’m dreaming, I’d like an end to the formal link between the unions and the ALP. And a pony.

Julia Gillard and Simon Crean have both had good things to say about factions in the ALP lately. As Gillard observes, it’s no longer factions but fractions.

This would be a good time for Gillard in particular to put her arguments into practice by proposing the dissolution of the Left faction in the Parliamentary party and, failing that, withdrawing from the group. It’s been at least a decade since the “Left” has had any distinct policy position, and unlike the Right, the faction doesn’t justify its existence by delivering the top jobs to its members. Far from providing effective opposition to the Right machine, the Left justifies the existence of the Right.

If, say, 40 per cent of the Parliamentary Party were independent of any faction, and agreed to vote against candidates generated by intra-party factions, it wouldn’t be hard to peel off enough members of the Right to bring the whole corrupt system to an end at the Parliamentary level. And if the Parliamentary leadership was anti-factional, their votes would control the National Executive and permit intervention to break the factions in the state branches.

It’s a while since I’ve done a full-length post on the AWB scandal, so I thought it might be time to see if anything surprising had emerged. Based on past experience, it seemed pretty clear that we could expect to find out that

1. Both Downer and Howard knew that the AWB was paying kickbacks to the Iraqi regime

2. This information was transmitted in a way that preserves deniability, so no conclusive proof will emerge

3. No government minister will resign

4. Endless hair-splitting defences of the government’s actions in this matter will emerge from those who have previously made a loud noise about Oil for Food.

The only surprise has been how thoroughly each of these has been confirmed.
Read More »

My opinion piece in yesterday’s Fin (over the fold) was about Ministerial responsibility, drawing on the discussion we had here. My central point was that Ministers should be esponsible for their own offices. That is, if a Minister’s personal staff are complicit in breaches of the law, or fail to act on information, the Minister should be presumed responsible for this.

Today comes the news that Howard’s office got a cable about the AWB scandal in 2000, but neglected to tell him about it.
Read More »

… how they knew what not to know

Peter Shergold, head of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet has stated what has long been apparent. The Westminster system, under which ministers are responsible for wrongdoing by their departments, is dead in Australia. Shergold says, in relation to incidents like the AWB scandal, that ministers should resign only if they ordered public servants to breach the law or “or if a minister had their attention drawn to matters and then took no action”.

Although Shergold apparently went on to deny this, it’s obvious that the current setup, in which ministers are screened by staff appointed on a basis of personal loyalty, ensures that ministers need never have their attention drawn to anything likely to compromise their position. Such information can always be communicated to a private secretary or similar staff member, who will judge what the minister needs to know and, more importantly, what the minister needs not to know.
Read More »