Betrayal: The underbelly of Australian Labor
By Simon Benson
(Simon & Schuster, 2010, 400 pages)
We usually only hear the accounts of the internal machinations of political parties after they lose government and insiders want to make a buck reciting their version of history.
In writing Betrayal, Simon Benson, chief political reporter for the Daily Telegraph, has got in early before New South Wales Labor is wiped from the Treasury benches.
Benson acknowledges from the start that the book is about the failure of the Labor Parry ''to govern for the good of its citizens'' as the party has descended from any principle into an organisation that gives ''priority lo politics over policy''.
Benson opens the book with controversy. He claims Kevin Rudd promised that if NSW Premier, Morris Iemma, delayed his planned electricity privatisation and consequent fight with the unions until after the 2007 election a Prime Minister Rudd would show Iemma favour and ''when the time comes ... f**k them [the unions] together''.
And from that point the core narrative of Betrayal is the contributing failure of the naked self-interest that drives NSW Labor factional players and MPs and betrayer-in-chief, Kevin Rudd, to stymie electricity privatisation ensuring Sydneysiders will become accustomed to brown-outs.
Some of the most scathing criticism of the factional system has come from its former patriarchs. In particular former Prime Minister Paul Keating lambasts the NSW right as ''not an organic faction run by political thought and ideology ... it's a sort of patronage club creaking as it goes along''.
And the extent of the NSW right's preparedness to sacrifice principle was perhaps best demonstrated when they used their political weight to install Nathan Rees from the Left faction as leader and premier against one of their own because he wasn't perceived by the public as ''toxic''.
Doing so wasn't an act of political charity to their factional foes but an attempt to find a way to keep their grip over the spoils that come with a majority in Macquarie Street.
But despite the scathing critique provided by those Benson interviewed, there are clearly heroes that have emerged out of NSW Labor.
Former state Treasurer, Michael Costa, actually comes out of the criticism appearing committed to the best interests of the NSW people because of his preparedness to fight to ensure that some good decisions were made by the government he served.
And despite his recent political demise, Costa also shows good judgement with his foresighted attacks on Rudd exploring the very themes that led to him being rolled.
Costa's hatred of Rudd was more than just rhetoric. In chapter fourteen an entertaining story is told about how he spent his nine hundred dollar stimulus payment on a statue of a naked small boy urinating water into the family pool with a plaque on the statue reading ''Rudd stimulates fiscally''.
But in reading Betrayal it is easy to think the rot of NSW Labor politics is a consequence of a few bad political eggs.
As much as Betrayal is a story about the failings of NSW Labor, it is also a story about the failings of politics and government to deliver positive outcomes.
Unlike markets which reward and punish decisions based on transactions when people buy goods and services that they want, politics' market signals are relationships.
And when relationships dictate outcomes from who is elected to Parliament or appointed to key public sector jobs a system of corruption is created where people can only get what they want when they buy into the system and use others to advance their own interests.
Apart from Costa, only Morris Iemma is portrayed in Betrayal as being prepared to fight the system to deliver a good public policy outcome. But the price of him doing so is his toppling as Premier.
At least, unlike Rudd who betrayed him, Iemma lost the top job trying to do something noble and was probably the last glimmer of hope in a Labor government that deserves the judgement that will be inflicted on it by voters next March.
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