Power Crisis: New Labor

Rodney Cavalier was Minister for Education in the NSW Wran and Unsworth Labour governments. After leaving politics, Cavalier has served on numerous committees and government bodies, as chairman of the Australian Language and Literary Council, on the Council of the National Library of Australia and as Chairman of the Committee for the Sesquicentenary of Responsible Government in NSW. He also spent two years as a journalist with the Australian Financial Review. Rodney Cavalier is currently Chairman of the Sydney Cricket Ground Trust. On Tuesday 19 October 2010, Rodney Cavalier addressed The Sydney Institute on his new book, Power Crisis, which deals with the political problems for NSW Labour.

POWER CRISIS – NSW LABOR

RODNEY CAVALIER

I was very confident that I would be the published author of books before I was 30.

Having never been a Marxist, I read George Orwell, mainstream political biography, texts on Labour history. My journal of preference was New Statesman. In the late 1960s, going into the 1970s, I was greatly taken with the new journalism as it emerged in the Esquire of that time, a magazine of great writing and long essays, unlike the magazine of that name of this day. One read The New Yorker wherever you came upon it.

I loved the writings of Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote. I was much impressed that what began as articles became the basis of books. I especially liked writing based on eye witness reportage, I appreciated the skills of a reporter in being there – partially involved or very involved, yet retaining the observer’s eye.

Witnesses to the event, conscious of an audience beyond the moment, may get to scratch the occasional note (often without looking down) provided that the movement of pen over paper does not alert others to their status as the presence of a reporter can be an issue. Whatever the notes taken, if any, the writers I admired built their accounts from memory shortly after. It was not stream of consciousness. As much as they could check facts, they checked. Exhaustively. Colour was not inserted at the expense of accuracy. The unverified perished.

Reading this writing was very influential on a bloke who was 20 and thereabouts. The books most influential were works of journalism exemplifying the journalist’s techniques. I cite:

George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia

Norman Mailer, Miami and the Siege of Chicago

Truman Capote, In Cold Blood

I enjoyed just as much tales of how the authors wrote their pieces.

At all meetings I kept detailed notes. Extraordinarily detailed really. Sometimes annotated afterwards. Party meetings, faction meetings, public meetings, meetings that I would swear under Oath did not occur.

At the same time as I was reading all of this – proof that you never read more than when you are hopelessly busy – I was finding that immersion in politics does not lend itself to public observations on what you are doing.

At all meetings I kept detailed notes. Extraordinarily detailed really. Sometimes annotated afterwards. Party meetings, faction meetings, public meetings, meetings that I would swear under Oath did not occur. Very occasionally I wrote these accounts up, usually to be read aloud to an audience of one or few, such as the late Jeff Shaw, when we gathered to discuss politics which was pretty well whenever we were not practising politics.

I kept a diary. It was disconnected. More gap years than diary. My diary as an expression of unbroken discipline began in June 1986 on that fateful day when Neville Wran advised the NSW ALP Annual Conference that he was standing down as Premier. On the stage that day, sitting behind Neville, I felt like the best part of my life was passing, I had not recorded in any sort of systematic way, I had to act now. From that day forward I kept a daily diary, written day by day, missed occasionally but not often.

Not fewer than 500 words per day, usually twice that output, 24 years of it, times 365 days, you can work out for yourself the volume of it all. Among it may be material of value. Certainly I have been able to mine those pages for my own purposes, settled disputes, saved one author from a certain defamation writ. A published chapter on the Wran Cabinet (Troy Bramston (Ed.), The Wran Era) is almost entirely drawn from my daily diaries. They were a far better source than any newspaper account.

That was because it was a chronicle. There was no agenda, no angles, no concern for a public reception. The subject matter was confidential. Very little ever reached the media anyway and that was the decision reached, not how Cabinet reached the decision or failed. The audience of the writing was me alone, except for a few occasions when Bob Carr and I offered readings to each other. The Cabinet entered the tale as one part of one person’s daily life.

Without being conscious of technique, I had chanced upon what a great writer had discovered for herself. On 20 January 1919, Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary words most apposite:

If I stopped and took thought, it would never be written at all; and the advantage of the method is that it sweeps up accidentally several stray matters which I should exclude if I hesitated, but which are the diamonds of the dustheap.

Before the diaries were my notebooks. My first large scale writings were the executive and campaign reports for the Fuller State Electorate Council and for Gladesville. John Faulkner borrowed these files for his speech at the SCG launch. I cannot bring myself to look. He noted that the shortest monthly report was 20 pages, one attained 47. This was on foolscap paper, small font – a word of which we were not aware. All of this for an audience of 11 delegates plus John Faulkner and Ernie Chaples.

Where this book begins is that blessed passage of years when Sally Ray presented the world with our children, Alison Elizabeth and Nicholas Ferguson Spofforth. When we moved to Bowral and joined the Southern Highlands Branch with a three-month-old. Sally later became Secretary. With her P&C background, she started a chatty newsletter in place of a bald meeting notice. I found it fascinating that people rang to say thanks. So I added some items of my own. People were grateful for the effort.

You cannot understand Australian Labor unless you understand what happened to the party in 1916 over conscription. The ALP has recovered from Lang, it has recovered from the Great Split of the 1950s, it has not recovered from conscription.

Then Sally went and got herself pregnant again and felt the need to stand down. I became secretary of the Branch for the usual reason – no one else was willing. A one-page newsletter was my inheritance. Two pages it remained for a good while, then four. I started to chance my arm beyond branch doings, then beyond politics. I broke four pages. Eight was not sufficient. Nor 12. The breakthrough piece was a very long essay on Bradman, Bowral and the First World War that pushed the journal out to 36 pages. My source was the holdings of the Southern Mail held by the Berrima District Historical Society for the years of the Great War. I invested days then weeks scrolling microfiche as the tragedy of Gallipoli, the Western Front, the campaign for conscription unfolded in front of my eyes.

The research and the writing of those long days provide the skein of this book. You cannot understand Australian Labor unless you understand what happened to the party in 1916 over conscription. The ALP has recovered from Lang, it has recovered from the Great Split of the 1950s, it has not recovered from conscription.

Essays are not a book. Good people pleaded with me there is a book here. I replied: “Apart from you and me and John Faulkner, who is interested?”

Maybe they were right.

This book began as a serial. Very nineteenth century. An essay which might have stopped after the first and only instalment became a story that kept on unfolding. In February 2008 the media was overdosing on the salacious possibilities of a story of a blonde, sex and bribes at Wollongong City Council. At the same time, inside the papers, was a story that the NSW Government was going to proceed with the sale of the State’s electricity industry and was not, this time, going to brook a decision to the contrary by the NSW Annual Conference, the ALP’s sovereign body.

If the Iemma Government was truly bent on defying Conference, then this was a story for the ages. I wrote an essay. “Forget Wollongong: Electricity is the potential Government killer”.

Conference, being sovereign, can direct a Labor Government to do or not do whatever Conference decides. This is a principle of Labor’s governance that goes back to the party’s beginnings in 1891. The question was settled beyond doubt in 1892 at the first state conference. Conference in 1894 introduced a Pledge which bound every Labor candidate to vote as Labor in Conference decided. Every candidate standing for the ALP in all the years since, each and every time they seek selection, must sign that Pledge. It is an obligation as solemn and binding as any Oath made to God. Over the years the obligations of the Pledge have been enforced regardless of the cost, most terribly in 1916 over conscription.

By next year the McKell model will be 70 years old. NSW Labor will have been in power for 52 of those years.

A second essay, the story very much alive, explored the fundamental question of Labor governance – who decides? For the express discomfort of the Catholics in our ranks, I drew an extended parallel with the needs of Henry VIII for a male heir and the insistence of the Church in Rome that a divorce was not lawfully possible. I had a lot of fun noting that no good Catholic could but identify with the party against the designs of a wilful ruler.

The McKell model of NSW Labor governance was created by William McKell, NSW Premier 1941-47, expressly to resolve the tensions between Labor in government and the ranks of party members and union officials who made that government possible. The core principle of the McKell model is that Labor governments must be able to govern without interference from the party. The corresponding obligation on the parliamentary leader is to manage the State and the party not as separate but as indistinguishable responsibilities of equal importance. The model served NSW Labor for 24 years 1941-65 under five premiers, served Wran and Unsworth for another 12, then for all of the ten years of Bob Carr. By next year the McKell model will be 70 years old. NSW Labor will have been in power for 52 of those years.

The events of 2008 broke the model. I was arguing that the end of the model would end a lot more than a premier or a Labor government. The known political universe would not be the same without the model. So it has proven. So next March it will come to pass.

The Annual Conference, May 2008, was one of the more explosive of modern times. Factional divisions meant nothing. The party machine, affiliated unions and fairly well all the delegates from electorate councils voted against the proposals of the Iemma Government on electricity by a margin of 702-107. A narrative of that event, laced with historical background, constituted the third essay. Which your Stephen Matchett was kind enough to compare to Robert Caro’s history of the filibuster in the US Senate – high praise indeed. I had attempted to describe politics as theatre. By reporting character and movement as it was happening or soon after, I hope that I captured an immediacy that provides a counter-point to the pace of the rest of the book. Of the Newsletter essays this was the least changed for the book.

When the government defied an express direction of Conference, a fourth essay explored the consequences of defiance. Both sides of Labor’s war now depended on the attitude of Barry O’Farrell and the Coalition parties. We were in Looking Glass Land: the Labor movement was lobbying the conservative opposition to protect it from the legislative designs of a Labor government.

With so much at stake, Morris Iemma had dared mightily, Morris had placed everything on the line, Morris had lost everything.

Expecting that the leadership of Morris Iemma was coming to an end, I explored in a fifth essay the mechanisms by which NSW Labor had changed leaders since 1939 with particular attention to the intricacies of 1973 when Neville Wran stood for the leadership and won at his first meeting of caucus in contrast to the knuckle-headed handling of the succession to Neville under the stage of the Sydney Town Hall 13 years later. I was suspecting another change was imminent.

The fall of Morris Iemma in September required an examination of the detailed planning involved in the plot, ascribing authorship and motivation. People were completely frank after the fall in what they had done though, curiously, players prefer not to be named as source when the context reveals that the only possible source for the actions and motivation of the person named is the person named.

Then and only then did I think there might be a book in all these words. It is rare in politics to have an issue resolved so neatly. With so much at stake, Morris Iemma had dared mightily, Morris had placed everything on the line, Morris had lost everything.

I discussed the prospect of a book with Tony Moore of Cambridge University Press. He agreed. That was October 2008. We thought fondly at the beginning that a book would be little more than stapling the essays together with a few connecting threads. That was not so.

For a work that I intended to be a serious academic study as well as a rattling good yarn, I realised that the history of the founding of the Labor Party in NSW needed telling inside the prism of the tragedy of 2008. As it turned out, a third as much again needed writing to bring the story unto 1939, a great deal of context was needed to explain the rise of Morris Iemma – conventional biography – then the trouble he entered as soon as he pulled off a remarkable victory in the state election of 2007.

Nathan Rees’ leadership was in trouble from his first week; he was confronting a cavern of black treachery.

For a writer who loves the words he has created, I had to face up to the creative destruction of so much that I had written because the repetition essential to a serial is not necessary in a book. Nor was the style and the tone of insiderness.

Politics did not keep still. A few lines on how Nathan Rees was coping by way of an epilogue was becoming a whole new, vital story. The undermining of Nathan revealed what NSW Labor had become in graphic etchings. Nathan Rees’ leadership was in trouble from his first week; he was confronting a cavern of black treachery. A book published in the beginning of 2009 was a story half untold. The book could not start until the leadership of Nathan Rees was determined which was likely to be before Christmas 2009 though there was no certainty about that or any other date.

If Nathan survived 2009, he was likely to survive until the state election. Staging Annual Conference in November brought on the end-game, the authority Nathan sought and gained and how he exercised it ensured the end was swift. The fall of Nathan brought the book to a definitive end.

A sub-theme of this book is the failure of the media to grasp the story. They had not a clue about the significance of the Pledge to the Labor stalwart and no interest.

Finishing the book, unlike the subject matter, was neither swift nor surgical. I certainly possessed a vast body of writing. I had an ending. I had interviews with the plotters, I had interviews with Nathan and his circle. The reports in the newspapers were of value only in explaining the case of the government – which newspaper reports did most faithfully – in a caricature that assumed all virtue was with those who would privatise.

In the Parliamentary Library, I read every cutting. My purpose was not for information. My purpose was to assemble a catalogue of reported certainty that Morris was safe as houses. A position unchanged and unchanging up to the eve of his fall.

A sub-theme of this book is the failure of the media to grasp the story. They had not a clue about the significance of the Pledge to the Labor stalwart and no interest. The obligations of Labor members of parliament contained in the express wording of the Pledge did not get a guernsey, not when the central line of the reportage across all the media was a heroic story of “elected government takes on self-interested union leadership”. I tremble about historians relying on daily newspapers for any understanding of the workings of our major parties.

My account had its own gap. It was huge. I had not spoken to Morris Iemma. Certainly, I had listened to Morris at Conference, conversed with him at the SCG, read every word reported. Was that enough? I thought not. Approaching a bloke whose career was in ruins was not a likely prospect. Likely or not, I had to make that approach and deal with the response. Serious delicacies here, a likelihood of rebuff, but these things have to be done. Reconstructing the fall of Nathan was project enough for Christmas 2009. At the Pakistan Test at the SCG, Kevin Greene (Minister for Sport) sought my opinion on appointing Morris Iemma to ecclesiastical responsibilities as a Trustee of the Sydney Cricket Ground. I had one question, the one I always ask: Does Morris want this appointment?

More than anything he has ever done. I expected no less. Having a Trustee who was the main character in a book written by his Chairman certainly was going to make for an interesting chemistry. The matter of the book I explained. We had a private welcome lunch for Morris, and I broached what I had written and what I hoped yet to do. Morris there and then rattled off explanations on what had occurred through 2007-08. With not a notebook, I listened. With not a note taken, I was enthralled.

Could he repeat this feat of memory in front of someone scribbling away? Would he? He would. In the cafe by the pool at the SCG, Morris and I sat down. I threw him the same questions as at the restaurant lunch and he recounted every nuance of what he had said previously. It was awesome.

One interview intended to round out sentences already on the page, an hour or so maybe, went for several hours. Morris advised a mutual friend he thought I might have more questions and I should not hesitate to contact him. Note that we were still at a stage of wariness. He knew well I had taken a different view on electricity, the arc of my narrative was not sympathetic to his government.

To ask Morris about his Pledge and his intentions following the Conference direction was a question about as difficult as ever I have put to anyone. The question hung heavily in the air.

We met again. Then again. I checked details in phone calls that went on. Face to face we explored what happened. The interviews passed 11 hours. Asked about when the General Secretary put it to Morris that it was time for him to stand aside, Morris affirmed almost every detail of what the General Secretary and his friends had told me. Almost always, Morris denied the central interpretation of his enemies. Invariably, he confirmed that an exchange had taken place at and where I had been told. I noted in my notes on sources:

Other conversations will confirm, enhance or undermine an earlier conversation. Honest witnesses to the same event will have a different recall, what was central to one was peripheral to others.

To ask Morris about his Pledge and his intentions following the Conference direction was a question about as difficult as ever I have put to anyone. The question hung heavily in the air. The book finished differently from how it started. Not so differently that I changed my view that the Conference has a right to overrule Labor governments. I did not change my view that the decision of Conference in May 2008 was correct.

Amid the reviews and the coverage of the book, others will make of this text what they will. I hope that, for the sake of the role of Australian Labor in an adversary democracy, the book has explained that the ALP is a party of rules, constituted authority and powerful traditions.

Solidarity is not an expression but the central ethos of the party in action.

The crisis I recount is a crisis of Western democracy. A crisis of participation. A crisis of belief.

Whether the electorate cares all that much about who governs is a crisis resulting from those other crises that cause voters to wonder if there is any real difference between those offering.

The book is a dark and ugly tale. It is not a forecast. The possibilities for parties led by men and women of belief and values remain sublime.