The most significant Australian election of modern times was in… 1998, when Kim Beazley went down to John Howard, the Bomber gaining a mere 50.9% of the two-party-preferred vote. Whaaaaaaat? Yes, Howard retained the prime ministership with only 49.1% of the vote, suffering a massive hit over the GST but still winning 13 more seats than Labor, 80 to 67.
The reason usually cited is Labor’s rotting old factional system delivered so many duff candidates, selected through stacked branches and dealmaking at the top, that it saw a plunging vote in electorates where this fresh meat was stored, thus distorting the vote spread. Had better Labor candidates pulled the vote back, Beazley would have been prime minister during 9/11. He would have, within his own very right Laborist politics, handled it magnificently — Labor would have taken the mantle of wise foreign policy leaders, and Howard would have gone down in history as a ghastly error by a desperate party. History is a [redacted].
Thus to Bill Shorten, the coming man always and the great never was. He is slipping from history before our eyes, ground between the smooth stones of events. Twice opposition leader, exiled to the minor ministries during government, he is already being forgotten, a victim of the supreme paradox of ambition: the greater the height, the further the fall.
He has achieved more than most of us will in changing peoples’ conditions, for better and worse. Yet his life looks like a failure and an absurdity due to the frenetic, futile hustling to become prime minister that ended in an overpaid sinecure running an educational establishment, which is pretty much Yass Tech.
He was a “faction man”, as dubbed by David Marr in his mostly uncomprehending essay on Shorten, a boy and then an adult within the affinity groups of ambition that replaced the actual factions in the 1990s. Born in student politics, based on university clubs and youf networks, the fragmentation of factions favoured psychologically flawed individuals with a need to manipulate others, conspire against all and gather people unto them.
They set up a process where, with a few exceptions, even the vestigial intellectual policy activity of older factions went by the board, and politics became a process of gotchas, drops and drop-ins. Labor was at war with itself for 25 years, but not as a clash of left and right titans; it was simply a blasted landscape of warlords, Mad Max read as a guide to politics. It has exhausted many, killed a few and driven thousands from the party. It has been instrumental in the success of the Greens, as people who would rather be in a workers’ party decided that (until recently) the Greens offered a chance to connect policy to politics without endless headbanging on microwars.
This sort of factionalising was the making and breaking of Shorten. He could not free himself from a crowd of cronies, who made the Mad Max crew look like a Methodist chapel tennis club. Whatever bound them all together, they have gone up and gone down with it. Those around Shorten made a play in his interests through the elevation of senator Kimberley Kitching, and then the use of her death for internal party warfare. This recent episode of internal sabotage of Anthony Albanese, plus an attempted takeover of the Transport Workers Union and the laying of the LGBTQIA+ census question boobytrap, was the last desperate act, defeated. Exit faction man, already become ghost. What a pointless waste of time and energy so much of it has been.
Now, it will happen again. As four or five seats become vacant or abolished in Victoria, the national executive is dropping in candidates who solve the party’s internal problems, while creating new ones in the — possibly imminent — election campaign. If increasingly fragmented electorates feel they are being taken for granted in a sort of party drone attack, “safe” and marginal seats will go in every direction. The fanger is not that the Coalition gets a majority, but that Labor loses its plurality so badly that the surviving teals have no alternative but to talk to Peter Dutton about forming government.
If that happens, it will be another moment in which Labor threw away its future for its petty internal ambitions and the failure of its members to bring to heel a privileged elite. Redux and on steroids, 1998.
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