By Phillip Coorey
Gazing wistfully at last week’s national outpouring of unity by the ALP was the Opposition. It is in such woeful shape that it would be hard-pressed to organise a manure fight in a barn.
This week offers more joy, with Utegate to be given another airing. The ABC’s blurb for tonight’s episode of Australian Story invites viewers to: ‘‘Join Australian Story inside the office of the Opposition Leader as Utegate implodes.’’
As this column reported recently, an ABC crew had been trailing Malcolm Turnbull for some time and just happened to be in his Parliament House the day Utegate backfired.
One scene believed to have been included concerns the moment a Turnbull staffer, Tony Barry, reads on the internet that the federal police have raided Godwin Grech’s home and believe the email linking Rudd to favours for a mate was concocted.
His brain snap-frozen with fear, Barry Googles ‘‘concocted’’ just to make sure it meant what he thought it meant.
Also this week, the federal Auditor-General’s report into the Ozcar scheme will, among other things, confirm stories written at the time about Turnbull meeting Grech before the Treasury official testified to a Senate committee.
The Utegate reminiscence will do Turnbull no favours and will come against a backdrop of the Government ramping up the pressure on his leadership before next week’s vote on the emissions trading scheme.
Right now, Turnbull would love a bit of boring. Because boring, the term so often used to describe Labor’s conference, was just how Labor liked it.
After all, watching your footy team thrash the opposition is never boring.
While the old stagers in the press corps pined for the days of conflict, ministers, MPs and delegates did not mind one bit.
‘‘Dull is good,’’ pronounced one minister, a veteran of countless stoushes past, as he left the convention centre on Friday night.
Said another: ‘‘We’re actually in government rather than fighting each other. Isn’t that a nice change?’’
They were right. What we witnessed last week was an outbreak of unity and contentment, an alien concept to the Labor movement for so many years past, that was hard to find anyone really upset about anything.
Two old union lags, brawlers from the Left, were discussing the taboo topic of the three-day event – Kevin Rudd’s virtual non-attendance.
Rudd launched the jamboree on Thursday morning. His flimflam announcement about 50,000 alleged green jobs unravelled and overshadowed the key message, which was to warn against squandering power with rash and hotheaded behaviour. He urged all and sundry to be smart and knuckle down for the long term.
Then he left for a funeral in Canberra and went to another funeral in Melbourne on Friday. He filled in the rest of the time doing other business elsewhere and did not return to the conference until Saturday, to induct Bob Hawke as a life member.
One gained the firm impression that even if there were no funerals to attend, Rudd would have found reason to distance himself from an event he described as full of ‘‘high jinks’’.
Rudd is not a creature of traditional Labor. He is respected but not loved. His authority is such that the party’s parliamentary wing has almost absolute power.
The two unionists were debating whether Rudd had treated the conference with disdain or contempt when the older one noted: ‘‘Mate, he’s got rid of Work Choices and we’re going to get paid maternity leave. It’s only been 18 months. We’re not doing too bad.’’
The only real backroom debate that involved passion was that about gay marriage. Despite weeks of negotiation between the Left and the Right, a deal fell apart on Friday night, and was not sorted out until Saturday morning.
Gay marriage was never going to get a guernsey, nor even nationwide civil unions. Rudd had put his foot down in advance. But the incremental word changes to the policy – including the removal of gratuitous language, and the explicit definition of marriage as a union between a man and a woman – won by the Left were enough to keep the debate going. They cost plenty of blood and sweat behind closed doors.
It was the archetypal Left v Right issue but, as passionate and heated as discussion became, it never once threatened to boil over to tear at the fabric of the party or conference.
Contrast this to the 2000 conference when, in the depths of opposition, Kim Beazley and the ALP were having a reasonably successful event in Hobart.
So John Howard lobbed a holy hand grenade by saying he would ban IVF for lesbian couples. The factions took the bait, the Right went especially nuts, Beazley couldn’t keep a lid on things, and the conference fell apart amid backbiting and cussing.
Not a bit boring.