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January 29, 2005
Well, it's all signed, sealed and delivered then on the ALP leadership question. Kim Beazley recycled with fire in his belly.
The functioning of the political machine has been restored, even if it is currently running on empty. Running on empty because the ALP is floundering on finding an issue to run on against the Howard Government.What are the issues it will a Beazley ALP fight on at the political barricades.
We should not forget the past. Remember Mark Latham? Alan Ramsay gives an accurate description of what happened:
It was a public execution, not a resignation...A year later, after he'd failed to deliver in 12 months the electoral gratification that the fumblings of Kim Beazley and Simon Crean had been allowed to bury, ever deeper, across almost eight years, Labor did to Latham what in a more primitive age was done to heretics. It burnt him at the stake, in front of us all, to the applause of a mostly accommodating media and those interests, internal and institutional, that Latham's confronting leadership style had so offended.
I agree. What comes to mind is Fascination, ecstasy, explosion, abandonment, dying, madness. The vortex of the void sucked them in to such an extent that we witnessed a spectacle of the ALP eating its own.
Now Latham made mistakes. And he was a lone wolf. But why the need to behead him? What happened to his friends? Should not the senior ALP leadership and campaign team take responsibility for losing the election? Why the evasion?
So why this bloodletting form of political madness?
There is an eerie silence about this public execution. We know that few are going to speak about it. Most are going to pretend that it never happened. A veil will be drawn over it. So Alan Ramsay should be applauded for saying that it was a public execution.
The unity of the normal political discourse was fragmented by the lethal violence.It has been restored. Things have now settled down. They can now pretend that it never happened.
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