Alp Conquistadors Burn Beazley's Boats
Sydney Morning Herald
Saturday October 7, 2000
HERNAN Cortes was the 16th-century adventurer who overthrew the Aztec empire and butchered tens of thousands in the process of becoming the wealthiest Spanish conquistador in the Americas. The admiring Michael Knight is the Labor adventurer who overthrew community ridicule of SOCOG only to become the despised humiliator of the fumbling but beloved David (Sandy) Hollway, Knight's own appointee. In the end, all Knight butchered was the closing of his ministerial career, along with much of the grudging respect for his uncompromising political management that ensured the Sydney Olympics worked so brilliantly. It seemed so pointlessly vindictive yet so apt for a man who takes his inspiration from one of history's most ruthless conquerors.
``I've always been a fan of Cortes," Knight boasted to reporters on Tuesday in announcing his resignation from politics by Christmas. ``When he got to Mexico, he burnt the boats, took the troops out, and said, `We're burning the boats, there's no way back, we've got to make a success of this.' I've always thought that a very admirable way to conduct your life. That's what I'm doing today."
Knight's greater folly was to burn Hollway along with the boats.
As somebody remarked at the time: ``Sandy began carrying Bob Hawke's bags 14 years ago and, metaphorically, that's pretty much what he's been doing for the NSW Labor network ever since. It's what got him the job running SOCOG. Everybody knows Graham Richardson recommended Sandy to Knight who, of course, was Graham's protege ever since he ratted on the NSW Left in 1992 because he couldn't get elected on the Left ticket to Bob Carr's shadow ministry. That's ancient history. But if Sandy was ineffective as a CEO after being a superb fetcher and carrier for others all of his working life, he was a great bloke whom everybody liked, specially those who worked for him. To humiliate him the way Knight did was simply to expose [Knight's] own huge personality flaws.
``It was madness."
So, in a way, was Kim Beazley's reaction. The day after Knight's announcement, Beazley went on Melbourne breakfast radio where he was asked would he want Knight on his frontbench. The question seemed to take him by surprise.
``Michael Knight?" he asked.
Yeah, said the radio jock.
``I think every government needs it [sic]," Beazley said. ``You actually do have to have those sort of hard men in politics."
What followed was an aimless meander on the subject of political hard men, of which Beazley is anything but, that seemed to suggest the Labor leader hadn't given a thought to what he might say if asked about Knight.
Unfortunately for Beazley, one commentator took what he had to say seriously. Next morning, in the Financial Review, Tony Walker speculated on Beazley opening the door for Knight to a career in Federal politics. Even by the most generous interpretation of Beazley's clumsy attempt to avoid criticising Knight, he'd done no such thing, thank the Lord, but it was more grist for the mill in a week, across the board, Labor would prefer to forget.
For if Knight was burning his political boats in Sydney, up in Brisbane, where Queensland's Criminal Justice Commission (CJC) began hearing on Tuesday what the city's Courier-Mail newspaper on Thursday headlined on its front page as an ``ALP plot to `rort' State seat", you wondered what the aformentioned ``hard men" of the Labor Party in that State might be burning, over and above the midnight oil. Irrevocably, you feel, circumstances are evolving that must be giving Beazley the horrors.
The CJC hearing flows from a former Queensland State Labor candidate, Karen Ehrmann, pleading guilty in Townsville to 47 counts of electoral fraud. Ehrmann was sentenced on August 11 to three years' jail, to serve a minimum nine months.
In the process, other names were bandied about. So were various illegal practices. Nothing has been tested, let alone proven. But the upshot is the CJC hearing, with Ehrmann the star witness.
The political gravity is obvious. Queensland's Labor Premier, Peter Beattie, was almost in tears a month or so ago pleading with voters his determination to root out rorters in his party and Government if they existed. Beattie has a one-seat absolute majority and an election due next June. Beazley, with Federal Labor ahead in most polls all year, even if by default, faces an election at the end of next year, most likely in late November or the first Saturday in December.
It will be his last if Labor cannot win.
Yet the very explosiveness of what is involved in the CJC hearing was all over the front page of the Courier-Mail on Wednesday and Thursday and was still a front-page story yesterday. You get an idea of what's at stake from David Solomon's front-page comment on Wednesday which began: ``The AWU faction of the [Queensland State] Labor Party had its reputation shredded on the first day of the inquiry yesterday with allegations that it encouraged or terrorised its members into breaking the law to maintain its power within the party. The largest and strongest of the ALP's power blocs [in Queensland], the AWU is the power base of figures including Deputy Premier Jim Elder ..."
It is also the political power base, of course, of Bill Ludwig, the ALP's Federal vice-president and a national executive member, as well as being the most powerful Labor political and trade union figure in Queensland, and of Wayne Swan, former Queensland State ALP secretary and Beazley's staff ``Queensland adviser" in Brisbane for three years after his defeat in the 1996 election and now, re-elected to Parliament, one of Beazley's most influential political advisers.
To quote Solomon: ``[Ehrmann's] evidence was a savage indictment of the way the AWU stacked party branches and manipulated votes, often using illegal means. Ehrmann said her prosecution and jailing had been due to her falling out with the faction over her refusal to support [Townsville mayor] Tony Mooney in his bid for party preselection for the State seat of Townsville. She said she had been warned of the consequences of supporting the Left's Mike Reynolds ..."
Who is Mike Reynolds? Premier Beattie's parliamentary secretary, no less. In State Parliament two days ago Beattie was under huge political pressure defending his decision not to stand down Reynolds until the CJC hearing was complete and its findings known. And this was only day three of an inquiry likely to go for weeks.
The real poison, of course, is Labor's factionalism. The bitter pursuit internally between the various party groupings for power and patronage, including safe parliamentary seats, State and Federal, has reached the point where accused excesses threaten Beattie's Government and Beazley's career. If the CJC outcome damages Beattie, it must damage Beazley. There are too many marginal Coalition seats in Queensland, seats Labor must win if Beazley is to become prime minister. Yet Beazley from the day he became Labor leader 41/2 years ago has refused to confront the destructive power of the factions, instead bending it to his own ends. Well, now the account is coming due.
In Canberra, John Howard's Government has seized on the political opportunity of what is happening in Queensland. The Federal Parliament's joint committee on electoral matters will conduct its own inquiry into what it loftily calls ``the integrity of the electoral roll". What it really intends doing, of course, is exploiting the CJC hearing in Queensland to kick the daylights out of Labor. This is already going on, now Parliament is sitting again after the Olympics, and the pace will escalate when the committee meets on Tuesday to set its inquiry timetable.
The committee called for submissions a few weeks ago. They close next Friday. One submission already circulated in the Labor Party ensures the heat on Labor will not come only from Queensland. Ralph Clarke, the South Australian State Labor MP who took his party to the Supreme Court last year to try to save his own career from a factional branchstack to depose him, tells how he won the court case and cost the Labor Party $250,000 in legal costs.
His submission recounts a massive attempted rort in which, on a single day, January 26, 1999, Labor Party membership in South Australia leapt by 2,103, from approximately 3,500 to 5,600, an increase of 60 per cent. In a single day! Subscriptions for the 2,103 new members totalled $41,937, all of them paid by just 11 people. What was happening was the factions were stacking the membership to influence parliamentary pre-selections and internal balloting for party positions and conference delegates.
It was a massive breach of the SA branch rules. A Supreme Court judge found these rules enforceable by law and declared the 2,103 ``new" members invalid. It didn't save Ralph Clark, though. He polled 84 per cent in his local preselection ballot, but this local ballot, under State ALP rules, elected only a quarter of the delegates who would make the final decision. A full 50 per cent were controlled by the unions, through head office, and this bloc union vote, in a factional deal, stripped Clarke of his party endorsement.
Now, the case fought through the courts in Adelaide last year is to be regurgitated before a Canberra parliamentary inquiry controlled by Labor's opponents. The odds are of the kind that favoured Cortes before he fell on the Aztecs.
© 2000 Sydney Morning Herald