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June 30, 2005
In launching Bernie Lagan's Loner: Inside A Labor Tragedy yesterday John Faulkner made some truthful comments about the culture of the ALP, its demons and the party's ability to face them.
On what he calls the gladiatorial NSW culture Faulkner says:
In NSW, a combative organisational culture has at times turned toxic. When maintaining factional power is put ahead of civility, decency, honesty, humanity or even legality, then bullying and thuggery become lazy substitutes for debate. Behaviour unacceptable outside NSW Labor is all too often rewarded within it....As an active member of the NSW Labor tribe, I know how hard it can be to draw a clear distinction between the ritualised conflict of Party forums and the real world.
And, by putting Mark Latham's leadership into the right political context, Faulkner critcizes those in the ALP and the press who lay the blame for the ALP's 2004 defeat at the door of a flawed Mark Latham alone:
Both Mark Latham and the Party he led were hurt by our own culture. And both the Party and the Leader were hurt by Labor's desire for a messiah to save us - to save us from ourselves as much as from outside forces. This is a burden that proved too great for Mark, as it would perhaps have proved too great for anyone...Mark was a bold politician, passionate about the future Australia he imagined. Part of his tragedy is that he became leader of the Labor Party at a time when his boldness and his passion were not enough.
It requires political courage to say this when many in the ALP (such as Bill Shorten, the Australian Workers Union chief,) are determined to make Latham equivalent to a poison, in order to avoid confronting the demons of their political culture.
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"When maintaining factional power is put ahead of civility, decency, honesty, humanity or even legality, then bullying and thuggery become lazy substitutes for debate. Behaviour unacceptable outside NSW Labor is all too often rewarded within it..."
I have no idea what goes on inside party rooms but statements like that are scary. Gutsy move by Faulkner.