Spiritual Eczema

The Life and Soul of the Party:  A Portrait of Modern Labor
by Brett Evans
University of New South Wales Press, 128 pp, $19.95

Amused, amusing and apposite, this book falls short of masterpiece status;  it bears too many signs of haste and sloppy editing ("a political phenomena";  "both of the them") for that accolade.  Yet Brett Evans -- an old-fashioned reporter who, would you believe, reports -- deserves thanks for his investigation of a political movement that, for the first time ever, now seems both electorally unstoppable and ideologically null.

By Christmas, assuming that voters feed John Howard to the same sharks which formed a welcoming committee for Denis Burke and will presumably devour John Olsen, non-Labor government will be unimaginable for at least another decade.  Nevertheless, answers to the question "What principle would Beazley, Carr, Bracks, Bacon, Beattie, or Gallop die defending?" are as elusive now as they ever were.  The hints of conscious social engineering here and there -- Bracks' abasement to Buggery Barn's legislative demands;  Carr's preoccupation with making NSW an "education State", as opposed, presumably, to an educated State -- scarcely mask the absence of those great rent-a-mob causes which abounded as recently as the Kirner Premiership.  Even the pseudo-causes so prevalent among leftist parties abroad (for example, Blair's vengeance upon Pinochet and the British aristocracy) find few if any echoes in ALP breasts.

Of course a Beazley Government would formally ditch the Queen.  But then, so would a Costello Government.  As for the other current catch-cries among Labor's True Believers (Aboriginal activism;  the "Knowledge Nation" that seems, in so far as any topic can, to set Beazley's own ticker racing;  the much-vaunted "right" to IVF for those classes now cryptically known as the "socially infertile"), it would defy even the silliest Obergruppenführer of the Liberals' twinset-and-pearls brigade to imagine that a post-Howard Coalition would wish, or be able, to oppose these shibboleths.

So:  given that between Labor and the other lot there no longer exists (as Alabama Governor George Wallace used to say) "a dime's worth of difference", what sops, if any, can Beazley or his State counterparts throw the baying party faithful?  Well, the politics of envy continue to be a nice little earner, as Evans' research attests.  Supporting Evans' narrative at both ends are two panels, as lovingly detailed as the artwork on a mediæval altar-piece.  Panel One depicts Keating at Sydney's Town Hall in late 1999, spewing anti-monarchist and anti-Timorese invective over an audience that would probably have cheered on a gang-rape, provided the rapists wore ALP badges.  Panel Two depicts John Button, groaning under the weight of his parliamentary superannuation scheme, yet still seeing himself as a battler, and hissing his hatred of Collins Street's "bloody stockbrokers".

Is a Keating's or a Button's inverted snobbery a conscious fraud?  Unlikely.  It seems more like a kind of spiritual eczema, which no personal affluence can soothe.  And when this ailment afflicts the ALP's most economically literate members, conceive of what havoc it must wreak on out-and-out class warriors.  Even Mark Latham, when dilating on the purpose of life, offers no more compassionate or large-minded credo than "Stick to the working class like s**t to a blanket".  The phrase "working class" is, surprise surprise, never defined;  but that it can coexist with the most voracious appetite for tertiary qualifications, and the most outré sexual enthusiasms, the Beazley epoch amply confirms.

Naturally authentic pre-modern boorishness, as well as cheap post-modern imitations thereof, finds a place in Evans' pages.  To read of Labor festivities at NSW's Oban Nursing Home on St Patrick's Day ("You young sheilas enjoying your drink?") is to be transported back to the golden era epitomised by South Australia's long and deservedly forgotten Premier Frank Walsh, whose idea of courteously accepting a Japanese diplomat's present was to bellow "Gee, thanks, Shorty!"  Opinion polling, Evans reveals, played no part in Australia before 1946's Federal election:  with the result that pre-pollster rustics who would not have known a spin-doctor from a spirochæte continued to work their way through the national body politic till the 1970s.

Evans might have explored this fact's ramifications further, since it raises the issue Beazley dares not avoid:  which group does the less harm?  White-bread politicians who at least combine amorality with some economic prudence?  Or entirely sincere, entirely ethical troglodytes who, given a quarter of a chance, would re-regulate absolutely every commercial transaction except two-up?  (Latham tosses off a nice one-liner about re-regulatory obsessives:  "They've tried that approach in North Korea, and they're eating the bark off the trees").  To those who sit around longing for a Curtin or a Chifley to re-emerge among us, like some King Arthur back from Avalon, reminders of the old Jewish proverb are germane:  "Be careful what you pray for.  You might get it".

Certainly, even if neither Curtin nor Chifley has returned, Sir William McKell still runs NSW Labor from the grave.  McKell and his successors controlled Australia's most populous State for 24 years (1941-65) by ensuring a bloc of vacuous but unfailingly amiable Labor backbenchers representing constituencies that should have been Country Party heartlands.  Sixty years on, these backbenchers' Labor successors continue to preserve Carr's administration from all perils save the sheer boredom of invincibility.  Yes, that's right, this is Labor's idea of root-andbranch internal reform.

Evans has great and justified fun with the spectacle of post-1975 ALP apparatchiks demanding the most stringent sacrifices from one community group after another, while Premier after Premier and State secretary after State secretary tosses into too-hard baskets any suggestions (however demurely offered) of an end to branch rorts.  In this context we must note -- and tireless visionaries like Senator Chris Schacht are only too keen to make us note -- that what most people call branch-stacking is not what the ALP calls branch-stacking.  The ALP's rather narrow definition covers only:  (a) such stacking as makes the newspapers;  (b) the subset of (a) excluding fashionable ethnic groups.  Unfashionable ethnic groups are, by definition, "Nazi war criminals".  Thus, whereas Labor's foes "stack branches", Labor is only ever (to quote a choice Keatingism) "engaged in the issues of enlargement".  Got that?

In case the above has not deterred you from joining your local ALP branch, Evans provides useful tips.  Walking in off the street with a declared interest in policy will get you nowhere.  Membership of a vast extended Lebanese family, preferably with potential ALP foot-soldiers in utero, is a much better option.  The Stakhanovite triumph of Australia Day 1999, which saw 2,000 new troops conscripted within 24 hours, has already entered ALP folklore.

Ultimately those of us not among the Elect -- who, that is, have neither joined the ALP nor felt the smallest desire to do so -- must find Labor rites as impenetrably mysterious as those of other secular priesthoods:  Freemasons, surfies, football teams.  Even Townsville Council's Karen "The Spider Woman" Ehrmann (but for whose chicanery Jim Elder would still be Queensland's Deputy Premier and the Shepherdson Inquiry a mere pious hope) appears to have had a genuine sense of mission.  As to what this mission is, and why thousands of otherwise sane people can delude themselves into crediting (say) Senator Nick Bolkus with a cosmic significance that Goethe plus Michelangelo could hardly boast, perhaps we heathens will never know.  But the ALP's innate penchant for public navel-gazing and Howard's seemingly incurable pixillation are both doing everything possible to guarantee that we all soon find out.