Rescuing survivors of Labor slaughter
Simon Benson
Thursday, May 03, 2012 (7:52pm)
IF it hasn’t already become so, the Australian Labor Party will soon become completely ungovernable.
Julia Gillard’s time as Prime Minister appears to be coming to an end. But no one inside the parliamentary party, or its executive branches, knows what to do about it.
This week the NSW party secretary Sam Dastyari publicly said he thought MPs should get behind Gillard.
It was a forlorn and unbelievable display of solidarity. Privately, the party boss is telling his NSW federal MPs that it is up to them what they do. The Labor party machine won’t get involved.
Dastyari has learned from bitter experience. When he began making calls earlier this year to his MPs to shore up support for Gillard in the face of the imminent challenge from Kevin Rudd, many of them told him to get stuffed.
He has also learned from his predecessors and their interference in the running of the previous NSW Labor government, when the party machine decided it was its job to dictate who was and who wasn’t going to be leader.
Dastyari’s position marks a significant change in the perceived power structures of the Labor machine and its relationship to the parliamentary wing.
If indeed he does intend to stay out of any moves against Gillard, then it truly will be up to the caucus to decide Gillard’s fate.
The problem with this scenario, to use a phrase once coined by Joe Tripodi, is that you get a situation akin to “herding cats”.
Perversely, this could work in Gillard’s favour. With no one inside the caucus yet bold enough to take on the task of herding the cats and tapping Gillard on the shoulder to resign, the PM will remain safe.
There will not be another spill or challenge from Rudd. He will only take the job by acclamation. It’s unlikely she will move aside.
Until some genius in the party works out how to get around this issue, it will be a stalemate.
The caveat, considering the level of angst within the caucus, is that the situation could become so volatile that no one will be able to stop it all falling over.
Despite public protests to the contrary, MPs are fixated on the fortnightly polls which show Labor on a hiding to electoral misery.
The number they fear is the primary vote. This week it is down to around 27 per cent, which means a large majority of those MPs would lose their jobs at an election.
But it’s likely the primary vote number will move between 27 and 33 per cent for the next 12 months, as it has for the past 12 months.
MPs have every right to be concerned about this and demand answers from their leader, as well as the factional bosses who now move sheepishly around parliament wondering how they justify their support for the PM.
But they are looking at the wrong numbers if they think shelving Gillard will solve all their problems. The number they should be considering in any consideration of removing Gillard is her dissatisfaction rate - now around 60 per cent.
This is the key number in terms of her survivability. At this level any leader is terminal and unlikely to ever improve.
On that assumption alone the caucus would ordinarily be looking to change leaders. That was the number Morris Iemma was on when he was dumped, despite a primary vote for the party of around 34 per cent.
But fixing one problem doesn’t necessarily solve the other. If they believe that, by dumping Gillard, the primary vote will miraculously rise to a respectable 36 per cent plus, they are kidding themselves. And there is a risk it won’t.
This primary vote is not singularly linked to Gillard. It is a reflection of Labor’s brand more generally and a reflection of the unpopularity of Labor policy - in this case the carbon tax.
Unless the carbon price is modified - and it clearly can’t be Gillard who does it - Labor’s electoral prospects are unlikely to improve. They will just continue to get worse. And the same fundamental problem will continue to exist. Labor will be smashed at an election.
This polling theory is also reflected, inversely, in the Coalition. Its primary vote is sky high because Tony Abbott stands to ditch all of Labor’s bad policies - not because people like Abbott.
Abbott’s dissatisfaction rating is almost as bad as Gillard’s, at around 40 per cent.
What this suggests is there is no longer a presidential element to the battle of national politics.
Most voters dislike both leaders.
And therefore it is unlikely that any leader Labor decides to go to the next election with - whether it be Gillard, Rudd, Shorten, Smith, Combet or Crean - will have any ability to do more than save a bit of furniture.
Dastyari and others are well aware that there is no longer a hope of retaining Labor in government. The party machine in NSW is already thinking of how it rebuilds in opposition.
And it is not merely interested in saving “furniture”. It is looking specifically at which furniture to save and who will be sitting in it.
In other words, which MPs does it want to keep around in opposition to give it the best chance of rebuilding. There is little point in saving a bunch of dud MPs just to have numbers on the floor.
It would have been unthinkable a decade ago that Labor would be at risk of losing Labor stronghold seats in southwest Sydney like Watson and McMahon.
But The Daily Telegraph has learned that Dastyari is already drawing up battle plans to save these two seats - both on around 10 per cent margins - and the MPs who hold them: ministers Chris Bowen and Tony Burke.
Like the desert bunker in the Arizona desert designed to protect the President and senior members of his administration in the threat of nuclear war so they have a group of people left capable of governing, NSW Labor is already building its own bunker and drawing up plans to save its future leadership team
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