Catch and Kill : The Politics of Power 9780702251627, 9780702249808

Citation preview

Joel Deane is a poet, novelist, journalist, essayist and speechwriter. He started out at 17 as a copyboy at the Sun News-Pictorial in Melbourne. Since then he has worked in San Francisco as a producer on the Emmy Award–winning MSNBC technology news show The Site, lectured widely on the use of public language, penned reviews and essays for Australian Book Review, and written speeches for Labor politicians such as Bill Shorten, Steve Bracks and John Brumby. The Sydney Morning Herald described Deane’s most recent novel, The Norseman’s Song, as ‘a bold unfolding of a succession of nightmares [that] belongs to a long line of yarn-spinners … from Henry Lawson to Frank Hardy to Peter Carey’; and his most recent collection of poetry, Magisterium, was a finalist for the Melbourne Prize for Literature. Catch and Kill marks his debut as an author of non-fiction.

CATCH And KILL The PoliTics of PoWeR JOEL DEANE

First published 2015 by University of Queensland Press PO Box 6042, St Lucia, Queensland 4067 Australia www.uqp.com.au [email protected] © Joel Deane 2015 This book is copyright. Except for private study, research, criticism or reviews, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher. Cover design by Design by Committee Cover photographs by Jason South (Steve Bracks and John Brumby) and Angela Wylie (Old Treasury Building) are reproduced with the permission of Fairfax Media. Author photograph by Meredith Squires Typeset in 11.5/16 pt Bembo Std by Post Pre-press Group, Brisbane Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group Lines on p. 9 from ‘The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock’ by TS Eliot, first published in 1915, are reproduced with the permission of Faber & Faber Ltd. Lines on p. 322 from ‘Ithaka’ by CP Cavafy (in the revised edition of Collected Poems, translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, edited by George Savidis, and published by Princeton University Press, 1992) are reproduced with the permission of Princeton University Press. National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data is available at http://catalogue.nla.gov.au ISBN 978 0 7022 4980 8 (pbk) ISBN 978 0 7022 5162 7 (ePDF) ISBN 978 0 7022 5163 4 (ePub) ISBN 978 0 7022 5164 1 (Kindle) University of Queensland Press uses papers that are natural, renewable and recyclable products made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The logging and manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

Contents

Prologue: First Memories1

CATCH Charlie Foxtrot Politics

13

Cops and Cockroaches

24

Memo from ‘Bongo Land’

36

Enter the Independents

46

Shellbacks and Troglodytes

56

Choking the Piñata

64

Treachery Place

76

Outnumbered87 Julia, Boudicca

97

The Golden Four

107

The Picture of Dorian Gray

115

A Dark Horse

131

KILL Skylab141 An Unholy Trinity

153

A Machine Made of People

163

Citizen Steve

172

A Blinding Aura

185

Crossing the Rubicon

196

Broken Glass

211

One Crowded Year, Part One

220

One Crowded Year, Part Two

235

A Death in the Family

250

Heading for Armageddon

259

‘Jesus Fucking Bananas’

270

A Taxi Called Kevin

282

The Smartest Person in the Room

299

Running Out of Friends

311

Postscript: The Road to Ithaka321 Acknowledgements325 Endnotes328 Index349

For Kirsten, Sophie, Noah and Zoe

There is nothing more disloyal to the traditions of Labor than the new heresy that power is not important. The men who formed the Labor Party in the 1890s knew all about power; they were not ashamed to seek it and they were not embarrassed when they won it. This Party was not conceived in failure, brought forth in failure or consecrated to failure. So let us have none of this nonsense that defeat is somehow more moral than victory. Gough Whitlam Speech to Victorian Labor’s 1967 State Conference

Prologue: First Memories

As a child growing up on the irrigation flats of the Goulburn Valley, I held fast to a belief that it never rained on Sunday, because Sunday was God’s day. It was a four-year-old’s theology. I was raised Catholic. Every Sunday, I dressed up and piled into the back of Mum and Dad’s white Valiant Charger with my big brother and sister, Tim and Liza, to be driven to St Mary’s, Mooroopna; a red-brick church surrounded by a moat of grey stone sharp enough to give a gravel stigmata to any child who lost their footing while playing chasey. We trooped up the stairs of St Mary’s, sat somewhere in the middle of the pews, not too far forward, not too far back, and listened to our parish priest – a ruddy-faced, centre half-forward of a middleaged man called Duffy – make genial noises about God. There were prayers. There were hymns. There were announcements. We shook hands with each other and the people behind us and the people in front of us. We scattered a handful of shrapnel on the offering plate. White wafers – the actual body of Christ, I was told – were taken out of a golden tabernacle that shone golden from within and, on the outside, had a shiny golden crucifix inlaid on the cabinet doors. Bells were rung. My parents lined up. Father Duffy murmured, ‘Body of Christ’, then placed the Eucharist on their poked-out tongues. Mum and Dad glided back to our pew, kneeled for a while with their 1

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eyes closed, then opened their eyes and sat on the wooden bench. More singing. A blessing. Then, finally, everyone genuflected, crossed themselves vaguely, and went back to their lives for another week. Mass was a deeply familiar, strangely mysterious routine. There were variations to the routine. One mass I spent the entire service staring at the right hand of a man with an Amish-style beard in breathless anticipation because his right hand only had three digits – the index and middle digits bandsawed off in the local sawmill. I wondered what it would feel like to shake a hand without fingers. I’m not sure how long my four-year-old’s theology held for, but I recall how it began. One winter Sunday, in the long hours leading up to the short drive to St Mary’s, I lay on my back in my beanbag, staring out the window at the flawless sky. It was a crisp Sunday, cool, but not cold, and the winter sun did not burn my freckled face. Lying there, staring at the blue sky, I noted it wasn’t raining. Then I started wondering whether it ever rained on Sunday. I thought hard and realised I had no recollection of it ever raining on Sunday. This, to my four-year-old mind, seemed a monumental discovery. It confirmed that Sunday was God’s day. I liked my theology. It reflected my four-year-old experiences and made sense to my four-year-old brain. I decided against sharing my revelation. Instead, I carried it around inside my head like Moses’s tablet. Then, one day, my belief system failed. It rained on a Sunday. Then it rained some more. It rained so hard the Goulburn River broke its banks and swallowed our house up to the top step. Dad’s younger brother, Peter, kayaked over from Shepparton to ensure everyone was all right. Soon after my childish theology was flooded out, a four-year-old ideology floated to the surface. An ideology forever associated, in my memory, with the iconology of early-1970s black-and-white tele­ vision. Like most children of the late 1960s and early 1970s, I grew up watching TV. As a four-year-old, though, it was hard to make sense of the images that swam before my eyes like the grey blur of a foetus in an ultrasound, although I do remember hiding in the beanbag one day because a Saturday matinee movie, Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy,

prologue: first memories

was too scary. Of all those early TV images, though, two of the most memorable belonged to the then prime minister Gough Whitlam and Catholic layperson BA  Santamaria. My fascination with Gough and Bob, like my fascination with rain and God, had everything to do with my upbringing. I was born into a family steeped in the Catholic and Australian Labor Party (ALP) tribalism of the mid 1950s that led to the Split, an exodus of right-wing Catholics from the Victorian and Queensland branches of the ALP and the formation of the anti-ALP party, the Democratic Labor Party (DLP).1 My family was part of that exodus. My great-grandfather Pat Deane, an Irish Catholic bush lawyer with Labor leanings, had heckled Country Party leader John ‘Black Jack’ McEwen at public meetings. By the time I was growing up in Mooroopna, my grandfather, another bush lawyer by the name of Pat, was heckling the ALP. I didn’t understand any of this but remember watching Santamaria on television as he presented Point of View. Here was a man with a bald, shiny pate who spoke in an even, soothing tone as he stared down the barrel of the camera, talking straight to me. It was mesmerising. Whenever Gough Whitlam’s silver pompadour popped onto the small screen, my reaction was just as black and white. More like black. Whereas Santamaria was small, bald and softly spoken, Whitlam was tall, hirsute and bombastic. Whitlam always seemed to be filmed from below or the side, not straight on or at my level. Sitting on the carpet in front of the telly, I was forever looking up at the side of his sideburned head as he spoke. Unlike Santamaria, who stared down the camera, Whitlam was not talking to me. He was talking to someone else – someone standing outside of the range of view, someone asking questions. It was an impersonal experience and anything but serene, because whenever Whitlam appeared on our TV, the lounge room exploded. My father, sitting behind me in his sleepy hollow armchair, smoking a cigarette, would rail against the ‘bloody dickhead’. I’ve forgotten most of the words Dad used, but never the anger in his voice. Portraying my childish view of Whitlam as a bloke in a black hat doesn’t quite do justice to the intensity of feeling that came over me

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whenever his mug appeared on the telly. The feeling was more religious than political. Religious in a pre–Vatican II, Catholic way; it felt – and that is the best word for it, felt – as though Gough Whitlam was the Antichrist. Such is the lot of the prophet: labelled both a messiah and a heretic; heralded with hosannas, crowned with martyrdom. My pilgrimage from the DLP to the ALP began in 1982–83, that summer of biblical proportions when the sky above Melbourne turned red from the uprooted topsoil of the drought-stricken Mallee, and Victoria and South Australia were terrorised by the Ash Wednesday fires. That was the summer my family moved from the country to the city. I was 13 when we shifted from a four-bedroom, tumbledbrick veneer house in Mooroopna to a three-bedroom flat on top of a newsagency in the middle of a Housing Commission area in North Fitzroy. By now, we were a family of seven, with my two youngest sisters, Gemma and Camille, added to the fold. I spent my first summer in Melbourne delivering newspapers in the morning, selling newspapers in pubs and card houses in the afternoon and exploring the world via the Brunswick Street tram in between. Early on, I noticed that Brunswick Street was bookended by two sectarian steeples – St Pat’s Catholic cathedral at the southern end and St Luke’s Anglican church at the northern end. I also noticed that once the tram cleared Brunswick Street and did a dogleg turn at the top of Eastern Hill, it bisected church and state as it took the gentle slope down to Collins Street. On one side of the tramlines was St Patrick’s Cathedral; on the other, the Parliament of Victoria – the backside of parliament little more than a torpedo punt from the front steps of the bat cave that is St Pat’s. The construction of state parliament, designed by Peter Kerr, began in a frenzy, but, more than 150 years later, the job is still incomplete. The assembling of that jigsaw puzzle of buildings was stalled by the depression of the 1890s and abandoned altogether after the construction of the north-east wing in 1929. The construction of St Pat’s took longer to get started but never stopped. The foundation stone was laid in 1858 and construction continued for another 81 years, ending in 1939. To

prologue: first memories

put that in historical perspective, works started just before the charge of the Light Brigade and didn’t end until just before Hitler’s blitzkrieg rolled through Belgium. With its neo-Gothic design, brooding basalt exterior and trident of sandstone spires, mounted on massive bluestone buttresses and made higher than originally designed on Archbishop Mannix’s orders, it is straight from the shock-and-awe school of architecture. St Pat’s loomed over the CBD for decades. As James Francis Hogan wrote in his 1887 book The Irish in Australia: ‘Sailing up the bay from the Heads, one of the first objects that arrest the stranger’s eye is the magnificent Cathedral of St Patrick, crowning the summit of the Eastern Hill – a monument of the undying faith and active piety of the exiled children of the Isle of Saints.’ Politician Charles Gavan Duffy – an Irish parliamentarian tried for treason before migrating to Victoria and reinventing himself as the state’s thirteenth premier – went further than Hogan when he addressed a religious gathering in 1880, reminding his audience of ‘the wonderful and magnificent basilicas and cathedrals which Catholics in the ages of faith had erected in Europe, which were an honour to their builders, a glory to the earth, and would last as long as the world held together’. ‘We have here,’ Duffy said, ‘a noble site which should be crowned by a nobler edifice. It has often struck me, when sailing up the bay, what a thrilling spectacle it will be to a Catholic immigrant to see, as he approaches our shores, our noble tower crowned by the Catholic cross, telling him that even in this remote corner of the globe he will not be an outcast or a stranger, but will find himself amongst brethren of the faith.’ More than 150 years on, St Pat’s and state parliament are working museums – relics of a bygone age. As a child of the DLP, I still carried vestiges of those bygone ages in my bones when I first arrived in Melbourne and began catching trams up and down Eastern Hill, navigating the narrow strait between church and state. In December 1982, Mum, Dad, Tim and I drove across town to visit our new school, St Kevin’s College in Toorak. The trip took ages. Sitting in the back seat

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of our green Valiant station wagon, sticking to the vinyl seats in the heat, I was dressed like a junior security guard in matching blue pants and blue shirt with epaulets and a blue tie. We took every wrong turn as we found our way from the bluestone and concrete of Fitzroy to the leafy streets of Toorak. When we finally arrived at Moonga Road, I thought I was in England. A few weeks earlier, I’d been playing cricket on concrete and matting pitches on ovals turned to dust by the drought. In Mooroopna, the kids in my team had renamed the local ovals Desert One, Desert Two and Desert Three. To my eyes, St Kevin’s was an oasis of turf wickets and clipped grass. They even had a proper pavilion, rather than a toilet block. As I sat in the school’s reception area, waiting to be interviewed by the principal, Brother Brandon, a name emblazoned on the honour board caught my eye. The name was BA Santamaria. Bob Santamaria. The man I’d grown up watching on TV had been the school captain and dux of St Kevin’s. I was quietly pleased by this coincidence. During my four years at St  Kevin’s, however, I drifted away from Santamaria’s view of the world. The drift began when, as a 15-year-old, I lied about my age – claiming to be 16 – and joined the Young Liberals. My time as a Young Lib was brief. I donned Dad’s ancient sports jacket and attended two political meetings. One of those meetings was in a plush house in Hawthorn. This was 1984, in the run-up to the 1985 state election that the state Labor government led by John Cain would win, and the Young Libs had invited the local candidate, Phil Gude, to speak. At one point, I barrelled up to Gude and said something stupid about the election, finishing with the line, ‘After all, it’s all about winning, isn’t it?’ Gude – a future head-kicking minister in the Kennett government – locked eyes with me and said, ‘Only if you don’t believe in something.’ He was right. Standing there, I realised I had no idea what I believed in; all I knew, from my DLP upbringing, was what I was supposed to oppose. I didn’t attend any more Young Lib meetings but kept receiving their pamphlets. By the time of the 1985 election, I was

prologue: first memories

asked whether I wanted to hand out how-to-vote cards for Gude. For some reason I said yes. One Friday night, a Young Liberal and his girlfriend dropped by my parents’ shop in North Fitzroy to give me a campaign T-shirt that read ‘VOTE 1 PHIL GUDE’. I wasn’t expecting the visit and, having spent time in Toorak, was self-conscious about my family’s cramped living arrangements. My dad wasn’t. He brought the Young Lib and his girlfriend upstairs to the crowded flat where we lived. I was sitting in the lounge room when Dad brought in the Young Libs. I could tell from the expressions on our visitors’ faces – a mixture of fascination and distaste as they did double takes at the state of our rented digs – that they didn’t live like us. I took the campaign T-shirt but didn’t say much. I just wanted them to leave. I wasn’t embarrassed by my family’s home; I was pissed off by the looks on their faces. I  didn’t hand out how-to-vote cards for Phil Gude. My days as a Young Lib were over. After high school, I drifted into journalism and thought myself apolitical. Things didn’t change until Jeff Kennett was elected premier of Victoria in 1992. By then, I was 23 and a public servant, working as a media officer for the health department. My job was to write media releases and speeches for the health minister, answer media enquiries from journalists about the state of the hospital system, and manage public health issues like legionnaire’s disease. I didn’t like what the Kennett government was doing to the state’s hospitals and decided to do something about it – I applied for a job with the state opposition. That’s how, in November 1994, I came to be sitting on a couch, staring across the coffee table at John Brumby, the leader of the Victorian Labor Party. We were in his office, which lay behind a green door tucked away in the rabbit warren of the north wing of state parliament. I’d never met Brumby before – he radiated intensity, wore his hair in the style of Ray Martin and seemed to have an answer for everything. It was as though the man had an Antikythera mechanism in his head – a maze of bronze wheels and gears that, when cranked,

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came to life as an analog working model of a Victoria that Brumby had assembled through intimate congress, having gladhanded his way around every suburb, city and town north of Wilsons Promontory, south of the Murray River, east of Bordertown and west of Mallacoota. ‘The thing about Brumby,’ former Bracks–Brumby minister Bob Cameron says, ‘is he’s like a walking filing cabinet … He’s got this formidable memory.’ Cameron is right. Over the next 15 years, I’d come to love and loathe Brumby’s hard-won knowledge and formidable memory: loathe, because he was a man of unshakable views who was difficult to surprise; love, because, beneath the pinstripes and steel, he was a policy purist. I’d never heard of the other interviewer, Brumby’s chief of staff, Rob Hulls. Tall and ungainly, he had the look of a semi-retired footballer. I’d come seeking a job as Brumby’s press secretary. It wasn’t a promotion. If anything, it was career Siberia. By then, I’d switched from the health department to the Environment Protection Authority. Taking a job with Brumby would mean a pay cut and going from the tenured safety and apolitical neutrality of a public service position to the professional insecurity, verging on oblivion, of the Victorian branch of the ALP. The interview was standard fare to begin with. Hulls sat back for most of the interview, letting Brumby take the lead. When he interjected, it was usually to ask a hypothetical question about how I’d handle this journalist or that situation. I kept my answers short, sharp. So short that, at one point, I apologised for not being more loquacious. Brumby said that was fine. The questions started closing in. Was I a member of the ALP? No. Why did I want to work for the state opposition? I gave a spiel about being disenchanted with Kennett. If asked about past political allegiances, I was going to fess up to the Young Libs, but no one asked. Instead, Brumby was interested in my family. Before long, we were talking about Santamaria and the DLP. I told Brumby I was the only member of my family who voted for the ALP. Brumby was intrigued.

prologue: first memories

He indulged in some qualitative research, asking me, ‘How can we win back people like your family?’ Without thinking, I shot back: ‘You don’t. They never come back.’ The next Friday, I was driving through Werribee when my mobile rang. I pulled over to the gravel shoulder of the road to take the call. It was Hulls. He offered me a job as press secretary to the leader of the state opposition. I accepted on the spot. In early 2011, 17 years later, I received another call from the office of John Brumby. This time the call came directly from Brumby. As always, he came straight to the point. Would I consider writing a book about the Bracks–Brumby government, which had been thrown out of office the year before? This time I didn’t accept the offer on the spot. I told Brumby I was interested but would have to think it through. The truth was I wasn’t interested in recounting the chronology of that – or any – government. What interested me was the unholy trinity of political power: winning it, wielding it, losing it. Spending 20 years in and around political parties had taught me a few lessons. First and foremost, it had shown me again and again that power is nomadic – it moves from person to person, faction to faction, party to party. The mistake often made by people in power is to believe otherwise – to convince themselves that they are in some way different, that their power is permanent. Power does that to people. It’s beguiling. It’s like the mermaids in TS Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock’ – singing, each to each, while those under its spell linger in the chambers of the sea ‘till human voices wake us, and we drown’. Those human voices are the voting public, and passive governments that fail to take their chances drown just as surely as those activist administrations that have the nerve to think and act before the mermaids end their song. The four men who were the nucleus of the Bracks–Brumby government – Steve Bracks, John Brumby, John Thwaites and Rob Hulls – had an instinctive understanding of the nomadic nature of power. As a result, they never stood still. From 2002 to 2010, they defied, then defined Canberra – forging a quasi-federal government

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with, in financial terms, the means and, in policy terms, the ways to stand on its own two feet. They led a government that could, in the words of Bracks, ‘catch and kill its own’. This is the story of their victories, their failures and the consequences.

Catch

Charlie Foxtrot Politics

It was Saturday 10 August 2013: day six of the federal election campaign. Stray bicycles and joggers could still be seen on the shared bike path that ran along Beaconsfield Parade, beside the bluestone sea wall and narrow beach. A surprising number of people were sitting in the sand or standing on the Kerferd Road jetty, watching the sun set beneath a crescent moon. This was Albert Park – a well-heeled bayside suburb nestled between Port Melbourne and St Kilda best known, outside Victoria, as the street circuit for the Melbourne Grand Prix – at the end of one of those sunny winter days when Melbournians swing gaudy scarfs around their necks and attend games of Australian Rules football in their tens of thousands. Three games of footy were being played around Port Phillip Bay. At the Melbourne Cricket Ground, Richmond had already beaten Brisbane in what would be Michael Voss’s last game as coach of the Lions. Across on the western side of the bay, Geelong had finished four goals clear of Port Adelaide at Kardinia Park. A few suburbs away, at Docklands, Carlton was in the process of losing to the Western Bulldogs at Etihad Stadium. Meanwhile, just as the sky turned from blue to black, the guests began to arrive at Beaconsfield Parade for a farewell party. These guests were as fervent as members of a cheer squad, but none were dressed for the football. Women wore flapper dresses and 13

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headbands; men, loud jackets and bowties. They were dressed, or supposed to be, as though they’d walked out of the pages of F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby in honour of Steve Bracks, the former premier of Victoria, who would soon be jetting off to serve as Australia’s consul-general in New York. The invitations to the event read, ‘The Great Bracksy Party’. Bracks was there, naturally, looking younger than when he was premier. So, too, an honour roll of luminaries from the recent past of the Victorian branch of the ALP. There was John Brumby – the man Bracks deposed as the state Labor leader in 1999, then gifted the premiership in 2007 – dressed plainly in business-casual attire. Rob Hulls, Brumby’s right-hand man and the former deputy premier and attorney-general, was there as well and, like his former boss, had decided against dressing up, wearing his standard kit of a check shirt, sports coat and chinos. Of the four men who, for almost 20 years, had been the engine room of Victorian Labor, taking the party from irrelevance to national prominence, the only one to make an effort to look like Nick Carraway, let alone Jay Gatsby, was the night’s host, John Thwaites. Bracks, Brumby, Hulls and Thwaites – who, more often than not, referred to each other as Bracksy, Brumby, Hullsy and Thwaitesy  –  were still close. They’d worked hard, played hard and fought hard since the early 1990s and, somehow, despite the inevitable rivalries, remained friends. Now, three years after the demise of the Bracks–Brumby government, one of them was gearing up for one more foray into the public arena. Of course, none of the Big Four were retired in the real sense of the word. Bracks had balanced corporate directorships with his pro bono work for Timor-Leste – travelling more than 30 times to the world’s newest and poorest nation. Brumby had kept busy with university and corporate work, and served as the chairman of the Council of Australian Governments. Hulls – ever the crusader for social justice – had established the Centre for Innovative Justice. Thwaites – besides consulting as a corporate lawyer and joining Bracks in Timor-Leste – was

charlie foxtrot politics

pursuing his environmental passions at the Monash Sustainability Institute and ClimateWorks Australia. Bracks’s New York adventure would be different, marking a return of sorts to the corridors of power. The setting for the party – Thwaites’s new third-floor apartment overlooking Port Phillip Bay – was ideal. There were cocktails to sip, champagne to slurp and finger food to eat as the sun set in the west. Some guests ventured to the roof for a better view of the bay, but most stayed in the apartment to talk. It was easy to see why. Many of the former ministers and staffers who crammed the apartment – veterans of the Bracks–Brumby era – hadn’t seen each other for years. One demonstration about how much time had passed was the fact that the daughter of two former staffers, born just before Bracks’s famous victory in 1999, was now a teenage waiter, serving hors d’oeuvres. The night was as much a reunion as a farewell, with conversations focused as much on yesterday as today. As The Great Gatsby’s Carraway said, ‘So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.’ Hanging over the evening, however, like the smog that cooks over the waters of Port Phillip Bay on a hot summer’s day, was the federal election and the contests being fought in the 150 electorates that would decide who would govern the nation for the next three years. This being a Labor gathering, there wasn’t a kind word to be found for the leader of the opposition, the conservative Tony Abbott. Then again, there weren’t many kind words for the prime minister, Labor’s Kevin Rudd. That was because, although this was a Labor gathering, these were Victorian Labor people. That differentiation is important. It’s a mistake, when considering political parties, be they Labor or Liberal, National or Green, to think of them as national entities, because they’re not – at their worst, political parties are confederacies of petty rivalries. Each state branch of each political party has its own history, culture, agendas, vendettas and factions. Within Victorian Labor, for example, many members are proud of a history of intellectual rigour (or arrogance, if you’re from north of the Murray), having been the ALP’s ideas factory since the late 1970s, yet wary of the troubles of tribal warfare.

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Victorian Labor’s most notorious internal battle was the Split. What remained of the Victorian branch of the ALP afterwards was largely the non-Catholic Socialist Left faction, which, under the leadership of state secretary Bill Hartley, became more interested in prosecuting internal enemies and maintaining policy purity than opposing conservative governments and attracting enough votes to win government. This was the hardline, borderline Maoist crowd Gough Whitlam infuriated in 1967 when, in a speech to the ALP state conference in Melbourne, he said: ‘I did not seek and do not want the leadership of Australia’s largest pressure group, I propose to follow the traditions of those of our leaders who have seen the role of our Party as striving to achieve, and achieving, the national government of Australia.’ Whitlam went further when, in reference to Hartley and his supporters, he said, ‘certainly, the impotent are pure’. A few months before the Bracks farewell party, in April 2013, the soon-to-be leader of federal Labor, Bill Shorten, quoted Whitlam’s famous zinger in his address to Canada’s New Democratic Party in Montreal. Whitlam’s ‘the impotent are pure’ rebuke wasn’t cynical, Shorten explained: It [was] pragmatic … At the time, Labor had been out of power for a generation. We were divided and we were more interested in fighting ourselves than anyone else. Some elements of the Party were happier to lose and remain pure than win and accomplish reform. Some didn’t want to win if they had to compromise. Some in our movement would settle for nothing rather than power. Therefore, that’s what millions of Australians had. Nothing. Whitlam and his supporters wanted more. They wanted to change the country – and they did. The Labor Government I am a member of feels the same.

Four months on from Shorten’s speech, no one was quite sure whether that Labor government felt the same anymore. When Shorten spoke in Montreal, Julia Gillard had been prime minister. Now, she was as much a part of Labor history as Whitlam, and her enemy Rudd

charlie foxtrot politics

was back in charge and leading Labor to inevitable defeat. Back at the farewell party, most people understood why Shorten and another key Gillard supporter, Senator Penny Wong, decided to switch sides – as Gough said, the impotent are pure – but that didn’t assuage the antipathy, verging on animosity, that they felt towards Rudd. Most seemed more inclined to doorknock and hand out how-to-vote cards to stop Abbott’s conservative brand of Liberalism than support Rudd’s populist brand of Labor. Granted, this wasn’t a Rudd-friendly room. He was from Queensland, for starters; a state whose Labor governments had been described as ‘Vichy Labor’ by more than one Victorian. Collaborators, in other words – the kind of people guided by self-interest. Rudd had courted the Victorians when he needed them but attacked them when he thought he no longer did. Many of the people in that Albert Park apartment had worked with or for the man and been seared by the experience. A few – the street-fighting Brumby in particular – had seared Rudd. Gillard, on the other hand, was a Victorian. Not a real Victorian, but good enough. She’d drifted east from Adelaide after university to find work as a lawyer and fought her way through the party ranks. Many of the people in the room had worked with Julia as a Labor lawyer, political staffer, Labor backbencher, minister, deputy prime minister or prime minister. Julia was an extended member of the Bracks–Brumby clan. When, to mark a quarter of a century in politics in 2008, Brumby had a small, very informal gathering in the premier’s media unit at 1 Treasury Place, Gillard was the only federal MP to drop by for a drink. I had a soft spot for Gillard1 but knew she wasn’t perfect. She’d made mistakes. In the run-up to the 2010 campaign, for instance, she’d baulked at (Victorian) advice to strengthen her environmental policies. And, for a significant minority of voters, Gillard’s prime ministership, like Malcolm Fraser’s, was forever tainted by the way in which she had gained power. Fraser’s sin was to be the beneficiary of GovernorGeneral John Kerr’s dismissal of Whitlam’s government in 1975;

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Gillard’s was to be the beneficiary of caucus’s dismissal of Rudd in 2010. Never mind the fact that Gillard, like Fraser, called an election after Rudd’s dismissal – and won government in her own right. As Australia’s first female prime minister, Gillard had also proven herself to be – despite a mixture of bad luck, bad judgement, a feral media and mutinous leaking by Rudd supporters – a good administrator. Besides, whatever her shortcomings, at least Julia wasn’t Kevin. More than one Victorian thought Rudd the ALP’s answer to North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un. As one Victorian quipped, ‘Thankfully, he was born in Australia, because if he’d been born anywhere else millions might have died.’ Mind you, Julia wasn’t universally loved in Victoria, either. She had her enemies in the Socialist Left faction; some fought for years to keep her out of parliament. But this wasn’t that sort of gathering. Besides former Bracks–Brumby ministers such as Peter Batchelor – looking as tanned and thin as a Tour de France domestique in his retirement – there weren’t many members of the Socialist Left at the party. Bracks had clashed with the Socialist Left over preselections, but – as a thrice-victorious former premier – was above reproach. Brumby, having been double-crossed during his opposition years, was wary of the Left. Hulls, as attorney-general, loathed the conservatism of many members of the Left. And Thwaites – one of Labor’s last independents, and a lightning rod for professional jealousy and animosity – was seen by more than one Left member as an enemy. The Socialist Left – besides Batchelor and Lynne Kosky – was shut out of the inner sanctum during the heyday of the Bracks–Brumby years. It was a shut-out that did more than ruffle Left feathers. Three years after the fall of the Brumby government, some leaders of the Left were still wounded by what they saw as rough treatment by the four leaders. During the years in government, memories of past troubles, such as the factionalism that had destroyed John Cain’s government in the 1980s, helped keep the Left’s frustrations from boiling over publicly. Would Bracks’s return to public life change matters? Probably not.

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The truth was that, of the Big Four, Bracks was the most adept factional player and had never really left public life. In 2008, he’d headed a review of the automotive industry for Rudd. And when Gillard became prime minister, she sometimes tapped Bracks for advice or assistance. One such occasion was 29 February 2012. That was the day Gillard’s private office couldn’t reach Bob Carr on the phone. Severe weather was forecast between Sydney and Canberra that day, but that wasn’t the cause of the poor reception between the former premier of New South Wales and the prime minister’s office. The cause of the problem was bad luck or bad management, or both. The week had started well. Two days earlier, on the Monday, Gillard had thumped Rudd in a caucus ballot, 71 votes to 31. She then had two cabinet vacancies to play with: one created by Rudd’s resignation as minister for foreign affairs, the other by assistant treasurer Mark Arbib’s snap decision to retire from politics. Arbib’s retirement from the Senate was a gift: unlike in the House of Representatives, a by-election wasn’t required. All NSW Labor had to do was nominate a replacement to sit in the Senate for the remainder of Arbib’s term. And Gillard wanted Carr. Even the NSW Right – once the model of political power, now the epitome of sleaze – couldn’t fuck this up, surely? It could. And it did. On the Wednesday – 29 February – The Australian’s Dennis Shanahan and Matthew Franklin broke the story that Gillard wanted to parachute Carr into Arbib’s Senate seat and Rudd’s cabinet seat but had been overruled. Rudd’s ministry would most likely go to defence minister Stephen Smith. Shanahan and Franklin were largely right. There had been a revolt, the Carr-for-Canberra push had been stymied and, now, instead of a political coup for the prime minister, Gillard’s attempted Carr recruitment was another case study in Charlie Foxtrot politics. Charlie Foxtrot, for the uninitiated, is a phonetic doppelganger for clusterfuck. In 2009, my final year working as a political speechwriter, clusterfuck became a fashionable word in some circles. I would attend

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meetings and hear many clusterfucks. I might skip a meeting and my fellow speechwriter Stephen Smyth – a man with whom I shared an affinity for opening batsmen in the tin-soldier mode of England’s Mike Atherton or Australia’s Bruce Laird – would attend in my stead, then swing by my office afterwards to brief me, deadpan, on the number of clusterfucks dropped. By 2013, Canberra was the capital of Charlie Foxtrot. It had been since 27 April 2010, the day federal Labor, under the leadership of Rudd, having seen its Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme rejected by the Green, National and Liberal parties, decided to defer the legislation rather than call a double-dissolution election. Instead of going to the ballot box to fight for climate change action – a policy Australians had voted for at the 2007 election – federal Labor turned tail. Yes, the Greens had engaged in political bastardry by siding with the conservatives, but that’s beside the point. Labor squibbed. Deferring the carbon legislation was more than a Charlie Foxtrot; for many Labor supporters, it was an act of political cowardice. Of betrayal. And that betrayal – together with the amateurish attempt to ram through a Resource Super Profits Tax – was the beginning of the end of Rudd’s first go-round as PM. Compared to the Carbon Pollution Charlie Foxtrot of 2010, the Carr Charlie Foxtrot of 2012 was minor, but Gillard’s office needed a go-between. They needed Bracks. Steve Bracks isn’t well known outside his home state, and not much understood within his home state. Tall, dark and handsome, with hands the size of two bunches of bananas, he is part Mona Lisa, part Machiavelli, part Humphrey B Bear. Outside political circles, Bracks is probably best remembered for the unexpected manner of his arrival, toppling Liberal premier Jeff Kennett, or the unexpected manner of his departure, resigning less than a year after winning a third term as premier. Appearances are deceiving, though, because the man inside the cuddly bear outfit was the most powerful politician Victorian Labor had produced since the Split. That’s not to say the Bracks public persona is an act. He is a warm, likeable bloke-next-door, but he is also coolly enigmatic – a man

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who, behind the Mona Lisa smile, is confident enough to keep his own counsel and ruthless enough to wield the knife. He is, as Robert Doyle, one of four state Liberal leaders who failed to defeat Bracks, says, without exaggeration, ‘One of the most accomplished politicians in Victoria’s political history.’ Ben Hubbard – one of many Bracks–Brumby alumni scattered throughout Canberra’s political and bureaucratic classes  –  knew Bracks’s capabilities well, having served as a political advisor in the former premier’s victorious 1999, 2002 and 2006 campaigns. Like Bracks, Hubbard was a country boy made good. He was ambitious enough to plough through a master’s degree in public policy while serving as one of Bracks’s senior advisors, going on to become, when Gillard unseated Rudd, the prime minister’s chief of staff before the age of 40. Now, as Gillard’s senior political advisor, Hubbard needed to fix the Carr Charlie Foxtrot. He telephoned Bracks and asked for a favour. Would Bracks speak to Carr? ‘Why?’ Bracks asked. Then Hubbard told him: the Carr-forCanberra push was on again. Gillard had won the internal battle to name Carr as her new foreign affairs minister. Now she had to get Carr to sign on. Bracks and Carr were close. Carr had helped make Bracks a premier in 1999, increasing environmental water flows to the Snowy River to swing a crucial independent MP behind the minority Labor government, and had been a political sounding board throughout Bracks’s eight-year reign. Bracks had spoken to Carr before the ministerial mutiny aired in The Australian. After Hubbard’s call, he phoned Carr again. The two ex-premiers had a long conversation. Two days later, on Friday 2 March 2012, Bob Carr and Julia Gillard stood shoulderto-shoulder at a media conference in Canberra. When asked about the PM’s offer to become foreign affairs minister, Carr said it was an offer he could not refuse. ‘You do not choose the moment,’ he said. ‘Often the moment chooses you.’ Given that Carr became one of the agitators for the return of Rudd to the Lodge on 27 June 2013, it might have been better for Julia if the

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moment had not chosen Bob. Still, federal Labor remained in office, and – thanks to Julia – Steve was back. Before she’d been defenestrated, Gillard had appointed Bracks consul-general. But now Gillard was gone, Rudd back from the dead, former Queensland premier Peter Beattie attempting a comeback as a federal candidate, election day fast approaching, and the first campaign poll, released that morning, suggested that Rudd’s Lazarus act would fail. According to the poll, 52 per cent of Australians wanted the Liberal Party, while only 48 per cent wanted Labor. That meant the Liberals’ Abbott was four weeks away from becoming prime minister, and Labor a month away from the abyss. Invariably, politics crept into conversations. Friends of Gillard reported that, having just bought a new house in Adelaide, Julia was planning a move back to her hometown. Rudd, meanwhile, having spent three years undermining Gillard’s government, was the last rat on a sinking ship. Outside, the waters of the bay were as dark as the sky by the time the partygoers crowded into the lounge to hear the speeches in honour of Bracks. Thwaites gave a satirical reading, in Gatsby-esque mode, of a book supposedly titled The Great Bracksy – claiming Bracks preferred the intimacy of crowds and no longer cared who became PM. ‘I first met the Great Bracksy,’ Thwaites said in his mock speech, ‘when he was a nobody, a quiet bloke from Ballarat, who occasionally surfed the west coast … Even then he had an aura. He was calm, unflappable, unknowable. He was never late, for anything. And he always knew when it was time to go.’ When Bracks spoke, he wondered aloud why Thwaites wasn’t sporting the white tuxedo he’d regularly worn to Labor functions during the opposition years. Then, amid the laughter, Bracks made a telling remark. It was a pity, he said, that federal Labor hadn’t learned from the experience of Victorian Labor and remained united. ‘We’re all still friends,’ he said, sounding almost amazed. Finally, the former premier turned to the future. He was scheduled to fly to New York the week after the federal election, but Abbott’s deputy, Julie Bishop,

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had reserved her right to sack him as consul-general if she became minister for foreign affairs. The bureaucrats in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade had assured Bracks that precedent was on his side, that he would be sent to New York. Bracks wasn’t so sure. The appointment, he joked, could last for three days or three years. Steve was wrong. It only took Bishop two days to sack Bracks, ending an era of political power that began in the dark days of 1990 and lasted a generation.

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Cops and Cockroaches

It was October 1988, Australia’s bicentennial. World Expo 88, the centrepiece of the celebrations to mark the two-hundredth anniversary of European settlement in Australia, was entering its final days in Brisbane. Writing in The Sunday Mail a quarter of a century later, Queensland journalist and author Matthew Condon set the scene: The six-month party included a white and pink submarine manned by tap dancers, a fun park with a rollercoaster called ‘Titan’, rocketfiring hovercraft, the Inner Mongolian Acrobat Troupe, a monorail, the Munich Festhaus, celebrity hairdresser Stefan’s 88m sky needle, street performers, stilt walkers, 80 international and local pavilions, a display of something called ‘high definition television’, nightly fireworks, a glow worm cave, an artificial snow ski slope, a river stage that hosted entertainers from the band Icehouse to John Denver and Phyllis Diller, 90 works of sculpture, 36 international exhibitions, the universal (or at least in Brisbane) adoption of the ‘chicken dance’ and a hangover ratio per head of population higher than any period in the state’s history. It entered city folklore that Expo 88 ‘changed’ Brisbane forever, propelling it into modernity.1

Some 2200 kilometres to the north-west of the party, in Doomadgee – a remote Aboriginal community of less than a thousand souls on the 24

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edge of the Gulf of Carpentaria – there was little modernity and no celebrations. Just tears. The Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody had come to town to investigate the death of Alistair Albert Riversleigh. Riversleigh was just 34 years old when he died. His marriage had broken up, and his wife and children were almost 500 kilo­metres away, in Mount Isa. He spent the afternoon of Friday 10 April 1987 on the Doomadgee riverbank drinking rum and a port locally known as ‘monkey’s blood’ with a group of friends, relatives and acquaintances. According to the royal commission’s report, written by Commissioner LF Wyvill, the people with Riversleigh at the riverbank ‘said that there was nothing untoward about his behaviour … He did not talk about his family nor of any problems that he may have had with his family. He was not involved in any fights and did not speak of killing himself.’ Around four o’clock, Riversleigh left the riverbank and travelled to his stepfather’s house. By this time, Wyvill wrote, his mood was dramatically different. He told two people at the house he was going to kill himself. At one stage, while talking to his stepfather, Dick Brookdale, he started to cry. Then, Riversleigh made a noose from a garden hose, threw it over the branch of a tree and tried to hang himself. ‘The end tied to the tree came loose,’ Wyvill wrote, ‘and he fell to the ground.’ After that, Riversleigh hung upside down from a tree branch by his legs for about five minutes before climbing down. The Aboriginal police constable found him sitting on a drum in the yard. He arrested Riversleigh and took him to the watch house, where he was recorded in the charge book as ‘drunk and for protection’ and locked up in the middle of three cells. Police sergeant Victor Jacob left Riversleigh in the lock-up to sober up and went back out to patrol in his police car. Riversleigh’s companion in the middle cell was Horace George. George wasn’t wearing a shirt. In a statement to the police the next day, he said:

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I had my shirt under my head for a pillow in the jail. When I woke up, my shirt was gone and I saw Alistair Riversleigh lying on the floor of the cell where I was. He was lying face down underneath the window. There was no one else in the cell besides me and Alistair. I didn’t do anything about Alistair when I saw him on the floor. I didn’t know he was dead.

Riversleigh had torn George’s shirt into two pieces, tied them together to form a halter and looped the shirt around one of the bars of the cell window, creating a crude noose large enough to accommodate the neck of a man. By the time the police constables returned to the watch house and a nurse was called, it was almost seven o’clock. Riversleigh’s body was taken to Mount Isa – the city where his wife and children were living – for an autopsy. A coronial inquest would find that the cause of his death had been asphyxia by hanging. In the introduction to his report, Commissioner Wyvill wrote: Despite his earlier threat to commit suicide and the widespread publicity given to the recent deaths of two Aboriginals in the lock-up at Yarrabah, another Aboriginal community in North Queensland, the Doomadgee Aboriginal police did not appreciate the risk that Riversleigh might do himself some injury or even commit suicide if locked up and left without supervision. Had the police at Doomadgee been properly trained and supervised and made aware of the significance of the recent deaths in custody, the death of Alistair Riversleigh should not have occurred.

However, none of the words in Wyvill’s report could convey the sound the family of Alistair Riversleigh made on the verandah outside the room in Doomadgee where the royal commission sat. One of those lawyers, Rob Hulls, never forgot the wails of a family in mourning. Hulls, representing the Riversleigh family, was an outsider. Just 31  years old, he’d only been in outback Queensland two years.

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He’d grown up a world away in Melbourne’s middle-class suburbs – attending Xavier College in Kew and the Peninsula School in Mount Eliza – as part of a large Catholic clan of seven. His father, Frank, was a lawyer. Frank Hulls was never a member of the ALP, but he was a staunch Labor supporter. ‘He had a lot of mates who were Labor and, during the Split, went DLP and then they went Lib,’ Hulls says, ‘and my old man always maintained that they were traitors who did the “DLP two-step”, he used to call it – from Labor to the DLP to the Libs. He always maintained his support for Labor.’ Despite hating the DLP, Frank Hulls was a friend of the man whom many thought most responsible for the Catholic exodus from the party in the 1950s – Bob Santamaria. ‘We had a beach house down at Mount Martha for many years, and Paul Santamaria, who was Bob’s son, was a mate of mine at school, because I was at Xavier, and the Santamarias and the Hulls were fairly close,’ Hulls says. ‘We’d go to Mornington to play cricket on the beach with the Santamarias and my vivid memory of Bob Santamaria was he was always sitting on the beach, sort of keeping an eye over all the kids, but poring through newspapers with a pen, highlighting stuff in newspapers.’ As a teenager, Hulls tried to go one step further than his father and join the ALP. He wrote to the Victorian branch of the party but never received a reply. He trooped to a branch meeting in South Melbourne to hear the local member for Albert Park, ‘Bunna’ Walsh, address the party faithful but was uninspired. ‘I thought, “I need something a bit more vibrant than this.” ’ Hulls drifted away from Victorian Labor; he finished school, played football and qualified as a solicitor. By 1986, he was working as a legal aid lawyer in Frankston – and restless. Although he’d never met an Aboriginal person in his life, Hulls applied for a job in Mount Isa as an Aboriginal legal aid lawyer. He told his girlfriend and family it would be a 12-month working holiday – an adventure. It was a decision that would radically change the course of his life. The day Hulls arrived in Mount Isa, he went to a welcome barbecue that doubled as a farewell barbecue for a senior sergeant. The departing

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policeman sought Hulls out and asked him a question: ‘What if I was to tell you that a week ago in the Mount Isa watch house an Aboriginal defendant was being force-fed cockroaches. What would you say to that?’ Hulls half-laughed in disbelief. That’s when the policeman made his point: ‘Your reaction is the exact same reaction that a magistrate or jury will give when that allegation is made. No one believes it, but it happened. I saw it. That’s why I’m getting out of this town.’ ‘And this,’ Hulls says, ‘is coming from a sergeant of police.’ The senior sergeant warned the Victorian that life as a lawyer for Aboriginal legal aid was tough. He was right. The circuit Hulls worked, stretching into Mornington Island in the Gulf, was mammoth. The courts where defendants were tried were often also the police stations where they had been charged. And the judges that plied the circuit were drinking mates with the prosecutors. ‘There was no independent judiciary,’ Hulls says. ‘All those rules had been broken.’ Hulls threw himself into local life, playing Australian Rules football for the Mount Isa Saints and hosting a weekly local TV show on sport. To mark Mount Isa’s bicentennial Australia Day, he organised the ‘Mine to Mine’ race from the Mount Hilton mine to the Mount Isa mine. Around town, he became known as a snappy dresser because he wore a jacket and tie to court. Some also called him the ‘boong’ lawyer, because his clients were all Aboriginal. Hulls’s work wasn’t always appreciated by the police. After one court hearing in Cloncurry, Hulls was tailed almost to Mount Isa – a journey of more than 100 kilometres – by two police officers he’d crossed swords with in court. Outside Mount Isa, the police pulled Hulls over and gave him a traffic ticket for not keeping far enough to the left on the road. ‘I thought, “You have got to be joking. This is just bullshit.” It was an attempt to intimidate, basically.’ Hulls was also receiving a political education. Tony McGrady – the mayor of Mount Isa, state member for Mount Isa and a future minister in the Beattie government – recruited Hulls to the Labor Party and became a political mentor. ‘I got to meet [future Queensland premier]

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Wayne Goss early on,’ Hulls says. ‘He took me under his wing a bit. In fact, he said to me at one stage at a function in Mount Isa, “If you’re ever in Brisbane give me a call and we’ll catch up.” Hulls took Goss up on the offer and the two lawyers had lunch in Brisbane. Goss wasn’t yet leader of the state opposition, but confided in Hulls he would be and encouraged the young lawyer to think about life in politics. ‘He made it pretty clear,’ Hulls says, ‘that if you want to make a real difference, if the laws are no good, there’s only one way to make a difference and that’s by being a political activist – by getting involved. I started to think, “I am representing a very disadvantaged group … They weren’t being treated with dignity and respect.” ’ Sitting in the royal commission hearing at Doomadgee, listening to witnesses talk about the last hours of Alistair Riversleigh’s life inside, while, outside, those who loved him mourned his death, hardened Hulls’s views on the injustice of the justice system. What became very, very clear, very clear, was that in any other community – you know, a white Anglo-Saxon community – a person tries to commit suicide in front of everybody in the town, they’d be rushed to hospital. They’d be taken straight to hospital and given assistance. Instead, because this is an outback, remote, Aboriginal community, a fella tries to hang himself in the middle of the town with a hose, he falls to the ground and immediately he’s taken off as a troublemaker to the police cells where, within minutes, he hangs himself. And that was a pretty stark reminder to me of how disenfranchised this community was, how the justice system was a very cruel system … I continually found, the more I did it, that we had a justice system that wasn’t taking into account the culture of Aboriginal people. And Aboriginal people had very little understanding of the justice system … I thought the best way to make long-term changes to our justice system was not to continue to represent people on a case-by-case basis, which is important, but to get in and change the laws.2

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McGrady advised Hulls that if he wanted to launch a political career, he should gain an apprenticeship as an alderman on the Mount Isa City Council. In 1987, Hulls did just that, winning a council seat in a local election. It was the beginning of an unlikely political career. ‘I have no doubt,’ Hulls says, ‘because of my personality, I wouldn’t have had the patience to play the factional game [in Melbourne]; had I tried to make a political path here in Victoria, it wouldn’t have been successful because I wasn’t prepared to play those games. I was in the right place at the right time in Mount Isa.’ More like the perfect time. Hulls’s 1990 campaign for Mount Isa had the timing of multiple lightning strikes. The first strike was difficult to predict. Mount Isa was part of the federal seat of Kennedy, held for 24 years for the National Party by Bob Katter Sr. McGrady didn’t think Hulls could beat Katter Sr – a former army captain and Labor member who’d made the DLP two-step from the progressive to the conservative side of politics – in a head-to-head contest. His best chance of victory was to stand against a new National candidate whenever Katter Sr retired. That wasn’t expected to happen in 1990, but then Katter Sr became ill and was forced to retire. Instead of replacing Katter Sr with his son, Bob Jr, the National Party preselected Ross Shannon. For the first time since Bob Menzies was prime minister, a Katter would not be standing as a candidate in Kennedy. As a result, the National Party candidate was, like Hulls, an unknown quantity to voters. Building a public profile took time in an electorate the size of Kennedy, which then covered more than 770,000 square kilometres – a land mass more than twice the size of the United Kingdom, stretching from the Gulf in the north to Boulia in the south, the Queensland border in the west to the Pacific Ocean in the east. The second lightning strike was even more unlikely. More than 2500 kilometres to the south of Kennedy, the Cain government was imploding due to the combined effects of high interest rates, financial crises and factional bastardry. Ten federal Labor MPs would end up

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losing their seats in Victoria. Months out from the election, Bob Hawke knew that to retain government, he had to pick up new seats outside Victoria. As a consequence, Hawke started campaigning furiously in electorates that had previously received scant attention. Two weeks from election day, he flew north to meet Hulls in Kennedy and delivered a rousing speech in the Longreach Civic Centre that was, according to The Sydney Morning Herald of 10 March 1990, ‘vintage Hawke campaigning in a style not seen in the mortgage belt city marginals’. Those lightning strikes narrowed the margin but still weren’t enough to deliver Hulls victory. For that to happen, he needed an act of God – and received one. On election day, the eastern corner of Kennedy, the sugar and banana belt, was inundated with a tropical flood, making polling booths inaccessible. Voters in the flooded parts of Kennedy would have to wait a few days until they cast their ballots. By the time they were able to vote, Hawke had already won the election – beating Liberal opponent Andrew Peacock. The outcome of the Kennedy poll, therefore, had no bearing on the overall result. In Mount Isa, McGrady saw this as an opportunity. Planes were chartered to fly to the east coast of Kennedy and new flyers were printed for the polling booths that asked voters whether they wanted their MP to be a member of the government or the opposition. The response was emphatic. Hulls won Kennedy with a 4.4 per cent swing in the two-party preferred vote. After that, the life of Rob Hulls was never the same. He says: I can remember on election night, when it looked like I was going to win, someone said, ‘Bob Hawke’s on the phone.’ And I said, ‘Oh, yeah, bullshit.’ And they said, ‘He is.’ And, so, I come to the phone and he said, ‘G’day Rob, it’s Bob Hawke here.’ And a mate of mine, Peter Mitchell, who now reads news for Channel 7, does really good impersonations, and I said, ‘Oh, get fucked Mitch.’ And this voice says, ‘Who’s Mitch?’ It was Bob Hawke.

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Another early caller was a man destined to become an ALP rat, Mal Colston.3 Colston wanted to recruit the newbie from Mount Isa as a member of the Right faction. He told Hulls to come to Parliament House in Canberra. The trouble was Hulls had never visited Canberra and was reluctant to fly south because he couldn’t afford the airfare. Once it was explained to Hulls his ticket would be paid for by the Commonwealth, the member for Kennedy made his maiden voyage to the nation’s capital. Colston met Hulls on the Senate side of Parliament House and bustled him inside. Hulls assumed they were headed for a caucus meeting of all the Labor MPs. He was wrong. ‘It wasn’t a caucus meeting,’ he says. ‘It was a right-wing faction meeting. I’d never joined a faction. The next thing I remember was sitting next to John Kerin, who I’d met in the campaign, and he thrust a ballot paper at me and said, “You’ve got to vote.” And I said, “Mate, I’ve only just arrived. Who do I vote for?” ’ Kerin told the rookie what to do. Of the class of MPs from 1990, the member for Kennedy was the roughest of rough diamonds. He lacked the polish of a party insider like Brumby but had a gift for verbal pugilism, a talent for political theatre and a bleeding heart for social justice. As a football player, Hulls had been nicknamed Skylab, because, like the ill-fated space station, he flew high but, due to his propensity for injuries, tended to end up hitting the ground in pieces. As a politician, Skylab retained his highflying abilities, but somehow kept landing on his feet – even when his feet were in his mouth. In May 1991, when Hawke was fighting a losing battle to keep Paul Keating out of the Lodge, Hulls and 13 other Labor backbenchers were invited to share a meal with the prime minister in his Parliament House dining room. In a Pilita Clark article headlined ‘New boy speaks the unspeakable’, The Sydney Morning Herald detailed what happened next: The dinner went smoothly enough, as a relaxed Mr Hawke told his guests to let it all hang out and tell him how they thought the government was going and what could be done to improve it … Of course

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the one issue on nearly every caucus member’s mind at the moment, no matter what they say publicly, is the ongoing speculation over the leadership. But was this the sort of thing one raised at dinner with the Prime Minister? Clearly not, according to most of those present. But one newcomer to parliament, the genial Member for Kennedy in North Queensland, Mr Rob Hulls, thought otherwise. After dinner, some of the group retired to the Prime Minister’s anteroom for coffee and it was in this relaxed atmosphere that Mr Hulls, who is not aligned to any faction, spoke the unspeakable. While he realised it was a sensitive issue, the fact was that the continuing speculation was hurting the government. What could be done? he wondered. According to some of those who listened with gruesome fascination to Mr Hulls, Mr Hawke remained stony faced throughout, then attempted to give a statesman-like ‘no comment’.

Just like that, Hulls made a name for himself. Soon after, the phone in his parliamentary office rang. His electorate officer, Kim McGrath – a feminist lawyer from Melbourne who was working pro bono with the Aboriginal Legal Service in Mount Isa when she first met Hulls – answered the phone. Fairfax’s chief political reporter, Michelle Grattan, was on the line, demanding to talk to Hulls about his confrontation with the PM. Grattan rang every five minutes for the next two hours. Hulls had gone from outback backbencher to national news item with one faux pas. Was it intentional? Hulls and McGrath both laugh at the suggestion. ‘That was just naivety,’ McGrath says. ‘No idea, totally inappropriate, but it gave him a national profile, and obviously some people thought it was part of his political genius. He was shitting himself.’ Together, McGrath and Hulls forged what became the modus operandi of his political operations for the next 20 years: a working relationship that could be simultaneously argumentative, exasperating, exhilarating and hilarious. Highly charged and highly strung, Hulls was as difficult to manage as one of the thoroughbred racehorses he loved to follow, but he had a love of the contest once the starter’s pistol fired.

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The trouble, in those early years in Canberra, was that Hulls was on his own. ‘He honestly did not know what a faction was,’ McGrath says. ‘A complete greenhorn; and I was an idealistic Fitzroy–St Kilda lefty, also new to the ALP. He had no idea and I had no idea, but for both of us the mission was Aboriginal justice.’ After the 1990 election, Julie Ligeti, an old friend of McGrath’s from Melbourne, started working in Canberra as a policy advisor for Peter Staples, Hawke’s minister for aged, family and health services. Ligeti and McGrath met as law students in the 1980s, bonding over a wine cask while hatching plans to start a legal aid street stall. Now, they became flatmates and McGrath began attending fortnightly Friday night or end-of-parliamentary-session drinks in Staples’s ministerial office. Hulls often tagged along. ‘Rob had no factional mates,’ Ligeti says. ‘Because Rob’s foray into politics and winning that seat was a beautiful accident of history, he wasn’t embedded in factions up there and he didn’t have huge networks of old friends in Queensland … The short of it was he found himself as a genuine independent in the federal parliament’ – and, therefore, genuinely friendless. ‘Rob had no one to hang out with in those long [parliamentary sitting] weeks. Kim knew me and we started going out for drinks together. And, I have to tell you, for the first six months I thought he was a boorish, sexist, loud, wild man who drank too much, who was an ill-mannered whatever – but he was pretty funny.’ Part of what made Hulls outrageously funny – and often outrageous – was the way, after a few drinks, he behaved like an oversized Catholic schoolboy, a man-child’s mix of good intentions and un­ intended consequences. A Hulls conversation would veer from profane to confrontational to confessional in a matter of minutes. As McGrath says: ‘I spent my first year in that job just training him not to say “fuck” in public.’ Hulls also had a unique way of dealing with obstreperous constituents. Back in Mount Isa, McGrady’s state electorate office was three doors down the street from Hulls’s federal electorate office. One day,

cops and cockroaches

the McGrady office received a call from a constituent unhappy about interest rates. McGrady told the constituent that, as interest rates were a Commonwealth issue, he should speak to Hulls. The constituent replied that he had gone to the member for Kennedy’s office only to be physically ejected from the premises. McGrady called Hulls and asked whether the story was true. It was – the argument between the MP and the voter had become that heated. ‘That was just his way. He couldn’t tolerate fools,’ McGrady says, adding, ‘He was well regarded, particularly by the Indigenous communities.’ When Hulls married his first wife, Petrina Dorrington, members of one Aboriginal community presented the couple with a painted turtle shell as a wedding gift. The marriage ended, but Hulls carried that giant shell around like a shield – hanging it on one office wall after another – for the rest of his accidental political career.

35

Memo from ‘Bongo Land’

Brumby. That’s what they called him. Or, at a stretch, JB. It was as though his Christian name – John – didn’t exist or didn’t matter. Only John Button, the diminutive Victorian senator and serial contrarian, differed, calling his young colleague Brums. Then there was the way people said his name. Brumby, like mate, could carry a welter of meanings, depending on the tone of voice, the manner in which the vowel was stretched, or, in the case of future Brumby loyalist Rob Hulls, the sheer volume of delivery. It was a name that could be spoken, laughed, sworn. Back in 1990, though, as the Hawke government fought for political survival, the name Brumby was, for the first but not the last time, sighed as though in anticipation of defeat. Defeat was a new concept for Brumby. At 37, he was a three-term veteran of the federal parliament and often mentioned in journalistic dispatches as ministerial material. Brumby was a doer. A man with an abnormally high quotient of competitive zeal – mongrel even – who had been on the ascent ever since he won state medals as a schoolboy swimmer. Looking back from the vantage point of political retirement, Brumby says he doesn’t know where the drive came from: ‘I don’t know what makes people what they are. A bit of this and a bit of that; a bit of genes and a bit of family.’ In the case of Brumby, the drive had much to do with his father, Malcolm. 36

memo from ‘bongo land’

Malcolm Brumby, like his eldest son, was a doer. He had moved from Perth to Melbourne with his family when he was 12, but maintained contacts in the west and was on friendly terms with WA premier Sir Charles Court. Brumby Sr saw action in the Pacific during World War Two on the Q-class destroyer HMAS Quiberon. After the war, Malcolm married Alison Aird and rose through the corporate ranks to become managing director of footwear manufacturer Ezywalkin Shoes, before reinventing himself post-retirement as a conservationist and farmer in the Western District’s Konongwootong Valley, near Coleraine. Malcolm and Alison Brumby based themselves in the leafy middleclass suburb of Ivanhoe while their children, John, Richard, Jim and Susan, made their collective way through secondary school. John followed Malcolm’s footsteps, attending Melbourne Grammar, where he socialised with future political rival Ted Baillieu. He then studied commerce at the University of Melbourne. The Brumby children weren’t mollycoddled. Malcolm forced John to try debating at Melbourne Grammar. ‘Debating used to scare the shit out of me,’ he says. During school holidays, the Brumby clan drove to the furthest reaches of the Western District, where the kids were put to work. Brumby recalls the weeks spent carting thousands upon thousands of hay bales. ‘I used to do the hay carting down there and you’d look down on the river flats, and there you were surrounded by a sea of bales,’ he says. ‘Frigging hay bales everywhere.’ By the time he was 15, Brumby had been shanghaied into the family business, working part-time at an Ezywalkin Shoes shop in South Melbourne. This was 1968, when Australia was only beginning to wake from the slumber of the Menzies years and realise the horrors of the Vietnam War; a time when the inner city was decades away from becoming a byword for hipsters, and South Melbourne was the stamping ground of migrants and factory hands. ‘Our biggest sellers were the Crosby slip-ons, which were a dollar a pair,’ Brumby says with photographic recall. For young Brumby, working at Ezywalkin Shoes was a life experience; for others, it was life. One of the teenagers he worked alongside

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wanted to study accounting and economics, and matriculated high school with similar marks to the future premier, but didn’t go to university. He had to work to support his family. At Melbourne University, young Brumby drifted. ‘I was a very poor student,’ he says. ‘I spent most of my time playing blackjack and drinking … and I did a lot of part-time work.’ By the time he graduated he was ‘not very happy. I had no idea what I wanted to do. Absolutely no idea.’ The logical decision would have been to keep following in Malcolm Brumby’s sizeable footsteps, right into the footwear trade, but the young man made what, at the time, must have seemed a radical departure. He became a teacher. ‘I had never thought of teaching,’ Brumby says. Still, it proved to be the making of him. By 1976, this private schoolboy from Melbourne’s middle classes, a kid scared shitless by public speaking, was teaching consumer education, typing and shorthand to teenagers from one of country Victoria’s poorest communities, Eaglehawk.1 Already politicised by the dismissal of Gough Whitlam’s Labor government in 1975, Brumby became a community activist – helping establish and run programs to ensure Eaglehawk’s students had somewhere to go for breakfast before school, sports and activities to keep them occupied during and after school, and services from the local community health centre. By 1980, Brumby was out of the classroom and working as an organiser for the Victorian Teachers’ Union. At the time, Victorian Labor hadn’t won a state election since 1952. When state secretary Bob Hogg started modernising the ALP’s most moribund branch, one of the young turks he recruited to help was Brumby. This wasn’t the Victorian Labor that, within a generation, would hijack the national policy agenda and earn a reputation as the ALP’s most intellectual and arrogant branch. Back then, Victorian Labor was coming out of a generation of splits and vendettas to rival the People’s Front of Judea in Monty Python’s The Life of Brian. Or, as Button once put it, ‘Bongo Land’.2 ‘The place was a shambles,’ Hogg recalls. ‘We didn’t have much money. We had to live off our own resources.’ Brumby was one of

memo from ‘bongo land’

those resources. Hogg liked the look of the young unionist. ‘He was young, very handsome, had a bit of a roving eye, wore an earring,’ he says.3 When candidates were called for the unwinnable upper house seat of Midlands in the 1979 state election, the application of the only eligible Labor member was conveniently lost, leaving the door open for the 26-year-old Brumby, who hadn’t been a member for the requisite two years, to gain valuable campaign experience. In 1980, Hogg seconded Brumby from the teachers’ union to work at the ALP head office at 23 Drummond Street, Carlton, as an organiser, covering local branches in Knox and Monbulk. It was a good time to be around Drummond Street. The turn of that decade was a golden era of policy development, when – in the aftermath of the Whitlam dismissal – a new generation of educated professionals flooded the party. A policy unit, the Labor Resource Centre, was established next door to the head office. Headed by Jenny Macklin, a future deputy leader of federal Labor, the unit became a fountainhead of ideas for future Labor state and federal governments. John Cain fought alongside Button and others to modernise Victorian Labor in the 1960s and, in 1982, went on to be elected the state’s first Labor premier in 27 years. He says one of the legacies of the Whitlam dismissal was that, between 1976 and 1980, left-wing, right-wing and independent factions stopped fighting among themselves. ‘The policy work that came out of the party in those four years has never been seen since or before, I think. It was a crucible of ideas,’ Cain says. ‘The Labor Resource Centre was a product of people like Jenny Macklin, Brian Howe [another future deputy prime minister] – [Cain government minister] David White was another who was in it. It just recruited experts on a whole range of policy issues and from outside the party … The policy work was prodigious. And the factions had a common purpose.’4 After a quarter of a century in the cold, Victorian Labor finally learned how to rub two sticks together and make some heat with policies. Victorian ideas, such as the need for a national power grid, became federal Labor ideas, then turned into realities once the Hawke government was elected. Brumby’s rise went from rapid to turbocharged in

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the year leading up to 1983. Despite his time at Drummond Street, he wasn’t a member of a faction, let alone a member of Labor Unity, the right-wing group that held sway over his old stamping ground of Bendigo. After working the outer eastern suburbs of Melbourne for a few years as an ALP organiser, Brumby returned to the country to work for the teachers’ union – just five months before preselections opened for the regional seat of Bendigo. It is possible to win Labor preselection to stand for a state or federal seat with either strong support from local branches or strong support from a faction – but, in 1982, Brumby had neither. ‘All of the locals were locked in and Labor Unity, centrally, was locked in,’ he says. That changed when four Labor Unity members – including factional leader Robert Ray and policy wonk Gareth Evans – stood up at the meeting that would decide the Right candidate and pushed for Brumby’s pre­selection. ‘Had those four people not stood up I would have got, you know, 10 per cent of the vote at best,’ Brumby says. ‘As it happened, there were six candidates and it took five ballots and I won it 34–36.’ As Labor Unity’s anointed candidate for the federal seat of Bendigo, Brumby threw himself into the campaign for the 5 March election – unseating the Liberal Party’s whip, John Bourchier. According to a report in The Age on 7 March 1983: The energetic teacher has packed a political lifetime into four weeks. Mr Brumby ran an old style country campaign mixed with big city savvy … From the day the election was called Mr Brumby worked tirelessly eighteen hours a day, and estimates that he met almost every worker and manager in every factory and business in the electorate … Mr Brumby’s message was clear: a Labor Government would provide stability for the textile and manufacturing industry and retain high protection.

By 1990, the message was no longer as clear. The world had changed and there was precious little protection or stability for the textile and

memo from ‘bongo land’

manufacturing industries in Victoria, and the state government led by John Cain was at the eye of the storm. Cain was seen as honest and decent. His government had engineered countless social reforms, from the creation of Melbourne’s café culture through to liquor reforms and the establishment of VicHealth, the world’s first health promotion body funded by tobacco taxes. For 86 consecutive months, Victoria had Australia’s lowest unemployment rate as Cain rowed against the tide of economic liberalism, maintaining expansionist Keynesian policies that saw his government boost the state’s economy by increasing capital and recurrent spending. Then the tide turned, with manufacturers hit by falling tariffs, businesses squeezed by high interest rates, and thousands of investors traumatised by the collapse of the Pyramid Building Society. Brumby says: ‘They were a runaway success until the shock to the system, which was interest rates at 18 per cent, and then Keating – Keating largely got the [federal] budget back into surplus by cutting middle-class welfare and secondly cutting the states.’ Unemployment jumped into double figures, home loan interest rates skyrocketed, more than 250 trams jammed Bourke Street as part of a protracted industrial dispute and, politically, the Pyramid disaster became conflated with the earlier collapse of the state-owned Tricontinental Bank, which had threatened to bankrupt the State Bank of Victoria. Meanwhile, the factions blocked Cain’s attempts to cut spending and regain control of the state’s finances. Some crises are political confections, created to win elections and manufacture consent. The Victorian crisis of 1990 was no confection. It was all too real: just ask my family. The Deanes had seen tough times before – for a year in the early 1980s, when we were living in Mooroopna in the Goulburn Valley, we couldn’t afford meat – but this was worse. Mum and Dad were running a newsagency in the inner city suburb of North Fitzroy, and they were drowning, struggling to stay afloat while they searched for someone to buy the business. Dad surrendered. Took himself to Eildon to fish and wait for the bank to repossess the business and the family home. Mum didn’t. She put on her best clothes, caked on her make-up as though it were war

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paint, marched into the bank and struck a deal that saved the house. My parents weren’t alone, either. Similar dramas were played out all over the state as businesses turned to rust and thousands packed their station wagons and followed the Hume Highway to New South Wales or Queensland. Button was wrong. It wasn’t just Victorian Labor that was bongo. All of it – the whole of the garden state – was bongo, too. The electorate was feral, with many blaming Labor for their troubles. Federally, the Hawke government was blaming the Cain government. That was because, one Hawke advisor says, the Victorians were ‘a fucking in­competent bunch of social theorists. They weren’t malevolent people. They were just fuckwits.’ In the eyes of the Victorian electorate, though, Brumby was hogtied to the fuckwits. It didn’t matter that, up in Canberra, he was chairman of the House of Representatives’ Standing Committee on Employment, Education and Training. Didn’t matter that the media was saying Hawke would promote him to the ministry after the 1990 election. Didn’t matter how many factories he visited, how many hands he shook. None of it mattered when people were losing jobs, businesses and family homes. The tide was going out for Labor in Victoria – and a tsunami was approaching. One day Brumby was in Maryborough, another old gold-rush town in his electorate, with Button, who, as minister for industry and commerce, had been responsible for lowering the tariff wall, reducing protectionism, and rationalising an inefficient, heavily subsidised automotive industry. Now, as the country slid towards its worst recession since the Great Depression, the latest current account deficits were released. The accounts were bad, swallowing almost 6 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP), holding back economic growth and reflecting a structurally weak economy. Button had dedicated his ministerial career to trying to retrofit those structural weaknesses,5 while Keating restructured the federal budget, reducing Commonwealth spending from 27 per cent of GDP to 23 per cent between 1987 and 1989 by cutting Medicare payments,

memo from ‘bongo land’

unemployment benefits, TAFE funding and transport spending. Whitlam’s dream of a free university education was scrapped and replaced by the Higher Education Contributions Scheme (HECS); middle-class welfare was attacked, with means testing for family allowances introduced. Keating also took $1 billion away from state and territory governments, effectively signing the death warrant for the Cain administration. ‘The Victorian ALP and the national government were barely on speaking terms. They had similar contempt for each other,’ Brumby says. Cain himself is rueful about those years: ‘We got belted to buggery in the early years of the Keating Treasury … They were very authoritarian. Arrogant.’ At one point, Keating refused to answer phone calls from Cain’s treasurer, Rob Jolly. Keating was tough, as his cabinet submission on the 1986–87 budget demonstrates: ‘There is no future in allowing matters to drift and hoping something will turn up. That would mean seeking to carry on as if the world owed us higher living standards than we can currently sustain. Clearly, however, the world will not let that happen.’ As a backbencher holding a marginal seat, Brumby was on the frontline of Keating’s tough love. Bendigo – an electorate with 60,000 voters – had more than a thousand people who, with the introduction of means testing, would lose their pensions. ‘That was a shitload of voters,’ Brumby says. ‘I held the line. If I’d broken I think the whole caucus would have broken. It was very, very tough. The NSW Right never liked the assets test because they never thought it was worth the pain, but it was. It was a good reform. It was the right reform.’ Brumby was also directly involved with the introduction of HECS and worked with deputy prime minister Brian Howe on a Medicare reform that didn’t get up but would be revisited by the Abbott government in 2014 – Medicare co-payments. Connected and cultured, Brumby stood out in regional Bendigo. Bob Cameron, a local Labor lawyer and future ministerial colleague of Brumby’s, says the member for Bendigo was ‘very nouveau’ for the

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time: ‘Very slick. Very polished. Very practised. And it was at a level unseen in Bendigo … He would always have his hair perfect.’ Beneath the ‘nouveau’ veneer, Brumby prided himself on being one of the hard men of the Hawke backbench – of fighting to secure the kind of economic growth that would underwrite social progress – but that was cold comfort in Maryborough. Brumby recalls the look on Button’s face when he saw the current account deficit. There were just billions of dollars of deficit, and this pale, drawn look came over [Button’s] face, and he said, ‘They just won’t lie down, will they?’ And he was talking about consumers. They were spending despite those horrific interest rates. So, it was tough. Unemployment was starting to go up and then Victoria was a cot case. John Cain had stood down, the economy was literally melting around us, the budget position was terrible and you had the start of Pyramid and everything else. It was just political poison.

That’s when Brumby sat down and wrote a memo to the man responsible for the ALP’s 1990 campaign – his first political boss, Bob Hogg, by then national secretary of the party. Neither Hogg nor Brumby kept the Bendigo memo, but both remember its contents. Brumby: ‘I put in it there were nine reasons why I was going to lose my seat. And I concluded the memo by saying, “This is not to say I won’t be trying. I am. I’m working my arse off. But the fact is we’re not going to hold Bendigo.” ’ Politically, Brumby was a dead man walking. Two days after the polls closed, John Brumby was home at 27 Shelley Street, Bendigo, with his wife, Rosemary McKenzie, and daughters, Georgia and Elizabeth. His Liberal opponent, Bruce Reid,6 had won, and Brumby was now unemployed. The phone rang. Hawke had already called to offer commiserations; now it was Keating’s turn. Brumby and Keating weren’t close. Brumby was more of a Hawke man. When speaking of Hawke’s

memo from ‘bongo land’

virtues, Brumby invariably wheels back to one of his pet topics. ‘His work ethic,’ Brumby says of Hawke, emphasising work ethic, ‘was quite extraordinary, from six-thirty in the morning through until 11 at night. His ability to maintain focus, when he was chairing a meeting at eight o’clock at night and he’d probably had a gutful of people for the day. His discipline. He had great discipline – particularly in the early years of the government – in still being fair and reasonable to everyone around the table.’ What Brumby admired about Keating was his attention to detail, his chainsaw attacks in Question Time and his zeal for reform. In the lead-up to the 1987 federal budget, Brumby and Ros Kelly (who would, with Keating’s backing, become a minister after the 1987 election, dashing Brumby’s last best shot at the frontbench)7 coordinated a group of backbenchers and worked with Kelly’s husband, deputy secretary of Treasury David Morgan, to prepare a list of spending cuts palatable to caucus. Brumby had also, in one of the Parliament House parties held to celebrate the delivery of the 1987 budget, given Keating some free advice, urging him to take a stronger role in the Hawke government’s push to ban mining from the Antarctic and, more generally, to ‘green up’ his policies. Now, Keating was returning the favour, and his advice was blunt: ‘Get out of politics. It’s a mug’s game, mate, get out of politics. You should go out and look after your family and get into superannuation, son.’

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Enter the Independents

Bunna Walsh was ‘old’ Labor in a good way. Born and bred in workingclass Port Melbourne, he joined the ALP and the Waterside Workers Federation and made his living as a wharfie. In May 1970, he won the seat of Melbourne West in the Victorian parliament’s Legislative Council, but only spent a half a day on the plush red benches of the upper house. The council, a conservative stronghold since the days of the bunyip aristocracy, referred the Melbourne West result to the Supreme Court as a disputed electoral return. At issue was Walsh’s criminal record. In 1950, a 16-year-old Walsh had been convicted of burglary in the South Melbourne Children’s Court and given a suspended sentence. Under the Constitution Act Amendment Act 1958, anyone ‘convicted of treason or any felony or infamous crime in any part of Her Majesty’s dominions’ was ineligible to sit as a member of the council. The conservative Legislative Council wanted the Supreme Court to determine whether or not that law applied to a crime committed by a child. In September 1970, the Supreme Court came back with its answer: it did. On 10 September 1970, The Age’s Michael Ryan reported on Walsh’s first day back as a wharfie with Gang 212 on the twilight shift at 17 Victoria Dock. ‘I don’t mind being back here with the blokes,’ Walsh told Ryan. ‘They’re good blokes, working a decent day’s work 46

enter the independents

to provide for their family – like me.’ Ryan hinted that there was more to the Walsh matter than met the eye: ‘Asked to confirm the waterside belief that his conviction for youthful assault and robbery arose when he was accosted by a male, Walsh said: “I don’t want to say anything like that. It might stir up new trouble for the fellow, when he thinks it’s behind him, as I did.” ’ Five years later, the Victorian parliament amended the Constitution Act, making it possible for people convicted of offences in the Children’s Court to be elected as MPs. In May 1979, nine years after his half-day stint as a member of the Legislative Council, Walsh won the lower house seat of Albert Park for the ALP. Usually, maiden parliamentary speeches are one long thank-you, as newly minted politicians pay respect to their family, their supporters and their electorate. Walsh’s was a litany of protest. The ex-wharfie railed against a conservative government that, after 24 years in office, cared more about cows and sheep than people. Walsh sounded warnings about the social, environmental and economic dangers of poor planning, poor educational services, unaffordable housing and Melbourne’s obsession with road transport. He rounded off with a declaration of purpose: ‘I will fight to ensure that tenants, the elderly, the unemployed, the exploited and the working people receive a better deal and that the economy of this state and country is used for the benefit of all people, not only for a select few.’ When John Cain led Victorian Labor back from the wilderness in 1982, Walsh made good on his promise, serving as government whip, then minister for public works; employment and industrial affairs; labour; housing and construction; property and services; and water resources. When, in 1989, unionists from the Socialist Left faction tried to stop the Cain government from reforming WorkCover legislation by, as Cain put it, ‘making noises about preselections’,1 Walsh was one of the few who stood up to the threats. Cain wrote: ‘Bunna was later to pay for his independence – shown on several occasions – with his place in Cabinet. In March 1990 they caught up with him and in the purge at that time he was dumped.’2

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By 1991, Walsh was facing political extinction. The demographics of Albert Park, which ran from the docks of Port Melbourne to the bohemian charms of St Kilda, had changed as the rooming houses closed and the young professionals moved closer to Port Phillip Bay. A new breed of Labor member, weaned on the cosmopolitan flair of Gough Whitlam, was also gaining ascendancy, and they didn’t want to be represented by a 57-year-old ex-wharfie. What they wanted were ‘new’ Labor representatives like the blond, handsome, 35-year-old surfer-cum-barrister called John Thwaites. Thwaites, a member of the local South Melbourne branch of the ALP since 1974, was independent by name and by nature. ‘I never joined a faction and I wasn’t prepared to toe the line,’ he says. I think I’ve got a natural aversion to being forced into groups – and, so, I didn’t – and I was told by everyone in the factions that I would never get into parliament without joining. Rather than join a faction and suck up to people, I decided that if I was going to get into parliament, I was going to need to get some numbers for myself. So I went around to the unions and got support from a large array of unions [including the Australian Workers’ Union, Transport Workers’ Union and the Health Services Union of Australia] … My basic support came from the [Federated] Clerks’ Union. Now, I was very lucky because the only way I was able to do that was that, at the time, those unions were not strongly aligned to any faction, and so they basically gave me support.

Thwaites also worked the local branches hard, building a grassroots network. By early 1991, Thwaites had the numbers to beat Walsh in the preselection for Albert Park. ‘And then,’ he says, ‘the shit hit the fan.’ Victorian Labor was a terminal case in 1991. In August 1990, factional instability had forced Cain to resign and be replaced as premier by the Socialist Left’s Joan Kirner. Kirner was now Victoria’s first female premier.3 Unless she could lift Labor’s support above 22 per cent, though, Kirner would be Labor’s last premier for a very long time.

enter the independents

One of Cain’s political advisors, a 36-year-old former schoolteacher called Steve Bracks, was asked to stay on and help Kirner’s rescue mission. Bracks and Kirner knew each other well; they both lived in Williamstown, and he managed her local campaign. Still, the quietly spoken, fiercely polite Bracks was a reluctant recruit. He didn’t want to be an apparatchik; he wanted to be a politician. Bracks had spent the 1980s on the electoral frontline, standing three times for state seats in Ballarat – including a by-election campaign in the winter of 1988 for Ballarat North, a Liberal Party stronghold. From a media point of view, the Ballarat North campaign, held in a regional city with local television, radio and newspapers, was a microcosm of a statewide campaign and an ideal training ground for a future political leader. During the campaign, Labor’s advertising man, Bill Shannon, drove up to Ballarat with party secretary Peter Batchelor to meet Bracks. Shannon didn’t see a future premier. What he saw was, he says, ‘the boy next door. I remember thinking that “this is the most unlikely politician” because, to me, he just didn’t seem to have anything like the sort of cut. I couldn’t see any meanness whatsoever. I couldn’t see any, frankly, edge. All I saw was a really nice bloke. I thought, “Oh, well, young and willing to give it a go.” And that was about it.’ Shannon wouldn’t be the last political operative to under­estimate Bracks. The winter campaign for Ballarat North turned heads in the parliamentary offices of Spring Street. Normally, by-elections are seen as an opportunity to register a protest vote against an incumbent government. The expectation was that, after six years in office, there would be a swing against Labor in Ballarat North. Bracks confounded expectations, losing the election but marginally increasing Labor’s vote. Cain called a snap election on the back of Bracks’s encouraging result, narrowly winning a third term. During the 1988 state election, Bracks stood for a second time in Ballarat North and lost for a second time, but achieved a swing of 3.58 per cent. ‘Steve ran a very good campaign up there. He was terrific,’ Cain says.

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Afterwards, Bracks and his wife, Terry, decided the best way to find a winnable seat was to move from regional Victoria to Melbourne. In 1990, the Bracks family settled in the seaside suburb of Williamstown, in Melbourne’s inner west. Like Thwaites, he would keep out of the mainstream factions, aligning himself with independents such as Cain, Jim Kennan, John Button, Michael Duffy and Barry Jones. Soon after arriving in Melbourne, Cain asked for Bracks to be seconded from the public service to his private office. ‘It wasn’t something I was seeking,’ Bracks says of the Cain job. ‘It was something I felt I was obliged to do. In fact, it was not going to help my particular career to do it.’ He soon found out that political life in the late period of the Cain government was Hobbesian – solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. Bracks started in Cain’s private office on Monday 25 June 1990. Two days later, an administrator was appointed to the failed Pyramid Building Society. Cain’s expansionist Keynesianism was grinding to a halt, and his new advisor – an economic hardhead – was already thinking along different lines. Bracks explains: I’d already developed a political philosophy, which was really backing up and supporting the Hawke–Keating approach to economic management. That is, opening up Australia to the rest of the world, putting in safety nets – health, the medical safety net, the industrial relations safety net – in a Labor way, but not restricting the market and its opportunities and opening up the opportunities more internationally: what Tony Blair went on to call the third way later on … By that time in 1990 the [Cain] government had geared up significantly on debt and debt servicing. Something like about 30 per cent of the budget outlays was on debt servicing. It was a very high proportion – not higher than the Bolte [government] years, but it was high … It left very little room for the government to change when the recession happened. They had no buffer. They had no way of moving. They had a block in the upper house – they couldn’t raise taxes. They had a block on the expenditure side because they

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were locked into high debt costs as a proportion of their budget. So, their discretion was less. And their political capital was reduced, too, so when they tried to restrain expenditure they ran up against interest groups – unions and others – who would not allow them to do structural change. So, they were caught both politically and economically … That influenced me enormously.

Cain saw the writing on the wall. ‘The government,’ he wrote, ‘ceased to govern in the real sense. There was a paralysis of decision making … That paralysis of decision making meant the government was just decaying.’4 On 7 August 1990, Cain called a media conference at 1 Treasury Place and resigned. I was sitting in the front row for that conference, working as a newspaper reporter. The outgoing premier looked grey. After Cain resigned, Bracks wanted to return to the public service but agreed to stay on in Premier Kirner’s office for another four months. ‘Every day was a crisis,’ Bracks says. Still, Bracks stuck to his task. His first job was to help design a jobs creation package. ‘It was based on the premise that Victoria was first into the recession and would be first out of the recession,’ he says, ‘and it involved some significant extra effort on training, preparing people for the recovery, when it occurred, by improving their skills; on advancing some public works, that is, offering support for councils to look at grants for public works; and some public works in health and education and other areas throughout the state – bringing forward projects, largely.’ His other project was more clandestine; he helped redraw the ‘Brisbane Line’ of seats that had to be held. Normally, Brisbane Line seats are ones that must be won to retain government. In 1990, the Brisbane Line seats were ones that had to be won to avoid annihilation. ‘We redrew the lines and mounted a significant campaign strategy, which meant that we campaigned in safe seats,’ Bracks says. ‘We campaigned in the Keilors and the seats which were sort of the 10 per cent – 8, 10 per cent plus [range] … We were honest enough with ourselves to do that. And Joan was honest enough to understand.’

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Soon after, Bracks returned to the public service and, while scouting for a winnable seat, became the leader of Labor’s independents. Then, in March 1991, the shit hit the fan in Albert Park. The last thing Kirner wanted, as premier, was a destabilised caucus. Losing Bunna Walsh, a Socialist Left colleague, in a preselection battle was destabilising. Kirner stopped Bracks in the street in Williamstown and told him that, for the good of the government, he should tell Thwaites to step aside and let Walsh keep Albert Park. The independents themselves – who behaved more like a gathering of like minds than a faction – were also divided. Kennan, who had ambitions to become Labor’s next leader, wanted Walsh to stay because he was a supporter. Cain also swung in behind his former minister. Thwaites came under enormous pressure. At one point, Kirner telephoned and told him that her government might fall if he won the Albert Park preselection. Thwaites says: I had all the powers that be put every bit of pressure they could to get me to pull out. John Cain opposed my preselection, Joan Kirner opposed it, Jim Kennan passionately opposed it – all of these people that I had worked with. And then when I got the numbers against Bunna – like, I could win – they then persuaded Bunna to pull out of that seat and Andrew McCutcheon, who had been my boss, he then jumped out of the seat he was in to the seat I was in, Albert Park, and everyone presumed I’d just pull out because he was a minister and a friend … It was quite a searing experience.

Thwaites refused to budge. He couldn’t help himself. He was smart, with degrees in science and law; he was ruthlessly single-minded, having won a seat on the South Melbourne council in a tradi­tionally conservative ward; and he hated being pushed around. ‘Thwaitesy was always seen as this rare, freaky independent creature,’ one Labor person explains. He just wasn’t ‘Labor’ in the Bunna Walsh sense of the word – he didn’t come from a working-class background, wasn’t

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part of a faction and had never worked for a union – but was quint­ essentially Labor in the Whitlam sense.5 Born in Oxford, the son of ‘Whitlamite’ schoolteachers, Johnstone William Thwaites grew up in and around the South Yarra campus of Melbourne Grammar; he lived on-site, then nearby in a school-owned house while his father, a politics teacher, served as a boarding master. At home, politics was a popular topic of conversation. At school, there was a peer group pressure to excel. ‘I never felt I was some sort of radically different person because I supported Labor,’ Thwaites says. ‘When I was at Melbourne Grammar, despite its reputation, the reality was it was not a place that idolised wealth or business success; the major push was academic excellence – academic and cultural excellence in the arts. That was the major pressure.’ Thwaites performed well at Melbourne Grammar, then, after matriculating in 1972 – the year of Whitlam’s landmark win – spent time in the United States as an exchange student in Cleveland, Ohio. Thwaites made the most of his time in Vietnam-era America, attending an all-black high school in Georgia and the Watergate hearings in Washington, DC, and meeting Andrew Young, an African-American congressman who would go on to become mayor of Atlanta and US ambassador to the United Nations. Returning to Australia, he studied at Monash University – focusing more on his surfing than student politics. After graduation, he joined the Albert Park branch of the ALP. One of the members of the branch was Frank Crean, Whitlam’s former deputy prime minister as well as a former state member for Albert Park. Crean would doorknock for Thwaites during his 1985 campaign for the South Melbourne council. From 1987 to 1989, Thwaites worked as a political advisor to two attorneys-general – fellow independent Kennan and the Socialist Left’s McCutcheon. Thwaites was close with Kennan, ‘an inspiring politician’ with ‘a very good intellect’, and McCutcheon, an architect, who was ‘a very smart guy, but his interests were more in planning and housing rather than in the law’. Now, though, Kennan, a man whom

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Thwaites had worked tirelessly for, was opposing his bid to start his own political career. Many of the supporters of Kennan and McCutcheon saw Thwaites’s bid for Albert Park as an act of betrayal – an individual indulgence at the expense of the greater good. Thwaites’s supporters could have made similar accusations against Kennan and McCutcheon. Either way, the Albert Park preselection battle was bitter – and personal. On the night of 4 April 1991, the battle came to a head. The independents held a debate in one of the dungeon-like meeting rooms in the basement of state parliament. The case against Thwaites was led by Kennan, the case for by Stuart Morris, a future justice of the Supreme Court. It was a surreal scene. Two lawyers destined to become Queen’s Counsels went head to head on the merits of Thwaites’s candidacy for Albert Park, while the children of independent member Robyn McLeod, probably upset by all the raised voices, cried in the background. At one point, Barry Jones decided he couldn’t stand the noise any longer and stormed out of the meeting. John Cain sent a message arguing the case against Thwaites’s candidacy, while John Button – Cain’s old friend – sent a message arguing the case for the affirmative. ‘It was a bitterly, bitterly fought preselection,’ says Labor Unity figure David White. ‘The two people who were fantastic were [independent federal member for Burke, Neil] O’Keefe and [Labor activist] Sheila O’Sullivan. They ran the Thwaites campaign.’ Labor Unity supported Thwaites’s candidacy for Albert Park. ‘We weren’t seeking to bring him into our group or contaminate him,’ White says. ‘We just didn’t want the others. We wanted to look to the future.’ In the end, Thwaites prevailed. ‘It was a seminal win,’ Bracks says, ‘because it said that we were prepared to look at what should happen after the election.’ Thwaites credits his victory to two men, former Cain government minister Evan Walker and Bracks. ‘It was unbelievable,’ he says. Evan gave this brilliant summary of it all and said, ‘Well, they need to get new blood.’ He was a friend of Andrew’s and had known Andrew

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since he was a kid, and Andrew was a good person, but [Walker said] he’d had his time. The other significant one was Steve [Bracks] because he represented the young aspirants for a seat and, really, on any basis, if I got up it was less likely that Steve would get up because I was taking one of those [seats] and yet he believed it was worth the potential risk to his political future to support me, to get me in, because that’s the sort of guy he is.

Around the time Thwaites made his play for Albert Park, Bracks was sizing up the state seat of Altona. It was touch-and-go whether or not Bracks had the numbers to win the preselection. In the end, he decided against nominating, and focused on the Thwaites campaign in Albert Park. ‘That period was about preparing for the next phase, once we lost government, of building the party up, ready for government again, and having the right people in place,’ Bracks says. ‘The independents were all about total independence for anyone on any policy matter within the party – not restricting – and finding good people. That’s what it was always about and that’s what we did.’ Thwaites holds a similar view: I believed that the Cain government and the Kirner government would not win the next election and it made sense to get some new people in there now … and then what happened essentially was the government didn’t want anything to upset the applecart which I thought – and my supporters thought – was pretty ridiculous because the applecart was already turned over.

Bracks and Thwaites hadn’t known each other before the battle for Albert Park; by the end of the fracas, they were inseparable. Without that preselection, the defining relationship of the Bracks government may never have been forged. The friendship that became the nucleus of  the Bracks government began in one of parliament’s dungeon meeting rooms on the night of 4 April 1991.

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Shellbacks and Troglodytes

Kelvin Thomson, the federal member for Wills, has two framed photographs on the wall in the reception area of his electorate office in Munro Street, Coburg. One photo is of the Victorian Parliamentary Labor Party’s caucus members standing on the steps of state parliament in 1988; the other is the same caucus in 1992. Thomson, at the time the state member for Pascoe Vale, is easy to spot in both photographs. Bald and strong, Thomson has one of those Easter Island heads that’s impossible to miss. Besides Thomson’s distinctive profile, the other notable feature of the two photographs is the size of the 1992 caucus. It is a third smaller than the 1988 caucus. That’s because on 3 October 1992 – the day of Joan Kirner’s first and last election as Victorian Labor leader – the ALP won only 27 of 88 seats in the Legislative Assembly and just five of the 22 seats up for grabs in the Legislative Council. ‘It was a terrible wipeout,’ Thomson says, ‘but since then I’ve seen worse, and there was some furniture saved.’ To save the furniture, Victorian Labor had changed tack significantly under Kirner, kicking open the door to the privatisation of state-owned assets, legalising casinos and pokie machines, establishing the Major Events Company and committing to the implementation of the landmark ‘casemix’ funding formula, which paid hospitals for the number of patients they treated.1 For her trouble, Kirner was 56

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called a traitor by some members of her own Socialist Left faction. What divided the Left was privatisation. The Socialist Left was philosophically opposed to the sale of public assets and could point to the carnage caused by privatisation in Thatcher’s Britain, but now one of their own was letting the neoliberal genie out of the bottle. As one of Kirner’s factional defenders put it, Victoria’s first female premier operated in a cold-war atmosphere that was a precursor to the gendered vilification meted out to Australia’s first female prime minister, Julia Gillard. Like Gillard, Kirner persevered. ‘Kirner,’ one Socialist Left leader says, ‘was much more successful than people give her credit for. She did remarkably well.’ Then again, such positive thoughts are only permissible more than 20 years after the fact. Few Labor people felt so charitable in 1992. Peter Batchelor, a bearded, vegetarian inner-suburban member of the Socialist Left with a red-blooded appetite for political pragmatism, was, at the time, the state member for Thomastown, and he was dismayed. He says: ‘There were some people who were happy to be in opposition, because if you’re not working hard and you’re not being creative and you’re just being negative – internally or externally – it can be an easy life … They were called shellbacks and they were just troglodytes.’2 One of the few benefits of Labor’s electoral defeat was that people from across the factions – including the Brahmins of the Left and Right, Kim Carr and Greg Sword – could agree on one thing: there was an urgent need for change. Under Carr’s leadership, Victoria’s Socialist Left had evolved from the ALP’s internal opposition party – remaining ideologically pure and fighting any and all compromises – to the mainstream. At the beginning of the Cain government, the Left had only one minister in cabinet; by the end of the Kirner government, the cabinet included nine members of the Left.3 ‘The way to influence proceedings was from the inside,’ one Left insider explains. ‘The traditional role of the Left has been the oppositional role … [But] the real action happens in cabinet and that means you have to be in government. That does not mean you subscribe to every bit of bullshit coming out of Chicago.’4

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With Left members Kirner and Jenny Beacham leading the parliamentary and administrative wings of the party, Carr’s faction was the driving force of Victorian Labor. That’s why Carr is considered by many members of the Socialist Left to be one of the three most important people produced by the Victorian ALP over the past quarter of a century.5 As one Left powerbroker explains: ‘He was the man who repositioned the Left from half in and half out to right in, and believing that a large part of our story – both socially progressive and about the role of the state – could be at the very heart of modern Labor’s story.’ In 1991, though, the Left’s position at the heart of Victorian Labor was attacked when a group broke away and established a rival left-wing sub-faction, the Pledge. After the 1992 election, the right-wing Labor Unity faction saw an opportunity to take control. Sword, the federal secretary of the National Union of Workers, was convener of Labor Unity. There were other Right chieftains – Senator Robert Ray was a senior player and a young Stephen Conroy, yet to snare a Senate seat and quickly gaining a reputation for ballistic profanity and mastery of factional engineering, was rising fast – but Sword was the one most animated by the dire state of Victorian Labor. He says, ‘We had a $1 million debt. We were positioned as the “Guilty Party”. We had no hope in hell of raising that money – no corporate support – and, not only that, you also had a total atmosphere of defeatism.’ Sword saw a desperate need for a renewal of people and purpose. Sword’s faction controlled 46 per cent of the delegates who selected candidates for ALP public office positions such as state secretary; the Socialist Left controlled 34 per cent, while the Pledge controlled 15 per cent and the independents 5 per cent. By early 1993, Sword was looking for ways to increase the number of delegates he controlled and give him the power base he needed to clean out the administrative and parliamentary wings of the Victorian branch. The Left and Right factions had been squabbling over the presidency of the party and the position of the state secretary and, having not had a parliamentary leader or state secretary since the 1970s, the

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Right was hungry for power. It wanted to make Sword ALP president and the Right’s John Lenders state secretary. The factional stand-off was broken when the Left and Right reached a power-sharing deal. Sword would hold the presidency for just 12 months, then hand the reins to Kirner; Beacham would stay on as state secretary of the ALP for 12 months, then hand over the task of preparing for the next state election to Lenders. On 19 June 1993, Sword – Labor Unity’s first state president since Peter Redlich’s reforming reign in the 1970s – stood on the stage of Monash University’s Robert Blackwood Hall and made an inauguration speech that outlined his business plan for Victorian Labor. To many members of the audience, it must have sounded more like a declaration of war. Sword said: We may have forgotten that less than 12 months ago we were demolished in the state election. The people outside this party, rightly or wrongly, who voted against us, thought that the [Labor] government … was inappropriate and was bad government. And they voted against it in masses. We have to confront those demons. We can’t pretend that it didn’t happen. It did … Every member of parliament is on notice that they will have attention paid to them in the coming preselection process … We can’t just believe it was bad luck, that the economy turned against us at the wrong time … We should examine all the policies that we have and ask ourselves the question: are they appropriate policies for the ’90s?

While Sword applied his mind to factional conundrums, Ray scouted for political talent – picking up two promising recruits in late 1992 and early 1993. The first was John Brumby. Since losing Bendigo in 1990, Brumby had thrived. During his first year out of Canberra, he worked as a consultant on superannuation and community banking for the Bendigo Bank. ‘It was during the period of Pyramid and a pretty dry-mouth period. People were very anxious,’ he says. He also emulated his father, buying 130 dilapidated acres at Harcourt, near

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Bendigo, with his wife, Rosemary McKenzie. The now rejuvenated Harcourt property is still in the Brumby family. When preselections reopened for Bendigo, Brumby decided against standing in the 1993 federal election. Joe Helper, a country mechanic who later became Brumby’s agriculture minister, stood – narrowly losing. Inevitably, Brumby was caught by Canberra’s gravitational pull, consulting for two Hawke ministers, John Kerin and Simon Crean, before taking a job as chief of staff to the minister for resources and tourism, Alan Griffiths. While working for Griffiths, in late 1991, Brumby received an offer too good to accept. He explains: In the final days of Hawke I was working for Griffo. Griffo was 100 per cent in the Keating camp, but people saw me as neutral, which I was. And, so, there was a group in the last two weeks of Hawke’s prime ministership – the last month – a group of backbenchers … there were a few in the centre-left and a few in the Right … came and approached me and wanted me to be Hawke’s chief of staff and put that proposition to Hawke as well. But, to be honest, I didn’t think it was the right fit, and I didn’t think I was experienced enough to do that, and I think Bob probably took the same view … The reason they were putting me up was not because I was a political genius and was going to solve all his problems, but because I would have had a much better relationship with the caucus than his office did at that time.

Brumby stayed with Griffiths. In the fishbowl of Australian politics, Griffiths is largely forgotten, but he was a national – then notorious – figure in his time. Like Brumby, Griffiths’s political life began with the election of the Hawke government. However, while Brumby lost in 1990, Griffiths won and was catapulted into the Hawke ministry – quickly gaining attention and seniority. In 1994, Griffiths’s ministerial career was ended by allegations that taxpayer funds were fraudulently used to prop up a failing sandwich shop he co-owned in Moonee Ponds. Although Griffiths was exonerated, one of his

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electorate officers was convicted of forgery and fraud offences. By 1996, at the age of 43, his political career was over. In late 1992, though, Griffiths was a powerful man, holding the seat of Maribyrnong in Melbourne’s west, gaining prominence as a senior federal minister and dabbling in the Right faction. Much of the content of Keating’s ‘One Nation’ statement – a 1992 economic program designed to create 800,000 jobs by 1996 – came from Griffiths’s office and passed through Brumby’s hands. ‘We were players,’ Brumby says, ‘And Griffo was very close to Keating.’ Sword and Ray wanted to find a leader-in-waiting for the Victorian ALP, a member of Labor Unity, untarnished by the Cain–Kirner years, who could be moved into a safe seat, then slotted into the leadership either before or after the next state election, due in 1996. Kirner would hold on until March 1993, then hand over to Jim Kennan, who would take over the unenviable task of grinding out the first years in opposition until the leader-in-waiting arrived. Griffiths suggested the leader-in-waiting should be Brumby. On 9 December 1992, Brumby and Griffiths were on a boat on Sydney Harbour for a tourism event. At some point during the cruise, Brumby’s mobile rang. It was Ray. Ray told Brumby that Bill Landeryou – the one-time Labor Unity powerbroker who had helped make Hawke prime minister – was retiring from state politics. His seat in Victoria’s Legislative Council was up for grabs. Ray asked Brumby, ‘Do you want to be a candidate? Go into state parliament?’ It was a chance for a second life in politics. Brumby told Ray he needed 24 hours to talk to Rosemary and make a decision. Ray gave him an hour. Brumby called Rosemary. They’d discussed, hypothetically, what they might do if a chance arose in state politics, but this was the real thing – concrete, urgent, inconvenient. The family was still living in Bendigo. That was tough when Brumby had to spend a third of the year travelling to and from Canberra to work for Griffiths. On the positive side, shifting to state politics would cut down the interstate travel, and, compared to a federal politician and staffer, life as a state backbencher promised a

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reduced workload. On the negative side, the Brumbys would have to sell up in Bendigo and move to Melbourne. Within the hour, Brumby gave Ray his answer: ‘Yes.’ By 20 February 1993, Brumby was a born-again politician. As the newly elected member for Doutta Galla in the Legislative Council, the plan was clear. Brumby would spend a few years in the upper house, then shift to the lower house as the member for Williamstown, either before or after the 1996 state election. In anticipation of this eventuality, Brumby rented a house in Footscray, within striking distance of Williamstown. Ray’s second recruit was another Canberra refugee. Rob Hulls had blazed briefly and brightly in Canberra. He spent most of his time as a federal parliamentarian on the road, sleeping as little as three nights a month in his own bed, working for Kennedy as though it were his client and he its advocate. But, in the end, none of that mattered. What mattered was that a Katter came back to claim Kennedy. Writing in The Sydney Morning Herald, Mike Seccombe said of Hulls before the federal election held on 13 March 1993: ‘The wise heads in Labor think he is the best of the 1990 intake … [but] he is fighting a dynasty. In the place of Bob Katter snr, he faces Bob Katter jnr, a far-right-wing relic of the National Party ministry of Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen, but a canny populist campaigner nonetheless.’ Like Hawke in 1990, Keating won in 1993, but, unlike in 1990, there wasn’t a flood in north Queensland’s coastal sugar fields. Without divine intervention, Katter won with a swing of almost 5 per cent in the two-party preferred vote. In Hulls’s electorate office, Kim McGrath saw the defeat coming. Midway through the 1993 campaign, ministers started cancelling planned visits to Kennedy. ‘They must have done polling,’ she says. ‘The Canberra people stopped talking to us.’ Soon after the election, Keating called Hulls. ‘The only advice I can give you,’ he said to Hulls, ‘is to get out of that place.’ A conversation with Robert Ray followed soon after. Ray asked Hulls whether he wanted to return to the political arena. Hulls said he did. Ray’s response was emphatic: come back to Melbourne.

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Within weeks of the 1993 election, Hulls had packed up and left Mount Isa. ‘Rob took the defeat fairly badly,’ says Tony McGrady. ‘I understood the reasons why he wanted to leave, but – and he never said this – I think he felt let down. He had worked so hard. And to see the person who had defeated him, it would have been very, very difficult.’ Mount Isa is a small town. If Hulls had stayed, McGrady says, ‘He would always be remembered as the bloke who was beaten by Katter.’ Hulls had been away from Melbourne for eight years. Superficially, he hadn’t changed. He was still a larrikin. But, beneath the façade, Hulls was serious – he would probably say passionate, one of his favourite words, rather than serious – about social justice in general and Indigenous justice in particular. Anyone who spent time in his company would, sooner or later, find the conversation returning to his searing experiences as an Aboriginal legal aid lawyer. The image of a man being force-fed cockroaches was never far from his mind. When Hulls landed back in Melbourne, Kennan was leader of the state opposition and needed a new chief of staff. Hulls was hired, but only after a bizarre job interview. He was sat in a room facing three Victorian MPs representing the caucus factions. Those MPs – Caroline Hogg, Bob Sercombe, Demetri Dollis – wanted to be sure that the former member for Kennedy didn’t harbour political ambitions. One of caucus’s factional leaders, Labor Unity’s David White, missed that interview. He caught up with Hulls later and took a different approach. His first words to Hulls were: I hope you have political ambitions. ‘That,’ Hulls says, ‘was my first impression of factions in Victoria.’

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Choking the Piñata

I once asked a unionist – a Labor man who possessed enough factional muscle to claim a parliamentary seat – whether he’d ever considered becoming a politician. He told me he’d been tempted once, but decided against the move because: ‘The qualities you require to be a successful politician are not the qualities you require to be a successful human being … As a union official, you tend to spend most of your life trying to make mountains into molehills. When you’re a politician, particularly when you’re in opposition, you spend your life making molehills into mountains.’ By the middle of 1993, the members of the Victorian Parliamentary Labor Party were facing a mountain, rather than a molehill. In parliament, they were outnumbered more than two to one by a phalanx of conservative opponents led by a politician bent on radical, punitive reform, Jeff Kennett. In public, they were pilloried as the ‘Guilty Party’ – responsible for most of Victoria’s economic ills. Internally, they were hamstrung by divided factions, a top-heavy administration and a debt of $2 million. And now, for the second time in five months, they were leaderless. Jim Kennan’s resignation, on 28 June 1993, came as a surprise. Shortly before he resigned, he’d been at the Collingwood Town Hall with his predecessor, Joan Kirner, and more than 500 Labor supporters. The event, called ‘Way to Go’, was held to thank Kirner for everything 64

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she’d done to save Victorian Labor from electoral oblivion. Kirner enjoyed the night, delivering a fiery speech about the Liberals’ ‘Guilty Party’ advertising campaign. Afterwards, she told The Age’s Doug Aiton, she had a ‘sixth sense’ that something wasn’t right with Kennan: ‘On the Monday I went to him and told him how hard it was to be opposition leader. I said, “You are going to hang in there, aren’t you?” “Yes, yes,” he said.’ Kirner then flew to Canada for a holiday. One night in Toronto, a fax was waiting for her when she returned to her hotel: ‘It was from Caroline [Hogg]. “Jim Kennan has resigned. Don’t come back. Your vote won’t count. Ring now.” Well, my hotel phone bill for the next two days was about $300. I still don’t know what was behind it, but I think he thought he wasn’t going to get the long-term support of the Labor Unity group. I was very angry at the time.’1 The Sunday before he resigned, Kennan drove to Parliament House and cleaned out his desk, taking personal papers and items, including a photograph of him with John Button and Malcolm Blight, then coach of the Geelong Football Club. The next day was Monday 28 June. Kennan met with Rob Hulls, his chief of staff, and said, ‘Rob, it’s going to be a great day today.’2 He attended his last shadow cabinet meeting, during which he criticised the Left–Right power sharing deal brokered by Greg Sword and Kim Carr. At 2.30 pm, he walked into the party’s regular caucus meeting. An hour into the meeting, Kennan stood and announced his resignation from the leadership and the parliament. Kennan had lasted three months as state opposition leader, roughly the life span of a bed bug. There are two schools of thought about Kennan’s resignation.3 The first is that he betrayed the party – that, having enjoyed the benefits of government through the 1980s, he should have stuck around and helped the next generation of Labor politicians begin the march back to power. The second is that, after 11 years in politics, including a decade as a minister, he had no more left to give. In a media interview shortly after he resigned, Kennan said he’d had ‘severe doubts’ about remaining in politics before assuming the leadership and thought that being leader would change that feeling,

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but found opposition ‘a dispiriting activity after being in government’. Kennan said: ‘You spend 10 years in government trying to talk the place up and a lot of opposition is really about sledging and waiting for bad news … The more I moved around and did things, the more I thought I was living in the shadow of something I had done in executive power. I was feeling increasingly hollow about going on with it.’4 Caucus would have to meet again to elect a new leader at 10 am on Wednesday. That night, Carr – newly installed as a Victorian senator following the retirement of independent John Button – hosted a crossfactional meeting in his 4 Treasury Place office.5 The Socialist Left was represented by Carr and four state politicians, Eddie Micallef, Peter Batchelor, Demetri Dollis and Theo Theophanous; Labor Unity by Stephen Conroy and two state politicians, Bob Sercombe and Andre Haermeyer. In the spirit of their new power-sharing arrangements, both sides sought to reach a consensus decision on Kennan’s replacement. The Left didn’t have a candidate, the Right too many. When Labor Unity had caucused before the cross-factional meeting, at least a halfdozen members, including Sercombe and Haermeyer, volunteered as possible leaders. Realistically, the leading contenders were Sercombe and Ian Baker – a former journalist and Kirner government minister. Sercombe was considered too bland, Baker too divisive. By about 9 pm, the factions settled on a consensus candidate, John Brumby. ‘He was the best we had,’ Sword says. The morning of Kennan’s resignation had been one of those perfect Melbourne winter days – crisp, sunny, clear – and leading the Victorian branch of the ALP was a tantalising, happily distant possibility for Brumby. He dropped his daughters, Elizabeth and Georgia, at school, then walked along the banks of the Maribyrnong River with his wife, Rosemary McKenzie, and their young son, Nicholas. Interviewed for a documentary6 a few years later, McKenzie recalled the morning: how they spoke about spending more time together as a family, with her easing back on work and him no longer having to fly up to Canberra every second or third week. Brumby then

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went into Spring Street for his caucus meeting, followed by a day sitting as the member for Doutta Galla in the Legislative Council. ‘And then,’ McKenzie said, ‘four o’clock that afternoon he rang and said, “Jim Kennan’s just resigned.” And I said, “Oh, yeah. I wonder who’ll replace him” … Those things we’d discussed that quiet, sunny winter’s morning didn’t quite happen.’ That night, Brumby was home with McKenzie in their rented Footscray house when the phone started ringing. Robert Ray and Sword wanted him to step into the breach. The phone kept ringing until midnight. ‘I was not keen to be the leader,’ he says. Brumby’s reluctance was understandable. He’d been a state parliamentarian for only three months. If he became leader, he would have to move from the upper house and stand in a by-election in Kennan’s now-vacant seat of Broadmeadows. He would have to move house again to live in his electorate. He would have to gear up for a by-election again. And – in return – he was almost guaranteed to spend the next three years with minimal resources fighting an unwinnable election. ‘It was Sword who really put the acid on me to stand,’ Brumby says. Sword pledged his support, then asked Brumby: ‘Have you got the balls to lead the party?’ ‘So,’ Brumby says, I put my balls on the table and stood. And I was elected as leader. It wasn’t that I had a particularly high view of my own abilities. It was more – if you looked around at everybody else who could have done the job, there wasn’t, I don’t think, anyone there who would have done justice to the party. That’s all. If there’d been a Rob Hulls or a Steve Bracks who’d been in there for five or six years, and who had the experience to lead, I would have very happily said [no].

David Feeney didn’t like the timing. Feeney, like Conroy, was a Labor Unity factional player on the rise. Built like Billy Bunter with a scabrous turn of phrase, the 23-year-old met Brumby during the Doutta Galla by-election. When Brumby won Doutta Galla, Feeney

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became his electorate officer. Now, Feeney told Brumby the leadership was happening too fast – it would be better if he waited until closer to the 1996 election. Brumby agreed, but was pragmatic, telling his electorate officer: ‘Listen, when these things come you just take them because that’s the way of the world and you can’t plan these kinds of things. You’ve just got to wrestle it.’ ‘Almost immediately after he became leader,’ Feeney says of Brumby, ‘he just went straight into the task of building a team and getting on with the job. I remember he used to talk about the three Ps – party, policy, people7 – and how we had to get these three things right.’ Kennett made Brumby’s path to the leadership as tortuous as possible, pushing the Broadmeadows by-election back to 18 September. That meant Brumby – who had to resign his upper house seat to take on the Labor leadership – was without a seat in parliament, and therefore an income for his young family, for almost 90 days. Within the Right (and some pockets of the Left) of the Victorian ALP, Kennett is no longer a figure of hate. As one former federal Labor minister says: If you think hard about the shift that Kennett brought about, it was really on economic management and to some extent public-sector industrial relations that [his reputation as a right-wing ideologue] rested. You know, Kennett wasn’t a particularly right-wing leader when it came to things like law and order. He certainly was very good on [One Nation founder Pauline] Hanson, for example.

The trouble with the Kennett government was the inequity of its policies – regional Victoria, for instance, was harder hit than Melbourne’s eastern suburbs – and the intemperance of its leader. In the rough house of Australian politics, there are generally thought to be three types of leaders – straight men (or women), fixers and maddies. Federally, John Howard was a straight man, Julia Gillard a fixer, and Paul Keating and Tony Abbott red-rag maddies (there hasn’t yet been a category created to contain Kevin Rudd). At a state level, Kennett

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was an A-grade maddie, especially when it came to political combat. Think of it this way: if a political opponent were a piñata, a straight man or woman would be likely to give it just enough stick, a fixer more likely to give it not enough and a maddie almost guaranteed to give the piñata far too much. Visionary and vicious, like Keating, Kennett was the kind of maddie who would not just belt the piñata until it spilled, but keep belting until the string that held the piñata snapped, then kick the piñata around the floor. Kennett just never knew when enough was enough – he had a tendency to choke the piñata. In 1993, the piñata that was the Victorian ALP was already lying broken on the ground, but Kennett couldn’t resist applying the chokehold. ‘We were not a particularly compelling or effective opposition,’ says Kelvin Thomson, at the time the state member for Pascoe Vale. ‘And Kennett was brutal. He was a hard man.’ Times were hard in the Brumby household, too. ‘To say that it was a difficult time would be an understatement,’ Brumby says. We moved from Bendigo to Footscray and then, having moved from Bendigo to Footscray, within four months we then had to start thinking about moving close to Broadmeadows. So, then we moved from Footscray to Strathmore, within the old city of Broadmeadows, and all the kids were under four, under five, so, it was a demanding time. There were plenty of times where we thought whether it was the right thing.

The Brumby by-election campaign for Broadmeadows was run out of Thomson’s Pascoe Vale office. On 18 September, Brumby won the by-election, increasing Labor’s primary vote by more than 7 per cent. Ten days later, on 28 September, he walked into the Legislative Assembly for the first time as leader of the state opposition. His first contribution was to ask Kennett a question without notice about claims that Victoria’s child protection services had failed to protect vulnerable children. Kennett responded by sarcastically thanking the Hawke government for sending Brumby to Spring Street: ‘He lost his seat in

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the federal parliament because he failed to gain public confidence. He failed in the upper house. And he is now a member of this place and the Labor Party’s new white hope.’ A month later, Kennett exploded when Brumby used parliamentary privilege to allege that the premier had asked the public servant driving his taxpayer-funded car to act as a glorified courier for KNF, the advertising agency he part-owned. First, Kennett dared Brumby to repeat his accusation outside parliament, implying that he would be sued for defamation. ‘The leader of the opposition,’ Kennett said, ‘is the most gutless politician I have ever known.’ As government and opposition members exchanged pleasantries across the chamber and the speaker called for order, Kennett went too far, bellowing in his parade-ground voice: ‘That is like my saying in this place that I know the leader of the opposition sleeps with boys!’ Leaning across the table that stood between the two men, Kennett loudly asked: ‘Do you? Do you?’ Brumby didn’t respond to Kennett inside parliament but demanded an apology when he later spoke to the media. Kennett refused to apologise. More than two years later, Kennett’s ‘boys’ insult was still being mentioned at Labor Party focus groups. ‘It constantly came up,’ one Labor campaigner says. Voters condemned Kennett for being a bully and criticised Brumby for not standing up to the bully. More than a few red-blooded citizens believed Brumby should have started a fistfight on the floor of parliament. In the end, this campaigner came to a dramatic conclusion: Kennett’s ‘boys’ outburst was the beginning of the end for both leaders. Both Kennett and Brumby would carry the baton for their respective political parties for another six years, but were now typecast in the eyes of the electorate. ‘Kennett,’ this campaigner says, ‘killed himself with that statement, just as he killed John Brumby. Kennett damaged Brumby’s standing as a strong leader, but confirmed, once and for all, that he was an arsehole.’ Tim Holding recalls the early 1990s as ‘a period of despair’. Holding has always been a study of intensity. An acolyte of the Right’s Robert Ray and Greg Sword, he rose quickly through Labor

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ranks – national president of Young Labor at 22; member of state parliament at 27; minister in a state Labor government at 29 – before bailing out of public life at 39, the age Steve Bracks was when his political life officially began. Back in 1993, though, Holding was a 21-year-old electorate officer for the member for Dandenong North, Jan Wilson. ‘If you said, “When we are back in government,” people would laugh,’ Holding says. ‘What a ludicrous proposition it was that any of the planning that was being done then would actually be relevant … People talked about us being out of office for a generation. For decades.’ Outside parliament, critics were cowed or cruelled – numerous community groups that spoke out against the Kennett government’s brutal cost-cutting had their public funding abolished. Inside parliament, the Coalition held 61 of the 88 seats in the Legislative Assembly. Any opposition member impertinent enough to ask a question was guaranteed to cop an earful. ‘It was intimidating,’ says Sherryl Garbutt, a former geography teacher elected to the Legislative Assembly during the Cain–Kirner government’s last term. And, now, Kennan had fled, leaving Brumby to clean up the mess. Robert Doyle, one of Kennett’s newly elected backbenchers, remembers watching Brumby chew the inside of his cheek with frustration while, across the parliamentary table, Kennett hurled epithets and abuse. Besides Brumby, one of the few Labor people who had the gumption to return fire was the newly elected member for Albert Park, John Thwaites. Towards the end of his maiden speech to parliament, Thwaites made what seemed, to Australian ears, an obscure reference to James Madison, one of the founding fathers of the US constitution. In 1787, Madison, who later became the fourth president of the United States, was one of 55 delegates to attend the constitutional convention in Philadelphia, acting as chief note-taker. It was Madison who argued for the need for checks and balances on the power of the state, writing: ‘Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.’ Thwaites, the former exchange student, quoted Madison, then made an observation:

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Looking around, I see plenty of ambition, so that augurs well for good government in this place. But I have one particular ambition which I share with all members on this side, and in pursuit of which I will be working tirelessly, and that is to return to the government side in four years so we will be able to implement the policies I have referred to: to increase inner urban population and provide affordable housing; to protect workers and working conditions; to retain state involvement in essential services; to support long-term full employment; and to improve the environment.

Thwaites quickly demonstrated his ambition. Wielding his training as a barrister, he began to attack the Kennett government as though it were in the dock and he the prosecutor – assembling evidence, asking questions, making accusations. One of his complaints led to Kennett being fined $100 for selling wine to raise funds for the Liberal Party without a licence. The ‘scandal’ was a storm in a wine glass, but a welcome respite for the opposition. In another attempt at schoolyard epithets, Kennett would later refer to Brumby and Thwaites as ‘two girls from Melbourne Grammar’, but nothing he said could stop their crusade to uncover and air the slightest allegation of impropriety. Back in the opposition rooms, Brumby’s hand-me-down chief of staff, Rob Hulls, also dug for dirt. Allegations – some minor, some major – were routinely made against the premier. Brumby, Thwaites and Hulls became a unit, with Hulls’s raucous personality galvanising the opposition rooms, Brumby’s white-hot ambition directing them and Thwaites’s tireless prosecution sustaining them. Hulls and Brumby had both been in Canberra at the same time – Hulls as the member for Kennedy, Brumby as chief of staff to Alan Griffiths – but spent little time together, other than one memorable trip to Queensland’s Barcoo River. Brumby and Hulls were travelling with Griffiths as he promoted regional Queensland’s attractions. During the Queensland tour, Griffiths’s travelling party stayed at a farm that ran chariot races with harnessed goats instead of horses, and Brumby decided to play

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Ben-Hur in a goat chariot. All didn’t go as planned. ‘I never realised how strong a fucking goat was,’ Brumby says. ‘They could pull you around this track at around 20 miles an hour.’ Hulls’s abiding memory of the day is watching Brumby and his goat disappear in a cloud of dust. Now, Brumby was in another race, only this time he was the goat towing a chariot crowded with shellbacks. ‘The show was a cot case,’ he says. ‘There were two women in the shadow cabinet, Caroline Hogg and Jan Wilson, everyone else had a beard or a moustache … They looked like, sort of, IRA terrorists.’ Brumby explains the gulf between Canberra and Spring Street in the early 1990s: I was obviously very fortunate to have the experience in federal parliament and again, with some of the role models there; you know, Hawke, Keating, John Button, John Kerin, Susan Ryan, all of those people who had achieved throughout their life … So, I was fortunate in seeing all of that, and, so, when I came to this show in the early ’90s – to be honest, the contrast couldn’t have been more marked and you didn’t have to be a genius, you didn’t have to be a perfectionist, to see that what we had needed substantial improvement. And that went for the shadow cabinet and the caucus. It’s just a conclusion you would draw. And I’m not saying that in a pejorative or diminutive way about the people that I worked with – they were fine people – but, you know, in a scale out of ten, they were a three, and we needed to be eight or nine. So, part of what drove me was, just a great belief in the Labor Party, but a great belief in public service, and that, you know, we just weren’t anywhere near the mark. It’s the continuous improvement business and we just had to come up.

Brumby needed help. Feeney, newly installed as Brumby’s private secretary, sitting outside the leader’s green felt­–covered door like a bespectacled Cerberus, came to the rescue with two young Labor lawyers, Richard Marles and Bill Shorten. Marles and Shorten were both sharp and young – aged just 26 – members of the Right. Marles

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worked for Slater and Gordon, Shorten for Maurice Blackburn Cashman. Both would soon move from the legal profession to the union movement, building national profiles before launching themselves into federal parliament in 2007. Shorten, Feeney and Marles camped in the state opposition leader’s parliamentary office for the first weeks of his reign, preparing documents that spelled out the work that had to be done to reincarnate Victorian Labor, including recommendations on key people and policies. Regaining credibility as a party that could be trusted with the state’s finances was part of the trio’s agenda. Brumby says the work they did for him was ‘fantastic’. Shorten and Feeney say they just wanted to help a much-needed moderniser. ‘The parliament was filled with the backwash of years of defeat and disarray and a lot of the giants of the Cain years were gone or going,’ Feeney says. ‘Thwaites, who was elected in 1992, was one of the exceptions to the rule.’ The three young Laborites also couldn’t help but be impressed by Brumby. ‘He had a spectacular work ethic,’ Feeney says, echoing Brumby’s admiration of Hawke. ‘He had extra­ ordinary discipline. He had a certain polish and a certain worldliness that, I think, impressed Bill and Richard and I. It was a higher calibre than we were used to seeing in our state politicians.’ On his first day as leader, Brumby called the opposition staffers together for a meeting. Phil Reed, a former roadie for the Uncanny X-Men then working for the ALP as a regional organiser in Melbourne’s south-eastern suburbs, was in the room. ‘He was very clear to the staff,’ Reed says. ‘He said, “I’ve worked in government. I understand what’s required to work in government and all I know is that we’ll have to work harder than that in opposition. So, get used to the fact that this is no nine-to-five job. You’re going to be in here in the mornings. You’re going to be in here late at night. You’re going to be in here on weekends.” ’ The Brumby standard had been set. Peter Batchelor was taken by Brumby’s competitive zeal, which could turn a game of table tennis at a caucus retreat into the ping-pong equivalent of Stalingrad. ‘John set about to try and change the attitude

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in a core group [of caucus and shadow cabinet members],’ he says. ‘He was determined to make sure that he would have a core group of people who would do the work.’ Brumby also had the support of the Right’s factional leaders – Sword, Conroy and Ray – to remake the parliamentary party, as well as Cain-era reformers such as David White. However, given the fact that politics is all about numbers, the push for renewal also destabilised Brumby’s leadership. As leader, Brumby depended on the continued support of the 40 other members of caucus. Without the support of at least 20 caucus members, he could be voted out of office at any time. That numerical reality created an existential threat for Brumby because a significant portion of his caucus – the shellbacks – knew that a rejuvenation of Victorian Labor meant redundancy for them. ‘John was in the very difficult position of the leader who wanted to overturn most of his followers,’ Feeney says. There was one way the shellbacks could stop Brumby from getting rid of them: get rid of him first.

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For Julie Ligeti, life after politics was beckoning. Her boss, Peter Staples, had been demoted from the Keating ministry after the 1993 federal election, meaning she no longer had to spend half of the year on the road. By early 1994, she’d settled on a new career, accepting a position as national political liaison officer for the Australian Conservation Foundation. This new job would involve some travel to Canberra, but Ligeti would be able to stop living out of a suitcase. It was a relief. She had one last weekend to enjoy before her post-political career started; then, that Friday afternoon, Rob Hulls called. Ligeti recalls what happened next: He said, ‘I’ve got a job for you.’ I said, ‘Rob, I’ve already got a job.’ He said, ‘No, no. I’ve got a job for you. You are the social policy advisor to the leader of the opposition.’ And I said, ‘Rob, I can’t, I’ve got another job. I’m starting on Monday.’ And he said, ‘No, no, no, no. Just a minute! Just a minute! I’m going to put Brumby on the phone.’ I’d never met Brumby. And John says – and he’s a bit hesitant, because he doesn’t know me from Adam either – ‘I’d like you to come 76

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and work for me.’ And I said, ‘Oh, okay.’

Ligeti didn’t turn up at the Australian Conservation Foundation on Monday morning. As career moves go, it was crazy-brave. The first years in opposition are difficult for any political party, but Victorian Labor had sunk to subterranean depths. ‘It was aversion therapy,’ Brumby says. ‘People just hated us.’ The working conditions were appalling. Hulls’s office resembled a walk-in closet. The three main policy advisors – including Ligeti – were jammed into an office barely big enough for one person; the economics advisor, Bruce Cohen, had a swivel chair without a wheel; and the three-person media unit, headed by key Brumby lieutenant Mark Madden, operated out of a chaotic lounge room of an office where blaring radios and television sets never stopped arguing with each other. ‘It’s probably the most underpaid and, in many respects, emotionally gruelling [job I’ve had],’ Ligeti says, ‘but it was the best work experience of my life – in terms of camaraderie, loyalty.’ Hulls’s next move was to recruit his electorate officer from Kennedy, Kim McGrath. McGrath, like Hulls, had boomeranged back to Melbourne after the 1993 loss and, like Ligeti, didn’t know Brumby. None of that mattered to Hulls – a politician who treated the people who worked for him like truculent family members. McGrath was family and therefore indispensable. She was hired. After the isolation and travel of federal politics, McGrath revelled in the intimacy and intensity of the state opposition rooms. ‘I loved being paid to try and ruin Kennett’s day,’ she says. She also loved being back with Hulls. ‘He drove me crazy,’ McGrath says of Hulls, ‘but he’s very good at making you feel like he really needs you. And he does really appreciate your advice, which is not what a lot of politicians do; a lot of them like to think that they know everything and they don’t need anyone.’ By early 1994, the opposition rooms were beginning to operate as Brumby and Hulls wanted; the hours were relentless, the arguments loud and the conditions poor, but the staffers who survived the

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hazing gelled. Not only that, John Thwaites was gaining welcome attention as the new shadow health minister. In a 31 January 1994 profile, The Age’s Michael Magazanik wrote: ‘Thwaites stands out. He is a big fish in a small pond, although one suspects he would be big in any pond … He is young, bright, articulate, good-looking, hard-working and confident with the media. He performs well in parliament – most of his colleagues do not – and has scored effectively against the government.’ Outside the opposition rooms, Brumby – aided and abetted by David Feeney, backed by Greg Sword and Stephen Conroy – pushed to bring more new blood into parliament. On 25 March 1994, Joan Kirner gave them a golden opportunity when she sent a letter of resignation to state secretary Jenny Beacham. In her letter, Kirner told Beacham she was standing aside to allow for generational change. The next day, Kirner officially announced her resignation to the ALP state conference, fittingly held at her old school, University High. The former premier then told The Age’s Russell Skelton that the successful candidate had to be ‘ministerial material’ as well as a true believer in the western suburbs. Having been a strong proponent for Labor’s new affirmative action policy – committing the party to have women stand in at least 35 per cent of winnable seats by 2003 – Kirner told Skelton, ‘It would be great for the seat to be the first where the affirmative action rules applied.’1 One of the delegates sitting in the audience had other ideas. Since leaving Kirner’s office, Steve Bracks had worked as executive director of the Victorian Printing Industry Training Board. He’d also kept busy in political circles, convening Labor’s independent faction, serving as Kirner’s local campaign manager and helping Thwaites battle his way into Albert Park. He saw Kirner’s retirement as his chance to finally, after three failed campaigns over the past nine years, realise his political ambitions, but winning the internal battle for Williamstown would not be easy. Bracks’s first problem was his gender. His second problem was that Brumby had backed affirmative action reforms. His third problem was that he was in the wrong faction.

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Kirner was a member of the Socialist Left, but Williamstown was not a Left-controlled seat. During Kirner’s tenure, Labor Unity had gained control of the local vote, partly through the fealty of several branches with high numbers of members from the west’s Vietnamese community.2 The Right’s rising factional lord, Conroy, now controlled Williamstown. Labor Unity wanted the next member for Williamstown to come from their faction and had the numbers locally and centrally to make that wish a reality. To cement the deal, the Right’s powerbroker Robert Ray, in consultation with Kirner, chose a female candidate. The fix was in. Knowing they were up against a former premier as well as the most powerful faction in Victorian Labor, most candidates would have backed out of the contest at this point. Bracks didn’t. Instead, he put himself forward as an independent candidate. Bracks’s explanation for what was an act of defiance is straightforward: he had said he was going to stand, and so he did. At first, the Bracks candidacy was shaping as another honourable defeat. ‘I put out a great leaflet, had great endorsements locally – very good endorsements, very good support,’ he says. ‘I had good connections all around the party with senior ministers from the previous government. But, you know, I was in a different faction.’ In other words, Bracks had no real chance. But then, after a decade of luckless campaigning in Ballarat and Melbourne, he had his first stroke of good fortune. Following the first debate, Labor Unity’s preferred candidate – who’d come under local scrutiny because she lived in Albert Park, on the other side of the West Gate Bridge – pulled out of the race. So far as political acts of God go, it was the equivalent of the flood that delivered Hulls victory in Kennedy in 1990. Now, all bets were off. Everything was up for grabs. ‘We went into intense negotiations after that,’ Bracks says – negotiations as complex as they were intense. The Bracks campaign fought on three fronts: Bracks campaigned locally and lobbied the administration committee that oversaw preselections; within the

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state opposition rooms, Thwaites lobbied Brumby to back Bracks; and, factionally, independent stalwarts Sheila O’Sullivan and former federal attorney-general Michael Duffy negotiated with the Right’s Conroy and Ray. One by one, the battles went Bracks’s way. Soon, he had Brumby’s backing as well as local support. The catch was the faction. Labor Unity wanted the candidate for Williamstown to be a member of the Right. The independents – Bracks, O’Sullivan, Duffy – held a series of meetings at Conroy’s office in Treasury Place. Ray was also in attendance. According to the Right, Bracks brought Duffy as a chaperone to the meetings because he was ‘terrified’ of Ray. Given what the Right wanted – for Bracks, the leader of the independents, to quit his group and join Labor Unity – he had every reason to be, at the very least, cautious. The meetings were tense and voices were raised. At one point, after a failure to come to an agreement, Ray said Labor Unity had no option but to put forward Jacinta Collins – fleetingly a minister in the second Rudd government – as its candidate for Williamstown. The three independents left the meeting and caucused on the footpath outside Treasury Place. O’Sullivan came up with the only compromise that would give Bracks the chance he deserved – surrender. The independents went back inside and agreed to a long-term alliance with Labor Unity. Bracks agreed to quit the independents and join the Right. ‘It sounds terrible,’ one Labor Unity player says, ‘but it was pragmatic. It was just a way of getting a good-quality candidate into the seat.’ It was also the beginning of the end of the independents, a quasi-faction that could trace its roots back to the democratically minded Participants who changed Victorian Labor in the 1960s – turning it from a reactionary to a progressive Labor Party. Thwaites best explains the independents’ conundrum: The Right basically gave us the Sophie’s Choice of destroy your own faction forevermore and get Steve, or don’t get Steve.3 What they basically said was, ‘Steve’s got to join us, but the independents have to

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agree to vote with the Right for the next two elections,’ and that was tantamount to saying the independents have to collapse because most of the independents were left-leaning … After that, the independents barely existed.

Within a few years, the group that had been home to the likes of John Cain, John Button, Barry Jones, Duffy, Thwaites and Bracks was the political equivalent of the Tasmanian tiger. Brumby was in his car with Hulls when Sword called to confirm the deal was done, Bracks had defected. ‘That couldn’t have happened without Greg Sword,’ he says. ‘The factions can be a force for good and they can bring people in, and they can also be a pest and they can have confused loyalties and they can engage in internecine warfare, but, at the same time, they are the vehicle to renewal. Greg was probably the best on it.’ On Monday 2 May 1994, The Age broke the news of the deal with a headline that read ‘ALP picks money man with TV talent for Williamstown’: ‘So keen is the ALP to get Mr Bracks into parliament, that he has been handed the ALP’s plum safe seat and all but promised a position in shadow cabinet by the end of the year. Why the excitement? Articulate people with economic credentials who can be trusted in front of television cameras are in short supply on the opposition benches.’ It was a coup for Brumby. In Bracks, he had a ready-made frontbencher, possibly a future shadow treasurer. But, all too quickly, his coup was followed by an attempted coup d’état. Brumby’s push for renewal within Labor Unity – backed by Sword and Conroy’s factional machine – had alienated almost half of his own faction. Labor Unity had 18 members in the Victorian parliament; ten of those MPs backed Brumby’s renewal efforts. The eight remaining Labor Unity members, including Brumby’s deputy leader, Bob Sercombe, and aspiring leader Ian Baker, were unhappy that longstanding Right MPs Ken Coghill, Gerard Vaughan and Tom Roper had been disendorsed as Labor candidates, and felt that their advice was being ignored by Brumby and his increasingly raucous office, led by Hulls.

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Members of the Socialist Left, meanwhile, were aggrieved by the antics of Feeney. Increasingly, the leader’s private secretary was seen as the enfant terrible of Victorian Labor’s factions, a man who wanted to operate in the winner-takes-all mode of NSW Labor politics. ‘He started fights in empty rooms,’ says one of Feeney’s factional associates. Feeney himself concedes that he was no friend of the Socialist Left: I was very unpopular with the Left. I was identified as a young factional apparatchik for the Right. I think there was a perception in the hothouse of the parliament that I had too much influence – I don’t think I did, by the way, have that much influence; but, myth and legend. I was kind of the guy who had come into the opposition rooms with John Brumby, so there was a sense that I was his commissar in the office.

Feeney held pole position in Brumby’s office, his desk accordioned between two doors upholstered with green felt, almost like upright billiard tables. The door to his left led to Brumby’s office; the door to his right led to Sercombe’s. The upside of Feeney’s position in the office was that it allowed him to simultaneously cater to Brumby’s needs and monitor Sercombe’s movements. The downside of Feeney’s position was that any accusations of factional wheeling and dealing ended, literally, at Brumby’s door. The first sign of trouble came at the shadow cabinet meeting, held on Monday 2 May 1994 – the day The Age broke the news of Bracks’s preselection. In a meeting later described as ‘turbulent and divisive’,4 Baker criticised Brumby’s performance and accused him of playing factional politics. Baker’s accusations were transparently self-interested, but he had a point. Brumby’s mistake, according to one of his allies, was to be too closely associated with the dirty work of unseating MPs to make way for talent. ‘It is a very difficult thing to do, and it’s not a thing that’s best done by the leaders,’ the Brumby supporter says. ‘It’s best you have a henchman do it … He tried to do it in spite of other people who could

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have done it for him.’ Instead of leaving the bloody business of renewal to Sword, Brumby jumped feet first into the mess himself. It was as though he was a teenager again on Malcolm Brumby’s farm, loath to be seen shirking an unpleasant task. Next, Sercombe weighed in, telling shadow cabinet he’d offered Brumby his full support, but received none in return.5 Brumby also received flak from other frontbenchers for apparently reneging on his commitment to affirmative action by backing Bracks in Williamstown and allowing staff members to dabble in branch stacking. Later that day, Brumby held a media conference and promised to stay out of factional politics and stamp out branch stacking. Outside shadow cabinet, deals were being made. During the day, Sercombe had a meeting at Fast Eddy’s – a hamburger restaurant at the top of Bourke Street – with one of the Left’s factional leaders, Demetri Dollis. Gregarious and built like a bespoke teddy bear, Dollis had migrated from Greece at the age of 15 and spent his entire working life as either a political advisor or a politician. Now, aged 37, he wanted to be deputy leader of the state opposition. Sercombe was willing to step down as deputy leader if Dollis could convince the Socialist Left to support Baker’s bid for the leadership. An agreement was reached: Brumby was gone. Driving home from parliament that Monday night, Brumby suspected something was wrong. He made several calls on his car phone, but everyone’s phones were engaged – a sure sign that something was brewing. Finally, Brumby rang Dollis: I said, ‘I just get the feeling something’s going on, mate. I’ve rung around a few people – everyone’s phones are engaged. Is something going on?’ He said, ‘No, there’s not. No, Leader, nothing is going on.’ I said, ‘Are you sure nothing’s going on?’ And he said, ‘Leader, if there was I would know about it. Leader, go home. Spend some time with your wife. Sleep well, Leader.’ I’ll always remember that – sleep well, Leader – right? And he’s already done the fucking deal to knock me off.

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In factional politics, there are two kinds of kills – the kind done for a meaningful purpose and the thrill kill. The attempt to unseat John Brumby as leader after only seven months in the job was purely a thrill kill: exhilarating and pointless. Labor’s parliamentary caucus was due to meet on Tuesday morning. The meetings were held in a large room on the Legislative Assembly’s side of Parliament House. ‘This was an ambush,’ one caucus member says. ‘John Brumby walks into it knowing nothing, George Seitz [a member of the Socialist Left] gets to his feet … and says, “I’d like to move a spill,” and – bang! – they had the numbers and away it went. Suddenly it was on and all of John Brumby’s supporters realised it was on and there was a vote and we were probably going to lose it.’ At one point during the spill motion, Seitz claimed Brumby was worse than Adolf Hitler. No one laughed. Neil Cole, shadow attorney-general and member of the Pledge faction, wrote about the leadership spill in his memoir, Stability in Mind: When the motion to spill all the leadership positions was moved in caucus, I just sat there. People who should have defended John didn’t, they just sat there not wanting to jump in, in case he lost so they could align themselves with the new leader they currently opposed. It was against my best interests but I spoke in support of John Brumby. I said the one thing that was true, John had worked so hard, had only been in the job six months and we wanted to dump him.6

‘It wasn’t about me,’ Brumby says. ‘It was about the deeper malaise in the party – Left versus Right – and dividing up the spoils of opposition. That’s what it was all about. Demetri’s hands were all over it.’ The leader’s position was declared vacant. The next move would be to hold a vote to fill the vacancy and, presumably, install Baker. At the last moment, a stay of execution was granted. Another member of the Socialist Left, Tony Sheehan, moved a motion that the caucus meeting should be adjourned for two hours. The motion was passed.

treachery place

It was 3 May 1994. Parliament was sitting. Question Time was scheduled for 2 pm in the Legislative Assembly. After the caucus meeting was adjourned, Sercombe asked David White whether the leader’s questions were done. He wanted to hand them over to the soon-to-be leader, Baker. While Baker’s supporters prepared for Question Time, the Socialist Left weighed up Brumby’s future. Every faction is bound by its own set of rules. Labor Unity is freewheeling – members can vote as they wish on internal debates and leadership challenges. The Socialist Left is different – once a position for the faction is agreed upon, its members are duty bound to vote as a block. This rule gave Brumby a lifeline, because, on an issue as important as the leadership of the Victorian Parliamentary Labor Party, the Left was sure to want an agreed position. After caucus adjourned, the Left held its meeting. Dollis wanted to back Baker. Fortunately for Brumby, one of the giants of the Left, Joan Kirner, was vehemently opposed to Baker’s bid and stood her ground in the meeting – arguing for a different outcome. What that outcome was became apparent when the Socialist Left sent one of its members, Eddie Micallef, to parley with Brumby’s chief supporter, White. Micallef had a list of demands. The Left wanted Dollis to replace Sercombe as deputy leader. They also wanted Brumby to quit Labor Unity and sack Feeney. Brumby had no choice; he gave the Left whatever they wanted. ‘That left Bob Sercombe and his supporters with nowhere to go,’ one Brumby supporter says, ‘They were fucked.’ Caucus reconvened and the thrill kill recommenced, although the sacrificial lamb wasn’t as advertised. Brumby was re-elected leader with the support of the Socialist Left, Dollis was elected deputy leader with the support of Brumby’s supporters, and Sercombe – the Fast Eddy’s conspirator – was out. At 2.06 pm, Hansard recorded that the speaker of the Legislative Assembly, John Delzoppo, took the chair, read the prayer and informed the house that photographs would be taken during Question Time.

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Brumby then rose and made an announcement: ‘I advise the House that at a party meeting today the Honourable Member for Richmond was elected Deputy Leader of the Parliamentary Labor Party.’ With that done, Question Time began; and, once again, Kennett had a field day. ‘The Left,’ Brumby says, ‘they were very clever – got what they wanted. And what they wanted was the deputy spot. They never wanted Ian Baker. So, they kept me as leader, they got Demetri replacing Sercombe, who was the big loser … and I also had to sack David Feeney. David was enemy number one and they demanded that he move on. So, he was the price.’ Brumby repeats himself, as though attempting to memorise a fact: ‘He was the price.’ If Feeney was the price, Bracks was the prize. On 13 August 1994, Bracks comfortably won the by-election for the state seat of Williamstown. It was his first political win on his fourth, and possibly final, attempt to enter state parliament – coming after he first stood for election in 1985. During the campaign for Williamstown, Bracks had set himself a deadline: if he didn’t win a seat in parliament in the next 12 months, he would shelve his political ambitions and focus on his career as a public servant. He also wrote himself a secret note, mapping out what he hoped to achieve in the next two decades of his life. First, he wanted to be elected to the state parliament by the time he was 40; second, he wanted to be premier by the time he was 48; third, he wanted to retire from politics at the age of 56. Bracks then folded that note into a square and carried it around in his wallet for years.7 On 15 October 1994, Steve Bracks turned 40. He had – with just 63 days to spare – achieved the first goal written on the note he carried in his wallet. There were just two more goals to go.

Outnumbered

Every election is a turning point, but some are less of a turning point than others. As turning points go, the state election of 30 March 1996 was not even a glance over the shoulder. The turning point that mattered – a sharp turn to the ideological right – had been taken four Saturdays before, on 2 March, when John Howard defeated Paul Keating’s Labor administration. Compared to that blow, the fate of ‘Bongo Land’ was inconsequential. No one expected John Brumby to win. Not even Brumby. Jeff Kennett’s Coalition government was too strong, and Brumby, in the aftermath of the failed Ian Baker coup, more beholden to the factions. Brahmins such as Stephen Conroy felt entitled to drop by the opposition rooms and dispense advice. ‘Stephen was a lot younger in those days and a lot more erratic,’ one Brumby staffer says. ‘He’d come in every week or two and bounce around the walls.’ In September 1994, four months after the Baker debacle, Brumby travelled to the ALP National Conference in Hobart. Keating and the NSW Right were looking for a policy win at the conference. They wanted to dump Labor’s convoluted three-mines policy on uranium, opting instead for an open-slather approach to uranium mining. Traditionally, the Victorians were the ALP’s staunchest opponents to uranium mining. The head of Brumby’s factional Praetorian Guard, Greg Sword, was vehemently opposed to any change. The entire 87

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Victorian branch decided to oppose Keating, a decision that made Brumby a lightning rod for prime-ministerial wrath. He says: As opposition leader I was obviously the figurehead of that. It was a pretty unpleasant little debate because it meant a lot for Keating because … as prime minister you want to get a win at conference – and he lost. [During the conference] I had breakfast one morning with Nick Bolkus, who was one of the national Left conveners, and someone else and it was a completely harmless breakfast … this was the morning of the uranium debate. Went out there, had the debate and Keating went down. Went down badly. And then, I’m still sitting in the big hall and a note comes in from one of Keating’s minders and the note says the prime minster would like to see me around in the side annex room, straight away. So, I get up and walk around to the side of the hall and there, coming towards me led by [ journalist] Laurie Oakes, is the biggest media contingent I’ve ever seen in my life. There’s just dozens of fucking TV cameras … and I’m looking behind to see who they’re after, but it’s me. And first question’s Laurie Oakes’s, and he says, ‘Mr Brumby, is it true that this morning you did a deal with the Left on uranium to save your leadership?’ First question, straight up. Nothing could be further from the truth … I just said, ‘That’s completely untrue.’ And he said, ‘It’s been put to me by reliable sources.’ That story came from someone associated with the national Right, the NSW Right, who’d not taken well to the fact that I’d rolled the prime minister.

Brumby extricated himself from the media phalanx and was led around to a side room large enough to house the Last Supper. The prime minister was waiting. There’s nothing in it except for an urn in the corner, a big box of Lipton tea bags, little jug of milk and two cups – that’s all there was – and when we got in there all you could hear was the urn bubbling – like, bubble, bubble, bubble – and it’s just me and Paul. And at the start he

outnumbered

was on one side of the room and I was on the other, and he says, ‘How are you, mate?’ ‘Good.’ And we each made a cup of tea and sipped on a cup of tea, and he told me just how unhappy he was about what I did and about how, when you’re a leader, you’ve got to make the tough decisions and you’ve got to push through. And I told him I understood all that and it was just one of those things – we had a long, long historical position, the [Victorian] branch. My history in Bendigo [where the local branches opposed uranium mining]. The party president [Sword]. Like, there was just no way I could’ve not taken the view I did, as difficult as it was. And I said, ‘It’s just the way it was and I’m sorry you didn’t get up.’ Anyway, we left it at that.

Once again, Brumby had been shoehorned into a position where he made powerful enemies. On 2 October 1994, The Sunday Age’s Paul  Daley reported that there could be consequences for the state opposition leader: On Thursday afternoon, it seemed like there might be further retribution, when a senior Left figure approached the media. ‘There is word going around that John Brumby’s leadership is under threat over this. I just want to let you know that’s not true and that you shouldn’t spread it,’ the Left figure said. Nobody seemed to know what he was talking about. But as a member of the Right observed, ‘the best way to spread a rumour is to say it has no currency’.

Back in Melbourne, Brumby now worked an office away from a deputy leader who was one of the lead conspirators in the Baker ambush; stood up in parliament only to be abused by a belligerent premier; and kept rolling the Sisyphean boulder on internal reform up the electoral hill. It was, to put it mildly, a thankless task. ‘There was such shit we had to get rid of. There were so many people we had to shove out of the joint,’ Brumby says. ‘That was a killer, but, to be fair, part of the deal [on becoming leader in 1993] with Greg Sword, Conroy, and Shorten and all – but particularly Greg. Greg’s view was, “We’re not going to

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win in ’96. It’s a two-term job and we’ve got to rebuild and renew. And we’ll help you bring the new people in.” ’ Before the 1996 election, Brumby lost talent he could ill afford to lose. Kelvin Thomson – a shadow minister with the wherewithal to be a finance minister in a Labor government – gave up on state politics to try his luck in Bob Hawke’s old seat of Wills. On the upside, the opposition leader also lost enemies. On 22 April 1995, one of Brumby’s political benefactors, Alan Griffiths, announced his retirement from politics at the next federal election, his ministerial career shot by the so-called sandwich shop affair. Bob Sercombe – the former deputy opposition leader who lost his job over the Baker coup – wanted Griffiths’s federal seat of Maribyrnong. It made sense for Sercombe: a chance to start again in a new caucus after being double-crossed by the Left in Spring Street. Sword also saw an opportunity. He offered Sercombe his support for Maribyrnong, but there was a catch. In return, Sercombe – who had enough local support to control preselections of three state seats in Melbourne’s west – would let Sword select the candidates for those three state seats. Sercombe agreed. In February 1996, Sercombe resigned as member for Niddrie, and Rob Hulls was installed.1 Hulls – the independent who had come to Victorian politics via outback Queensland – joined Labor Unity to seal the deal. ‘I only joined the Right, to be frank, because the seat of Niddrie came up and it was a Right seat. That’s the only reason,’ says Hulls, adding, ‘They [the factions] are not philosophically based.2 Some of the most conservative people are in the Left, and some people with some fairly left-wing views are in the Right. It’s just based on numbers.’ When he spoke of ‘left-wing views’, Hulls was being selfreferential; he would prove to be, on most issues, the most progressive member of Victorian Labor for the next 14 years. The Right also sent out David White to recruit high-profile candidates. White approached former AFL footballer Justin Madden and ABC TV journalist Mary Delahunty. They said no, this time. Other future Labor ministers – Lynne Kosky, Christine Campbell and

outnumbered

Bob Cameron – were preselected for winnable seats. Meanwhile, John Lenders – Sword’s choice as Victorian Labor’s state secretary – was making a mark. Officially, Lenders hadn’t taken over from Jenny Beacham as state secretary until 1 July 1994, but Beacham had spent much of her last 12 months in South Africa, helping Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress gear up for the first post-apartheid election. Her absence had given Lenders time to settle in. State secretaries are – according to the myth-makers – supposed to be Machiavelli or Merlin, mongrels or magicians. Lenders was neither. Having grown up on a dairy farm in Gippsland, he is reserved and quietly spoken, an introspective man with strong but closely held views who would not look out of place standing in a milking shed at six in the morning. Lenders didn’t think elections were won by backroom deals or sleight of hand. He believed they were won by the steady assemblage of hundreds of details – finances, fundraising, mailouts, marginal campaigns, candidate training, policies, advertising – into a siege machine with the brute force to flatten the walls of government. And anything that stood in the way of Lenders’s siege machine had to go. When he started as state secretary, Lenders realised the party’s fundraiser raised less money than she was paid. She went. So, too, did anyone or anything else that wouldn’t help win the next election. ‘The party organisation was a creature of rules … a turgid bureaucracy,’ says Lenders. ‘There was all this factional mistrust and no one was accountable for anything.’ As arduous as Lenders’s renovation was, Brumby’s job was harder. The opposition leader’s aim was, he says, ‘getting a work ethic back into the joint’, but that was easier said than done. On 31 May 1995, I arrived at work in the opposition rooms before nine. It was my birthday and I was late. By then, I’d been a political staffer for five months. In that time, I’d met some of the opposition’s more colourful characters – such as George Seitz, who one afternoon presented me with a paper napkin covered in scrawl and told me to turn it into a media release (I didn’t). But Seitz’s napkin manifesto was nothing compared to the story that was waiting for me that morning. Brumby’s

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media director, Mark Madden, and my fellow press secretary, Aileen Muldoon, were already on deck in our shambles of a media room. Aileen looked pained; Mark, pissed off. The night before, Mark told me, two Labor MPs decided to have a fight on the floor of the Legislative Council. The pugilists were two pint-sized former Cain–Kirner ministers – Theo Theophanous and Brian Mier. Theophanous and Mier, a florid-faced former plumber and unionist, both had to be restrained after Mier ‘launched a loud and abusive attack’3 on Theophanous over a decision he’d made, as the Kirner government’s minister for consumer affairs, to introduce a fee for credit card users. Mier was consumer affairs minister before Theophanous and opposed credit card fees. Two men fighting over an old argument from an extinct government: the pointless stupidity of it all was stunning. I’d started working for Brumby in the summer of 1994–95. I spent most of my first week with him in a Statesman driving around the dusty plains of the Mallee. During those long days in the car, Brumby was all business: reading documents, answering calls from advisors such as Julie Ligeti and Kim McGrath, speaking to journalists. At his functions, such as a house crowded with local farmers in the middle of land as bare and brown as a burned biscuit, he shook every hand, looked in every eye and answered every question. In the evenings, he might meet with local Labor candidates and supporters, offering support and encouragement. In the mornings, he would invariably pound laps up and down the lanes of deserted public pools before drying himself off and doing it all again. The pace was unrelenting and Brumby indefatigable – a road warrior. In his weaker moments, though, in those down times between phone calls and functions, the scars were visible. Brumby complained more than once about his treatment at the hands of Kennett. Back in the 1990s, there were protocols that most governments followed, such as inviting an opposition leader to state functions or simply acknowledging the opposition leader’s presence in a speech. Kennett, presaging the unpleasantries of Tony Abbott’s Liberal Party, ignored niceties. Brumby was not invited to functions,

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and was more likely to be publicly abused than acknowledged. Kennett couldn’t stop choking the Labor piñata. With internal enemies to his Left and Right and Kennett ruling the roost in the city, Brumby instinctively went where his enemies weren’t – campaigning tirelessly in and around the regional centres of Geelong, Bendigo, Ballarat and the Latrobe Valley. Although he now lived in Melbourne, Brumby still identified strongly with regional Victoria. I learned that the first morning we set off for our first trip together to the Mallee. Having grown up in the bush, I knew the weather would be hot and sunny – too hot for my woollen suit and too sunny for my freckled skin. I met Brumby on the steps of state parliament wearing my only pair of jeans and my only serviceable hat. Brumby didn’t care about the jeans but was appalled to see I’d turned up for a country trip wearing a purple baseball cap emblazoned with the logo of the Los Angeles Lakers. He called me a ‘fucking yuppie’ and told me to get in the car. Needless to say, I didn’t wear the cap when we arrived at our first meet-and-greet in the Mallee – and was duly sunburned. In time, Brumby’s incessant – verging on obsessive – campaigning around regional and rural Victoria would bear electoral fruit, but in the run-up to the 1996 poll, it seemed almost an act of political nostalgia. In the eyes of his enemies, Brumby’s travels appeared an attempt to recall better times when, say, as an influential backbencher, he shared a flight from Canberra to Bendigo with Bob Hawke and helped finesse the assets test proposals for cabinet. Or, better yet, the time when, as Alan Griffiths’s chief of staff, he’d helped craft the Keating government’s ‘One Nation’ statement. What Brumby’s critics couldn’t see was that the country – together with the outer suburbs – was being left behind by the economic recovery that was sweeping across the nation’s central business districts and inner suburbs. Brumby was, like Kennett and Keating, a maddie. When he made up his mind, nothing was going to change it, and Brumby was dead sure the way to beat Kennett was through the back door of the regions.

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Victorian Labor’s pollster, Matt Viney,4 says the quantitative research didn’t show what Brumby was seeing and hearing whenever he drove out to yet another regional city or factory or farm and started talking to people. ‘John Brumby was the first person to recognise Jeff Kennett’s weakness in the bush and in the regions,’ Viney says. ‘He was talking about that from ’94 to ’96. He was campaigning hard out in the regions in all of that time. He saw that and he saw it without polling.’ Ultimately, what mattered most was not what Brumby saw in the regions, but how many votes he could win in the campaign. The answer was not encouraging. Kennett timed the 1996 state election to coincide with the running of the Formula One Grand Prix at Albert Park – effectively blanketing the first week of the campaign. Kennett’s timing was perfect. Victorian Labor – saddled with a $2  million debt and in the midst of an administrative restructure – now had to fight a hat-trick of elections in a month: Keating’s federal election, local elections and Kennett’s state election. To make matters worse, Lenders couldn’t borrow money to finance Brumby’s campaign. In 1988, Victorian Labor had spent $3 million on its state campaign and, in the process, run up a huge debt. In 1992, Beacham had halved the budget to $1.5 million in a cheap, creative campaign. Now, Lenders decided, he could only afford to spend what he had on the 1996 state poll – going further into debt for an unwinnable election would only rob the next, possibly winnable campaign. As a result, Brumby never had a chance against Kennett. The hopelessness of Brumby’s situation is best captured by Outnumbered, a fly-on-the-wall documentary shot during the 1996 campaign. Director Richard Keddie – who would go on to create the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) ‘Your Rights at Work’ campaign, as well as produce the Hawke and Stalking Julia telemovies – followed Brumby for the entirety of the campaign. Lenders refused to give the film crew access to Drummond Street.5 Instead, Keddie was free to roam the opposition rooms. He was there when the opposition leader flew in a jittery light aircraft with press secretary Colin Radford and advisor Phil Reed; when he addressed classrooms full of

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bored teenagers; when, egged on by Aileen Muldoon, he conducted a live-to-air TV interview; when he stood in his shirtsleeves beside his friend and chief of staff, Rob Hulls, listening to a car radio broadcast the news that the election had been called; when he debated treasurer Alan Stockdale; when he prepared for, then delivered, his policy launch speech; when advisors James McGarvey and Joe Burke analysed polling numbers that suggested Labor could go backwards on election day; and he was there, in the aftermath, when Brumby drily spoke of the ‘joy’ of four more years in opposition. What Keddie didn’t get to see was how, during the campaign, the hard drive that held all of the opposition’s policies crashed, and, as Brumby’s office didn’t have back-ups, they had to track down hard copies, then retype every policy. ‘The. Policy. Development. Process,’ one member of the campaign staff says slowly, shaking his head at the agony of it all. ‘You could hear the F1 cars racing from Albert Park at Drummond Street.’ Nor did Keddie see the time when, during his regional campaign launch in Bendigo, Brumby reached the announcements of his policy speech and found the text simply had subheadings and a note: ‘JB to fill in the details.’ Nor the fact that the ALP had only $350,000 to spend on media buys – barely enough to pay for 78 tele­ vision ads; Kennett, by comparison, had 1630 ad slots. During the campaign, the media thought Brumby outperformed Kennett on the hustings. Come election night, none of that mattered. Labor secured a two-party preferred swing of 2.83 per cent, winning three lower house seats and losing one, for a net gain of just two seats in the Legislative Assembly. ‘Expectations in ’96 were very high that we’d get back in one, which was just loony stuff, although I probably said it myself,’ Brumby says. ‘We did all right in ’96, but there was some disappointment in the party. There always is.’ Viney believes 1996 ‘wasn’t as bad as it was made out. The margins all got more shallow. We were within striking distance, even though we were seat-poor, we were actually, in terms of [the two-party preferred vote], we weren’t too far off … We actually made more gains in ’96 under John than people noticed.’6 And – importantly for the

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viability of Victorian Labor – the debt that dated back to the 1988 campaign was paid off. Victorian Labor was out of the red for the first time in a decade. However, the most profound gain was made not by Brumby or Kennett, Labor or Liberal, but by an independent MP called Russell Savage. Savage, a former policeman, stood for Mildura – Victoria’s most northern seat. In Mildura, Kennett’s decision to close the local train service to Melbourne caused outrage; Savage tapped into that outrage and secured a swing of 22.3 per cent to unseat Liberal candidate Craig Bildstien, one of Kennett’s closest supporters. Kennett didn’t take kindly to Bildstien’s loss and spent the next three years belittling and marginalising Savage. Once again, the premier couldn’t stop choking the piñata. In the final reel of Outnumbered, Kennett appears unlikely to ever pay a price for his petulance. At one point, the camera holds Brumby’s face in a close-up. Someone off camera asks the opposition leader a question: ‘Do you like it?’ Brumby responds with a question, ‘Doing this?’ then shrugs. ‘Yeah. It’s what I do.’ ‘Can you tell me why?’ ‘Why I like it?’ Brumby looks away for a beat. Looks back: ‘Well, I’ve sort of grown into it, I suppose.’ As he speaks, Brumby’s eyes, beneath his hedgerow eyebrows, don’t betray much. He’s somewhere in the penumbra between adrenalin and fatigue. He’s disappointed, but trying not to let it show.

Julia, Boudicca

Political parties are like glaciers. At a glance, they appear as motionless as they are monolithic, but they are always moving. People and ideas are forever coming and going, factions forever fracturing and re-forming, and the perpetual momentum of collective ambitions building and building until the pressure overcomes institutional inertia, something breaks and, somewhere cold and dark, a piece of ice the size of Tasmania falls into the sea. Such moments of transformation are, due to size and scale, inherently dramatic and unexpected, but, in hindsight, inevitable. The transformation that followed the 30 March state election – a split in the Left of Victorian Labor that finally gave the Right the power to control the party – is a case in point. The troubles of 1996 circled around the thwarted ambitions of one woman, Julia Gillard. Although Gillard is today known as the first female prime minister of Australia and, in the eyes of her supporters, the Boudicca of progressive feminism, in the 1980s she was just another left-wing insurgent. Originally from Adelaide, Gillard entered the Victorian Labor fray just as the new guard of the Socialist Left – under the leadership of the likes of Bob Hogg and Kim Carr – gained ascendancy over the old guard loyal to former ALP state secretary Bill Hartley. The old guard wanted the Left to remain as an opposition force within the Labor Party, fighting for policy purity rather than political power.1 Carr and 97

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his generation – including future Hawke minister Gerry Hand, future Bracks–Brumby minister Peter Batchelor and future Rudd–Gillard minister Lindsay Tanner – wanted to bring the Left in from the cold and become the ideas factory of the ALP. By the early 1980s, the new guard of the Left was succeeding. In Sydney, the NSW Right was more interested in gaining and maintaining power than developing and implementing reform. In Melbourne, progressive ideas were being turned into policies by Socialist Left leaders such as Hand and Brian Howe, former Participants such as Michael Duffy and John Button, and Labor Unity stand-outs such as Gareth Evans. ‘The New South Wales Right, with the exception of Keating, they weren’t in the reform business,’ John Brumby says. They were in the getting re-elected business. And there’s nothing wrong with that, but there’s no point being in government if you don’t do anything. The big ideas in government used to come out of Victoria and out of the centre-left … which was always that old group of people who had either been in the independents faction or the fringe of the [Socialist Left] or the fringe of the Right … They were the balancing faction up there. And they probably enjoyed a coveted position … They were always, in a sense, the real drivers of reform.

Gillard may have been a reformer, but that didn’t mean she was welcome in the Left. ‘I was constantly repudiated by my party,’ Gillard wrote in her autobiography, My Story. When, straight out of student politics, she tried to join the Socialist Left, her application was rejected by the old guard because she was considered too right-wing,2 but Gillard managed to network her way in. Once inside the Socialist Left, Gillard and her friends from student politics – including Julie Ligeti and Michael O’Connor, a future national secretary of the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union – set out to democratise the faction. ‘Our efforts were largely unsuccessful and resented by almost everyone. Looking back at it now, I can see how brash and pushy we must have

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seemed to many of the seasoned leaders of the new guard,’ Gillard wrote. ‘We made enemies within the new guard and, of course, we were the enemy of the old guard.’3 Gillard’s standing within the Left wasn’t helped by her affiliation with the Socialist Forum, a left-wing debating society established by former members of the Communist Party. As Gillard herself said, the Socialist Forum was seen by many Labor people ‘as an attempt to create a new subfaction within the Left … My association with the Forum meant I now faced a formidable array of enemies in trying to get support for preselection and entry into federal politics. In fact, I struggled for years.’4 Gillard’s opponents included Left heavyweights such as Carr and Tanner. In 1993, she was in a close-run preselection battle for the federal seat of Melbourne, but lost when Demetri Dollis swung his supporters, many of whom hailed from Melbourne’s Greek community, behind Tanner. Gillard then lost a preselection contest for a Senate spot in the 1996 federal election. Her position on the Senate ticket was reinstated, but she then failed to win a seat. Gillard said she ‘did not do what I think was expected and give up’.5 Instead, she followed the footsteps of Ligeti and became a staffer for Brumby. Gillard was hired to replace Rob Hulls as chief of staff after he was preselected as a Labor candidate for Niddrie. She started work a few months after the disastrous federal and state elections of March 1996. As far as career moves went, joining Brumby could be considered an act of either defiance or desperation. After all, here was an unwelcome member of the Left who had spent years in preselection purgatory, joining the office of a right-wing state opposition leader who had been held hostage by some of her own enemies in the Left. A few weeks before Gillard joined the state opposition, Brumby had hired Ben Hubbard as his new private secretary. Hubbard – a cricket tragic from Bendigo – was a political nerd, enmeshed in the arcana of campaigning. ‘People were pretty flat,’ he says of the post-election mood in Brumby’s office. ‘We had some good weeks, but we felt like the underdogs.’

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With typical derring-do, Brumby decided that this was the time to radically reframe the Victorian ALP. In the run-up to the 1996 state election, he reasoned, the party had been more of a protest movement than an alternative government – opposing virtually everything Kennett said or did. That hadn’t worked, and it was time for a new approach. ‘We had to do a fair bit of repositioning,’ Brumby says. Within four days of the state election, Brumby added five new faces to his frontbench, including Hulls as shadow attorney-general and gaming minister, and promoted Steve Bracks to shadow treasurer.6 John Thwaites added community services to his shadow health portfolio. Brumby, Bracks, Thwaites and Hulls were now the nucleus of the state opposition. In public, Brumby also shifted gears, coming out in support of policies such as the bid for the 2006 Commonwealth Games. But he wanted to go further. One of the landmark policy reforms adopted in advance of the 1996 state election would be the cornerstone of every Victorian Labor financial decision for the next 14 years. Under the new policy, Labor guaranteed that when in government it would deliver a $100 million surplus every budget. Theo Theophanous, a powerful but controversial member of the Socialist Left who would ultimately defect to the Right, becoming the Vasco da Gama of factional politics, ensured the surplus commitment received Left support. ‘We entrenched in the culture of the party and parliamentary party financial responsibility,’ Brumby says. ‘Fiscal responsibility was the bedrock of what we did’ – he taps his desk to punctuate the point. Five weeks after the March election, Brumby addressed the ALP state conference in Essendon, announcing plans to increase ALP membership by 2000 within a year and foreshadowing policy changes. ‘We have to have earned the right to govern,’ he told the conference. ‘Our policies must reflect the new realities of a Victoria heading into a new century. For example, nearly 70 per cent of all new jobs generated are in small business, an increasing number of Victorians are working from home, and under Kennett Government

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policies, more and more essential services are being privately provided.’7 Brumby spelled out what he had in mind in an article published in The Age on 17 July 1996: The modern Labor Party must be neither Old Left nor New Right as neither remotely resembles the challenges ahead or offers a new way forward – a new direction for Labor. Our policies must reflect this new direction, while maintaining Labor’s core values. The values of a fair go for all, a just and democratic society that believes in the right of every individual to reach his or her full potential regardless of social, economic or geographic background; a society that equally values the corresponding right of every individual to dignity, security and respect … We cannot simply wait until the next election is upon us and say to the people of Victoria: ‘Here we are, new and improved – try us on for size.’ We must regain their confidence and support over time. We must do the hard work now. We must be honest with ourselves and with the Victorian people.

Brumby wanted to stop opposing the staging of the Grand Prix at Albert Park and the construction of the CityLink toll road, as well as the party’s blanket opposition of all privatisation. Theophanous – as shadow minister for industry, science and technology, and small business – came out in support of his leader, pointing out that electricity privatisation would be largely completed by the time of the next state election and CityLink mostly built. There was, Theophanous said, ‘not much point in opposing something that’s already happened. The real challenge is to move on. Our policy framework will be much more about protecting consumers, ensuring that people are not ripped off, either, in their electricity bills or in tolls or in any other of the many charges that will be involved.’8 Brumby and Theophanous were saying Labor had to stop telling people what it would have done if it were in government and start explaining what it would do when it was in government. What the Left heard was a declaration of war.

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To understand the psychology of the Left in 1996, you have to appreciate the previous five years from the Left’s perspective. In 1990, the Left’s Joan Kirner became premier and made a series of tough decisions, such as selling the State Bank of Victoria and cutting thousands of public service jobs, that went against the grain of her own faction. The pressure contributed to a split in the Left, with a splinter group breaking away to form the Pledge faction. ‘We took a big institutional hit in supporting the [Kirner] government in various tough decisions to keep the state afloat,’ a Socialist Left leader says. To add insult to injury, the Pledge – supposedly more left-wing than the Socialist Left – formed an alliance with Labor Unity, while members of the Right began blaming the Left for the economic failings of the Cain–Kirner years. ‘That was a big psychological driver, which impacted on some of the actions of the caucus and the party,’ the Left leader says. Seen from that perspective, factional trouble was inevitable. Brumby came under attack for jumping the gun and Theophanous for acting outside his portfolios and against the interests of his faction. Writing in the Herald Sun on 18 July, journalist Matthew Pinkney observed: ‘It was a brave move triggered by recognition that while ideological purity might bring honour, it would also buy a long-term lease on the opposition benches. But in an epic mess, Labor has contrived to turn sensible introspection into a media fest on treachery and internal strife.’ By intimating policy change was inevitable, Theophanous had ‘committed heresy’ because he had ignored internal democratic processes. Rumblings of leadership spills resurfaced in the media while Brumby kept busy, travelling to Greece, Italy, South Africa and Mauritius on a three-week business trip in August, then spending a week visiting 25  ALP branches in Melbourne’s outer suburbs and regions in September. Speaking to The Age’s Shane Green on 22  September, he said, ‘We’ve got to be in a position to be able to govern this state.’ Brumby’s office pointed out to Green that Victorian Labor had attracted 1500 new members since the 30 March state

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election – and still had six months to achieve its goal of signing up 2000. By the next month, Brumby was once again forced to call for unity. Addressing another ALP state conference at Monash University on 12 October 1996, he said that the party would not win back voters until it stopped fighting with itself: ‘For every ounce of energy that has been expended building for the future there has been twice that amount fighting old battles, settling old scores, hacking into factional enemies and repeating old mistakes.’ Ironically, after the state conference, Brumby’s factional backers went looking for new battles to fight. Labor Unity leaders Greg Sword and Stephen Conroy met the Socialist Left’s Theophanous and Telmo Languiller – a Uruguayan-born factional player with a network of Latin American supporters – in a pub in Springvale. Sword already had a good working relationship with Ian Jones, the convener of the Pledge. If he and Sword could convince Theophanous and Languiller to support Labor Unity, the Right would, for the first time, gain majority control of the Victorian branch of the ALP. Theophanous’s brother, Andrew, was already a federal politician. Theo wanted to join Andrew in Canberra, but his first attempt to land the federal seat of Batman had been thwarted by Martin Ferguson. Now, if Theophanous and Languiller supported the Right, another bid for a federal seat was possible. If Theophanous and Languiller defected, it would be the solution to the factional conundrum Sword had been working on since 1993. In the end, Theophanous’s choice was made for him. On 19 November, his parliamentary colleagues in the Socialist Left suspended him indefinitely for several ‘unacceptable incidents’9 – including allegations he was associated with branch stacking. (Theophanous has vigorously denied all allegations of branch stacking.) The 1990s were a time of branch-stacking wars in the ALP as Left and Right factional players sought to gain control of seats by loading up local branches with bogus members. The stacking wars left the party in a hopelessly conflicted position – philosophically, level heads in all

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factions were against branch stacking; practically, the income from bogus memberships was welcomed by a financially strapped organisation struggling to dig its way out of debt. ‘This was a time of deep, deep hatreds,’ one factional player explains. ‘It was a very ugly period where there was a risk of the exclusive focus being on the control of the branches rather than, “What is the pathway back to government?” … There were these sub-textual layers of blame attribution, ideological debates, but, fundamentally, [it was] about control – who was going to control the future.’ The Left’s vote to suspend Theophanous was carried 14 to 2. In response, Theophanous released a defiant statement: ‘I think most members of the Left know deep down that we need to take a new direction but, unfortunately, many don’t seem prepared to act. The party needs to prepare itself … for government beyond 2000. Ordinary members of the party want to see the party look to the future and not back to the past.’ A month later, Theophanous made his own break from the past. On Monday 16 December 1996, more than 350 members of the Socialist Left turned up for a general meeting. One attendee recalls the meeting as being ‘very fractious and very well attended’. That was because the faction was set to decide whether or not to expel Theophanous from its ranks. Among the attendees was Gillard. The supporters of Theophanous moved first, making a no-confidence motion against Kim Carr. Gillard was among the throng that voted to unseat Carr. ‘Very tumultuous,’ one attendee says. ‘To see people like Julia … side with the Theophanous gang marked a big cleavage. It really marked the Labor Party going forward.’ The vote on the no-confidence motion was defeated by just three votes and a scuffle broke out between Andrew Theophanous and state MP Alex Andrianopoulos. In the end, though, Theo Theophanous was expelled from the Left. He was now a politician without a faction. ‘I wouldn’t like to be in his shoes in the longer term,’ Eddie Micallef, the Left’s state parliamentary convener, told The Age’s Green. Another Left MP was less effusive, telling Green, ‘Realignment is in the air.’10

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How much of a realignment became plain on 20 December. Theophanous and his supporters split from the Left, formed a new faction called the Labor Renewal Alliance, then formed a powersharing coalition with the Labor Unity and Pledge factions. The new factional coalition had majority control of Victorian Labor. Previously, the Socialist Left and Labor Unity had shared control over pre­selections, policy and leadership positions. That power-sharing arrangement was now history. The repercussions of the split were huge. Theophanous and Gillard had the backing of this new factional triumvirate. That meant Theophanous was safe in state parliament and could use his base to launch a second bid for federal politics,11 and Gillard was able to run for preselection as a Left candidate with right-wing backing. On the contrary, the 15 remaining members of the Socialist Left in state parliament were sitting ducks, with more than one set to lose their seat in the preselection bloodletting leading up to the 1999 state election. ‘In essence,’ Gillard wrote, ‘I entered Federal Parliament as a member of the national Left faction who had been preselected against the wishes of most of the Left and with the support of the Right. Not an easy way to start. By now, I well and truly considered factional politics to be nonsense.’12 Would the factional realignment have fallen the way it did without the thwarted political ambitions of Gillard? Probably not. At the time, there were three members of the Socialist Left with the intellectual muscle to shape the faction – Gillard, Tanner and Carr. Tanner and Carr were opposed to Gillard, but a political personality as resolute as hers could never be stopped, only slowed. Sooner or later, Gillard was bound to find a way through the factional impasse; and the fracas over Theophanous was the means to that end. By siding with Theophanous, Gillard secured the political career that should have been hers on merit, the forces that opposed her – the Left – were routed and the forces that stood by her – the Right – rewarded with a majority position in Victorian Labor. As one Labor Unity leader of the time put it, the ‘big church’ Right that controlled the party for the next decade was created

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by Gillard’s factional play and the emergence of what became know as the Ferguson Left.13 ‘The person who saved our bloody life is Julia,’ he says. That’s why, as the Socialist Left identity points out, ‘the story of the [former] prime minister and how she got into parliament cuts very closely across what happened in the state arena at the same time.’ Gillard herself said as much in 2006: ‘I had to fight hard to get pre­selected. I had to play a factional game to do that. I’d do all of that again tomorrow.’14 As for Brumby, he took the opportunity to settle an old score. With the factional realignment, Brumby now had the numbers to make Thwaites – the man without a faction – his deputy leader. Dollis was history. Brumby isn’t vengeful by nature – he is not the kind of maddie to choke the piñata – but he made an exception for Dollis, the man who told him he had nothing to fear the night before the Baker coup. The day after the Left split was a Saturday. Brumby spent the day securing the numbers to promote Thwaites before calling a caucus meeting for the coming Monday. At that caucus meeting, every leadership position in the Victorian Parliamentary Labor Party would be spilled – and Dollis would have no chance of being re-elected as deputy. ‘I called the caucus meeting,’ Brumby says. ‘I didn’t ring Demetri until I went into the car. He said he hadn’t really seen it coming … He would have appreciated knowing earlier, but he said, “I can understand why you are ringing me later.” That’s the way it goes. I returned the favour.’15

The Golden Four

The venue was secret: close enough to state parliament to be convenient, far enough away from traditional Labor territory in the west and north of the city to be secluded. No one would think of looking for a Labor Party war room in the middle of Kew, the leafy eastern suburb that sat on the high side of the Yarra River, looking down its nose at the old industrial sites of Abbotsford and Collingwood. After all, this was the place where Robert Menzies had come to retire, where Archbishop Mannix had lived and died, and the last home of legendary fixer John Wren – a suburb where people of money and position came to raise their families in large houses and quiet streets. Driving to the venue from the opposition rooms, the attendees travelled up Johnston Street. Past the Tote Hotel – a live music venue that had once, according to legend, been the centre of Wren’s illegal gambling empire. Past the Abbotsford Convent and the Collingwood Children’s Farm before climbing through Yarra Bend Park and passing the red-brick walls of Raheen – the Italianate mansion where Mannix and cardboard billionaire Richard Pratt both, in different centuries, were visited by the city’s elite as they lay on their deathbeds. Their venue, just before Kew Junction, was nothing as grand as Raheen, just a rented conference room, but, in the minds of the attendees, it looms as large as that mansion’s tallest tower – because this is where the plan to steal government from Jeff Kennett was hatched. 107

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‘Part of the challenge of those meetings was we didn’t want Theo and a whole lot of others to come,’ explains one of the Kew participants. Attendance was by invitation only. A young Ben Hubbard, John Brumby’s private secretary, lent administrative support; Matt Viney, the party’s pollster, relayed the latest research insights from the field; Julia Gillard, chief of staff to the leader and future federal member for Lalor, offered political advice; Bill Shannon, Labor’s resident advertising guru, developed the story; John Lenders, state secretary of the party and campaign director for the next state election, made sure every detail fitted the electoral siege machine he was building. Ultimately, though, the meetings were all about ‘the golden four’ – as Lenders calls Brumby, Bracks, Thwaites and Hulls – who, after four years of opposition, were finally in positions where they could inflict damage. ‘They were a very, very proud group, the four of them,’ says one opposition staffer. A very, very smart group. From that they wove their individual values … into a fairly cohesive thing – that marrying of social values and progress with economic management. And our team of four were perfect in terms of their skillset, their values base: Brumby, economic management; Bracksy, a centrist with a great and deep knowledge of how the public sector works and a great managerial style; Hullsy, at the very, very progressive end of values; and Thwaitesy, he was the absolutely perfect opposition spokesperson … he was a political drama slut.

‘If you looked at them as an opposition unit, it is nearly the perfect opposition battering ram,’ says Robert Doyle, a future state opposition leader and lord mayor of Melbourne who, in 1997, was serving as a parliamentary secretary in the second rank of the Kennett government. What Doyle was speaking of was the mix of talents and characteristics that Brumby, Bracks, Thwaites and Hulls shared. He adds: And, if you think about it – not Hullsy so much – but Bracks, Thwaites and Brumby; the camera is kind to all of them. They all

the golden four

present very well. So, as an opposition unit, they were remarkably good … Probably the most effective of them was Thwaites. And that might sound odd, but in my mind the other three – good opposition politicians though they were – I would say Thwaites was the best of them, Hulls was the next best, and then Brumby and Bracks after that.

Assembling this opposition ‘battering ram’ came at a price. The party was still in turmoil following the upheavals of December 1996, the preselection thrill kills were only just beginning to play out across state and federal seats, and Brumby had made lifelong enemies in the Socialist Left. In Kew, though, none of that mattered. Other than Gillard, the room was a Left-free zone, and Gillard was wedded to the Right now, anyway. As a consequence, everyone could be trusted. Nothing would be leaked. The Kew hotel was a safe house. It was here that Shannon first saw Brumby, Bracks, Thwaites and Hulls together. He was taken by their camaraderie – particularly the verbal sparring between Brumby and Hulls – as well as their discipline. The ‘golden four’ met four times at Kew, across 1997 and 1998. The meetings ran from 10 am to 3 pm. It was at those meetings that the strategies that would defeat Kennett and the policies that would define the early years of the Bracks government were settled upon. ‘That was all very important,’ says Bracks. ‘We picked a place where no one would know where it was … John Brumby used to laugh and wear his dark glasses in.’ ‘They were critical,’ says Thwaites. ‘We set our whole strategy.’ Bracks’s role was central. Brumby had given his shadow treasurer the task of rewriting Labor’s policy platform before the next state election, which was expected to fall in 2000. It was a huge job. ‘I spent most of my life on this,’ Bracks says. ‘I knew, by their first name, every union leader in the state, most business leaders, interest groups. I saw them regularly, argued with them on occasion, you know, for particular policy positions that we might want to pursue or not pursue. I brought a team around me which could help write [the policy] … It

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was the first time the party had done this for 20 years.’ Bracks also sought out the chief author of the 1982 party platform, Gareth Evans. ‘I talked to Gareth about what he did. He used the power of his intellect. He wrote most of that policy – as he did for Kim Beazley [in the 1998 federal election].’ Bracks decided to take a different, far more labour-intensive approach. He travelled around the state and listened to the members of Victorian Labor, from factional players to unionists to branch members, as well as business and community leaders. ‘I wanted people to own it,’ he says. ‘My premise on change is that you pursue change, but you do everything you can to bring people with you – so, I was doing that.’ Bracks was the ideal person for the policy review. His time as a political staffer and public servant had shown him how governments work, and, like Brumby, he was an admirer of Hawke’s economic reforms. ‘I’d seen it from several sides. I was pretty well ready. I knew how public policy was determined, developed and implemented. I knew the role that we wanted to play in government,’ he says. At the Kew meetings, Bracks reported on the policy development process and received feedback from Brumby, Thwaites and Hulls. ‘That senior group was driving it,’ he says. The direction from the Kew meetings then filtered down to shadow cabinet, where Brumby focused relentlessly on policy development. Viney’s polling informed Bracks’s policy work. Increasingly, Viney was zeroing in on so-called soft voters. Soft voters are not swinging voters, who pendulum from one party to the other from election to election. They’re people who normally vote for one party or candidate – Labor, Liberal, Green, independent – but who are not rusted on to that party or candidate. They’re open to persuasion and, if convinced of the merits of the alternative, prepared to directly vote for or preference a different party or candidate. Viney went out of his way to find soft voters and discover what they thought on key issues. He developed a soft voter survey. Respondents answered two or three introductory questions, then were asked about their voting intentions – at which time the soft voters were identified.

the golden four

‘Committed voters would be thanked and finished at this point,’ Viney says. ‘If they were soft voters, we’d then ask more questions.’ Half of the people polled turned out to be soft or undecided voters; those were the voters invited to Victorian Labor focus groups. ‘All of our research became entirely focused on what was affecting those people,’ he says. What Viney found was that people were concerned about breadand-butter issues, such as waiting lists at hospitals, class sizes in schools, the number of police on the street and job creation. The probity questions that Brumby, Thwaites and Hulls had focused on since 1993, including democratic fundamentals such as sacking judges, bulldozing community concerns over the Grand Prix and neutering the auditorgeneral, were not vote-changing issues. ‘What was pretty obvious from the research was that was not changing votes,’ Viney says. ‘None of that was changing votes and it probably never does, to be honest. You can’t convince people of what they don’t fundamentally believe. It’s the hardest thing to do in politics.’ Thwaites, newly installed as Brumby’s deputy, took a hands-on approach to strategy. Hubbard believes Thwaites’s promotion was ‘the big event’ that put the opposition rooms back on track after the disappointments of 1996. ‘It was a breath of fresh air through the office,’ he says. He was dynamic. He would actually add a lot of other things outside of health and planning, his shadow portfolios. And the good thing about Thwaitesy, he’s always happy to contest – not in a rude way – but actually question why we’re doing things and how. And I actually found it a good rigour. He’d ask you things and you’d have to explain it. You’d have to justify it. Think about it.

Informed by Viney’s research, Thwaites developed a new ‘messages’ document that homed in on the concerns of soft voters. From now on, Labor would talk in concrete language: jobs instead of just the economy, class sizes instead of education, waiting lists instead of health, police numbers instead of community safety. ‘The polling was showing that

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the Kennett government was well ahead,’ Thwaites says, ‘but on every topic we were ahead. It was this split. People couldn’t imagine them losing, but there were all of these hot buttons.’ Brumby, Bracks, Thwaites and Hulls decided to push those hot buttons – jobs, class sizes, waiting lists, police numbers. Probity issues were still important but, unlike in the 1996 campaign, would not be the central message of the next state election. The pieces were starting to fall into place. The Victorian Trades Hall Council had railed against the Kennett government since 1992. After the 1996 election, they changed tack. ‘Instead of just skirmishing with Kennett,’ says Brian Boyd, at the time an industrial officer at the Victorian Trades Hall Council, ‘we decided we better do something about the Labor Party and trying to get them in. There was a shift in the labour movement.’ The factional tensions that existed between Left and Right remained within the parliament, the party and the union movement, but they were subsumed by a growing desperation to defeat the conservatives. As Boyd says: ‘It became a pragmatic working relationship with a common purpose: get Kennett.’ Of all the pieces to fall into place, one of the most important was Lenders, who, in his understated way, was proving to be the ideal state secretary. Lenders paid off the party’s crushing debt and formed a tight working relationship with Gillard,1 synchronising operations between the equally understaffed opposition rooms and Drummond Street. His reforms were practical, pragmatic. Policy committees were pruned to focus on key areas such as health, education, community safety, the economy and the environment. When Lenders found bureaucracy was choking operations and making it harder for ALP members to access conferences, he simplified the rules and opened up state and country conferences. When he realised factional leaders had developed a habit of sending underlings to the all-powerful Administrative Committee meetings, Lenders encouraged those leaders to cut out the intermediaries and attend meetings themselves. Knowing that Kennett had changed electoral laws, making it possible for the government of the day to call snap elections and gain

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at least one week’s head start on the campaign, Lenders narrowed the margin of that head start by improving logistics. ‘The first week of your campaign is your stress week, particularly when you don’t know when the election is going to be called. Even buying media you’re at a disadvantage, because they could do the buy and do the election,’ Lenders says. ‘The plan was to take out of the campaign period administrative tasks that were just going to waste people’s brain power and time.’ Candidates’ paperwork was organised months ahead of time; Candy Broad, the ALP’s assistant national secretary, would be seconded to Victoria during the campaign proper; a list of 22 marginal seats were drawn up as winnable; unionists from interstate who had volunteered to act as organisers for marginal seats were linked with individual seats, then flown to Melbourne to meet candidates and local party people; and Trades Hall was regularly briefed on how Labor was faring in the marginals. ‘He’s quite unassuming,’ Brian Boyd says of Lenders, ‘but what he did do was encourage us to have that working day-to-day relationship between the industrial wing and his office on where the marginal seats were going.’ Phil Reed, who was working for Brumby’s office in 1997, is equally effusive: ‘The most professional period of head office was Lenders as state secretary. The reality is Lenders was instrumental in turning head office into a campaign machine.’ Lenders was aided and abetted by cross-factional support. ‘The key people there were Greg Sword,2 overwhelmingly, and Kim Carr. Kim, he got the fact that Labor in Victoria had to be stable and get its act together to win. Greg and Kim were just phenomenal,’ Lenders says. ‘With those two blokes behind you – you could do a lot.’ Lenders – with the backing of new, Left-aligned state president Jill Hennessy – focused on building up a war chest for the coming election and searching for a new home for Victorian Labor. Having survived three elections during March 1996, Lenders knew Drummond Street was no longer able to meet the requirements of a modern election campaign. He needed a campaign room big enough

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to house the 30 staff of the opposition rooms and ALP head office, as well as innumerable volunteers. Lenders decided that, to be ready for the next state campaign, a new ALP office would have to be found by 1 December 1998.3 Before Lenders had a chance to find a new home for the Victorian ALP, he was given a chance to test-drive the campaign machine he’d built. On 11 November 1997, the Liberal Party’s Roger Pescott – a former diplomat who’d been dumped as a minister following the 1996 election – resigned in protest against Kennett government legislation that undermined the independence of the auditor-general, forcing a 13 December by-election in the seat of Mitcham. Labor candidate Tony Robinson secured a 15.8 per cent swing and won the Mitcham by-election.4 A poll by The Age found that two-thirds of Mitcham voters were concerned by Kennett government attacks on the auditorgeneral, and three-quarters disapproved of another decision to abolish workers’ compensation rights.5 After more than four years as opposition leader, Brumby had won his first election. Mitcham seemed like the beginning of Labor’s comeback, but, for Brumby, it was the beginning of the end.

The Picture of Dorian Gray

Towards the end of Outnumbered, Richard Keddie’s documentary of the 1996 state election campaign, John Brumby delivers a prescient analysis of the lot of the political leader. Speaking in the immediate aftermath of the election loss, a 44-year-old Brumby says: You’ve got to understand about politics that the moment you hand yourself over to it, you know, you’re finished, because you can do everything right [he clicks his fingers] and you can just be gone like that. It’s the fickleness of the voters. It’s the timing of the elections. It really is. It’s just a whole lot of factors that are just outside your control. So, you’ve got to find that balance. I hope – I think I find it through trying to keep open the people contact things, the engagement, the inclusiveness, and so on. So, that’s where my sights are, and I’ll put the work in and I’ll work harder than anybody and, you know, I’ll represent the party, while they want me, to the best of my ability, and the one and a half million people out there who want me,1 so that’s the job I’ll do, but I’m not going to hand over myself – lock, stock and barrel; heart, soul and mind – because if I did that I’d be stupid, because one day [he clicks his fingers again] the show’s going to spit me out. That’s politics.

By 1998, the show that had chewed up Brumby and spat him out in the 1990 federal election was getting ready to spit him out for a second 115

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time. Brumby still had the Hawke-ish work ethic. Still put in the hours. Still did many things right, few wrong. None of that mattered. What mattered was he had taken Victorian Labor from a position of hopelessness to expectation – and expectation is impossible to control. That was dangerous. After the Mitcham by-election, Victorian Labor was finally within striking distance of government. The ALP’s two-party preferred vote was 48 per cent – a gap narrow enough to be overcome by the kind of sharp, smart campaign John Lenders had in mind. Victory was possible. During 1998, though, the numbers slipped. Labor’s twoparty preferred polling went down to 44 per cent, lower than the vote Brumby attracted in the 1996 election, and the hope of victory began to feel unattainable. Labor people – foes as well as friends – were whispering about their leader again. ‘John Brumby was becoming increasingly impatient. A bit anxious as well,’ says one frontbencher. ‘He was very difficult. He was very aggressive,’ says a left-wing powerbroker. ‘He’d upset some of the old Left guard,’ says a left-wing MP. ‘It was really tense and people just wouldn’t back off. You could see it wasn’t going to improve and, so, you needed change,’ says another MP. ‘He just didn’t click with the electorate … and had no capacity to work with people or show any compassion,’ says a Pledge MP.2 ‘All the whispers were that Brumby didn’t have the juice to take Kennett,’ says a prominent unionist. ‘The public never warmed to him,’ says one member of the campaign. The internal preselection battles that had marked the first half of 1998 didn’t help Brumby’s cause. All deals were off between the Right and the Left for preselections, with open season declared on MPs associated with the former Cain–Kirner government. ‘It was a brutal, bruising Labor Party preselection of the old-school type,’ one of the candidates says of the 1998 preselection round. ‘As unpleasant as it was, it really was a good round of preselections. The best we’ve ever had.’ In Dandenong North, the Right’s Jan Wilson retired and was replaced by Lenders; in Springvale, the Left’s Eddie Micallef was defeated by the Right’s Tim Holding; in Richmond, the Left’s

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Demetri Dollis was replaced by a high-profile Left candidate, former Melbourne lord mayor Richard Wynne; in Sunshine, the Right’s Ian Baker – the leader of the 1994 coup attempt – was defeated by Theo Theophanous’s factional wingman Telmo Languiller; in Northcote, the Left’s Tony Sheehan – the former Kirner government treasurer – was replaced by high-profile former journalist Mary Delahunty; in Doutta Galla, the Right’s Tayfun Eren was disendorsed and replaced by former AFL footballer Justin Madden; and, in Melbourne, the Pledge’s Neil Cole was defeated by the Pledge’s Bronwyn Pike, yet another high-profile candidate. The battle for the seat of Melbourne was nasty, with lasting repercussions for Brumby. Pike, a former Uniting Church social justice director who’d developed a public profile by speaking out against privatisation and Victoria’s new casino and had come close to winning preselection for Mitcham, wasn’t the only aspirant for Melbourne – Brian Boyd from Trades Hall also wanted the seat. Brumby backed Pike, catching Boyd off guard. ‘This was a little bit surprising to me in 1998, because we’d been working so well from ’95 up to ’98 on the [Occupational Health] and [Safety] stuff,’ Boyd says.3 ‘So, I thought the relationship was pretty good, but then I got shafted … That’s where things went a bit south.’ Looking back, Brumby agrees with Boyd’s assessment: ‘I worked pretty well with Brian, particularly with the workers comp stuff, but Brian wanted to move into Melbourne to replace Neil Cole and I supported Bronwyn and it was a very hard call because’ – Brumby pauses – ‘for a variety of reasons it was a very hard call. So, he was very disappointed. Very disappointed. So, there were ongoing tensions.’ An 11 November 1998 article by The Age’s Ewin Hannan captured those ongoing tensions: The level of hatred and personal enmity throughout the wider Party is palpable. Representing about 40 per cent of the Party, many members of the Socialist Left remain hell-bent on revenge after their losses during the last preselection round. They privately declare they have no confidence in Brumby. They assert he has no chance of winning

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the next election, and nominate Bracks as their preferred leader. Furthermore, they ridicule Brumby’s program of party ‘renewal’, depicting it as a grubby power play by Labor Unity. The result of this destructive behaviour is clear. While the wider party refuses to get behind him, Brumby will continue to struggle to convince the electorate that he leads a united party, let alone a credible alternative to Kennett.

Delahunty had been struck by the ‘palpable enmity’ felt towards Brumby by the surviving shellbacks when she joined the caucus after winning a by-election for Northcote on 15 August 1998. Walking into caucus, says Delahunty: My first impression was the shambolic nature of it. The people were standing up at the back reading newspapers and they were – and I’m being really frank – but they were the rump and the leftovers … The shellbacks. They were totally disinterested … There was a lot of energy up the front and the energy came from ideas – ideas about policy. That’s what struck me. That’s what I was interested in. That’s what I was looking for.

‘The Quartet’, as Delahunty calls Brumby, Thwaites, Bracks and Hulls, were the ones generating most of the energy in the caucus.4 She saw Brumby as the ideas man, Thwaites as the media star, Bracks as the foundation builder with the party platform, and Hulls as the headkicker in public and the policy scrutineer in private. ‘There were other people who were significant,’ she adds. ‘Peter Batchelor’s role in the parliament shouldn’t be underestimated.’ Initially, Delahunty was nonplussed by the byzantine parliamentary tactics of Batchelor: Batch’s role was much more subterranean and it took me a lot longer to appreciate it, because they seemed to give him so much leeway about the strategy of how the parliament was run … There were

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weeks when we just went through the night. Now, all of this was Batch’s doing … He managed all of those tactics within the parliament to constantly try and embarrass the government and give us at least something to hang our hats on in terms of being an opposition, because, you’ve got to remember, Kennett was absolutely rampant. He was rampant in the parliament. He was rampant in the public arena.5

One place Kennett wasn’t rampant was regional Victoria. Brumby’s much-derided belief that regional Victoria was turning against Kennett was being proven correct. In a by-election held on 1 February 1997, regional Victorians had elected a second independent politician to the Legislative Assembly for the seat of Gippsland West. The Gippsland West independent, Susan Davies, was more left-wing than Mildura’s conservative independent, Russell Savage, having stood as a Labor candidate in the 1996 state election. In her maiden speech to parliament, delivered on 2 April, Davies put the Kennett government on notice. ‘That the people of Gippsland West are not happy is self-evident, because I am here,’ Davies said. ‘The swing against the government was 13 per cent. Even for a by-election the bush does not move like that unless something is seriously amiss.’ Davies summarised regional Victoria’s message to the Kennett government in five points: a wish to be genuinely consulted on matters vital to the regions, a refusal to be bullied into submission, a reminder of the government’s duty to provide basic services, anger at selling off assets to foreign companies, and concern at the negative effects of gambling on small businesses and many families. Davies concluded with a warning: ‘Hear our message or face the consequences. The choice is very simple.’6 Kennett didn’t heed Davies’s message. Instead, he bulldozed the independents into the arms of Labor. One of Kennett’s first acts after winning office in 1992 had been to banish the few remaining ALP members to the ‘Chook Shed’ – a battery of prefabricated offices with low ceilings plonked in the gardens behind Parliament House. There are MP offices within parliament – including dungeon-like cells beneath

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the mass of stairs that lead from Spring Street, the converted offices located in the two former caretakers’ houses and cubby holes such as the bird’s nest of an office tucked away above the vaulted ceiling of the parliamentary library – but, traditionally, MPs lowest on the pecking order are the ones sent out to the Chook Shed. ‘It turned out to be quite an advantageous decision by Kennett,’ says Batchelor, who, as shadow leader of the House, allocated rooms for ALP members. ‘He thought he was punishing us, but it got people together, particularly backbenchers, and they were able to rebuild a sense of camaraderie … They used to have their party out there once a year [an end-of-year shindig that has since become a tradition] and it was all a function of being outcasts, I suppose.’ When, in 1996, Savage defeated the Liberal Craig Bildstien to become the member for Mildura, Kennett singled him out for similar treatment. Batchelor was told Savage was Labor’s problem – room would have to be found for the independent in an ALP member’s parliamentary office. Batchelor decided against making Savage share with an ALP member. Instead, he evicted a Labor backbencher from a Chook Shed office to make room for the member for Mildura.7 ‘It was a rare show of decency on my part,’ Batchelor says drily. Labor MP Bob Cameron – who, like Savage, was based in regional Victoria – and other Labor backbenchers began inviting the former copper to eat with them during the long parliamentary sitting weeks. Intelligent and understated, Savage became a regular at Labor functions. ‘Russell was like a conservative version of [former federal Greens leader] Bob Brown,’ Cameron says. ‘The Liberals and the Nationals didn’t speak to him. Kennett had made it clear that he was an enemy of the people … Therefore, he would only socialise with us.’ By 1999, ALP polling was seeing an enormous shift in voter sentiment in regional Victoria as soft voters moved away from the Liberal and National parties – attaching themselves to independent candidates and Labor. Brumby’s forecast of a regional and rural revolt against the Kennett government was coming to pass. Unfortunately, by the time Kennett faced the consequences for alienating regional Victoria

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in general and Savage in particular, it was too late for the state opposition leader.8 Brumby’s endgame began on 4 February 1999, when the Herald Sun’s Andrew Bolt wrote an article that said he was about to: Unveil an education policy that makes Premier Jeff Kennett look like a teacher union’s pet … Schools whose students keep doing badly will get a visit from a SWAT team of experts. The team will shake up the school, check the teaching methods and possibly order the school to set up after-hours and holiday classes. If the school still doesn’t lift its game, the principal gets the boot.

In the Bolt article, Brumby went on to say that he was ‘only talking about a small number of schools … Typically, the kids that are being failed by failing schools are Labor kids in Labor areas.’ The day Bolt’s article was published, Essential Media Communications,9 a public relations firm working for both Victorian Labor and the Victorian Teachers’ Union, cut ties with the ALP over Brumby’s ‘SWAT team’ policy. Brian Boyd also came out swinging, warning, ‘John Brumby has got three or four months to prove he has got what it takes.’ Boyd says the outburst against Brumby was more political than personal: [The industrial wing] had a very pragmatic view. We weren’t putting all this effort in to lose again, just, and let Brumby get another few seats closer and wait another four years. Especially, off the back of how close the ’98 waterfront came to us suffering a major defeat – we scraped through that … We needed some relief. That was our mentality. That was really our motivation … It wasn’t because of [losing the Melbourne preselection to Pike] that I said what I said, it was actually coming off a key group of our affiliates … All we wanted was to shake him up a bit and say we wanted a little bit more oomph, because Kennett was bragging that he had Brumby’s measure.

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The Brumby–Boyd feud went from bad to irretrievable when shadow cabinet met in Queenscliff on Monday 15 February. The day before, the Socialist Left had threatened a public brawl at the state conference unless Labor Unity came to an agreement over branch stacking. The meeting became acrimonious, with Theo Theophanous arguing against Brumby’s proposal to expand the number of shadow ministers in his cabinet. According to The Age’s Hannan, Theophanous asked Brumby how he would justify this decision to the media. Brumby replied that he wasn’t expecting the media to ask about the decision. Rob Hulls – Brumby’s closest ally and the MP most likely to call a spade a spade – quipped, ‘They will now.’ ‘The meaning of the Hulls barb,’ Hannan wrote, ‘was clear. Labor MPs, including Brumby, had long suspected Theophanous was behind a stream of media leaks damaging to Brumby.’ At one point, he reported, Theophanous asked Brumby, ‘Are you accusing me of leaking?’ In response, several members of shadow cabinet laughed. However, as Hannan explained, Brumby didn’t have much to laugh about: That morning, The Age had run a front-page report that the Victorian Trades Hall Council executive had ‘disinvited’ Brumby to its upcoming Labour Day dinner dance. The union decision, taken the previous Friday, reflected the degree of loathing among left-wing unions towards Brumby … No formal resolution was passed and the union leaders decided not to record their decision in the official executive minutes. It was an embarrassing snub. But the subsequent leaking of the decision last Sunday, two days out from his release of the party’s policy platform, was seen as the bigger act of treachery. For Kennett, it was an excellent chance to cause grief for the labour movement, and through the unions, Brumby.10

Leigh Hubbard, the secretary of Trades Hall, spoke on the phone with Brumby before shadow cabinet met. During the call, Hubbard told Brumby that Boyd no longer had enough support to survive at Trades

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Hall and would be gone by the end of the day. ‘On the basis of that I did a media conference and I got stuck into Brian pretty heavily, because I expected he’d be fucked by the end of the day,’ Brumby says. Brumby told the media that Boyd had ‘been wandering around meeting rooms vowing to get me and to get the Labor Party … Brian’s been talking the party down for the last six to nine months – and I get around the party branches; I meet with the candidates regularly; I speak with elements of the union movement and people have had a gutful.’11 Brumby also sank the boots into the construction unions Boyd worked with, calling them ‘lapdogs’ for agreeing to meet with Kennett. In hindsight, Brumby says, his attack on Boyd was ‘a serious error of judgement … I’d gone out on a limb, getting stuck into Brian, making an enemy for life and reinforcing some perceptions about attitudes to the CFMEU [Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union] in particular, all on the basis of an assurance that Leigh Hubbard had given me that he was going to neck him and he had the numbers.’ The trouble was that Hubbard didn’t have the numbers; Boyd wasn’t going anywhere. Theophanous heard Brumby’s ‘lapdog’ comments and called Trades Hall. ‘I knew within minutes,’ Boyd says. ‘It brought out the crabs.’ The rest of the week was a shambles. Hubbard publicly criticised Brumby for putting people offside with his tough approach to unions, Theophanous called for a ‘new direction’ for Labor, Brumby called for Theophanous’s resignation, Theophanous resigned but refused to endorse Brumby as leader, Mary Delahunty was promoted to the frontbench in place of Theophanous, Brumby launched the new policy platform produced by Bracks, and Cole chipped in from Melbourne, calling for Brumby to be dumped as leader.12 After Queenscliff, Brumby’s leadership was critical; within two weeks, it became terminal. On 27 and 28 February, the two-day ALP state conference was held at the World Trade Centre – a concrete and brick Esky of a building near the intersection of Spencer and Flinders streets. On the first day, a Saturday, Brumby was slated to launch the new policy platform, which would then be promoted via

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political advertising on radio and country television under the watch of Lenders.13 Brumby’s speech – according to neutral members of the audience – was one of his best, full of passion and fire. The first day of the state conference was designed to give the opposition plenty of positive policy ideas to talk about, such as cutting class sizes, boosting police numbers, improving hospitals and strengthening the number of WorkCover inspectors, but none of that mattered. As Brumby spoke, Boyd and Martin Kingham, state secretary of the CFMEU, led a walkout of about 20 delegates. It was a piece of political theatre timed to ensure more questions about Brumby’s tenure as leader and no coverage of the new policy platform. Party president Jill Hennessy, who was chairing the conference, saw it all from the stage. ‘I remember thinking at that time, “Geez, I should have stayed in the community legal sector,” ’ she says ruefully. Another member of the Left is more direct: ‘I felt a deep sense of personal shame by virtue of being in the same faction as those people at the time.’ Outside the conference, Kingham said the next election was a ‘write-off’ and called for preselections to be reopened and for a spill of all leadership positions. ‘The place is leaking like a sieve, there’s more Band-Aids than there is structure and body to the leadership, and it’s got to be brought to a head,’ Kingham said.14 Brumby didn’t let the walkout faze him. He powered to the end of a memorable speech that nobody remembered. What people remembered, other than the walkout, was what happened next: instead of walking off to the side of the stage, Brumby walked down onto the floor of the conference, where he was mobbed by a media scrum anxious for his response to Kingham. Phil Reed, who’d been at Brumby’s shoulder for much of the 1996 campaign, intervened and tried to guide his leader to a private room down the side of the stage. ‘All of the media is just coming in completely around me,’ Brumby recalls, ‘so Phil Reed marches me off down to the Trade Centre and takes me down a passageway and a door … and it’s a passage that leads to nowhere.’ Not exactly nowhere, according to Reed: ‘I walked him into a broom closet.’

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The week after the walkout, Labor’s two-party preferred polling collapsed to 38 per cent, the same dismal level as when Joan Kirner lost office in 1992. It was beyond dispute: Brumby was finished. Many journalists assumed the frontrunners for Brumby’s job were Thwaites and Hulls. They were wrong. In 1999, Thwaites’s years of defying factional gravity finally caught up with him. Despite being, in the eyes of many, the best performer in the opposition ranks, the member for Albert Park had no factional base and no chance of succeeding Brumby. ‘I would have been better off being in a faction,’ he says. People just don’t trust you; that is the problem if you’re not in a faction … They think that you think you’re too good, because most people – if you asked – 90 per cent of people don’t really want to be in a faction, it’s the price you pay. So, if someone’s got there without it, they think, ‘Well, who does he think he is? Or she is?’

More than one of Thwaites’s factionally aligned colleagues confirm his suspicions. ‘Thwaites was never a factional player,’ one former Left minister says. ‘He never understood the factional politics. He never engaged with us really. The perception was that Thwaites thought he was above all the grubby factional politics … He never ever played in any of those games.’ Neither did Hulls. Still, even though Hulls was a Labor Unity blow-in – having only joined the faction to secure his preselection for Niddrie – the Right stuck by their man. Two weeks before Brumby and Boyd stoushed in the media, Hulls had an equally spectacular brouhaha in a pub. While drinking with a friend at the Meyers Place Bar near parliament, Hulls was baited by two young women who were Kennett supporters. Hulls, who was trying to console his recently divorced friend, was in no mood for bar-room sledging. The young Liberal supporters were firmly told where to go. Three weeks later, Hulls was celebrating his birthday with a Saturday afternoon barbecue at Brumby’s house. The festivities were interrupted by a call

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from The Sunday Age’s gossip columnist, Lawrence Money. The young Liberals had told Money that Hulls swore at them. Hulls confirmed that he had. Money told the shadow attorney-general that, as a public figure, he shouldn’t be using ‘that sort of language’. Hulls’s response was short and sharp. He told the journalist, ‘Go and get fucked,’ and hung up. The Sunday Age’s response was equally sharp. When opposition staffer James Higgins was dispatched to pick up an early edition of the paper that night, he called Hulls from the CBD with good and bad news. The good news: the Meyers Place barney was in the gossip column. The bad news: it was on the front page as well. The 24 January 1999 edition of The Sunday Age should be a collector’s item. Under the immortal headline ‘I called one of the women a loser …  but I’d never said I’d spew on anyone’, Money reported the young Liberals’ claims – that Hulls handed out copies of his parliamentary card, said he was a ‘loser’ and told one of the women he would ‘like to vomit’ on her. Money also reported Hulls’s response. ‘It was me,’ he said, ‘but their accusations are not quite right. I did not call myself a loser and I didn’t say I would spew on anyone. I could have called [my friend] a loser. I called one of the women a fucking loser after she went on about supporting Kennett. One bloke accused me of never having done any real work. I told him to go and get fucked.’ Hulls apologised for his behaviour. Labor Unity didn’t seem to mind. As Brumby’s leadership made its final descent in late 1998 and early 1999, Labor pollster Matt Viney was given a task. The party wanted to find out how voters perceived the current and possible future leaders of the government and opposition. Viney assembled short video clips of the Liberals’ Jeff Kennett, Phil Gude, Louise Asher and Rob Knowles, and Labor’s John Brumby, Steve Bracks, John Thwaites and Rob Hulls. He showed those eight video clips – each clip being around 30 seconds in duration – to a half-dozen different focus groups, with each group numbering up to 12 men and women. ‘The most extraordinary thing was that people almost instantly decided whether they liked them or didn’t like them,’ Viney says.

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Politics has become a TV medium. People are used to looking at a TV show and deciding whether or not they like a character on the TV program very quickly, and they’ve developed that skill quite finely, and quite astutely, really. And they came to conclusions about these politicians that were, in my judgement, remarkably good, remarkably accurate, in seconds … The overwhelming view in all of the focus groups was the fact that Steve Bracks was instantly liked – by all of the focus groups and in overwhelming numbers. One bloke said to me, ‘He looks like the kind of bloke you’d like as your next-door neighbour.’ They weren’t seeing him as a politician.

‘Your whole bloody career is decided that quickly,’ remarks former Cain government minister and Labor Unity grandee David White. ‘Bracks was just gold.’ The previous year had been a coming of age for the shadow treasurer. While reworking Labor’s policy platform, he’d travelled around the city and state, talking to Labor people from across the factional divide. Many had been impressed by his forensic approach. Parliamentary members of the Left and Labor Unity – led by Lynne Kosky and Andre Haermeyer15 – began a shadow campaign for a Bracks leadership. ‘That’s where he got the confidence of people to take the leadership,’ says White. ‘Without having done all that policy coordination, policy development work, then members of the unions wouldn’t have known him well enough to say it’s okay to knock Brumby off … He had won a lot of people’s confidence.’ ‘The bond between myself, John Thwaites, Rob Hulls and John [Brumby] was very, very strong. Very strong,’ Bracks says. ‘The last thing we thought about was any leadership change, we were just all committed to the task. But there were those dashed hopes from Mitcham. All this work was going on, and I think the view was just out in the party that we were going for another honourable loss again.’ Bracks, Thwaites and Hulls may not have been thinking about any leadership change before the state conference, but Sword knew something had to be done. Not only did Brumby have enemies in the Left,

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he was facing an insurgency from within the Right and the shadow cabinet. ‘The constant drip against John as leader started [after the preselections],’ Sword says. I was reaching the conclusion that, despite John’s ability and talent, there’s no way he was going to win the election, because you had this thing every day in the press, ‘Is he going to be leader? Is he not going to be leader?’ John also suffered from the fact that we’d had five years of constant renewal battles, and in some way he’d carried the scars of that transition from old to new Labor. Your leader is sort of your picture of Dorian Gray – you know? They take all the scars. So, if you want to get rid of all that, you change your leader. You start fresh.

Sword wasn’t sure about making Bracks, the former independent who’d been strong-armed into the Right, the next Dorian Gray of Victorian Labor. Sword organised a meeting with his preferred Dorian, Hulls. ‘There was never any formal approach as such,’ Hulls says, ‘but soundings were made.’ Hulls’s response was a blunt no. The thing about politics, in my view, is you’ve got to know your limitations, and I know what I’m good at and I know what my limitations are. You have got to have, I think, an inner calm to take on that [leader­ship] position. And I used to laugh my head off, in­ternally, when I’d read about potential new leaders of the opposition, or frontrunners, and they’d always write about Hulls being a potential leader, and other people and I used to laugh because I always knew my limitations when it came to that inner calm. I’m far more aggressive and blunt than Steve and John, and even when shit’s happening all around – when I was Brumby’s chief of staff, or in government with Steve – outwardly, at least, they were always very calm, very cool, never aggressive, very rarely shouted. That’s an inner strength – and I think you need that to make a good premier … To be leader in my view, you’ve got to have a better ability to divorce your passion from the day-to-day running of the state, and I would have found that very

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difficult. I’m very passionate about a whole range of issues and to try and put that passion in a box is not something I could have done.

With Hulls out of the race, Sword approached Bracks, who wanted the job. It was time for the Labor Unity powerbroker and the leader of the opposition to have a hard conversation. Sword, throughout Labor’s opposition years, had been a grim reaper for politicians past their prime, telling people over a coffee or lunch that their time was up – that they had to make room for new blood. ‘For lots of people I was the person you didn’t want to have a conversation with,’ Sword says, ‘because you knew what the conversation was going to be: “We’ve made a decision. You’ve come to the end of your useful time and we need your seat to put someone in.” ’ Now it was Brumby’s turn. Some members of Labor Unity didn’t want to tell Brumby what was coming, but Sword insisted that he deserved to be advised rather than ambushed. Sword had been the one to challenge Brumby to put his ‘balls on the table’ and stand as leader in 1993; Sword had been the one beside Brumby as he renewed the party’s personnel and policies; Sword had been the factional player protecting Brumby. Now he was the one to tell Brumby to quit. The two men met for lunch. As usual, Sword cut to the chase. He told Brumby he was fucked, that Labor Unity was switching support to Bracks, that he faced a lynching, that the best way to walk away with some political capital was to resign. ‘It was a difficult lunch,’ Sword says. ‘I was part of John’s Praetorian Guard. I was there to knock back anybody, but I came to the conclusion – could not come to any other conclusion – that this was not going to end. You had to make the change.’16 As the pressure built on Brumby, Bracks headed to Bendigo to visit local businesses and farms with Jacinta Allan, the 25-year-old candidate for Bendigo East. Usually punctual, Bracks was running late, leaving Allan waiting outside the electorate office of federal Labor MP Steve Gibbons. By the time Bracks arrived – looking distracted with a constantly braying mobile – Allan was seething with indignation

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and insisted she drive. Unfortunately, Allan managed to become lost while navigating her hometown. Now Bracks became testy, asking the candidate whether she knew her electorate. A flustered Allan insisted she did. Finally, Allan and Bracks arrived at their first appointment – a  dairy factory. It was there, standing in the foyer, that Allan saw a news bulletin flashed on a television, announcing that Bracks was poised to become the leader of the state opposition. ‘That’s why he was late,’ she thought. The next day – Friday 19 March 1999 – Brumby resigned as leader of the state opposition. ‘There’s only two days when opposition leaders never complain about the media coverage,’ Brumby said in his resignation speech. ‘The first is the day that they’re elected and the second … is the day they stand aside.’17 At 2.08 pm on Monday 22 March, Bracks walked out of the Labor caucus room as the newly elected state opposition leader, with his wife, Terry, by his side, experiencing an upbeat echo of the blanket media coverage his predecessor had received just three days before. ‘If we do everything right, and that’s my intention and plan, I believe we can win,’ Bracks told the assembled journalists.18 Nobody believed him.

A Dark Horse

On Tuesday 19 October 1999, seven months after John Brumby resigned as leader of the state opposition, Steve Bracks was sworn in as premier of Victoria. As electoral turnarounds go, it was incredible. Labor had gone from unelectable to government in just over seven months, and Bracks had secured himself a place in Victorian Labor folklore as the David who felled the political Goliath that was Jeff Kennett. There’s no shortage of Labor people who can take a degree of credit for toppling Kennett. Joan Kirner for pulling Labor back from electoral obliteration to devastation in 1992. Brumby for his back-breaking work as opposition leader. John Thwaites for keeping Labor alive with his relentless prosecution of the Kennett government. Rob Hulls for rallying the opposition rooms as chief of staff, then joining Thwaites in the parliamentary vanguard. John Lenders for building an electoral siege machine.1 Greg Sword and Kim Carr for backing renewal. Theo Theophanous for engineering the split in the Left that gave the Right majority power and paved the way for Thwaites to be made deputy leader. Bill Shannon for his political advertising – including the iconic ‘two taps’ advertisement.2 And Bracks for his policy work as shadow treasurer and his campaign nous as leader. After 19 October, there was a tendency to think of Bracks as an accidental premier – as a lucky bloke who’d won the electoral lottery – when, in truth, he was the political giant no one saw coming. 131

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He was seen, superficially, as smart, nice, inoffensive. Rob Hudson worked closely with Bracks as an advisor and a parliamentarian, and says Bracks used underestimation to his advantage: ‘He thought it was a good thing to be underestimated. I mean – would anybody have picked Steve to be the leader of the Labor Party in the mid 1990s? I don’t think so. They thought he was this nice, affable guy, you know, good-looking, probably competent in his portfolio.’ Kim McGrath concurs: ‘It wasn’t obvious, even right on the inside, that Steve was the next one to come up [out of Bracks, Thwaites and Hulls]. He’d been such a dark horse.’ Of all the politicians I’ve worked with, in state and federal politics, Bracks is the most confident I’ve seen. Confident enough not to feel the need to win every argument, be seen as the smartest person in the room or take the credit for every idea – confident enough, if it suited his purpose, to allow himself to be underestimated. I first noticed Bracks’s quiet confidence when I was working as Brumby’s press secretary. Part of my job was to prepare shadow ministers for media conferences, and, in 1995, it fell to me to help Bracks with his first media conference as shadow finance minister. Bracks came into the opposition rooms’ shabby media office and stood there, nodding genially, as my bosses, Rob Hulls and Mark Madden, told him how he should perform. They wanted Bracks to be aggressive, adversarial. ‘Really stick it up Kennett,’ Hulls said. Bracks said, ‘Thanks,’ then walked out of the opposition rooms, down a flight of bluestone stairs bowed by 140 years of passing feet, and through a maze of tunnel-like corridors that emptied out into a car park at the rear entrance of Parliament House. Once there, Bracks skirted the car park, making a beeline for the usual cluster of television cameras, microphones and micro-recorders. The journalists drew around Bracks. I stayed behind, by his shoulder, holding my recorder just above his sternum. When the shadow finance minister started speaking, it was nothing like the aggressive, adversarial approach Hulls and Madden wanted. Instead, Bracks – calmly, carefully, firmly – explained his position, steering clear of invective or

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accusation. It wasn’t a note-perfect performance. Bracks doesn’t hail from the Toastmasters International school of public speaking – he has a tendency to breathe shallowly, swallow words and muddle lines – but that wasn’t the point of the exercise. The point of a media conference is not to sound perfect, but authentic. And, from the start, Bracks had the confidence to want to sound like himself – an authenticity that was the secret to his success. That quiet confidence guided Bracks in 1999. He says: I’ve always had a view that you’ve got to be true to yourself, that if you’re not you’re seen through pretty quickly – you’re seen as a phoney – and this was me. It was part of my personality. So, it wasn’t just what I thought was right, it was what I knew I could do because they were my true qualities. And I was true to myself … What you see is what you get – I’m going to be myself.

Bracks’s modus operandi as opposition leader was much the same as it had been as a shadow minister. In essence, he says, the Bracks approach was all about: Not responding to Kennett on every occasion. Having our own narrative – health, education, public safety, the regions. Not being baited to simply run your opponent’s agenda. Not responding all the time when you’re asked to by the media … I had to make Labor ready. I had to make us a viable alternative government with a proposition which they thought was relevant to what they wanted – getting the proceeds of growth through better education, health, public safety and the regions; a style which was more inclusive, which they wanted … So, I had to present that – strongly present and push that – because my view was that 80 per cent of the victory for Labor coming up was, you know, the people who were disillusioned with the Kennett government and angry with its attack on some of the democratic institutions and on cutbacks in funding in health and other areas. But that wasn’t enough. The last 20 per cent [of soft voters] was crucial and essential.

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Everything Bracks did in politics was deliberate: done for a principle or a purpose. This is a man, as Bracks’s first speechwriter, Michael Gurr, once put it, with ‘a diary in his head’, thinking three meetings into the future.3 ‘What we did in ’99 wasn’t an accident,’ Bracks says. I had a strong view on the sort of leadership that we needed in the Labor Party in Victoria, but also Victoria more broadly, and that was to chart our own course, to not be in the shadow of the dominant figure in the state, which was Jeff Kennett … That meant bringing people with you. That is your own shadow cabinet, your own party more broadly. Not just the caucus, but the whole of the party and the trade union movement. But also it meant, ultimately, bringing the people – the public – with you when you were reforming and changing and pursuing some of those policies. So, it was a different style and it ended up being, as it worked out, part of a slogan, rightly or wrongly, the ‘new style of leadership’. So, it emerged out of that.

Bracks is right: 1999 was no accident. It was far more bizarre. In the lead-up to the poll, everyone – including Bracks – expected Labor to lose.4 It’s easy to see why. To win government, Labor needed to win at least 15 seats. Even if they picked up 15 seats, Labor still needed the support of one of the two independent MPs, Russell Savage or Susan Davies, to govern – assuming Savage and Davies held their seats. To further complicate calculations, Labor could find only 14 marginal seats that were winnable – and, of those, only 12 were realistically winnable. What turned the tide for Bracks in 1999, like Hulls in 1990, were three coincidences – one inevitable, one serendipitous, one tragic. The inevitable coincidence was Craig Ingram. Ingram was an abalone diver from Gippsland who, besides protesting the Kennett government’s treatment of regional Victoria, was distressed by the state of the Snowy River. More than 90 per cent of the water flow from the Snowy had been diverted to feed the electrical turbines of the Snowy Mountains Hydro-electric Scheme, and Ingram wanted a portion of that water flow returned to the river for social and ecological reasons.

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Ingram won the seat of Gippsland East with a swing of 22.9 per cent, beating the Nationals’ David Treasure. Davies had foretold Ingram’s victory in her maiden speech to parliament, when she warned the Kennett government to listen to the concerns of regional Victorians or face the consequences. Ingram’s election – together with the return of Davies and Savage – gave independent MPs the power to decide whether Kennett or Bracks would be premier. After the election, Victoria’s 88-seat Legislative Assembly was hung, with Labor holding 41 seats, the Coalition 43, and the balance of power resting with Savage, Davies and Ingram.5 The serendipitous coincidence involved the regional seat of Geelong. In the lead-up to the election, state secretary John Lenders and marginal seat coordinator Andrew McKenzie drew up a list of 22 targeted marginal seats, then cut the list to 14. The candidates in those 14 seats received the extra resources – from volunteers to mailouts to advertising – necessary to sway enough wavering voters to, perhaps, get them over the line. Based on the brutal calculus of electioneering, Geelong wasn’t going to make that final 14 until the Australian Workers’ Union (AWU) decided to support the campaign. The reason why the AWU offered to help was that the Labor candidate for Geelong was Ian Trezise, a former AWU official. Trezise ended up winning Geelong by just 16 votes. Winning Geelong gave Labor just enough seats to sit at the negotiating table with the three independents. The tragic coincidence concerns Peter McLellan. A Vietnam veteran and former roadside mechanic for the Royal Automobile Club of Victoria, McLellan was more of a blue-collar than blue-blood member of the Liberal Party. In July 1998, he resigned from the Liberals to protest the Kennett government’s attacks on the independence of the auditor-general, then decided to recontest his seat of Frankston East as an independent. McLellan’s Labor opponent for Frankston East was Matt Viney, Labor’s resident pollster. Viney’s campaign, managed by former Brumby staffer James McGarvey, was exhaustive. Advertisements focusing on Frankston Hospital and Frankston police numbers were

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run in local cinemas 12 months before the election was called. During the campaign, every house in the electorate received direct mail as well as VHS tapes with a five-minute infomercial about Labor’s plans for Frankston. On election day, Viney hired spruikers to man polling booths. Then, around 2 pm on 18 September, Labor head office called Viney with the news: McLellan had died of a heart attack that morning. He was 56. McLellan’s election-day death voided the poll for Frankston East. A supplementary election for the seat would have to be held, and, with the parliament hung, the winner of the election would determine the government. Kennett set the date of the Frankston East supplementary election for 16 October 1999. The three independents said they would decide whether to back Bracks or Kennett after the result of the Frankston East poll was known. In the meantime, Savage, Davies and Ingram wrote an Independents’ Charter demanding open and accountable government, a more democratic parliament, a greater focus on the needs of rural and regional Victorians and increased resources for independent MPs. Bracks and Kennett both signed the Independents’ Charter. Bracks, however, also won Ingram’s support by getting NSW premier Bob Carr to personally meet the new independent MP and guarantee that water would be returned to the Snowy. On 16 October, Kennett’s fate was sealed when Frankston East went back to the polls and overwhelmingly voted for Labor, electing Viney with a swing of almost 8 per cent. The next day was a Sunday. Thwaites hosted a barbecue at his house in St Kilda, partly to mark the birthday he and Bracks shared – 15 October, the day before the poll – but largely to celebrate the end of the second campaign. Late in the afternoon, Bracks’s chief of staff, Tim Pallas, arrived with a belated forty-fifth birthday present. Having chartered a plane and spent the day flying to the corners of the state, Pallas had a piece of paper with the signatures of all three independent MPs, pledging to support a minority Labor government.6 Delirium followed. Shortly after Pallas arrived, a snapshot was taken of Bracks, Brumby, Thwaites and Hulls – arm in arm, beaming. All four men kept framed copies

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of that picture on or near their desks during the remainder of their time in politics. ‘That was the day we knew we would form government,’ says Kim McGrath. On Tuesday 19 October 1999, Steve Bracks became premier. In the aftermath, the Herald Sun ran a Mark Knight cartoon that showed Bracks as David brandishing his slingshot victoriously over a fallen Goliath (Kennett) and exclaiming, ‘I did it!’ Behind Bracks, in the bottom corner of the cartoon, are the three independents standing around a smoking cannon. Knight’s point – that Kennett was felled by Savage, Davies and Ingram rather than Bracks – is half right; the independents played a part in the downfall of the Kennett government, as did Brumby, as did Bracks. However, the person most responsible for Jeff Kennett’s downfall was Jeff Kennett himself. It was Kennett who underestimated Bracks, Kennett who treated the independent MPs with contempt, Kennett who assumed the power of government was his to keep. As then NSW premier Bob Carr said: ‘If you spend most of your time boasting about how good you are, you’re really inviting the gods to strike you down. In a democracy, the gods are the voters.’7 ‘You look at the dynamic of that campaign,’ says opposition staffer Dan O’Brien. ‘Kennett was being an arsehole, Bracksy was straight out of the casting office of a Hollywood movie. We had a good run; the media engaged with Bracksy.’ Years later, Kennett put his finger on the reason for his demise: We didn’t lose in the city, we lost in the bush. I really attribute much of our loss to John Brumby, and give him credit for it. He did a lot of work in country Victoria for months before the election, years before. He had that wonderful ad with the tap, with a huge amount of water, this is what Melbourne’s getting, and this is what country Victoria is getting, drip, drip, drip. Very effective … I have a grudging respect for John Brumby.8

‘I’ve often pondered,’ former Liberal leader Robert Doyle says, ‘what would have happened if Kennett had have turned the blowtorch on

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Bracks the same way he did on Brumby as opposition leader? Bracks sort of flew under the radar and Jeffrey allowed him to do it, and then he called an election thinking that, I’m sure in his own mind, that Bracks is not well known enough [to win] – and the rest is history.’ Bracks didn’t win the 1999 election. Like Julia Gillard after the 2010 federal election, he won the negotiation. He was the great persuader who kept Labor from losing the 1999 state election, winning just enough seats to hang parliament, then outmanoeuvring Kennett in the countdown to the Frankston East supplementary election. It should come as no surprise that Gillard turned to Bracks for guidance when she was negotiating her way to victory with the federal independents in 2010. It was Brumby who – through his bulldozing party reforms, exhaustive campaigning and community outreach through campaigns such as ‘Labor Listens’9 – put Bracks in a position to negotiate his way to power. But could Brumby have won in his own right? Greg Sword, the man who told Brumby to move over, thinks Bracks was the ‘right product at the right place’: ‘You play your part in history … There’s a lot of luck and a lot of circumstance and you can’t determine the timing, so you just play your part in history and you hope you do a good job.’ Brumby is equivocal. I can’t answer that. I always said I thought we would get 12 seats. I could name all those 12 seats, but I always had trouble identifying the thirteenth and fourteenth to get us into government. We got 12, plus we got the thirteenth, Frankston East … I was absolutely confident that we would have got the 12 with me as leader because that was just going to happen. Would we have got the thirteenth? I don’t know. Can’t answer that.

The rest, as Robert Doyle says, is history.

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I arrived back in Australia in February 2001 with my wife, Kirsten, and our two-month-old daughter, Sophie. We’d spent the previous six years in the San Francisco Bay Area, with Kirsten studying at Berkeley while I worked in a few internet startups. Back in Melbourne, my head told me to stay in the internet business, but my heart wanted politics. In hindsight, I felt that way because I needed to be around people who either were family or felt as close as family. Our last few years in the United States had been tough. Kirsten had been ill, and I’d struggled. Then, Kirsten became pregnant. When we were told our daughter Sophie had Down syndrome, we shelved our plans to move to New York and flew home. Within a few weeks, I was back on the Labor payroll as press secretary to two ministers, Rob Hulls and Keith Hamilton, the agriculture minister. I was meant to be shared 50–50 by Hulls and Hamilton, but poor Keith – a laconic country lefty from the Latrobe Valley – never saw me. Rob was all consuming and a law unto himself. This fact was impressed upon me when I had a job interview with the premier’s media director, Sharon McCrohan. McCrohan was firm: my job was to ‘keep Rob out of trouble’. Hulls and his chief of staff, Mark Madden, were equally firm: my job was to create as much trouble as possible. McCrohan and Hulls both demanded that I do their bidding and ignore the other. I pledged fealty 141

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to both and, as a consequence, was forever apologising to the media director or the attorney-general for treasonous conduct. ‘What have you done for me today?’ Hulls would demand most days. ‘Don’t tell me you’re sorry again,’ an exasperated McCrohan once said to me after yet another mea culpa, ‘just don’t do it again.’ In many ways, McCrohan and Hulls – both instinctively populist – were the alpha and the omega of the Bracks government, with McCrohan representing the right and Hulls the left. Hired by Bracks when he became opposition leader in 1999, McCrohan was second only to chief of staff Tim Pallas among political advisors and wielded more influence than many ministers. Having cut her teeth in the hurly-burly of federal parliament as press secretary for the NSW Right’s Laurie Brereton, McCrohan was feared around Spring Street in the same way that the fictional Malcolm Tucker is feared in the British political satire The Thick of It. Like Tucker, McCrohan is profanely brilliant, with a gift for the vernacular and a disdain for bullshit artists. Like Hulls, she had an instinctive feel for how a political idea would be received by the ‘punters’, as well as a tendency, when stressed, to break into spectacular invective. Hulls and McCrohan bitched to me about each other. Whenever they were in the same room, though, they rarely disagreed. And, whenever the government found itself in trouble, Hulls was one of the first people McCrohan called for help. The attorney-general, McCrohan once explained to me, was best kept behind glass that should only be broken in case of emergency. ‘He was so fiercely loyal to the government and to Steve,’ says McCrohan. ‘So, they would have their blues … and they would give each other shit and all the rest of it. Rob might have been out in the field, but if the government was in trouble, he would come around to the premier’s office, “Is Steve all right?” He was very protective of his mates.’ Another Hulls confidant explains Hulls’s role more pithily: ‘He was a bit like the eccentric uncle.’ Eccentric uncle or not, Hulls operated as a socialist satellite of the government, with left-wing parliamentary secretary Richard Wynne playing Robin to his Batman.1 Hulls and Wynne had spent the first few

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years of the Bracks government crusading against Aboriginal injustices, same-sex discrimination in the statutes and gender discrimination in the legal profession. In 2000, they launched Victoria’s first Aboriginal Justice Agreement – a partnership with local Aboriginal communities designed to reduce the appalling imprisonment rate of Indigenous Victorians – as well as pushing through dozens of amendments to state laws that discriminated against same-sex couples. Hulls also gained the enduring enmity of the conservative bastions of the bar for threatening to abolish barristers’ wigs and appointing more female judges. He loved the controversy: After years of Kennett, I knew there would be an enormous amount of goodwill to the new government for a substantial period of time – a year, a year and a half. We were going to have, I thought, a fairly substantial honeymoon period. There were people that had been neglected under Kennett and the view I had was, ‘Get this stuff done while the honeymoon’s still on’ … I think Bracksy took the same view.

Hulls was at his most freewheeling when Bracks was overseas on a trade mission – leaving Thwaites as acting premier – or Skylab himself was interstate on a ministerial junket. Just how freewheeling became apparent to me on my first interstate trip with the attorney. It was July 2001 – winter down south – so the Standing Committee of Attorneys-General (SCAG) met in sunny Darwin. For SCAG, the attorneys-general of every government in Australia came together to discuss legal issues. The meetings were rotated around the capital cities and, traditionally, were clubby affairs. By 2001, Hulls had other ideas. The Darwin SCAG meeting – hosted and chaired by the Country Liberals’ Denis Burke, the chief minister of the Northern Territory – fell on the eve of a territory election. The opposition, under the leadership of Labor’s Clare Martin, was hoping to defeat Burke. Hulls was aware of Labor’s political hopes. He was also aware of Burke’s legal troubles. Burke had recently been found guilty of

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contempt of court and ordered to pay a $10,000 fine, plus costs. Hulls saw an opportunity to make a stand on principle and score a political point. I was in the room when Hulls ambushed Burke. Hulls waited. He let everyone find their seats around the meeting table, he let Burke give his welcome-to-Darwin spiel, then interrupted the chief minister and read a motion that condemned ‘any attempt by any chief law officer to use his high office to impose improper pressure upon, or to intimidate litigants’, expressed grave concern at the contempt conviction and noted the court’s finding that Burke’s actions ‘had a clear tendency to interfere with the administration of justice’. Hulls demanded that Burke step aside as chair of SCAG. The room went quiet – like the moment a child fills their lungs before they scream – and I glanced out the window of the office tower, staring into the tropical gloom of Port Darwin. I was cringing, waiting for the onslaught. And then it came. Burke, while keeping a veneer of cool, was outraged. The Howard government’s attorney-general, Daryl Williams, threatened to scuttle SCAG altogether. The meeting was adjourned and Hulls held a media conference on the street with a group of bemused local journalists. We tried enlisting support, but Martin’s office declined an offer for a joint media conference. Eventually, the SCAG meeting went ahead with Burke as chair. Still, Hulls was happy. He’d turned Burke’s legal troubles into a national issue. He’d also enjoyed himself immensely. Not everyone enjoyed Hulls’s political performance art. Western Australia’s new attorney-general, Jim McGinty, was deeply surprised. McGinty – an urbane former opposition leader – says, ‘That was fairly bare-knuckled political brawling, and I think that was the most extreme example of that and I copped it very much at the first meeting. It was brutally political.’ That pretty much summed up Hulls’s approach to federal–state relations. ‘SCAG did have a reputation of being a graveyard,’ Hulls says. ‘If you wanted something buried, you took it to SCAG.’ He had a different view:

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Why have these meetings if they are just going to be touchy feely? You have an opportunity when you have got the federal attorney and every state attorney – the senior law officers of every jurisdiction, including the Commonwealth – and if you’re just going to hang around with each other holding hands singing ‘Kumbaya’, what’s the point of having these meetings? This is a great opportunity to get some reform at a national level.

McGinty may have been initially taken aback by Hulls’s brand of political pugilism, but he soon joined in. ‘You had the clash between progressives and conservatives there, constantly,’ McGinty says. Two things stuck out about him. One is that he was always prepared to have a fight on a point of principle, and he stood up for principle in a way that most others didn’t … federal or state. I always regarded that as being particularly important. The first meeting that I attended at SCAG … up in Darwin – the Denis Burke issue – those two issues: principle and fight. Rob was prepared to put the two of them together and take the fight up.

After Darwin, Hulls and McGinty, together with Bob Debus from New South Wales and Rod Welford from Queensland, ran amok at SCAG meetings, sparring with Williams, then his replacement, Philip Ruddock, on everything from defamation law reform to the surrogacy rights of same-sex couples. ‘[Hulls] was the leader of the gang,’ says McGinty. The attractions of SCAG were plain for Hulls. As a conviction politician, he saw this as an opportunity to go into opposition mode – railing against the injustices of the Howard government. In short, Hulls’s SCAG shenanigans were a welcome release from the discipline of government. Hulls had made his name in opposition, gaining a reputation as a headkicker prepared to do almost anything to win power. Government is different. In government, politicians have to be willing to do almost anything to retain power. Winning power demands energy, wielding

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power requires restraint. Hulls, as a minister, surprised many with his restraint – he was willing to rein in his freewheeling antics for the good of the team – but was constantly on the lookout for any opportunity to express his inner headkicker. The more Hulls was allowed to play up at SCAG, the less likely he was to blow up in Spring Street. Hulls – like all his ministerial colleagues in Victoria – had been on a steep learning curve. Labor was fortunate the 1999 state election ended with a hung parliament and a month-long stalemate while the Frankston East supplementary election played out. Fortunate, because that interregnum gave the opposition rooms time to prepare for government. Besides Bracks, with his experience in the public service, and Brumby, with his experiences in the belly of the Hawke government, the members of the first Bracks ministry were rookies. Four ministers – Bronwyn Pike, Marsha Thomson, Candy Broad and Justin Madden – as well as cabinet secretary Gavin Jennings hadn’t spent a single day in parliament. Labor was busy during the supplementary election. Daniel Andrews, Victorian Labor’s assistant state secretary, was dispatched to Frankston East to run Matt Viney’s supplementary campaign for the seat. Bracks stayed on the hustings, and Pallas2 worked closely with the three independents. Meanwhile, the opposition rooms crammed for government, with staffer Ben Hubbard coordinating the blitzkrieg production of a raft of internal documents that explained to the incoming ministry Labor’s priorities, as well as the processes and principles of governance. One of those documents, A Strategy for Labor in Government, acknowledged the constraints of a minority government and a hostile upper house, and set out the two key aims of the Bracks government: re-election and implementing Labor’s policy agenda. Hubbard also produced a document, Transition to Government, that was, in effect, Government 101. Almost 6000 words long, it covered staffing, the handover of power, managing relations with the union movement, developing proper processes for cabinet and caucus, a code of conduct for ministers, and a timetable for the development of the state budget in April 2000.

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Once a deal with the independents was secured, Bracks and his incoming cabinet went back to school to learn how to run a government, with the teachers including former Hawke and Keating minister John Button and former Department of Premier and Cabinet (DPC) secretary George Brouwer. ‘We were instructed,’ says Peter Batchelor, newly sworn in as minister for transport, ‘tutored, if you like. We just weren’t left to our own devices. It was a very useful thing because it set the tone and it set the modus operandi and it set high standards – and there’d be an expectation of high standards and probity and those sorts of things, which the lack of sometimes brings governments down or undoes them.’ Sherryl Garbutt, the incoming minister for women’s affairs, environment and conservation, says Button saved her from meddling in her departments: ‘He said, “Your job is not to run the public service … Your job is to add political value to what they do. Let them do their work and then you add political value” … It was very sage advice.’ Bracks – seen within the party as a stopgap leader before he pulled off his unlikely election win – used the constraints of minority government to discipline the cabinet and caucus. ‘That had a very tempering impact on what we could do,’ Batchelor says of the relationship with the independents. ‘You couldn’t do anything that was regarded as, you know, extreme, because it wouldn’t get through, and if it didn’t get through it would reflect badly on the whole of the government and bring us undone … Steve Bracks was the consummate leader for that scenario.’ ‘It never got out of control,’ says Garbutt. ‘It was Steve’s cabinet and Steve did have authority right from the beginning … He was the premier and we better behave like ministers … He was way ahead of us.’ When the make-up of the cabinet was debated, Bracks put his foot down with the Pledge, which wanted two cabinet positions, telling the faction they could only have two ministers if one of them was Pike. The Pledge acquiesced and Pike became minister for housing and aged care. This steely side of the premier – a politician who’d seen his own

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independents group cannibalised by the Right – was routinely shown to the factions. McCrohan explains: Steve sent a very clear message early on that when a few of the factional warlords would turn up in his office and he’d say to Rosa [Silvestro, the premier’s executive assistant]:3 ‘Have they got an appointment?’ And she’d say, ‘Nup.’ And he’d say, ‘Well tell them to fuck off ’ … If he was making a decision about a cabinet appointment, they’d hit the phones. He wouldn’t take their calls. And so they’d try Tim [Pallas] or they’d try somebody else. He made it very clear early on that he was not going to be captive to any of them.

After the 1999 election, Bracks also mended fences with John Brumby. ‘During the campaign it was still evident,’ says one staffer. ‘I remember when Steve was speaking, doing his [1999 campaign launch] speech, and talking about rebuilding the regions, and John and Rosemary were sitting together, and I remember looking at John and his face was clouded over. And I could see that it was still very real for him – that pain.’ On election night, Brumby was sitting on a TV panel. He couldn’t disguise his delight at Bracks’s result. With the fate of the next government hanging on the outcome of the Frankston East supplementary election, Brumby had time to decide whether or not he wanted to be a part of a Bracks government. He did. From then on, the slate was clean. ‘In the big scheme of things, Steve’s misdemeanours were minor, and, at the end of the day, that happens in politics,’ Brumby says. ‘In my mind it was sort of, “Let it go and get on with the game” … I left all that behind. It was good for the party, good for Victoria, and, I think in the long term, good for me as well.’ Brumby’s response to the loss of the leadership was ‘one of the most selfless things that I can recall in politics’, says Tim Holding, a newly elected MP in 1999. He did all that work, and when he was within sight of having his first real chance of being able to win an election … instability in the party

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got to the point where he had to pull up stumps. Firstly, to recognise that and step aside, but then to say, ‘Not only am I willing to step aside and give Steve a clean run at it, but I’m then going to try and help us win the subsequent election.’ And we all remember his face when we won the election – he was on the TV for fuck’s sake. Any other former leader could have said, ‘I don’t think I’m going to do the election night coverage.’ He sat there, on the TV, as Labor won all these seats – the seats that he’d laid out the political strategy for winning … and he sat there and he couldn’t call the win, but he sat there, and what a feeling it must have been … What a guy. Seriously.

Brumby’s sacrifice made Bracks protective of his predecessor’s reputation. As one Labor Unity identity puts it: Bracksy’s got this fascinating thing, and I think it’s part of his charm and his initial success. In his own head there was a deep continuity between Brumby and himself. And obviously he overthrew John because of his own ambition – in that he thought that the show needed momentum – but in his own head he was part of the Brumby trajectory and he did punish with extreme viciousness people who had been disloyal to John.

Brumby repaid the favour, giving Bracks unstinting support. ‘It’s kind of a top-dog thing,’ one advisor says. ‘You might have thought Brumby having been humiliated in that run-up [to the 1999 election] might have wanted to have his day and come back but he never came back at Steve. He always gave Steve top billing.’ From the beginning of the government, Bracks and Brumby worked elbow to elbow without a burble of disquiet. Together, Garbutt says, they were formidable: I thought they were a great combo. Bracksy was a very decent guy, what you saw was what you got, but a great strategic thinker. He was miles ahead of me and I think most of the cabinet when we dealt with

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issues – he could see a long way into the future. He also had this great ability to cut through. He could really see into the heart of an issue and pick what was driving it … Brumby did the hard numbers and he saw things in economic terms, but, on the other hand, he also had, I think, a lot of Labor heart and commitment.

Ministerial cabinets are like classrooms without a teacher, with the premier or prime minister the most popular or most dominant pupil, and the rest of the kids playing follow the leader. Bracks dictated how his cabinet behaved. It was orderly and organised, voices were rarely raised, and ministers were never ganged up on. ‘The cabinet meetings were usually not too long, well managed, and they made decisions pretty much in line with where things were at immediately before the meeting,’ says Terry Moran, secretary of the DPC under Bracks. ‘The public perception is that Steve Bracks is a ditherer, which was entirely wrong,’ says one cabinet minister. ‘Steve was pretty clear about what he wanted out of cabinet processes, and, with one or two notable exceptions, he got whatever he wanted.’ ‘With Steve, if you wanted to speak you had to put your hand up,’ says Pike. ‘He uses his natural and admirable courtesy as a weapon,’ says Delahunty. ‘Steve is quite a dark soul,’ says another former minister. ‘He can just turn it on like you turn on a light. Unbelievable.’ The courteous authoritarianism of Bracks is confirmed by an anecdote Robert Doyle tells. One day, during Question Time in the Legislative Assembly, a Bracks minister said something across the chamber to the then opposition leader. Sledging was normal in parliament and Doyle had a thick skin, but, on this occasion, he found what was said unacceptable. After Question Time, Doyle spoke to Bracks, detailing the abuse. ‘Within 24 hours,’ he says, ‘that minister had stopped me in the corridor and made an absolute, unqualified apology to me.’

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Cabinet subcommittees were rowdier. These were the places where policies were prosecuted, with the Expenditure Review Committee (ERC) the highest court and Bracks, as chairman, the supreme judge. The ministers sitting alongside Bracks on the ERC – which in the first term were Brumby, Thwaites, Batchelor and Lynne Kosky4 – held enormous influence over the aspirations of their cabinet colleagues. That’s why, just as every member of caucus wanted to be a minister, almost every minister wanted to be a member of the ERC. Hulls wasn’t fazed by the ERC. ‘I never had budget envy,’ he says. ‘I  always knew that you can achieve real Labor reforms in the justice area without requiring huge amounts of money.’5 In the Bracks cabinet, Hulls held a privileged position. ‘Rob had the luxury of two things,’ explains one ministerial colleague. ‘One, he was the attorney, so, therefore, a lot of stuff had to get very strong legal advice around it – you’re playing in that pivotal role, regardless of who you are. But also, his particular type of personality … Here is a person who really eschewed the factional stuff for – really, his entire political career – and got away with it, which is pretty amazing.’ ‘He’s not really a team player, Rob,’ says Thwaites. ‘Steve is the quintessential team player, in that he is totally corporate, whereas Rob is more of an individualist.’ While Hulls went rogue, Bracks fulfilled a long-held personal ambition – delivering the government’s first budget in May 2000 – then promoted Brumby to treasurer. From then on, Bracks gave Brumby latitude to drive the government’s economic agenda. ‘Steve was the chairman of the board, Brumby was the CEO,’ explains Bob Cameron, at the time Bracks’s minister for local government, WorkCover and the Transport Accident Commission. Brumby had a similarly exalted view of his position in the government, as did Thwaites, creating a rivalry between the treasurer and deputy premier that lasted until 2007. ‘The person [Brumby] had intense rivalry with was Thwaites,’ says one staffer. ‘They were constantly fighting it out to be number two. That was actually quite a

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positive dynamic in terms of thrashing things out [in cabinet] – a bit of idealism from Thwaites and a bit of pragmatism from Brumby.’ For Bracks and Brumby, the state of Victoria’s finances was an unexpected bonus. The Kennett government’s last budget projected a surplus of $66  million in 2000, but, before the 1999 election was called, Victoria was heading for a surplus closer to $600 million – a windfall for any state government. Instead of expanding the Liberals’ commitments, Kennett stuck to his guns, capping additional spending at $70 million and insisting his government only had a ‘thin sliver’ of resources available.6 That decision contributed to Kennett’s defeat in 1999 and gave the Bracks government a running start. Normally it takes years for an incoming government to find the funding to deliver its campaign commitments. Thanks to Kennett’s largesse, on 2 May 2000, Bracks stood in the Legislative Assembly and, while delivering his government’s first budget, effectively cleared the decks of the 1999 campaign commitments – ticking off 115 campaign promises, while forecasting a surplus of $592 million. By the end of its first term, Labor had lived up to Bracks’s pledge to be ‘financially responsible and socially progressive’ – keeping the budget in the black and the economy growing, while hiring more than 3300 extra nurses and health workers for the state’s hospitals and 3000 extra teachers for the state’s schools. Labor’s initial mission had been accomplished. More than one member of the government began to ask the question: What next?

An Unholy Trinity

On 11 September 2001, Steve Bracks was attending a fundraising dinner with Kim Beazley, listening to the federal opposition leader sell his plans for a ‘knowledge nation’. It wasn’t an inspiring address. By now, more than a few Labor people were beginning to wonder about Beazley. They believed he had the wherewithal to be a good prime minister, but doubted his ability to win government. Power is like that: few possess the ability to campaign and govern. One of the by-products of the rise of the professional politician – men and women who climb through the ranks of university politics, the unions or industry groups and political staffing until ‘qualifying’ as a candidate for a seat in parliament – is that too many make the grade not for their ability to assemble and represent a community of supporters but for their acquiescence to a Tammany Hall–style patronage system built around adherence to hierarchy, loyalty and tribe. As a consequence, not enough postmodern politicians of any and all parties know how to win power, fewer know how to wield power and next to none know how to cope with losing power. ‘While we build a caste of apparatchiks who believe their role is to simply get into government and to stay in government,’ says Bracks minister Mary Delahunty, ‘you won’t get that sort of basic change being attempted.’ The consensus in Labor circles by early 2001 was that Beazley was cruising, like Kennett in 1999, taking the result for granted and, thus, 153

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asking to be smitten by the gods of democracy. Whatever the case, federal Labor was caught flatfooted by John Howard, who started buying his way out of trouble – cutting the fuel excise by 1.5  cents a litre and abandoning the half-yearly indexation of the tax. Despite Howard’s move, the Coalition still lost a by-election for the Queensland seat of Ryan on 17 March 2001, suffering a swing of 9.6 per cent, and, by May, Newspoll found voter satisfaction with Howard was down to 31 per cent. While Labor slept, however, Howard was relentless – working his way back into the contest with a series of deft political moves, such as doubling the First Home Owners Grant and responding to business concerns about onerous paperwork for the new Goods and Services Tax (GST). As a consequence, when voters in the Victorian seat of Aston went to the polls for yet another by-election on 14 July 2001, Beazley was stunned. Instead of winning Aston, Labor lost. The margin was narrow, just 108 votes, but Howard called it correctly the next day when he appeared on ABC TV’s inaugural episode of Insiders and said: ‘If there were an unstoppable momentum for Labor to win the federal election, they’d have rolled us over in Aston … The government is well and truly back in the game.’ Up in Canberra, Andrew Herington1 was in despair. Forty-nine years old, sporting the erratic, unruly hair of a middle-aged John McEnroe, Herington was a former anarchist and hippie who had morphed into the political staffer’s equivalent of Björn Borg: a machine who chased after every shot, no matter how marginal, returning ball after ball until his opponents were overwhelmed by emails, memos and policy documents. In 2001, Herington was working for Jenny Macklin, the policy wonk in excelsis who rose from the ALP’s Labor Resource Centre to become deputy leader of the federal opposition. Macklin was Herington’s kind of frontbencher – smart, driven by ideas, formidably hardworking. None of that softened the blow of 29 August 2001. Five days before, a wooden fishing boat crammed with 438 refugees became stranded in the Indian Ocean, 140 kilometres north of the

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Australian territory of Christmas Island. A Norwegian freighter, the MV Tampa, rescued the refugees and, instead of setting sail for the nearest port in Indonesia, responded to the demands of its new passengers and set course for Christmas Island. Contending that the Tampa should have made for Indonesia and not Australia, the Howard government refused to allow the ship to enter Australian waters. On 29 August, an Australian Special Air Service (SAS) unit boarded the freighter inside Australian waters. The SAS operation, together with the pleas for help that the refugees had written on the Tampa’s deck, was beamed to televisions around the nation. ‘My actions on the Tampa were instinctive,’ Howard wrote in his autobiography, ‘driven both by application of international law and the simple principle that every nation has a right to protect its borders and decide who to admit as immigrants or refugees.’2 Less than two hours after the SAS had taken control of the Tampa, Beazley stood in the wattle-green chamber of the House of Representatives and kowtowed to Howard: There is no doubt that the difficulties we currently experience with the illegal entry of people who may be refugees into this country via sea, via these boats, are products of a change in relations between Australia and Indonesia … People should act lawfully. The Australian government has acted lawfully. The captain of the ship should act lawfully. We urge him to continue to do so; should he not, then that is a substantial problem for the government, and the government is seeking as best it can to resolve it.

Beazley’s insipid response transformed him from an alternative prime minister into a pretender. Within the federal opposition, only one advisor argued against capitulation on the Tampa. ‘Everyone was convinced,’ says one member of federal Labor. ‘It was classic groupthink.’ And it was a catastrophic miscalculation. Beyond the groupthink of Canberra, many progressively minded voters saw Beazley’s use of the words ‘illegal’ and ‘lawfully’ as an unforgivable sin. He had not just

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approved of Howard’s actions, but adopted the federal government’s bastardised terminology. Refugees were now illegals. For Herington, it marked the beginning of the end of his time in Canberra. As that day evolved I thought our policy was going to be completely different to what the policy was. And when Kim went in and said, ‘We support you. We’ve got to protect the borders.’ You had to do a kind of North Korean thing, saying, ‘How can he say that? Oh well, I suppose that’s right. He knows best. He’s the leader.’ And you think, ‘Shouldn’t we have done the opposite?’ … You’d go down to the Holy Grail [a Canberra watering hole] and get pissed and think, ‘Fuck.’

He would eventually return to Melbourne to work for Bracks. The Tampa – coming in the middle of an unprecedented economic boom that made Australia more middle class and insular – changed Australian politics. It divided Labor’s supporters. Progressives in the inner city were now at odds with aspirational voters in the suburbs, accelerating the exodus of post-Whitlamite hipsters to the Greens on the left and suburbanite strugglers to the Liberals on the right. And it gave the Coalition a new way to win elections – border security. Next, the Tampa became conflated with the terrorist attacks in the United States on 11 September 2001 and Bali on 12 October 2002. The ‘war on terror’ did more than institutionalise Howard’s brilliant political improvisations, making the molehill of refugee arrivals into a mountain of border security; it also created an opportunity for Bracks and Brumby. Suddenly, the attention of the prime minister was focused on international affairs, creating a domestic power vacuum. In time, Bracks and Brumby would act to fill that vacuum. The Bracks government had, as Ben Hubbard says, ‘done its knitting’ before the 9/11 attacks, proving its bona fides as a trustworthy financial manager and delivering results in its four policy ‘pillars’ – hospitals, schools, public safety and regional Victoria. It had also shown a liking for signature statements, committing to a

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$688 million project to replace thousands of kilometres of open water channels in the Wimmera Mallee, with more than 9000 kilometres of pressurised pipeline, and $1.5 billion for the establishment of rapid, reliable regional rail services from Melbourne to Geelong, Ballarat, Bendigo and the Latrobe Valley. The Department of Treasury and Finance (DTF) advised against the Wimmera Mallee Pipeline, but Brumby and Bracks pressed ahead, alarmed that up to 90 per cent of the water released into the Grampians water catchment’s maze of creeks, channels and gutters disappeared before it reached farmers. ‘It just made so much environmental sense,’ says the then environment minister Sherryl Garbutt. ‘It was a great project, and Brumby as treasurer saw the importance of it. It ticked all the boxes.’ Their decision was partly informed by the general attitude monitoring survey the state government used to keep tabs on community sentiments, which found that, with Victoria in the grips of what would become its worst-ever drought,3 the public was prepared to support action on water security. Still, investing years and hundreds of millions of dollars in a project with no political upside was a curious decision for a minority government. ‘That,’ says Kim McGrath, the former Hulls electorate officer who had, by 1999, become the resident greenie in the premier’s private office, ‘was totally, totally visionary – and insane. Here we are, a Labor government. There’s not one single seat out there that we could possibly win. That’s all National Party heartland. It was just great public policy.’ Linking regional Victoria to Melbourne by rail also went against the natural inclinations of the bureaucracy. After taking office, Bracks was briefed by Bill Scales, the incumbent secretary of the DPC. ‘The most salient thing that he said was water was going to be the issue of the next decade. He was right,’ says one Bracks advisor. Scales then suggested to the leader of a minority government supported by three regionally based independent MPs that he should depopulate regional and rural areas. ‘I thought, “Mate, you’ve lost me,” ’ the advisor says.

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Another Bracks staffer, Dan O’Brien, had spent much of 1999 commuting to Melbourne from Ballarat. Catching ‘a shit train’ back and forth gave O’Brien an idea – what if Labor rebuilt the rail services to the state’s regional cities? Bracks quickly made O’Brien’s idea a centrepiece of the 1999 campaign. ‘That was done on an absolute belief that that would engender economic growth in the regions and help spread out the benefits of economic growth better than anything else,’ Bracks says, ‘and it was done on that belief, against all the advice we had in government. If we had have just left it to advice, we would never have done it.’ Bracks was passionate about what became known as Regional Fast Rail. ‘It had the ongoing interest of the premier,’ transport minister Peter Batchelor says. ‘It was a project that had Steve Bracks’s stamp all over it – he owned it. It was a hard and tough project, but he was really interested in it right from the word go and would follow you up on how that project was going.’4 As treasurer, Brumby had to cope with the mounting costs. The numbers kept creeping up. I remember when they went over $500 million, like, there was a big debate about whether we just cut it off then or whether we kept it going … Was it the right thing [to keep going]? Yep … In fact, if you were doing that thing again you might go, ‘Well, shit, maybe we should have spent another $100 million.’ Or, ‘Maybe, Geelong, we should have electrified it so it fits straight into the Metro grid.’ You never know the answers to these questions and at the time you’re always under pressure. Under pressure, publicly, because 100 [million dollars] becomes 200, becomes 400, becomes 800 – and you can’t manage your projects and it’s another blowout. But the reality is every dollar of that was well spent. It’s been transformational.

Victoria’s strong balance sheet also gave Bracks and Brumby the ability to  act independently of Canberra. In 2001, the Howard government called for applications from state governments for the construction of

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Australia’s first synchrotron.5 Victoria, Queensland and New South Wales each put in a bid. ‘The only other real, genuine bidder was Queensland and Peter Beattie. He was putting a strong case up. New South Wales should have, but didn’t, put a strong case up,’ Bracks says. With a federal election looming, the Victorians were concerned the decision would be made on political grounds. The Victorians were also suspicious of the Beattie government, which was shaping up as a competitor in the burgeoning biotech industry. The Queenslanders were seen as happy to collaborate with the conservatives, and Beattie too close for comfort to the prime minister. ‘Carr wouldn’t knife you without you getting some sign he was going to do that, but you could never trust Peter Beattie,’ explains one Canberra player. ‘Peter Beattie would be all smiles, “Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes,” and then he’d be acting on the side … The Commonwealth’s strategy is you split the states; you do a deal with some and you marginalise the others and you get what you want. With Peter Beattie as premier, Queensland was the easiest one to peel off, followed by New South Wales.’ Beattie makes no apologies for working closely with the Commonwealth. ‘I had a good relationship with Howard,’ he says, ‘I’m not going to say otherwise, but the point was that Howard could see that we were leading [on innovation], and he could see a political opportunity he could take advantage of where it favoured the nation.’ As the tender progressed, the Victorians became paranoid Queensland would cut a side deal. ‘We were told that it was going to be a dispassionate assessment and the cynics amongst us, which was all of us, basically took the view that political considerations, while not being necessarily publicly talked about, would prevail,’ says Bracks’s chief of staff, Tim Pallas. That feeling intensified in May 2001, when Beattie flew down to Melbourne for a conference and, in a speech, said: ‘We think Queensland will be Australia’s California and our Gold Coast will be the Silicon Valley … Queensland is going to lead.’6 More than one of the Victorians scoffed at Beattie’s claims. ‘It’s one thing to say, “We’re going to be the smart state.” But there’s so much

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more to it than saying it,’ says one Victorian Labor luminary. ‘I don’t know anyone who goes to Queensland and says, “Fuck, how smart are these people? What do they do?” … It’s not reflected in reality.’ However, if Queensland landed the synchrotron, Beattie’s braggadocio would start to smell like something other than bullshit. Brisbane could leapfrog Melbourne to become the national centre of research and development. In June 2001, Bracks and Brumby, together with the secretaries of their respective departments, Terry Moran and Ian Little, met in one of the premier’s meeting rooms at 1 Treasury Place. ‘It was one of those interesting moments,’ Bracks says, ‘when we were looking at the funding of the synchrotron and what we could put in to put our best bid forward.’ There was a magic moment in that meeting where we looked at it and we thought, ‘What is the federal government after? We’d probably have to put in something close to 60, 70, 80 million dollars towards it, or something like that. And then John and I both looked at each other and said, and I can’t remember who said it first, and it might have even been Terry Moran who suggested it to me … ‘Why don’t we just do it ourselves? Not even worry about the Commonwealth. Just fund it and do it. Attract private sector funding and research institution funding for beamlines’ … And so we did.

On 21 June 2001, Bracks and Brumby announced Victoria would build its own synchrotron at Monash University without federal funding. ‘It will help our scientists make major medical breakthroughs, including the fight against cancer and other diseases. It will help others to make new advances in engineering and manufacturing, such as the design of advanced computer chips,’ Bracks said.7 None of that cut any ice in sunny Queensland. Bracks called Beattie with the news – Queensland’s premier was not amused. ‘The anger from Beattie was palpable,’ Bracks says. Soon after, Beattie, Bracks and Brumby crossed paths at the BIO 2001 conference in San Diego,

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where, according to The Age’s Gay Alcorn and Garry Barker, domestic tensions had an international airing: As international scientists argued about whether genetically modified rice could rid the world of malnutrition, Victorian and Queensland premiers Steve Bracks and Peter Beattie were calling each other ‘mate’ and subtly and not so subtly sticking the boot in … But if a sore point existed it was that synchrotron. Victoria’s development of it, announced this month, pre-empted a federal government bidding process, which Queensland was confident of winning … By the time Mr Beattie finished with the synchrotron, it seemed it was hardly worth bothering about. ‘There are cabs all over the world. You can get in a cab anywhere. You’ve got to have the brains to make the cab. We’re going to have the brains to make the cab.’ Mr Beattie’s proposals for centres of excellence was ‘much more significant than the synchrotron. This actually maintains our lead in Australia, because we’re investing our minds.’ ‘Oh yeah,’ Mr Bracks said. What if Queensland went ahead anyway and announced its own synchrotron? ‘I’ll have $2000 that they won’t do that,’ he said.

Bracks would have won the bet: Queensland didn’t build its own synchrotron – instead, the Sunshine-cum-Smart State invested in Victoria’s pirate version. ‘He will regret that till the day he dies, poor old Peter, the synchrotron,’ says Brumby. By the second half of 2001, with the synchrotron, Regional Fast Rail and the Wimmera Mallee Pipeline in place, it was possible to begin to judge the Bracks government by its actions rather than its words. This was a government that, as advertised, was fiscally conservative and socially progressive: wedded to bread-and-butter service delivery and regional development, betting on new innovation industries, concerned about sustainability, impatient for social justice, cynical about the Commonwealth and disdainful of rival states. Unlike Bracks, Beazley had nothing to show for five years in opposition – and therefore nothing to fall back on when New York and

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Washington were attacked by terrorists on 11 September 2001. On that day, Howard was in Washington, placing him in the global spotlight. Beazley, meanwhile, was delivering a speech in the outer suburbs of Melbourne, shilling for funds. ‘He was launching this “What I stand for” speech,’ Bracks says. He had three pages of, ‘This is what I stand for, this is what I stand for, this is what I stand for,’ and it was a reaction against Howard, who said he had no ticker, and the policy divide where there was no effective response from our federal party, either. So, it wasn’t just Howard saying there’s no other agenda except security, it was also the lack of response from our federal party to that agenda, except to try and play catch-up with Howard … We even had leaflets on ‘what I stand for’.

Terry Bracks – a former teacher and astute political mind who ran Julia Gillard’s local campaigns – attended the Beazley function with her husband. Driving home, Terry and Steve dissected the speech, agreeing that when the leader of the federal ALP had to start explaining what they stood for, something was wrong. Home in Williamstown, the Brackses switched on the television to catch The West Wing, but the program was interrupted with the news of the 9/11 attacks. ‘Initially we thought, “Is this part of West Wing?” ’ Bracks says. And then the premier’s phone started ringing.

A Machine Made of People

William Carlos Williams, the great modern poet, once wrote that a poem was a ‘machine made of words’.1 Williams went on to explain there could be nothing sentimental about a poem because there was no room for redundancy. ‘Prose,’ he said, ‘may carry a load of ill-defined matter like a ship. But poetry is the machine which drives it, pruned to a perfect economy. As in all machines, its movement is intrinsic, undulant, a physical more than a literary character.’ Much the same could be said about governments. They are machines made of people, and when every part, every person, is pruned to a perfect economy, they can become a driving force for national reforms that benefit the wider community and economy. The Hawke government had that drive when it floated the dollar and opened up the Australian economy in the 1980s; the Keating government – in cahoots with the Kennett government2 – had that drive in the 1990s when it introduced competition policy reforms; the Howard government had that drive when it fought and won an election on the GST. Since then, Canberra has, to paraphrase Williams, been a ship adrift, carrying illdefined matter from no one to nowhere. There are innumerable reasons for this lack of drive and direction, but, ultimately, they boil down to three failings – one political, one bureaucratic, one imaginative. The political failure began with Gough Whitlam. When Whitlam’s modernised ALP swept to power in 1972 – no longer a 163

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troglodyte defender of the two foundation stones of the federation, egalitarianism and racism,3 but a party of progressive nationalism – it was immediately at odds with the bureaucratic machinery of the Commonwealth. After 23 years serving the Liberal and Country parties, the upper echelons of the Australian public service weren’t ready for Whitlam – and Whitlam wasn’t ready to trust the Tories’ bureaucratic lapdogs. The tone was set after the 1972 election when Whitlam, in his first meeting with Sir John Bunting, the head of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, ignored the Public Service Board’s advice on machinery of government changes – preferring the ideas generated by his private secretary.4 The Whitlam government kept working around the public service by increasing the number of political staff – creating the precedent for West Wing–like political offices. One former federal public servant says: Part of the reason why I left Canberra is that I could see – it started under Whitlam, sort of eased off a bit under Fraser – but then, gradually, the idea of having a massive White House staff over the other side of the road in Parliament House, that really took off. And, now, each of the senior ministers has a massive staff – especially the prime minister … The fact is the public service has been sidelined somewhat. Treasury is the exception.5

The bureaucratic failure began with John Howard. It was Howard who institutionalised the notion that the job of the public service was to administrate, rather than instigate. On winning office in 1996, Howard sacked six federal departmental secretaries and hired a new head of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, Max  Moore‑Wilton, who was more in step with his belief that government policy was made by the ministers’ offices, rather than the bureaucracy.6 Thereafter, Howard’s preferred method of developing policy was to create a departmental taskforce to tackle a specific problem. Big-picture policy development was out of fashion.

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State and federal bureaucrats worked around Howard’s changes by establishing the equivalent of an underground railway for national reform – a working group that met every three weeks to discuss ways to improve competition and regulation across the federation. ‘This was a huge process,’ public servant Jenny Goddard said. ‘We were sort of pressing on and then every now and then we’d put recommendations up to leaders.’7 That ad hoc approach limped along until the terror attacks of 11 September 2001. After that, whatever drive for and direction of national reform that remained was diverted – with good reason – by the urgency of national security. The state and territory governments were briefed on the threat of domestic terror attacks, Bracks was warned the Melbourne Cricket Ground could be a terrorism target during the 2006 Commonwealth Games, and the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) met just six times over the next four years. Two of those meetings were reactions to extraordinary national events – water security in the face of the Millennium Drought, and national security in the face of the terror attacks in the United States and Bali. The other four meetings dealt with water and national security, as well as a grab bag of issues ranging from foot-and-mouth disease to human cloning, to native vegetation, to child pornography. COAG lost direction. Individually, the issues the council discussed were important, but none were connected to an overarching plan to secure Australia’s future prosperity and sustainability. With the riches from the mining boom rolling in, domestic policy retreated to the comfort food of middle-class welfare, rather than hunting for initiatives that would boost economic productivity and workplace participation. Beyond the GST, the Howard government’s social and economic policies were like a donut – sweet, soft, fattening, without a centre – while the Beazley opposition’s were a photocopy of a picture of a donut – flat, tasteless, pointless. Not enough people in positions of power thought beyond the next election cycle, let alone the exploration cycle of the mining boom. This failure of imagination – combined with the political and bureaucratic failings already

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embedded in the system – meant Australia wasn’t prepared to concentrate on generational problems, nor implement generational solutions. We no longer had the patience for national reform. In March 2000, Terry Moran wasn’t contemplating Australia’s policy donut, he was thinking about London. Moran had spent the previous seven years in Brisbane, running the Australian National Training Authority and then Queensland’s Department of Education, but that was coming to an end. He’d been offered a job in London running a major education program for the British government and was about to say yes. At 52, Moran was a bureaucrat in his prime. Tall and bespectacled, ruddy-faced and silver-haired, at a glance he had the bearing and inclinations of an Irish-Australian version of Cardinal Richelieu, hence his nickname ‘The Cardinal’. Depending on the circumstances, he could be charming or overbearing, pushing relentlessly until people either gave him what he wanted or gave in. Personally, Moran reminded me more of a superannuated altar boy than a cardinal; after all, he was studious and watchful, as a cardinal should be, but wilful as well, as only a Catholic schoolboy could be – a potent combination. As a public servant, Moran was no mere administrator: he was an unapologetic instigator. Moran had grown up in North Fitzroy and attended Parade College. In the 1960s, the Catholics of Melbourne were still an ethnic enclave. The prevailing view at Catholic schools like Parade was that students should be steered to law, medicine or public service, because the Protestants would never let them succeed in business.8 As a consequence, the emphasis was on academic achievement. At Parade, Moran came across a Christian Brother called Frank McCarthy – a brilliant scholar and teacher who knocked back a Cambridge fellowship to teach Parade’s boys.9 ‘He was inspirational,’ Moran says emphatically of McCarthy. McCarthy’s thinking rubbed off on Moran, who, straight out of La Trobe University, joined Canberra’s Public Service Board in 1972 – the year Whitlam came to power. As he rose through the ranks of the

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state and federal levels of the public service, Moran came to believe in the transformative power of education. He says: ‘I believed that it could make the single biggest difference to the life chances of young Australians and it was, in a sense, the escalator for social and economic mobility beyond anything else. It could also in a way compensate for, to an extent, disadvantage that individuals might experience.’ Moran’s own life was an embodiment of his belief in the power of education. By March 2000, the boy from North Fitzroy was a man with the world at his feet, waiting in Sydney Airport for a flight back to Brisbane, poised to take a job in London. Then, his mobile rang. It was Bracks. Moran and Bracks knew each other, having crossed paths during Bracks’s time as a public servant in Melbourne. Now Bracks wanted Moran to fly home to Melbourne. ‘What job would you have in mind?’ Moran asked. ‘Bill Scales wants to go,’ Bracks replied. ‘I’d like you to do [the DPC].’ After the 1999 election, Bracks was happy for Scales to stay on as the head of the DPC, but his view wasn’t shared by all in the Labor camp. Scales was made to feel unwelcome and, by early 2000, was ready to leave. Bracks canvassed the names of possible replacements with Scales, mentioning Moran. Scales’s response was very Sir Humphrey Appleby (‘That’s an interesting choice’). According to Bracks, Scales wasn’t opposed to Moran, but saw him as ‘too much of an operator or a fixer, which is what he was, which is what I wanted’. And now Bracks was speaking directly to his chosen fixer. What would Brother McCarthy have made of the scene? One of the boys he taught standing at an airport that could take him home or to the other side of the world? When McCarthy found himself in a similar position, asked to choose between Melbourne and Cambridge, he chose the bluestone walls of Parade. Moran did the same. He called his wife, Jenny, and asked her whether she preferred London or Melbourne. ‘We’ll take Melbourne,’ she replied. A few days later, Moran was sitting outside the premier’s private office on the first floor of 1 Treasury Place – an austere five-storeyed slab of concrete and glass built in the shape of a digital figure-eight

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around two square voids. It was a building and a floor Moran knew well; in the mid 1980s, he spent two years at 1 Treasury Place as Premier Cain’s chief of staff. Now, he spoke to Premier Bracks and accepted the job as secretary of the DPC. Three months later, Moran moved into his second-floor office directly above the premier’s corner suite. A private elevator ran up the south-eastern corner of the building – connecting the offices of the premier, secretary, deputy premier and treasurer. At first, Moran felt as though he’d moved into a library. He says: ‘The thing that struck me about DPC was how unbelievably quiet it was. There was just no sense of excitement. Treasury regarded itself as top of the heap on policy and their view of policy, of course, was somewhat different. And so it began.’ Moran was told that the DPC was the bureaucratic equivalent of a traffic cop – ensuring the submissions for cabinet were delivered in a timely and orderly manner – whereas the DTF, headed by economist Ian Little, handled policy. ‘Everyone said, “Well, Treasury is dominant in policy.” And I thought, “Fuck that.” And my initial aim was to have strength in DPC that was at least equal to that of Treasury, then start winning the fights over Treasury.’ Moran brought in Garth Lampe, a public servant he trusted, to run policy and cabinet. With Lampe in place, Moran began the laborious job of reorganising and repopulating the department – searching for policy themes to mine and recruiting people with the brains and ability to turn raw material into ideas. He says: Basically, I proceeded to incrementally reorganise the place and get people in of all ages – young people, old people, experienced people, so there was a mixture – and reworked the way that we did the work and then started to find themes, then started to get secretaries [from other departments] working together on particular difficult topics – often with my involvement as well, but not always … and tried to open up a dialogue with Steve. This was through the remainder of 2000 to 2001, into 2002.

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In Moran’s book, success depended on two factors: ‘What’s the strategic direction? And can you get the right sort of people to make it happen? And so I always built structures around people, not designed structures and then found people.’ Moran wanted to turn the DPC from an administrative traffic cop into an investigator and an instigator. But first, he needed to win the trust of the premier, which meant getting past the premier’s private office. ‘We didn’t trust the bureaucracy,’ one member of the premier’s office explains. And then we had this contestable advice model. This was a Tim [Pallas] special where, rather than try and have advisors massaging the department to put up briefs that reflected the policy and what we wanted, which was what most of us wanted to do … you’d have your departmental advice come up and then your political advisor could put advice over the top of that. Hence, ‘contestable’ … It sometimes worked, sometimes didn’t.

Did the premier’s private office hinder Moran’s progress? He smiles enigmatically: ‘I liked the fight.’ Central to that fight was the need for the DPC to, in essence, behave like a faction – keeping conflict in-house and standing shoulder to shoulder against outsiders. ‘From the outside there should not be a crack of light between two senior people,’ Moran says. ‘If we’ve got any problems, we sort them out internally. We take, externally, a united position.’ With that in mind, Moran read the riot act when he heard about one breach of protocol. Rob Hudson – Bracks’s director of policy, and therefore a political staffer rather than an apolitical public servant – had ventured up to the second floor and helped write a departmental brief. After Hudson’s incursion, one Bracks advisor quips, the secretary built a ‘Berlin Wall’ between the department and the premier’s private office. It never happened again. In November 2001, Moran’s partly recalibrated department fired its first significant policy salvo, Growing Victoria Together. Coming off the back of a summit held with community and business leaders in

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March 2000, Growing Victoria Together was Moran’s attempt to connect the central policy ‘pillars’ first dreamed up by Brumby, Bracks, Thwaites and Hulls in their meetings in the Kew hotel in 1997 with the heavy machinery of the public service. Back in 1997, those four pillars had been reduced to media-friendly grabs – increasing teachers for schools, cutting hospital waiting lists, putting more police on the streets, revitalising regional Victoria – with the need to restore democracy an underlying theme. Growing Victoria Together translated those media grabs into the dialect of the bureaucratic mandarins. Ten goals and 36 ‘progress measures’ were set for the next decade. The goals sounded fluffy – such as creating ‘quality jobs’ and ‘innovative industries’ – but the progress measures were specific and often ambitious, for instance, by 2010, that 90 per cent of young people ‘will successfully complete year twelve or its educational equivalent’. The premier’s political staffers, particularly the cynics in the media unit (myself included), groaned at the sight of Growing Victoria Together and harrumphed knowingly when it disappeared with minimal media fanfare. It was, we told each other, another case of a politician (Bracks) being CBD – Captured by Department – and we thought no more of the frolic. ‘We had a big launch and all the rest of it,’ says Sharon McCrohan. ‘We might have got a single column in The Age. That was it. And that’s all it deserved. And that was a total Captured by Department document. And, in the end, all of the targets were watered down so significantly that they were obviously meaningless.’ What the staffers didn’t realise was that Growing Victoria Together was designed to capture the bureaucracy rather than the media. Moran ensured that each of the 36 progress measures was owned by a government department. ‘Secretaries are now judged annually on how well they have focused effort on the measures and engaged in joint planning with other secretaries,’ he wrote.10 ‘In turn, this prompts secretaries to ensure that GVT goals are appropriately reflected in departmental business plans.’ Growing Victoria Together became a bible within government departments. Its focus on what Moran calls ‘measurable outcomes’ ensured

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the wheels of the public service rolled, more or less, in the right direction. It also pointed the way towards more ambitious projects; national versions of the Parade ambition for social mobility. Parade College had been a social and economic escalator for generations of Catholic schoolboys, including Terry Moran and Frank McCarthy. What if something similar could be achieved on a statewide – even national – scale? To achieve that, Moran would have to do something radical with the policy machine made of people he was assembling within the concrete and glass bunker that housed the DPC: hijack Canberra.

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Terry Moran wasn’t the only one ruminating on measurable outcomes. Ian Little, the head of the DTF, was also contemplating the next big thing. Little had an impact even before he was appointed a departmental secretary – blazing a path through the Reserve Bank, ANZ and the DTF; and working on the National Competition Policy (NCP), the last great reform of the Hawke–Keating years. He was just 42 when he was made head of the DTF, and having worked on the NCP – which drove productivity improvements in the electricity, gas, road transport and water sectors – understood the benefits of macro reform. The NCP had stemmed from the anxieties of the 1970s, when, in the aftermath of another mining boom, Australia went bust. Through the 1970s and 1980s, the Australian economy’s output slowed, inflation and unemployment rose, and the nation’s productivity lagged behind global benchmarks, with per capita income dropping to sixteenth in the world by the late 1980s. By 1995, the reforms undertaken by the Hawke administration, such as floating the dollar and taking the barbed wire down from the tariff wall, were making an impact as Australia climbed out of the 1990–91 recession and began what would become the longest bull run of any member of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The NCP – introduced by Keating, with Kennett helping enlist the support of the Greiner and Goss governments1 – was designed 172

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to consolidate the reforms of the Hawke era. Under the NCP, states and territories that implemented agreed reforms received payments. In other words, measurable outcomes were rewarded. Analysis by the Productivity Commission later found the NCP reforms in infrastructure boosted Australia’s economy by 2.5 per cent. At the time, that was around $20 billion a year – and that was just one part of the NCP reforms. By 1998, when Little became secretary of the DTF, the NCP was old news. The Heads of Treasuries (HoTs) – the bureaucratic gathering of the secretaries of every treasury department in the country – were in search of the next big thing, and Little was pushing the need for a new long-term economic reform program. The looming challenges included an ageing population, high terms of trade, the end of a long global deflationary cycle and drought. The then secretary of the federal Treasury, Ken Henry, explains: … we had wondered how we were ever going to meet these challenges in a federation characterised by pronounced vertical fiscal imbalance and a chronic lack of coherence in accountabilities. Motivated by these challenges, our discussions were wide ranging – especially across the numerous elements of productivity and participation that might drive sustainable growth. We discussed the relationship between health status and workforce participation, and the importance of preventative health policy; we discussed the link between education – including early childhood education – and participation; we discussed the national infrastructure challenge – in water, land transport, energy and access regulation. And we discussed the financial arrangements that might be required to underpin progress in these and many other areas.2

What the bean counters at HoTs were talking about was the urgent need to drive Australia away from the economic rocks and towards a more productive and sustainable way of living and working. What they were talking around was the fact that – thanks to political, bureaucratic and imaginative failures embedded in the system – Australia was

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already a ship adrift carrying a load of ill-defined matter. Of the states, Victoria was most likely to put those words to action. That’s because, unlike Queensland and Western Australia, the state couldn’t rely on the economic bonus of a sizeable resources sector, and, unlike New South Wales, it had – tentatively under Joan Kirner, bombastically under Jeff Kennett – already made a start on the reforms that were called for, such as casemix funding for hospitals, privatisation of stateowned enterprises and tighter financial controls. That urge to continually remake the world, the Liberals’ Robert Doyle believes, is quintessentially Victorian: ‘I think we have always been about policy, when we get into government, rather than politics, whereas New South Wales has always seemed to me to be about politics over policy.’ Little and Moran both saw a new round of reforms as an opportunity for Victoria to advance its own interests by promoting the national interest. ‘Through the establishment of a strategic policy capacity and the lack of a reform discussion with Howard in office, there was a gap there and a gap that could be filled by Victoria,’ says Ben Hubbard, by now a key player in Bracks’s office. ‘And, really, it took a while to convince Steve of it, but that’s Bracksy – he’s a slow burn. But, then, when he’s converted, he’s a great advocate.’ In the lead-up to the 2002 state election, the DPC produced a document designed to convert Bracks to the cause for a new national reform agenda in the spirit of Hawke and Keating. The document was the Red Book, a briefing book prepared on the assumption that Labor would win, setting out the department’s pre-emptive response to Labor’s election policies. The usual Blue Book was prepared for the Coalition opposition, but, in 2002, there wasn’t much need for the bureaucracy to bother. On 30 November, the state opposition, under the leadership of Doyle, crashed to its worst result in 50 years, winning just 24 seats in the Legislative Assembly and losing control of the traditionally conservative stronghold of the Legislative Council. Doyle never stood a chance. The Liberal campaign was wrong-footed early on by the revelation that the shadow treasurer, Robert Dean, had

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allowed his voter registration to lapse, making him ineligible to stand as a candidate. John Brumby capitalised on Dean’s bungle, remarking that if the shadow treasurer couldn’t manage his own affairs, how could you expect the Doyle opposition to manage the state? Bracks, meanwhile, was the figurehead of a slick, well-resourced campaign, and, as the leader of a state riding a wave of economic and population growth, had nothing to fear. Labor outmanoeuvred the Greens with its environment policy, coming out with a plan to phase out logging in the Otways. And, in his policy speech, Bracks put water infrastructure at the centre of the government’s agenda, starting with an immediate $320 million investment to establish the Victorian Water Trust. The Wimmera Mallee Pipeline was just the beginning. ‘The Trust,’ Bracks said, ‘will be an untouchable source of funding to rebuild our irrigation systems, revive our rivers, and save our water.’ Everything from water recycling to irrigation to greywater systems would be targeted, but there was no mention – yet – of a desalination plant. In the premier’s office, new staffer Andrew Herington – who had quit Jenny Macklin’s office in Canberra following the fiasco of the 2001 federal election – was given the job of coordinating the 2002 campaign policies. Herington had not been warmly received back in Victoria. Staffing a Labor leader’s office can be a factional balancing act, with the Left and Right often insisting on proportional representation in senior positions. Herington was an independent, but the Left insisted he should be counted as a right-winger, while the Right suspected he was a Trojan horse for the Left. Another black mark against Herington was his pedigree as an advisor in the Cain and Kirner governments. ‘There was a real “don’t revisit the past, don’t have people from the failed Cain government” kind of sentiment. They wanted a fresh, different group of people,’ he says. Fortunately for Herington, he knew the premier – having worked on policy development with Bracks in 1996. The Left’s Jenny Doran, a former president of Victorian Labor and senior member of Bracks’s staff, also vouched for him. Herington joined Bracks’s office in February 2002 and was quickly put to work. Having written much

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of the 1985 and 1988 election policies for the Cain government, he became the premier’s point person on all 2002 election policies. He was also given the task of rescuing Labor’s planning policy, Melbourne 2030. The ambitions for Melbourne 2030 were sound – contain the urban sprawl, promote the growth of regional cities, ensure Melbourne remains economically competitive as its population grows, protect Melbourne’s ‘livability’, increase the supply of affordable housing and minimise the city’s impact on the environment – but never fully realised. The two reasons for this failure were transport and Treasury: Melbourne 2030 didn’t tackle public transport and didn’t have budget dollars allocated. As a consequence, it was never more than a confection of aspirations. ‘When I was developing Melbourne 2030, transport was part of it,’ says Bracks planning minister Mary Delahunty. ‘But there was huge resistance from Treasury about putting any serious transport goals in Melbourne 2030.’ Herington concurs with Delahunty: ‘People felt they were politically protected because it was Kennett’s baby – privatising public transport – and if it all went to shit it would just prove that privatisation didn’t work. But the public don’t accept that. They expect the government to be responsible. And if it doesn’t work, they blame the government.’ Transport minister Peter Batchelor says the government’s fundamental error was to underestimate how quickly patronage would increase across Melbourne’s public transport system. ‘That’s the area we didn’t get right,’ he says. The budget emphasis, early on, was ‘do the regional rail’. Each year there tended to be an area of government that would do exceptionally well out of the budget. It would be schools one year, or hospitals the next, and the metropolitan public transport was left too late and the difficulty with metropolitan train services [is] they take so long to bring to fruition. So, if you don’t start early you never get anywhere near it to compete [with the increased patronage]. And that was the problem.

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Brumby says cost blowouts associated with Regional Fast Rail contributed to the slow start on metropolitan rail investment: You might advance an argument that, well, public transport got left behind in Melbourne, but, again, I’d say that, at that time, population growth and patronage growth was growing at trend levels, so there wasn’t a problem. But the thesis [that the costs of Regional Fast Rail delayed metropolitan rail investments] is in part right to the extent that we were spending more on public transport – it was all going into the regional rail. That’s correct. But, would you have done it differently? I don’t think you would have. And, indeed, had we not had the four years of 9 per cent plus patronage growth in the metro system we wouldn’t have had the problems we had. We were very much victims of our own success. The stronger the economy got, the stronger the state got, ironically, the better the conditions in health and education, the more people wanted to live in Victoria. And the stronger the economy, the more people in part-time work, the more people using cars, the more people using public transport … Just more trips.

‘There weren’t many areas of government in which we got advice which was largely inaccurate,’ Bracks says, ‘and probably public transport was one.’ He says: Treasury consistently underestimated our population growth and consistently underestimated the strength of the economy and low unemployment – high employment – which meant more people were commuting. So, more people commuting, more people living here, more people coming here. At the start of our term in office, our first term, we had commitments to encourage public transport use because it was underused when we came to government. That was in our policy. Our policy was to lift the use of public transport from 30, 40 per cent, whatever it was, to 80 per cent. We had these ambitions and targets. Those targets became totally irrelevant as our population continued to boom and our employment levels continued

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to grow, which meant people were commuting to jobs in the city. So, the economic motivators were pushing people into public transport.

In the bureaucracy and the political offices, public transport was barely a blip on the radar. ‘There was a pervading view that only 10 per cent of the commuters actually use public transport,’ says one senior advisor. ‘It’s obviously a huge issue that we just didn’t respond well to at any point of the government. There was a pervading view that roads were more important than rail.’ In 2002, that pervading view was yet to hurt the government electorally. Bracks’s popularity was stratospheric. After Dean’s voter registration fiasco, Bracks could have said almost anything during the election campaign and still won. In the end, the Liberals lost 19 seats in the lower house while Labor secured a two-party preferred vote of 57.85 per cent. It was a ‘Bracks-slide’ – elevating the premier into the pantheon of Victorian Labor leaders. The boy from Ballarat was now as powerful as Kennett had ever been. He was Citizen Steve. Daniel Andrews – Victorian Labor’s assistant state secretary and candidate for the lower house seat of Mulgrave in the 2002 state election – says the premier emerged from the campaign with a ‘blinding aura’ among new caucus members. One of those new caucus members was Maxine Morand, a former Thwaites staffer. Every minister’s office reflects the minister. Bracks’s travelled at high altitudes, at times resembling a stealth bomber; Hulls’s was loud and argumentative, sometimes highly strung, always uproarious; Brumby’s worked and played hard, operating almost as a training ground for apparatchiks; Thwaites’s, though, was more like a cult, hence its nickname – ‘Thwaico’. Like Hulls, Thwaites employed staff on merit, rather than factional allegiance. To land a job in Thwaico you required policy nous; to survive, you needed the stamina to keep up with a man who never seemed to sleep. ‘John wanted to be like Bill Clinton,’ explains one staffer. ‘He wanted to survive on four hours’ sleep a night. That was what he aimed to do. He was incredibly driven. No one worked harder than John.’ As a result, Thwaico – more than even the

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hard-driving outfits under the control of Brumby and Hulls – was more like a way of life than a job. Morand thrived in Thwaico. She first met Thwaites in 1998, when she joined an ALP health policy committee. Morand worked in healthcare, which impressed Thwaites. Thwaites pushed the policy committee’s proposal to ban smoking in restaurants through the state conference, which impressed Morand. After the 1999 election, Lynne Kosky told Morand that she should apply for a job as a political staffer. She did – landing a plum role as Thwaites’s advisor for public health issues, including tobacco. When preselections for the 2002 election came around, Morand stood for the seat of Prahran, but lost. Thwaites encouraged her to keep trying and stand for Mount Waverley, in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne. Mount Waverley was held by a seemingly unassailable margin of 9 per cent by the Liberals’ Ron Wilson, making it relatively easy for an independent candidate like Morand to win preselection. It helped that she knew the area – Wilson’s electoral office was above a shop where her father had run a local record store, Maxine’s Music. It also helped that she received practical and financial backing from former state secretary John Lenders. Still, no one was expecting Morand to win, yet she was elected with an 11 per cent swing. The ‘Bracks-slide’ had turned safe Liberal seats like Mount Waverley into Labor seats. It was a remarkable turnaround. Just five months out from the election, Bracks had been facing trouble. In June 2002, Victoria was poised to start a $425 million redevelopment of the Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG) in preparation for the 2006 Commonwealth Games. The Australian Football League and the Melbourne Cricket Club had agreed to pay for three-quarters of the redevelopment, and the Commonwealth had committed the remaining $90 million in funding. However, with work due to start, Tony Abbott, acting as the Howard government’s workplace relations minister, insisted on a range of workplace conditions that were unprecedented in Victoria and seemed designed to inflame the relevant unions.

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Bracks saw Abbott’s ‘frolic’ as an attempt to ‘close down the state’ in the vein of the 1998 waterfront dispute. With the MCG set to be the centrepiece of the Commonwealth Games, Bracks couldn’t afford a waterfront-style lockout. Ron Walker – chair of the Commonwealth Games Committee and, at the time, national treasurer of the Liberal Party – was enlisted to help. Walker organised a video conference between his St Kilda Road office and Abbott in Canberra. Before the meeting, Walker appeared confident a compromise could be negotiated. Once Abbott was beamed in from Canberra, he set Walker straight. The minister was polite but firm. There would be no compromise. Bracks wrote to Howard, seeking a compromise, but the prime minister wouldn’t overrule Abbott. Next, Brumby, Thwaites, Kosky and Batchelor were called together for an emergency meeting of the allpowerful Expenditure Review Committee. At that meeting, the ERC decided that, given the government’s strong financial state, Victoria could afford to say no to Canberra’s funding. ‘Our strong financial position gave us the opportunity to be more independent,’ says Brumby. On 6 June 2002, Bracks announced Victoria was walking away from Howard’s $90 million contribution towards the MCG redevelopment. The Victorians would pay instead. Before making the announcement, Bracks called Howard out of courtesy. ‘Howard did not take my decision well,’ he says. After taking the call, Howard strode into Question Time and unloaded on Victoria: What the Bracks government have done, because they do not have the guts to stand up to the building unions in Melbourne, is cave in … When faced with a choice between standing up for the public interest and standing up to the trade union movement, the Labor Premier of Victoria has scuttled and run. He has caved in to the unions. He has sabotaged the $90 million contribution to the Melbourne Cricket Ground and, in the process, he has robbed the Victorian people of $90 million they otherwise would have got.

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As for Bracks, he makes no apologies: ‘I talked to Howard as prime minister before that and said, “We’re still trying to find a way through.” He said, “Yeah, that’s a good idea.” In the end I had to phone him and say, “We can’t because of the intransigence of your minister. He won’t shift or move.” And he was palpably upset about that, but I think we had done everything possible.’ One of the consequences of the decision to forgo federal money for the MCG redevelopment, as well as the decision to go it alone on the Australian synchrotron, was that funds could not be spent on breadand-butter infrastructure like public transport without increasing debt – a thought that, given the traumas of the Cain–Kirner years, the Bracks government was unwilling to countenance.3 Bracks was already spending hundreds of millions of dollars connecting Melbourne via faster, more reliable train services to the regional cities of Geelong, Ballarat, Bendigo and Traralgon. Rather than risk its standing as a sound financial manager by going into debt to fund similar upgrades of Melbourne’s train services, cabinet decided to wait. What Bracks and his cabinet didn’t see coming was the combined impact of population and public transport usage spikes. Between 2000 and 2010, Melbourne’s population increased from 3.46  million to 4 million, while, between 1998–99 and 2010–11, the number of trips taken on Melbourne’s trains almost doubled – increasing by 94 per cent. It was a fatal error. ‘The Department of Transport were very roads focused,’ says Herington, ‘and they never believed that public transport numbers would go up … The reality is that it was predictable and we could at least have hedged against it, realising how long it takes to increase capacity when [the rail system] is stretched.’ Cabinet also had its head turned by internal polling. Again and again, general attitude monitoring survey – or GAMS – results came back showing that Labor was ranked ahead of the Coalition as a manager of public transport and that the metropolitan train system was not a top priority among voters. Internally, the prevailing view was that public transport was not a big enough vote changer to determine

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the fate of the government. That prevailing view was wrong. In June 2002, however, the meltdown of Melbourne’s train network was years away. Of more immediate concern was another factional bunfight at Victorian Labor’s head office. Part of Labor Unity – the block of votes controlled by the National Union of Workers’ Greg Sword – had joined with the Socialist Left for the express purpose of ousting state secretary David Feeney. As hurdles go, the ‘Get Feeney’ campaign was expected and unexpected, deserved and undeserved. Feeney was a good state secretary. He was organised and tactically astute and, together with assistant secretary Daniel Andrews, had developed a strong working relationship with Bracks and Thwaites. He had also accumulated a pirate’s treasure to pay for the upcoming campaign. Yet Sword wanted his head. Why? The issue wasn’t about Feeney’s ability. Ever since his days as a factional enfant terrible in Brumby’s opposition rooms, Feeney had made it his mission to antagonise members of the Socialist Left. Lately, he had also antagonised the Right’s Sword. What Feeney didn’t realise was that his bad behaviour was uniting the Left and Sword’s part of the Right against a common enemy: him. ‘He took his bat and ball and went home and then I was screwed,’ Feeney says. Feeney was on his honeymoon when Sword made his move to the Left. Sword and the Left’s Kim Carr wanted Feeney out of head office immediately, but Bracks intervened – demanding that the state secretary be given a stay of execution until after the 2002 election. Feeney was a dead man walking. Still, he made the most of his time on political death row, running a campaign that, statistically, was the most successful in Victorian Labor’s unhappy history. Come New Year’s Day 2003, though, he was unemployed. ‘I did make an arse of myself,’ he says. Terry Moran, meanwhile, was ready to put his policy machine into action. Growing Victoria Together had already captured the broad social, economic and environmental challenges the state faced in the decade ahead. Now, with the Red Book, Moran sought the authority to start hunting down some of those challenges – particularly those in health,

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education and Commonwealth–state relations. It was a request for a policy catch-and-kill on a monumental scale. Moran’s message to Bracks, former DPC bureaucrat Ben Rimmer says, was as follows: ‘A serious government needs to have serious policy development done at the heart of it and it needs to do that in a whole-of-government way. It needs to do that with strong political leadership … and, to a greater or lesser extent, Steve said yes.’ With Bracks’s imprimatur, a cabinet policy and strategy committee was created, and mirrored by a new policy and strategy projects team in the bureaucracy. ‘And they started working,’ the bureaucrat says. Another DPC official explains the thinking behind the policy catch-and-kill: We had a premier that was going to go into a COAG, a very strong Commonwealth government, and we just knew we were going to be, you know, rolled over by a train. They were just going to throw stuff at us. We didn’t have any way to wedge them … And that’s when we said we need a paradigm shift. We need to change the nature of the debate – i.e. go onto their turf, talk about their issues and say, ‘Hey, we need this,’ and in doing that change the power dynamic. And then, through that, then get a whole lot of things up. And that’s what tactical negotiations is all about.

After the 2002 election, Bracks could do almost anything he wanted – and one of the things he wanted was the political reincarnation of Feeney. The former state secretary spent 2003 and 2004 in the premier’s private office with his hand on the tiller for political strategy, before leaving to take up a role as assistant national secretary of the ALP, then masterminding a surprise state campaign victory in South Australia. Feeney’s time in Bracks’s private office won’t feature prominently in his memoirs. After all, with the next election years away, the policy work was boring for a wartime consigliore like Feeney. During his time in the premier’s private office, Feeney – sooner than most – realised what Moran was up to on the second floor. Feeney

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attended a dinner that brought together senior staff from the premier’s office and the senior bureaucrats from the DPC. By this time, Moran had assembled most of the people who would become major players in his national campaign – including Helen Silver, an economist and future secretary of the DPC; Chris Barrett, a former ALP staffer who would become deputy secretary of the DPC, chief of staff to Wayne Swan and ambassador to the OECD; Rod Glover, a former federal Treasury official and Labor staffer, as well as a future deputy secretary of the DPC and Rudd government staffer; and Ben Rimmer, a musician with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, who would become deputy secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet. Policy wonks came and went, like replaceable parts, but Moran’s drive to create, as Rimmer puts it, an ‘idea generation, analysis factory that would be useful for the premier’ remained the guiding principle. Moran’s eye for talent was keen, and his recruits operated like a faction within the confines of the Victorian public service – a faction trafficking in ideas rather than votes. They were Terry’s faction. The political staffers in the premier’s private office had serious competition on their hands.

A Blinding Aura

Absolute power, we’re told, corrupts absolutely, but absolute power doesn’t exist in a democracy. In a democracy, every politician – no matter whether they’re a president or a prime minister or a premier – has  to, sooner or later, face the electoral gods that are the voters. Between elections, most politicians are not just beholden to the public. They’re also beholden to their faction or political party; to pressure groups campaigning for social, environmental and economic causes; to the media; to the vagaries of an increasingly digital and global economy; to natural disasters; to acts of war; and to the slings and arrows of daily life. In a postmodern democracy, then, power is more likely to physically, rather than morally, corrupt the holder of the flame, because she is a mistress as relentless as she is beguiling as she is nomadic. As neat and pleasing to the eye as the ‘absolute power’ line may be, it is too simple, too black and white, to be true in a democracy where nothing is absolute, not even power. In fact, Lord Acton, the man who coined that aphorism – ‘Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely’ – was actually writing about papal, rather than political, power. Still, there are occasions when political corruption – such as the kind practised by the NSW branches of the Liberal and Labor parties in the 2000s – is so blatant, so galling, that it almost qualifies as absolute. 185

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Likewise, there are also windows in time when the power politicians wield becomes so unfettered as to be almost papal. And when those occasions of almost absolute power arrive, what’s interesting is what that power reveals, rather than what it corrupts. That’s because power captures the character or the internal workings of the person holding it as clearly as a spotlight on a stage, or a CAT scan on a brain. A politician with limited or no power has an easy out: they can promise anything to anyone, comfortable in the knowledge that they will never really have to deliver. A politician with almost absolute power, however, has nowhere to hide. They must decide what matters most and act accordingly. After the 2002 state election, Steve Bracks, the first Catholic Labor premier since the Split, found himself possessing the political equivalent of papal infallibility. He had a parliamentary majority larger than Jeff Kennett’s in 1992. He had a ‘blinding aura’ to caucus’s newly elected Labor MPs. He had supremacy over the factions. He had a strong financial position, thanks to the largesse of the Kennett government and the parsimony of his treasurer, John Brumby. He had a departmental secretary, Terry Moran, driving a policy machine of brilliant minds. He had a media unit under the leadership of Sharon McCrohan able to discipline the utterances of his ministry and caucus and control the tempo of the metropolitan media – thereby controlling the state’s political agenda. He had a cabinet with two senior ministers, John Brumby and John Thwaites, who were more than qualified to lay claim to his job but, instead, were intent on fighting each other for the right to be his number two. And – behind glass – he had a political wrecking ball, Rob Hulls, happy to be called upon in times of emergency so long as he was otherwise free to run an unfettered campaign for social justice. Bracks could do almost anything. But his next move appalled Labor’s political hardheads. Within days of the election, Bracks told journalists of his plans to introduce set four-year parliamentary terms, abolish eightyear terms for members of the Legislative Council, cut the number of upper house seats, and establish a Senate-style proportional representation

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model for voting in the upper house. They were the most significant parliamentary reforms the state had seen since the commencement of responsible government in 1851, and the most substantial democratic reforms the state had seen since women gained the right to vote in 1908. If the reforms went through, Bracks would surrender one of the greatest advantages of incumbency, the luxury of choosing the election date; almost certainly forfeit a majority position in the Legislative Council; and give the Greens the chance to win their first seat in a Victorian parliament. In other words, as soon as Bracks won papal-like power, he used that power to ensure he never held it again. The Right’s factional leaders, as well as the premier’s own advisors on political strategy, argued against the reforms. They were ignored. For Bracks – one of the generation of Labor politicians inspired by Gough Whitlam and fired up by his dismissal – democratic reform was an article of faith. He says: I joined the party in ’74. Started standing for seats in ’85. I was aware that the Holy Grail for the Labor Party in Victoria was to reform the upper house … I wanted to not squander the opportunity, because I saw other governments who squandered it – the Cain government in particular when they had a temporary majority in the upper house. I thought it was a rort, frankly, that these upper house members were sitting there for six years or eight years. It was a joke. It was a stale mandate – all that sort of crap. It was an article of faith for me. It was in fact one of the reasons I was committed to the Labor Party, historically, one of the things I wanted to achieve if I got there. I didn’t think I would get, so soon, a majority in the upper house. I did, so I did it. And I had to stare down the caucus. This was hard for the caucus, because moving to fixed-term elections and removing the eight-year term in the upper house, that disadvantaged a large number of caucus members … So, it was very hard for them and they were very agitated by it. The party organisation was agitated by it. They felt we would control the upper house for at least the next seven or eight years … I can remember the party president at the time, Greg Sword, saying to me

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in my office, seeing me in particular about this, ‘Do you really want to do this? Do you realise the implications? Isn’t there a way we can discuss some other options?’ And I said, ‘No. We had a clear platform, a clear commitment, we won the election, we’re honour-bound to do it. I’m going to do it.’ I didn’t even entertain a process. Usually, when the party people come to you – factions, party people – they say they’d like to do what we want, they just want a process they want to go through, a delay in order to achieve that. That means they want to change it. So I said, ‘No.’ The faction leaders were a bit agitated, too. If I had relented it wouldn’t have got through.

In cabinet, Brumby, Thwaites and Hulls backed the premier, making the parliamentary reforms a fait accompli. Richard Wynne, Bracks’s newly promoted cabinet secretary, says that the support of John Lenders (‘A man with a spreadsheet on everything’) gave the cabinet comfort. Still, Hulls says, support was far from unanimous: ‘There were those who took the view that you were better off playing the politics and not going down this democratisation path. I was in the camp that – we went into it with our eyes open, we knew what the ramifications could be – but it was the right thing to do in the long term.’ Peter Batchelor, having supported the policy of parliamentary reform when he was the party’s state secretary in 1985, understood the thinking of the naysayers. It was generally seen by people through the lens of political operatives. What would be the mathematical consequences of it? Or – what would be the implications for the preselection process? … Some people in caucus didn’t want to have to deal with parties and people from other political persuasions. You know, it is hard work. There’s the fear of the unknown, too.

On 26 February 2003, Bracks introduced the Constitution (Parlia­ mentary Reform) Bill to the Legislative Assembly. By 8 April, with minimal fanfare, the Bill had become law.

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Like Bracks, Thwaites quickly made his presence felt after the 2002 election. One of the privileges of being deputy leader was that Thwaites had first call on the portfolios, and it was no secret that, after almost nine years in the gruelling health portfolio, he wanted a change of scene. That knowledge made Hulls anxious. Thwaites, Hulls and Bob Cameron were the only lawyers in the Bracks ministry. While there was no chance of Hulls losing his beloved attorney-generalship to Cameron, Thwaites was another matter. Given his rank, if Thwaites wanted to don the AG’s horsehair wig and gown, the job was his, but Hulls was never in danger – Thwaites and Brumby were both going for water. With the drought in its fifth year, Bracks had made water security a centrepiece of the 2002 campaign, promising to establish a $320 million Victorian Water Trust. Now he needed to demonstrate how seriously he took water security – and by extension the drought – by handing the portfolio to one of his most senior ministers. Brumby – who worked with Sherryl Garbutt on the Wimmera Mallee Pipeline Project – first locked on to water as a political and economic issue when he was barnstorming around the state as opposition leader. Water infrastructure across Victoria, from the Wimmera to the Goulburn Valley, was archaic and in desperate need of investment. The Kennett government then raised the hackles of regional communities by amalgamating water authorities and introducing a catchment management tax. Although sound economically and environmentally, Kennett’s policies were acts of political masochism rather than machismo; farmers were outraged and Labor had a field day. What the Kennett government – and, years later, the Brumby government – failed to realise was that water rights in regional Victoria are the equivalent of gun rights in the United States: God-given and defended beyond the bounds of reason. I should know. I grew up in the irrigation flats of the Goulburn Valley, a place where water has been the third rail of regional and rural Victorian politics ever since a young Alfred Deakin introduced irrigation in the 1890s. It was the irrigators of the Valley to whom Sir Henry Bolte, Victoria’s longest serving premier, was speaking in 1964 when he said not one

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drop of water would be taken from north of the Great Dividing Range for use in metropolitan Melbourne. In irrigation country, Bolte’s ‘not one drop’ pledge sits like a loaded shotgun beside the door, waiting for any politician who comes knocking. For Brumby, water was his perfect portfolio, reinvigorating the regional areas he loved by renovating and extending the nationbuilding water works of Deakin. Bracks thought differently. Thwaites stepped into the breach as minister for environment, water and Victorian communities – portfolios that would give him the ability to, like Brumby and Hulls, cover vast political territory. Thwaites’s new portfolios also put him in the direct firing line of Brumby, who, besides being treasurer, was also minister for state and regional development. Cabinet became a courtroom, with Thwaites and Brumby the silks and Bracks the judge. ‘Thwaites used to prosecute the green cause, push it a little bit,’ says Bob Cameron, then agriculture minister, ‘and Brumby used to prosecute the brown cause – perhaps a bit over the top – in the other direction. But there used to be a really clear divide, especially in that middle period of the government, in that second term … The green– brown stuff was very noticeable.’ Thwaites and Brumby now dominated cabinet meetings, with Hulls staying on the sidelines of debates unless they qualified as social justice issues, and Bracks sitting in judgement above the fray. ‘When Brumby and Thwaites were running those counterarguments against each other, you never knew which side Steve would fall on, necessarily,’ says McCrohan. ‘He was genuinely open-minded, listening to the arguments, and would then make the decision … He really fostered that level of competition between them and that sort of policy debate because it was so healthy for the government.’ Bracks knew exactly what he was doing: I had two different types of people in mind. One was John Curtin, who personified humility in the way he operated publicly, which was an endearing quality, which the Australian public liked, but hadn’t

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been utilised much, really. They like it when they see it. They like it when it’s demonstrated effectively … On the opposite end, I saw Bob Hawke’s inclusive style. So, I guess, picking parts of leadership out of parts of people – that is, bringing people with you, bringing his cabinet there. Never having a vote in cabinet, having a consensus view.

Thwaites says that the Bracks approach was all about the ends, rather than the means – or the ego: His great skill is that he doesn’t have to personally take credit for everything so that you see Steve’s achievements in retrospect and you scratch your head and you say, ‘How did he do that?’ – because at the time he wasn’t saying, ‘Look at me! Look at me!’ You didn’t notice him … If you hear him give a speech, or even just personally, he rarely says stuff that you say, ‘Gee, that was brilliant or insightful.’ If you talk to Brumby or hear him give a speech, you go, ‘My God, this guy’s really got a vision.’ Steve’s not really like that, but you then step back six months after a situation and you realise that he has engineered it all, delivered an incredible outcome – the best possible outcome – and everyone’s pretty happy. It’s an extraordinary ability … People don’t see him coming.

When cabinet met, ministers turned up at 1 Treasury Place in dribs and drabs, like university students arriving for a tutorial with bags in tow and folders under their arms. Some were doorstopped by the media before they walked through the automatic glass doors. Bracks, Brumby, Thwaites and Moran were already inside, stacked neatly, one on top of the other, in their offices. Hulls preferred to avoid the TV cameras unless he had a case to prosecute, using a labyrinth of underground car parks, subterranean corridors and Get Smart–like security doors to access 1 Treasury Place from his ministerial office at St Andrews Place. Inside cabinet, rookie minister Jacinta Allan found the meetings to be a controlled environment. Cabinet went like clockwork, with the most heated policy debates dealt with at the subcommittee level.

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Bracks sat at the cabinet table and worked his way down the agenda while, arranged so that eye contact was possible, the warlords of his political and policy machines, Tim Pallas and Terry Moran, watched from a separate desk on the far side of the room. Of course, there were exceptions to the rule. The first exception began with a poorly implemented policy and ended with a broken promise. The policy belonged to the Kennett government. Before losing to Labor in 1999, the Coalition privatised Melbourne’s public transport system, which, at the time, was losing $250 million a year. National Express bid to run part of the tram and train network, and estimated it would make a profit if it boosted patronage by between 8.3 per cent and 14.9 per cent in its first three years of operation. Unfortunately, by the end of 2002, patronage had increased by only 5 per cent, leaving the company with a shortfall of around $200 million a year. ‘The rail contracts that had been written by Kennett were just makebelieve, Alice in Wonderland stuff,’ says Brumby. ‘Kennett had done a cost curve that had the subsidy trending down over ten years to zero or close to zero as they got more efficient and carried more passengers. And, in fact, that couldn’t have been further from the truth.’ By December 2002, shortly after the state election, National Express surrendered – forfeiting a $90 million security bond and giving notice it would walk away from the tram and train network in seven days. ‘What has happened today should be seen as a celebration of the philosophy of privatisation,’ Kennett told the media,1 but the Bracks government wasn’t celebrating. It now had to ensure the trains and trams kept running once National Express walked. National Express was due to stop operating at 3 am on a December weekend. Transport minister Batchelor wasn’t certain what would happen beyond 3 am. Would National Express take the keys to the trains and trams with them? Would the computer records be deleted? ‘We had to figure out what we would do to make sure trains kept running,’ Batchelor says. ‘We had to have contingency plans in place in case it all went pear-shaped. We were prepared to have a state of emergency invoked.’

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Template orders were drawn up for the state of emergency powers. Rehearsals were run through. If need be, Governor John Landy would have to be roused from his bed at 3 am to sign the papers declaring a state of emergency. ‘The whole of the state would have ground to a halt,’ Batchelor says. ‘It could have brought the government down and it could have brought the state to its knees – the worst case that we had to run through demonstrated that.’ In the end, there was no transport emergency – the public transport staff kept working and the trains and trams kept running. There was just a financial hangover. As treasurer, Brumby now had to find around $400 million a year to refinance Melbourne’s entire public transport system. To put that in context, at the time Brumby usually had around $400 million in new budget expenditure at his disposal, with money for any other new ventures needing to be found through cost cutting. Brumby had another problem. One of the Bracks government’s key election promises was to extend the Eastern Freeway past Springvale Road to Scoresby, with Bracks stating several times that the freeway would be built without tolls. The Howard government had also promised to kick in $445 million for the freeway. The problem was that, due to changes in the design – such as the decision to tunnel under rather than cut through Mullum Mullum Creek – the estimated cost of the freeway project had jumped from around $800 million to $2 billion. Melbourne’s public transport network had to be rescued – that was beyond debate – but what about the Scoresby Freeway? Labor could shelve the project and break an election promise, finance the project by sending the budget into the red and break an election promise, or toll the road and break an election promise. Brumby decided that the best option was a toll. He says: I came to the view – unambiguously to the view – that we had no option but to toll, and I certainly prosecuted that view. If we proceeded with that on budget, it would be close to $2 billion that would not be

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available for a Geelong Hospital upgrade, or a Warrnambool Hospital upgrade, or a new Children’s Hospital. I had a very strong view that we had to bite the bullet.

One complication was the offer of $445 million in federal funding. If Victoria opted for a toll road, Howard would probably take the money off the table. For Brumby, that possibility was worth the risk, because Victoria would retain its financial independence and not be beholden to the Commonwealth. ‘I spent a lot of time on this and I knew what a hard decision this was for Bracksy, because he was a great asset for the government,’ Brumby says. His approval ratings were still in the mid-50s. And I thought that if he reversed his position – if we did this as a toll road – it would probably take ten points off his approval rating … I put to him a piece of paper which had ten reasons why we should toll … I gave that to Steve with a longer attachment to take home one weekend and, to his credit, he said he would have a good, long, hard think about it, which he did, and when he came back in the next week, he’d made up his mind that he would support the tolls. Getting that off budget and leaving $2 billion for other capital projects was one of the best and, certainly for Steve, probably one of the toughest [decisions] in the whole term of government.

Bracks concluded that – given the doubling of construction costs to $2 billion – the original funding model, where the state and the Commonwealth each paid half of the costs of building the Scoresby Freeway, was woefully insufficient. Meanwhile, Brumby was frustrated by the intransigence of federal treasurer Peter Costello. We had this bizarre thing with Costello where he wouldn’t provide the $400 million if it was a PPP [public–private partnership], if it was a toll road, but at the same time federal Treasury was putting documents out in the marketplace on infrastructure, saying that what was needed

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from a shared approach from the private sector and government. So, it was a purely political decision not to be associated with a toll road.

Bracks backs Brumby’s assessment. He says: We always felt we had a strong economic base case, a strong intellectual argument to put, as we did, in a whole range of things, but we didn’t have the politics. And that was the case on the synchrotron – and in the end they would have probably gone where the politics was better for them, that was Queensland. It was the case on the air-warfare contract, which went to South Australia – we had a strong case in Victoria at the docklands in Williamstown. And it was the case also on this US study centre, which we put in a strong submission for – we backed and supported – an unbelievably good submission backed by Melbourne University … but it went with Sydney University and their location because their vice-chancellor was well known to Prime Minister Howard. In each of those cases we knew that the politics wasn’t running our way. Victoria was not seen as politically strategic.

With the Scoresby Freeway, the Victorians felt, once again, that political considerations were running against them. ‘We couldn’t get the Commonwealth to move [on its funding contribution],’ Bracks says. ‘We incorporated the extension of the Eastern Freeway into EastLink, it became a big project, but they were still static on a smaller amount … And so I had to ring the prime minister again and say we didn’t need his money, we were going ahead with tolls, but if he wanted to contribute some funding he could.’ On 14 April 2003, the premier made the announcement: the Scoresby Freeway was no more. In its place, the state would build a privately operated toll road rebranded as EastLink. Bracks’s ‘blinding aura’ flickered and dimmed. Only time would tell how many votes the National Express fiasco and EastLink backflip had cost the government.

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‘To those,’ former prime minister Alfred Deakin once wrote of Australia’s federation, ‘who watched its inner workings, followed its fortunes as if their own, and lived the life of devotion to it day by day, its actual accomplishment must always appear to have been secured by a series of miracles.’1 Deakin was right. Given the parochial tendencies of Australia’s colonies, the fact that the federation did come to pass on New Year’s Day 1901 was miraculous. More than a century on, accomplishing national reform through the federation has become equally miraculous and ever more unlikely, the equivalent of turning a stubby of beer into wine. The reasons for Canberra’s reform inertia are legion, but, ultimately, come down to money. Before World War Two, the states and Commonwealth all collected income tax. In 1942 – the annus horribilis of Australian history, when Singapore fell, Darwin was bombed, Sydney attacked and a Japanese invasion expected – the Commonwealth decided to collect all income tax to aid the war effort. Four states – Victoria, South Australia, Queensland and Western Australia – challenged the federal legislation that created a uniform income tax code, but lost in the High Court. In the decades that followed, the fiscal legs were, one by one, kicked out from under the states. They fought to win back the right to tax income, and lost. Lost the right to tax fuel and alcohol. Lost tobacco, too. They sold off 196

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state-owned enterprises to raise lump sums, but, in the process, surrendered the ongoing revenue those businesses provided. Some – even the wowsers in Victoria – legalised casinos and pokie machines for the tax dollars, and clung grimly to land tax, stamp duty and payroll tax. When the Howard government came along with the GST and the promise of a new source of revenue, the premiers responded as though the money were the last glass of water in the desert. In other words, the federation is just another faction, and, like all factions, is ruled by numbers – although these numbers are dollars and cents, rather than delegates and votes. What happened once the Commonwealth gained numerical superiority of the federal faction was inevitable. Imagining itself Ozymandias, it looked on the mighty works of the federation and despaired, for the states were remote (Western Australia), economically stagnant (South Australia, Tasmania), parochial (Queensland), intellectually arrogant (Victoria) or just plain arrogant (New South Wales). They couldn’t see the big picture. Couldn’t be trusted. And, so, Canberra used its financial numbers to control the federal faction. Naturally, the states resented their loss of autonomy. The trouble was that, although they were as remote, stagnant, parochial and arrogant as the feds believed, the states knew the cities, suburbs and towns in ways the feds never could. Besides, once the loss of balance in any system – whether it’s too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere or too much power in Canberra – gains momentum, it cascades beyond the ability of mortal hands to contain. There are always unintended consequences, and they are seldom welcome. The federal faction became a seesaw, with the Commonwealth the fat kid on one end, feet anchored in the ground, controlling the destiny of a scrawny post-colonial old man suspended in mid-air. That’s why the states and the feds have a mutual antipathy. The states think the feds bullies, the feds think the states whingers. And, in negotiations, both parties revert to type – bullying and whingeing – and nothing comes to pass. The mutual loathing has more to do with the imbalance of power between the states and the Commonwealth than the

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political affiliation of any given premier or prime minister – much more. All of which is why, for the miracle of national reform to come to pass, moments of grace known otherwise as personal relationships must be found within the recesses of the steam-driven engine of the federation. Or, as the late Wayne Goss – premier of Queensland when Keating’s National Competition Policy was agreed to by the states and Commonwealth – once told me: ‘You need to get the chemistry right.’ There has to be a synchronicity between the prime minister and the premiers. On Friday 29 August 2003, there was more animosity than synchronicity to be found in Canberra. It was the day of the COAG summit. Before heading to Capital Hill – to a place described best by Victorian politician Tim Holding as ‘that House up there; that mad cesspit of innuendo and gossip and just relentless politics’ – the premiers and chief ministers held a war council at Yarralumla’s Park Hyatt Hotel, a  charming bungalow of bricks and tiles originally built to house parliamentarians in the 1920s and, briefly, the de facto Lodge of Prime Minister James Scullin. In attendance were Tasmania’s Jim Bacon, Queensland’s Peter Beattie, Victoria’s Steve Bracks, New South Wales’s Bob Carr, Western Australia’s Geoff Gallop, South Australia’s Mike Rann, the Northern Territory’s Clare Martin and the Australian Capital Territory’s Jon Stanhope. All were Labor politicians. All were unhappy with John Howard’s conservative government. As usual, the issue boiled down to money. Howard had stepped away from the traditional 50–50 healthcare funding split with the states, letting the Commonwealth’s proportion of funding fall into the 40s at a time when the ageing population and ever increasing array of high-tech medical treatments were causing healthcare costs to climb alarmingly. ‘We put a heap of money into trying to dampen the demand, which worked. The rise in demand actually reduced,’ says John Thwaites, the former health minister. But that wasn’t enough. Preventative measures would slow, not stop, demand. At some point, Canberra needed to cough up more health dollars.

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Carr and Bracks caucused before the meeting. They agreed a mass walkout – having all the premiers and chief ministers rise in solidarity and leave the PM on his own in COAG – might create enough of a media stir to embarrass the feds into action. It was Carr’s show. With 15 years on the clock as the leader of the party in New South Wales, he was head prefect of the Labor leaders. A tall, thin, atheist, bespectacled bibliophile who avoided rugby and didn’t drive a car, Carr was an unlikely political leader. Time and meticulous market research – used to identify and amplify the traits voters considered his strengths, such as his intelligence, his passion for the environment, his stentorian voice – had turned the former journalist into a national figure. Having taken NSW Labor from opposition to government, Carr was seen as a trendsetter. The policy approach Carr adopted was the ‘problem–solution’ model: go out into the community and find out about the problems people have in their daily lives, then develop the policies that are the solutions to those problems. The Brumby–Bracks opposition copied Carr’s model to a point. The flaw in the model was that focus groups tended to identify current, rather than future, problems. As a consequence, the Carr government, like the Bracks government, focused on improving bread-and-butter services but failed to invest enough in service-related infrastructure – especially public transport infrastructure – and, therefore, found itself unable to solve future service bottlenecks. After he became premier, Carr reached out to the oppositions led by Brumby and Bracks. As an opposition staffer in 1995, I recall sitting in state parliament’s caucus room, listening to then NSW Labor general secretary John Della Bosca explain the workings of Carr’s first victorious campaign – right down to hiring actors to interject with applause and whoops at appropriate moments during the leader’s campaign speech. Carr became a sounding board for Bracks. ‘Very early on in my leadership I reached out to other leaders in other states, and in particular to Bob Carr,’ says Bracks.

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I went up to see him and sought advice and support … I felt his model was a good one, which was largely the lineage going back to the Hawke and Keating governments. The one Tony Blair called the third way, what we called opening up the Australian economy, accepting the market, but protecting the public through strong safety nets – social security, medical, industrial – so this was the model which we were pursuing and it was a model we translated to the state level as well, working with the private sector, developing our economies, growing our economies, having a strong fiscal position, but using the proceeds of that to give back to people as widely as possible across the state … Bob was very helpful.

As close as Bracks and Carr were, by August 2003, Victoria was diverging from New South Wales. Economically, Bracks and Brumby ran a tighter ship than Carr, delivering surpluses, winding down debt, reducing payroll taxes and planning for a parsimonious round of enterprise bargaining agreements with the state’s public servants. Not only that, Terry Moran’s policy machine was far more sophisticated than New South Wales’s blunt, poll-driven, problem–solution approach to policy development. Bracks also kept factional politics out of the cabinet. Factionalism aside, Bracks was also unimpressed with the intolerant noises coming out of Sydney and Canberra in the wake of the Tampa incident and the 9/11 terrorism attacks. ‘I thought our policy response to the Tampa was poor, incoherent and detrimental, long term, to the stocks of the Labor Party,’ he says. I thought it was a low point for the Labor Party. I had a high regard – and I do have a high regard – for Kim Beazley. I think he would have made a magnificent prime minister … but, nevertheless, I think that was an error and I think it’s been haunting the Labor Party ever since … I felt, internally, quite anguished about that whole issue and probably, in retrospect, I should have gone out and criticised them as well – not just by the actions I did, but overtly as well.

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Bracks  –  who was the grandson of Lebanese migrants and, like Kennett, held the multicultural affairs portfolio while premier – responded to 9/11 by reaching out to Islamic communities, supporting refugees in the community and legislating to outlaw racial and religious vilification. ‘He made a very conscious decision to do that post 9/11,’ says Sharon McCrohan. ‘He understood very well and very quickly how this was going to change … In Victoria he knew it had the potential to rock the multicultural boat quite significantly, and so he made a very conscious decision very early on to really push.’ While the Victorians chose the middle ground, Sydney turned to the right. Shortly before the Tampa incident, Sydney’s tabloid media used the gang rape of a young woman to indict not just the offenders, but their Islamic-Lebanese community. Carr himself spoke about Lebanese gangs and the need to label ‘ethnic’ offenders more accurately. By July 2002, Carr and Bracks were sparring in the media over migration. Carr wanted the Howard government to restrict the number of immigrants able to settle in Sydney; Bracks said it was ‘senseless’ to say Sydney and Melbourne wouldn’t grow.2 The sprawling western suburbs of Sydney, meanwhile, were gaining a reputation for aspirational intolerance. In 2002, a study by Macquarie University and the University of New South Wales concluded that western Sydney was Australia’s least tolerant place.3 ‘We split on that whole issue,’ says Bracks. Despite their growing differences, Carr and Bracks were of a like mind on health funding. Both premiers knew the introduction of the GST hadn’t delivered as promised. The GST was supposed to end the days of mendicant premiers begging alms from Treasury, but, with the GST locked in place at 10 per cent, premiers had no power to change the tax rate. All they could do was watch as GST revenues ebbed and flowed in line with consumer confidence, while the Commonwealth stepped back from prior agreements to maintain funding levels for state services. Carr and Bracks were also dismayed to witness federal Labor’s long descent into factional barbarism as the caucus chewed through Beazley, Simon Crean and Mark Latham as leaders. ‘We are in a terrible

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position,’ Latham wrote in his diary in 2003, while Crean still led the federal opposition. Simon is unpopular, but it goes beyond the personal standing of one individual. We have big structural problems that have plagued us for the past decade and remain unresolved … The [internal ALP] research report says that ‘Howard is experiencing a second honeymoon – he is seen as strong, decisive, acting in the national interest’. By contrast, we are seen as ‘lacking policies and direction, divided [internally focused] and big spending’.4

The Labor premiers and chief ministers were on their own. To make up ground in Canberra, they had to unite against Howard. The trouble was, not everyone wanted to make an enemy of the prime minister. The loquacious Beattie enjoyed a cozy relationship with Howard, and was reluctant to surrender his inside lane for anyone south of Coolangatta. ‘Beattie was such a slut,’ says one member of the Victorian contingent. ‘Beattie would be actually one of the few premiers who would go out of his way to praise John Howard for doing something.’ In the end, Beattie was browbeaten into joining the walkout. After leaving Howard in the cabinet rooms, the Labor leaders reconvened in an antechamber. While they were talking, Arthur Sinodinos, Howard’s chief of staff, knocked on the door. Sinodinos had a message for Beattie: would he parley with the prime minister? Beattie made a move for the door, until Carr intervened, calling out, ‘Where the fuck do you think you’re going?’ The Queenslander stayed put. There may have been a lack of chemistry in Canberra, but the three premiers – Carr, Bracks, Beattie – shared a moment of political frisson. Carr broached an idea with Bracks and Beattie: they should shift to Canberra simultaneously and take leading roles in the federal opposition. ‘Bob Carr and I had some discussions and he was of the view that – and we’ve talked about it since – that maybe at that time when

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things were going extremely well for us at a state level, when our federal party was down, that we should have made a pact to all go in, Beattie, Carr, myself, and all play different roles,’ Bracks says. ‘We almost could have done it … but we never got to that stage.’ Beattie – who ended up contesting a federal seat in the 2013 election – says he wasn’t ready to leave Queensland. ‘There was a discussion involving Bracks and Carr and I about, “What can we do about the state of the party federally?” At that time it looked pretty grim, and we were talking about who should go to Canberra. None of us, really, were busting a gut to go to Canberra, but we all knew that something had to be done.’ Carr says the idea of three premiers moving en masse to Canberra was bold: It was bold enough to have worked because those guys were popular in their states, and I in mine. So, we would have taken a fair bit of political capital across with us. I think there was polling around that time that had Labor-inclined voters say why not look to Carr or Beattie. [But] I probably had too much doubt to stalk into the federal parliament.

The backrooms of political parties buzz with parallel universes such as these – where Carr, Bracks and Beattie walk into the House of Representatives as though they were the political equivalent of the Three Tenors. The fact that, in this case, the possibility was openly discussed underlines how far Canberra had fallen since the end of the reform era in 2001. Vince FitzGerald, one of the wise owls of Commonwealth–state relations, attributes the lack of reform to the Goss thesis on personal chemistry: You need, at both levels, if not the leader then at least among the lead ministers in the major governments – and there are only four or five or those, Canberra and the biggest states – you need if not the

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premiers, the treasurers, whatever, to get on. To have a reasonable correlation of vision, and to be able to get on with one another and be able to work things out to everyone’s advantage. And, by the way, the same sort of thing has to work among the bureaucrats.

By 2003, FitzGerald had been enlisted to artificially create some reform pheromones. FitzGerald is a backroom wonk of formidable reputation. A former departmental secretary, he looks and speaks like a genial grandfather, but doubles as the policy equivalent of a bomb-thrower. In 1993, he wrote National Saving: A report to the treasurer, the document that argued the case for what became Australia’s compulsory superannuation scheme. In 1995, he crossed swords with Paul Keating over the link between Australia’s foreign debt and Australians’ mortgage interest rates. Keating came off second best. Terry Moran knew FitzGerald from his time running the Australian National Training Authority, as the consultant had worked on reforming training initiatives. Now, Moran wanted FitzGerald and his firm, Allen Consulting, to carry out a task requiring a combination of deft touch and brute force. By the middle of 2003, the Bracks government was cruising. Six months after its resounding re-election, Brumby delivered his third budget speech and said that Victoria’s progress had been ‘remarkable’. He wasn’t exaggerating. Unemployment was at a 13-year low, the state’s share of national business investment at an all-time high and the crime rate down by more than 8 per cent. Besides projecting an operating surplus of $245 million, the budget also funded all 133 recurrent spending promises Labor had made in the 2002 campaign, as well as a $10 million down payment on a new Centre for Stem Cells and Tissue Repair at Monash University, $93 million to create the Victorian Water Trust and $474 million to finance the operations of the 2006 Commonwealth Games. Since 1999, Brumby said, the government had cut $1 billion in business taxes, doubled investments in capital works and retained Victoria’s triple-A credit rating. What the budget didn’t do was buy new trains to cater to the beginning of Melbourne’s spike in public transport patronage. Instead, Brumby

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allocated $11 million for extra bus services. ‘We put a lot of extra money into buses,’ says Brumby. ‘A shitload. I’m not sure, politically, there was a dividend for that. I’m not sure people associate buses with the state government.’ Within the treasurer’s office on the fourth floor of 1 Treasury Place, the agenda was clear: keep finances in the black and leave two legacies – the rebuilding of regional Victoria’s cities and towns, and the establishment of a globally competitive biotech industry. Like Moran with his policy machine on the second floor and Thwaites with his water works on the third floor, Brumby was building an empire. Bracks, meanwhile, was unperturbed by the ambitions of the residents of the three corner offices stacked above his first-floor suite. ‘He’s got the best human intelligence – emotional intelligence,’ David Feeney says of Bracks. ‘He could read a room, read a person. And, so, that made him masterful with his colleagues and that made him unassailable as leader. And he knew he was unassailable as leader, so he was relaxed about his senior colleagues growing and building and plotting and scheming.’ If anything, Bracks egged on his political and bureaucratic colleagues. Brumby was given carte blanche to roam the boardrooms of Melbourne and the backblocks of regional Victoria, Thwaites the latitude to chase almost any endeavour he sought, Hulls the luxury of a roving brief as attorney-general and Moran a green light to aim the DPC’s policy machine at Canberra. Letting Moran jump in the deep end of national reform was a lowrisk enterprise for Bracks. Pushing for a national reform agenda played to Victoria’s strengths in healthcare, education and regulatory efficiency. Bracks could afford to wait and see whether Moran’s enterprise managed to cross the latte-coloured Rubicon that was the Murray River, let alone make it to the bureaucratic Rome that was Canberra. If Moran’s machine floated, the premier could wade across the Rubicon as well, but, for now, Bracks remained high and dry. Within the premier’s private office, meanwhile, there was a growing desire for movement. ‘By the time we got into term two the overwhelming sense was that

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we were losing a bit of direction, I reckon,’ says one Bracks staffer. ‘We were looking for a firm solid narrative right from the word go.’ Bracks’s problem was largely a by-product of success. During his government’s first three financial years, annual surpluses were, on average, $391 million. As a result, Bracks and Brumby financed most election commitments within the first year of the government’s election in 1999 and re-election in 2003 – raising questions about what to do for the next three budgets. Moran, meanwhile, planned his campaign. He knew he couldn’t just tell the other jurisdictions what to do – Victoria already had a bipartisan reputation for intellectual arrogance. They had to be lured. He needed the policy equivalent of a decoy duck to send out into the water, make some noise and lure some targets. FitzGerald was his decoy. He would use FitzGerald’s Allen Consulting to commission quasi-independent policy ideas, then push those ideas into the public domain. The implicit message would be: this is not official government thinking, but it’s worthy of debate. ‘We were brought in for the grenade stage when you’re just trying to get a debate rolling,’ says FitzGerald. ‘There was still an element of evangelism needed to get the system changed … That’s what it was. It was evangelism, if you like, to get the world to the stage where the Helen Silvers and so on could take up the nitty-gritty negotiations.’ ‘That was a new approach,’ says DPC bureaucrat Ben Rimmer. Downstairs, the private office was unimpressed. ‘A lot of us thought it was a make-work exercise for Terry Moran. Terry started to bring Vince FitzGerald into his circle of trust about creating a new national reform agenda,’ says one Bracks staffer. ‘When it first started we didn’t give it too much hope, quite frankly. We thought it was a great waste of time.’ Upstairs, DPC bureaucrat Rod Glover was well aware of the project’s political fragility. ‘The [premier’s private] office, in my view, could have killed this thing on a number of occasions,’ he says. ‘And people in the office that were not entirely onboard could have killed it.’ But they didn’t. Couldn’t. That’s because the premier was already onboard.

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‘Steve was prepared to take a punt,’ says Moran, ‘because he was good at making decisions that were partly rational and partly intuitive.’ Bracks wanted to see what Moran’s ‘make-work exercise’ would produce. The answer was Governments Working Together, a humdrum title for what was, in hindsight, a prescient policy document. It was written in 2004 but could have been authored yesterday. Building on the insights of federal Treasury’s landmark Intergenerational Report, it highlighted the challenges facing the federation – such as an ageing population, technological change, globalisation, income inequality and the need to cater to a more casual, flexible workforce – then went several steps further and suggested policy remedies. In education, those remedies included establishing a new, integrated school system incorporating public, private and Catholic schools; and directing public funding to students and schools with the greatest need for extra support. In health, possible reforms included giving regional health agencies more control over how and where funding was spent and prioritising preventative healthcare to improve the community’s overall health and reduce hospital admissions; and reducing public hospital waiting lists by contracting private hospitals to carry out elective surgery on behalf of the public health system. The best way to have a positive impact on the lives of Australian families, the report argued, was for the states and Commonwealth to stop fighting and start working together cooperatively. This focus on what became known as ‘cooperative federalism’, as well as improving the nation’s ‘human capital’ by investing heavily in healthcare and education, were the foundation stones of what would become the national reform agenda. More controversially, Governments Working Together also waded into the hot-button issue of taxation reform – arguing the tax system should be redesigned to become more efficient and equitable. At issue was the paradox that, in a nutshell, people paid too much in income tax, then – if they were wealthy enough to hire good accountants – were given back too much in tax rebates. The answer, the report said, was to both reduce the marginal tax rate and abolish rebates. People would then take home

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more of their weekly wage without having to engage in any accounting skulduggery, and be encouraged to work and save more. Although Governments Working Together was an Allen Consulting production, many of the policy ideas came from Moran and two of his policy wonks, Rimmer and Glover. ‘It was sort of published as if it was an Allen Consulting group work, but the education ideas were mine, the tax ideas were Rod’s, the pulling it all together was Ben, and the ideas on health were Vince’s,’ says Moran. ‘The purpose of the tax work was to give a reform-lazy Costello some original ideas, which it did,’ says Glover, ‘and got some of the tax reform debate going.’ However, with a federal election looming, Bracks was worried Glover’s ideas for a flatter tax regime could become a political football; as a result, some of the details of the proposed taxation reforms were cut. ‘Nonetheless, the essence of the argument was there. And the argument is still there because it’s never been taken up,’ Moran says. In terms of education, the argument was that we should shift to basically treating all schools the same for a given student. So, for a disabled child, whether the child went to a government school or a non-government school the taxpayers, through the Commonwealth and the state, would put as much money on the block for the child, and then schools could charge fees up to a limit, and then, after that, their government support phased out. There were a lot of changes about government education, but this was a major shift in how you fund it. That was not taken up … And then on health, Vince’s idea was a pooling of funding at a regional level – Commonwealth and state – and that didn’t get up at the time either, but that idea has been adapted into the health settlements with the states.

The Victorians decided to hold off on publicly releasing Governments Working Together until after the federal election. With Latham installed as leader of the federal opposition, relations were already patchy between federal and Victorian Labor. ‘Latham, before he became

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leader, had a good policy brain,’ Brumby says. ‘You had to keep him in the middle of the seesaw; he was a bit up and down.’ As for Latham, he didn’t like the Victorians. His record of a 27 April 2004 meeting in Bracks’s office at 1 Treasury Place says it all: We tried to get him to reverse his broken promise on the Scoresby Freeway … We’re copping the fall-out electorally – disastrous polling right through the eastern suburbs. We can kiss goodbye to any hope of winning La Trobe, Deakin, Aston, or Dunkley, and Anna Burke will be lucky to hang on in Chisholm. I might as well not bother campaigning in the marginal seat belt of Melbourne. Bracks, however, was unmoved, when [Labor senator John] Faulkner put it right on him: ‘The stakes are high in what we are talking about. You need to know, Steve, this could be the difference between forming a Federal Labor Government and falling a few seats short. You need to think about how history will see that’ … Bracks refused to help, not budging an inch. Sat there like a statue, that silly grin on his face.5

Latham led Labor to an electoral defeat at the 9  October election. The national two-party preferred vote was 52.74 per cent Liberal, 47.26 per cent Labor – a 1.79 per cent swing against Latham’s alternative government compared to Kim Beazley’s 2001 loss. Federal Labor did better in Victoria, winning 49 per cent of the two-party preferred vote, but suffering a 3.14 per cent swing. Of the marginal seats Latham mentioned – Aston, Deakin, Dunkley, La Trobe – the Liberal Party incumbents secured positive swings of between 2 and 7 per cent. The vote in the Labor-held seat of Chisholm barely shifted. Bracks’s broken promise on the Scoresby Freeway cost Latham votes, but not seats. Of the five seats that federal Labor lost in 2004, none were in Victoria. Latham’s defeat had nothing to do with the backflip over Scoresby/EastLink. During 2004, while federal politics took the front pages and Governments Working Together gathered dust on the shelf, the Victorians turned to evangelism. Moran decided to take the DPC’s policy

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machine on the road. His bureaucrats flew to all corners of the continent – Brisbane, Hobart, Perth, Adelaide, Darwin, Sydney – to brief the Labor premiers and chief ministers on the need for national reform. ‘The work that we did with the states was fascinating,’ says Rimmer. What we did in those discussions was we basically said to the other states, ‘First of all, there’s value in working together. We’re prepared to invest in bringing that network [of state and territory governments] together.’ And that was quite a radical idea … The basic premise was it’s actually not only a good thing but actually a necessary thing for states to make a contribution to national debate.

The Victorians were greeted with a mixture of suspicion and relief. Rann was a strong supporter, while Gallop and Beattie were ‘okay’. Carr – who was inclined to think he could achieve more solo – was the hardest to recruit. ‘There was a lot of, “Thank Christ somebody’s investing in this and doing something about it”,’ says Rimmer. ‘PostTampa, Latham leading, the premiers were a bit desperate, and so there was quite a lot of openness about it.’ Besides briefing the politicians, the Victorian bureaucrats spent time with their interstate counterparts away from the glare of federal politics. ‘That started the idea that it was okay for the states to work together,’ Rimmer says. ‘It actually created networks between the senior state officials, orchestrated by Terry, that still endure to this day.’ The Victorian way was becoming the federal way.

Broken Glass

Back in 1 Treasury Place, trouble was brewing. One of the issues on which NSW premier Bob Carr had decided to go solo was tort law reform. Public liability and professional indemnity insurance had been a matter of public concern since the insurance industry ran a media campaign in the early 2000s, claiming that an alarming increase in litigation and overly generous damages awards from the courts were causing a crisis. Insurers threatened to stop insuring everything from doctors to local playgrounds to weekend pony clubs unless reforms were made. It was disingenuous to blame everything on litigious lawyers; other factors contributed to the spike in insurance rates, such as the collapse of HIH Insurance in 2001 and troubles in the global insurance market. Still, NSW treasurer Mike Egan, together with assistant federal treasurer Helen Coonan, led the charge to save the nation’s pony clubs. Their plan was to reduce the rights of people to sue if they believed they had suffered an injury due to negligence. Unusually, the legal reforms were handed to the federation’s finance ministers, instead of the Standing Committee of Attorneys-General. ‘I think this is a bit of a tribute to Rob and some of the other AGs as well, that [in] things like tort law reform,’ says WA attorney-general Jim McGinty, ‘they deliberately bypassed the attorneys-general, because they knew that, by and large, the attorneys-general would be saying, “You shouldn’t be taking away people’s rights.” ’ 211

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‘I just thought it was the wrong decision. It was kowtowing to the big end of town,’ says Rob Hulls. I have no doubt that there was a deliberate attempt by Howard to bypass the attorneys, and they gave it to finance ministers, who are pointy heads who are always going to look at the financial impacts and not the social impacts. And they were bluffed. They were bluffed by insurance companies. Did premiums go down? Nup … They used little pony clubs, ‘Pony clubs will have to shut down.’

New South Wales first, then the other states, one by one, legislated to limit the rights of injured people. By early 2003, new laws were in place in most jurisdictions that meant people who had, due to negligence, suffered significant injuries – such as amputated fingers and toes, a substantial loss of movement in an elbow or a limb, the loss of a breast or the complete loss of smell or taste – no longer had the right to sue for compensation. The hold-out state was Victoria. Almost everyone that mattered in the Bracks government – including the premier himself – wanted tort law reform. But not Hulls. The attorney-general fought a backs-to-the-wall campaign against tort law reform in cabinet against the new finance minister, John Lenders. The battle between Lenders and Hulls dragged on into May. As Hulls lost ground, the arguments became more heated, more personal. Hulls, I’d been told, was a minister to be kept behind glass that should be broken only in the case of an emergency. Now, the broken glass was around the table in the cabinet room and not on the floor of the Legislative Assembly. The other cabinet ministers watched the battle play out with morbid fascination. ‘It was the first real divisive issue in cabinet because you had Hullsy over here, Lenders on the other team, and they were all getting lobbied furiously,’ says Sharon McCrohan. ‘It was the first time that outside interests had penetrated the cabinet. Before that it was almost impenetrable … [Hulls] made it far more personal than he should’ve, and Rob’s a passionate bloke. When Rob goes hard on something he goes hard. There was a danger there, but it recovered.’

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Jacinta Allan says Hulls seemed ‘energised’ by the fight. ‘It did seem like every meeting, great slabs of the meeting were devoted to it,’ she says. Tim Holding – another young minister seen as a future leader in the Right – paid close attention to the debate. It was a fierce fight. I thought John Lenders presented his side of the story very cogently. He was well informed and, I think, understood the broad ramifications of the issues that were being canvassed. Rob was pretty passionate, too, but I have to say that Lenders was better than Rob in the argument. Rob is impressive in full flight, but Lenders was better informed.

‘Rob and I clashed a lot on it in government,’ Lenders says drily. ‘Lenders still reminds me of it,’ says Hulls. The truth was, Hulls could never win. The premier wasn’t just backing Lenders’s position in the cabinet – he was an active participant in the reforms. ‘It was a market failure,’ Bracks says, ‘and you can do one of two things with market failures. You can let it fail and have the consequential dislocation which occurs, which finds a new level, and the market re-establishes later, or you can intervene and see it through. We intervened … We could not stand by and see significant change to the way of life of Victorians.’ The approach taken to tort law reform by New South Wales, where the right to sue was taken away for all but the most catastrophic injuries, was later criticised by Justice David Ipp, who chaired a review that recommended changing personal injury laws to reduce litigation and court-awarded compensation payments. ‘Certain of the statutory barriers that plaintiffs now face,’ Ipp said in a 2007 speech, ‘are inordinately high.’1 Bracks took the middle ground, creating a minor injuries scheme to help injured people recover. ‘I had to conclude the negotiations on this. I had to get personally involved. You had to, as premier,’ Bracks says.

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It was hard fought. I think the hardest part was we fell out of favour with some of the labour law firms in that period, and that caused considerable difficulty for Rob Hulls and others who received that support. They took out full-page ads against us, campaigned against us, but it made no difference at all. The public benefit, the public interest, in fixing this was so strong that it made no difference; any reform which affects a special, vested interest will always cause you some difficulty, but, long term, if you stare that special interest down, you will win.

Cabinet waited for Hulls to wear himself out, then gave tort law reform the green light. ‘The matter was just not negotiable,’ says Bob Cameron, one of three lawyers in cabinet, who found himself in between the views of Lenders and Hulls. ‘In the end it was, “Steve says this is what’s going to happen … no matter what.” ’ ‘It was almost yelling,’ Bracks says of Hulls’s fight against tort law reform. ‘He was never going to win that argument. Ever. I told him, but he didn’t stop. Good on him.’ On 21 May 2003, Bracks gave a second reading speech in the Legislative Assembly, explaining the rationale of the Wrongs and Limitation of Actions Acts (Insurance Reform) Bill. A working system of insurance is vital to a secure society and a strong economy. Government must be watchful that the system of insurance – and the associated law around compensation for wrongs – works well. It needs to work well – on balance – for everyone. It needs to work well not just for insurance companies, medical defence organisations, claimants and their representatives; it also needs to work well for everyone who is affected by their decisions and their behaviour.

The deal was done. Bracks had won.2 Now, he repaired the damage. The premier met with his attorney-general and offered to back one of his pet projects – a human rights charter – on one proviso: Hulls

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had to speak to other ministers individually and hear them out before he came to cabinet with a policy paper. ‘My aim was for him not to just rely on me to get it through but to have to go the hard miles and, therefore, build some support for it,’ Bracks says. ‘That was what I was asking him to do, and I thought it was good for him to do. It wasn’t in his nature, but if that meant success or failure, he did it.’ Bracks’s offer to support Hulls on a human rights charter was a mixture of good policy and good politics. Both men knew any attempt to codify human rights needed to be put in place before Labor lost control of the upper house in 2006. For Hulls, too, it was an opportunity to protect people such as the Indigenous defendants he’d represented as an Aboriginal legal aid lawyer in Mount Isa. He says: It became second nature when I was taking instructions from Aboriginal clients. They wanted to plead guilty to an offence and, so, I’d take down their details and the like. And, then, as we were about to go into court they would go, ‘Oh, yeah, he’s the one who bashed me.’ I’d say, ‘Hang on, you didn’t tell me anyone bashed you.’ He’d say, ‘Oh, yeah. He bashed me.’ You know, it was just second nature that Aboriginal people in Far North Queensland would just get a bashing each time they were arrested – regardless – and they’d only mention it as an afterthought. That was just the way it was. I thought, ‘How can we allow this to occur? What about their rights? These people are human beings.’ So, yeah, it was that type of experience that made it pretty clear to me that human rights are pretty precious even in a country like Australia. Don’t take them for granted.

Hulls didn’t shut up after the tort law reform debate. On the contrary, the attorney-general remained cabinet’s resident civil libertarian.3 The best example of Hulls’s intransigence came during the aftermath of the London terror attacks of July 2005. On 27 September, at COAG, the Commonwealth, states and territories agreed to ram through new counter-terrorism laws, including covert search warrant powers and the ability for preventative detention – locking up people

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for up to 14 days without charge on the basis that they might be a security threat. Within a few weeks of the COAG agreement, draft legislation landed in cabinet. Normally, legislation went through multiple layers of checks and balances before it arrived in cabinet for it to consider giving ‘approval in principle’, or AIP. If cabinet granted an AIP, the legislation was drafted, then brought back to cabinet again for debate and possible tweaking before it was taken to parliament. The counter-terrorism laws of 2005 were radically different. The legislation had been drafted, at Bracks’s request, without an AIP. This had never happened before. According to the cabinet briefing: The amendments in this Bill to enhance the covert search warrant provisions and introduce a preventative detention regime and stop, search, and seize provisions are likely to be the most contentious of the counter-terrorism laws that Victoria is required to enact … These legislative measures should be put in place to complement the security arrangements for the Commonwealth Games in Melbourne in March 2006.

Not only that, the laws came without a sunset clause – they wouldn’t disappear when the terror threat went away, but would remain on the legislative books as a new police power. ‘Some parts of the community are likely to complain that the new laws, particularly preventative detention orders, will grossly infringe civil liberties,’ the cabinet briefing said. Hulls took it upon himself to speak on behalf of those ‘parts of the community’ in cabinet, forcing a deferral. Hulls then came back to cabinet with a legal briefing from his department arguing against the anti-terror laws. ‘Rob spoke brilliantly,’ says Mary Delahunty, who also sought legal advice. There were a lot of people who didn’t want to offend Steve. Anyway, honestly, there were some ministers who came into the cabinet who were positively nauseating in their obsequiousness to the premier.

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Some had reached the zenith of their career, some were headed, in their eyes, a lot further up. On that anti-terrorism Bill I could afford to offend the premier because I didn’t want to go any further.

When the counter-terrorism laws arrived back in cabinet on 9  November, they had, among other amendments, a sunset clause. This time cabinet approved the legislation. ‘We had blues around the cabinet table, obviously,’ says Hulls. Often in cabinet it got to the stage where people would be gung-ho about taking away rights and then Bracksy would say, ‘Let’s hear from Hullsy.’ He always knew that I would take a far more human rights perspective … I don’t think we were as gung-ho as some other jurisdictions in implementing these reforms and that’s because Steve knew that human rights was a big issue. After the fight I put up in relation to tort law reform, where I fought tooth and nail against those reforms and ultimately was defeated, that created a pretty ugly, not split, that’s not the right word, but – ah – cabinet meetings got fairly boisterous, and there were very strong views expressed. And he knew that I would be equally as strong with the human rights charter. And he was very facilitating with the charter, suggested that I personally call cabinet ministers to get their support, which he knew was something that I was always reluctant to do, calling in favours and all of that sort of stuff.

Almost half of the cabinet opposed the human rights charter, but, unlike Hulls, many were reluctant to stand against the premier. Tim Holding told Hulls he had misgivings about the charter being misused by vexatious litigants, but wouldn’t try to knock it off in cabinet. ‘There was a fundamental concern that split the cabinet around what the status of the charter would be, and Rob would argue both sides of the street,’ Holding says. ‘He argued on the one hand that it was going to be profound change, and on the other hand that there would be very little change at all.’

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When the charter arrived in the cabinet, the other major player in the room – John Brumby – showed tacit support by declining to speak on the issue. In the end, Bracks summed up the argument and gave the human rights charter his blessing. Once again, the deal was done. Twelve months after his defeat on tort law reforms – on 27 May 2004 – Hulls stood in the Legislative Assembly to make a ministerial statement outlining future reforms of Victoria’s justice system. For the staid legal system, it was, Hulls said, a ‘radical statement’: I believe Australia is at a crossroads. Human rights and their associated responsibilities are those essential to human dignity, freedom and tolerance, and are essential to any truly democratic society. They represent the integrity afforded to all members of a community regardless of their individual attributes and are a statement of our common humanity. Australia, however, is currently unable to make this statement with any veracity … This failure is due, I believe, to eight years of a federal government that views the vulnerable as a threat, rather than a responsibility; the law as an impediment, rather than a protector; and human rights as a peripheral and maddening inconvenience … It is time, then, to return human rights to centre stage and recognise that they are the international extension of the fair go, that simple concept that Australians have historically embraced but grappled with less successfully in reality. We need to put the fair go back on the agenda, to have a conversation about its place in Australian society, talking openly about rights, their associated responsibilities, what they are and how they might be realised, who is missing out and how they should be promoted and protected.

Two years later, six months before the 2006 state election, Hulls introduced the Charter of Human Rights and Responsibilities Bill to the Legislative Assembly. The Labor-dominated houses of state parliament duly voted to make the Bill law. As a consequence, state and local authorities in Victoria were required to adhere to 20 basic human rights, including the right to recognition and equality before

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the law, cultural rights, property rights, the right to privacy, and the right to freedom of thought, conscience, religion and belief. ‘There hasn’t been this plethora of legal action in relation to the charter despite the doom-and-gloom-sayers,’ says Hulls. ‘It’s a good brake on excesses of government … Without Bracksy’s support we might have had a different outcome.’ Was the human rights charter a way for the premier to make peace after the battles over tort law reform? ‘I think that he’s smarter than that,’ Hulls says. ‘Bracksy was a consensus politician, not a confrontationalist. I was more of a confrontationalist. He knew that if I was passionate about something, my confrontationalist style may not have been helpful to the overall’ – Hulls allows himself a knowing laugh – ‘wellbeing of the show.’

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One Crowded Year, Part One

Just over five years after becoming premier, Steve Bracks returned to his hometown. The day was 26 November 2004. The occasion, the Eureka 150 Democracy Conference, hosted by the University of Ballarat to mark the sesquicentenary of the Eureka Stockade – the short, sharp, bloody rebellion by local goldminers that was the closest colonial-era Australia came to a Boston Tea Party moment. The battle for the stockade lasted just 15 minutes and was contained to a pocket of the Ballarat goldfields; the $1.3 million commemorative jamboree to mark its anniversary carried on for weeks and spread around the country. The celebrations were important to Bracks. I know because, by 2004, I was his chief speechwriter. I shared an office and worked in partnership with another former Murdoch journalist, Sarah Dolan. It was Sarah who shouldered much of the day-to-day duties, giving me the time I needed to research and write keynote speeches that tried to explain where Victoria was, where it had come from and where it was headed. Most of the speeches Sarah and I wrote came with staccato instructions. We would sit across from the premier in his corner office and run down a list of upcoming speeches – in November 2004 we cranked out 33 speeches, as well as a few forewords and messages – with suggested subject matter. Bracks would agree or disagree with our ideas. If he agreed, we knew from past speeches what vein to 220

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mine; if he disagreed, we hoped he had a better idea. Usually he did, sometimes he didn’t. The keynote speeches were different. For these, the aim was to stretch, find a way to extend or expand the story of the Bracks government by reaching into the past or the future, and, in doing so, put the present in sharper focus. The Eureka speeches – Bracks gave 23 speeches during 2004 that, either directly or indirectly, related to the stockade – were all stretch speeches. Each attempted to put the Victoria of 2004 – trying to maintain a tolerant multicultural society in the face of a ‘war on terror’ and out-of-kilter fears about refugees and border security – in an historical context. Bracks knew exactly what he wanted to say: that the undemocratic, intolerant, unsustainable context of gold rush–era Victoria was a repeatable error; that the virtues of democratic reform, multicultural tolerance and sustainable growth were about more than being a bleeding heart; that the best way to make a community safe was to keep that community united, not by fear but by mutual respect. It was during these speech meetings – abbreviated conversations that always ran on time, unless Bracks and Sarah compared tedious notes about the vagaries of ocean swimming – that I glimpsed the duality of the man: the way Bracks could be in the one moment both warm and distant, polite and immovable, verbally uncommunicative and physically articulate. Bracks has a gift for body language – and by that I mean making other people read his body language. The people who underestimated Bracks – and, therefore, lost their battles with him – were the ones who either misread or failed to read signs. For instance, when, in April 2004, Mark Latham complained in his diary about Bracks’s ‘silly grin’, the problem wasn’t the premier’s Mona Lisa smile, it was the federal opposition leader’s intellectual arrogance – the belief among too many federal MPs that only second-rate politicians end up in state parliaments – because I guarantee the premier wasn’t smiling inanely. On the contrary, I suspect he was thinking dark thoughts indeed. People who spent time around Bracks soon learned to divine his unspoken language. Most mornings, Bracks’s chief of staff, Tim Pallas,

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hitched a ride in to 1 Treasury Place with the premier. It was an arrangement that suited Pallas because he lived a few kilometres from Bracks’s house. Every morning, Pallas knew as soon as he climbed into the back of the Holden Statesman whether the premier was in the mood for light conversation. ‘Steve was semi-detached, but very emotional,’ Pallas says. ‘It was a subsumed emotion.’ Bracks could be wordlessly eloquent in his office if we speechwriters, greedy for any morsel of an anecdote, outstayed our welcome. While never directly telling us to get out, he would somehow manage to change the temperature in the room – shortening his answers by a syllable or two, letting his face cloud over and his eyes darken, stealing a sideways glance towards the door – and, within a few minutes, Sarah and I would be walking back down the broad corridor of green carpet to the paper crater that was the speechwriters’ room. It was during these meetings that I came to the conclusion that the secret of Bracks’s success was his duality, his ability to be political without being political: that he won power by behaving like anything but a politician while, beneath that authentic sheep’s clothing, he was as big a wolf as any man or woman has to be to rise to the leadership of a political party. Nothing was accidental about the success of Steve Bracks. The man was a political machine, but a political machine with contrarian tendencies, as demonstrated by his radical reform of the upper house. That’s why I knew that his speech on 26 November, although barely 1100 words or ten minutes in length, was a major one. During 2004, as the build-up to the anniversary of the 1854 uprising drew closer, Bracks came back, again and again, to the themes of multi­­cultural­ism, growth and democratic reform. Now – before an audience that included Gough Whitlam, Latham, Nobel peace laureate and future president of Timor-Leste José Ramos-Horta, former secretary of state of Ireland Mo Mowlam, and eminent historian Geoffrey Blainey – he summarised the story he’d been refining all year: The facts of Eureka are beyond dispute … [but] we are still in dispute about what Eureka means. Is it an event of national importance? The

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cradle of Australian democracy? Or is it just a colourful episode in our history with no real meaning for contemporary Australia? The aspirations that fired Eureka – justice, democracy and the right to dissent – were set out in the Ballarat Reform League Charter of November 11, 1854. That landmark document is the closest Australia comes to a Declaration of Independence or Magna Carta … That means Eureka isn’t just a story. It’s a responsibility. A calling to ensure we stay true to its democratic principles and build on its multicultural heritage, because Eureka – the so-called birthplace of Australian democracy – was a thoroughly multicultural affair. Of the 101 miners officially counted at the Stockade on December 3 only four were Australian born. The 97 other miners hailed from 18 countries … When you look at Eureka in this context, its importance in our evolution – from a fledgling colony to an egalitarian nation of immigrants – becomes clear … In conclusion, I note that one of the abstracts to be presented here will argue democratic reform didn’t go far enough after the Stockade. That the prevailing powers engineered a way to hamstring state or colonial parliaments by, among other things, entrenching the squattocracy in the upper house. If that is truly the case, I would argue that our government’s reform of the upper house, introducing proportional representation and four-year terms – is another victory for the aspirations of Eureka.

In the 12 months that followed the delivery of that speech, the future of the Bracks government was determined – and by future I don’t mean longevity but reach, for 2005 was the year the Victorians went from a state government with local concerns to a quasi-federal government with national ambitions. As always, the government’s hits and misses were driven by a combination of external ambitions and internal contests: the external ambitions of Bracks, Brumby, Thwaites and Moran; the internal contests between the ‘brown’ (or economic policy) ministers led by Brumby and the ‘green’ (or environmental and social policy) ministers led by Thwaites – not to mention the internal contest between Moran and Brumby.

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Moran became as influential as Thwaites and as powerful as Brumby. ‘When you look at any high-functioning team, like that government was, you can see all of the bits that kind of clicked together and how important that was,’ says political staffer turned bureaucrat Chris Barrett. Certainly, the Brumby–Terry–Steve relationship was very important … From Terry’s point of view he would complain sometimes, but it was all very functional. With Brumby he would get incredibly frustrated that Brumby wouldn’t agree with him straight away. He’d get angry on the subject matter, but it was never personal. And there was always a kind of a … joshing sort of tension there that was underpinned by an enormous respect.

Having spent two weeks travelling with Bracks and Moran around China on a trade mission in the winter of 2004, I knew that the premier and the secretary enjoyed each other’s company. I liked Moran, too. Liked his intelligence and catholic interests in the arts and industry. There was an ego with Moran, but an ego in keeping with his abilities. ‘He’s a serious political thinker for a secretary,’ Barrett says of Moran. He thinks deeply about politics and the marketplace for ideas in politics. One of the things that always amazed me about Terry would be you’d be sitting in your office and he would call you around and start talking to you about some crazy idea. And you’d be sitting there thinking, ‘Why the hell am I having to sit here listening to this …’ And, more often than not, you would find that three, four, five, six months later that would become the issue. He had a really good political read of where the next set of ideas was coming from or was going to be required. National reform agenda was a classic example of that. He picked there was, I think, a complete vacuum.

Following the re-election of the Howard government – with the tide well and truly out on national reform in COAG – Moran could see a policy vacuum he was anxious to fill. So, too, could Brumby. As usual,

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the treasurer didn’t need any prompting. Given his political teething as a backbencher in the Hawke government, reform was his comfort food. With the backing of DTF secretary Ian Little, Brumby gave a series of speeches calling for another tranche of national reform in the Hawke and Keating mode. ‘He opened the batting,’ says one DPC bureaucrat. ‘It was typical of Brumby’s ideas-driven approach.’ While Brumby beat the drum publicly, Moran sent a private missive to Canberra. With the 2004 election decided, Governments Working Together – the policy decoy prepared by Vince FitzGerald to scare up a national debate about reform – had been released in early 2005, but Moran wanted to ensure the prime minister understood where the Victorians were coming from. ‘I went by back channels … to get John Howard the message that we weren’t looking to cause political embarrassment to the prime minister. We were actually keen to get something done and we wanted to work constructively with the Commonwealth,’ Moran says. Howard must have received Moran’s private message. When COAG met in Canberra on 3 June 2005, the PM agreed that national reform was needed to sustain and enhance Australia’s standard of living. ‘John Howard supported it,’ says Moran. ‘After that, we thought, “Oh, shit, what do we do about this?” So, we came up – that is the DPC came up – with a whole string of advice and papers, which essentially, in part, built on some work that had been done.’ After COAG, Moran’s policy machine in 1 Treasury Place became a clearinghouse. Bracks had already released three documents before COAG met – Governments Working Together as well as one report on workforce skills and another on infrastructure investment. A New Approach to Workforce Skills for a More Prosperous Australia was produced by the DPC and argued for a more collaborative, federalist approach to workforce training. It was ahead of the curve in identifying the need to overcome short-term skill shortages as well as the upheavals of technological advances and the retirement of the baby boomers. ‘The more important (and longer-term) challenge is to ensure that Australia has the supply of skilled labour it needs to meet the challenges

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of demographic change (ageing) and the needs of a changing and dynamic “knowledge-based” economy,’ the report said. A decade later, federal politicians still say much the same, only now the ‘longer-term’ challenge of ensuring a ready supply of skilled labour has – through mismanagement and inaction – become a short-term crisis requiring the importation of foreign skilled workers on 457 visas. Infrastructure Investment for a More Prosperous Australia, produced by Allen Consulting, recommended the establishment and implementation of a ‘national infrastructure strategy’ through COAG. The report noted the ‘lack of a market signal’ from a ‘national greenhouse policy’ and recommended that the Commonwealth, states and territories should design and implement a carbon emissions trading scheme. To their credit, the Rudd and Gillard governments responded – establishing Infrastructure Australia and the now-defunct Carbon Pricing Mechanism. Within the DPC, Moran’s policy wonks saw those three documents as a beginning rather than an ending. The bureaucrats knew from qualitative research carried out for cabinet in 2004 that the community believed there was – in the aftermath of the GST – a national policy void. Rod Glover says: There was a realisation that was really clear, not just within government, but with business stakeholders and opinion leaders, that the reform debate had slipped away and that, basically, there was a void in the debate. The proposition we put to Steve at that point was, ‘Every politician around the country will be seeing this and they’ll all be thinking that it’s a little bit too risky, but it’s actually perfectly positioned for you to basically be the contrarian in a strategy sense. You’re filling the void that everybody outside of politics knows exists.’

Not everyone in Canberra wanted the void filled. Mandarins in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet were, one DPC officer says, ‘unbelievably cautious’. Another Victorian bureaucrat puts it more acidly, saying that, among Commonwealth public servants, ‘There was

one crowded year, part one

a very, very, very, very deep arrogance and lack of understanding about what state governments did; and a very high opinion about what their role was.’ The DPC’s Helen Silver – an alumna of the Productivity Commission – was at the vanguard of the Victorians’ attempts to convince the Commonwealth public service to, as another DPC officer says, ‘play ball’. The most receptive people in Canberra were found in federal Treasury. It’s easy to see why. The Victorians’ initial policy work drew on Treasury’s landmark Intergenerational Report, and the ideas on tax reform contained in Governments Working Together were the policy equivalent of a conversation starter. The other reason for Treasury’s interest was that, unlike the rest of the Commonwealth public service, it retained a modicum of intellectual independence from its political masters. ‘The one department that managed to protect itself through all of that Howard period was Treasury,’ says one public servant with experience in Victoria and Canberra. ‘Federal Treasury did have, under [former secretary] Ken Henry, quite a substantial policy capability.’ Henry had also broadened the policy scope of Treasury, looking beneath the hard numbers of GDP and productivity to gain an understanding of national wellbeing. ‘The way we sold it to federal Treasury and in some of the policy debates,’ says Moran, ‘was to say Treasury’s published Intergenerational Report, number one, which says we’re in real trouble … unless we do something about population, productivity and participation – the three Ps – what our reforms will help with is productivity and participation.’ In essence, the Victorians were writing for an audience of two: Howard and Henry. They needed the prime minister to reboot a national reform agenda at COAG, and they needed the head of Treasury to adopt the agenda to ensure it didn’t wander like a lost orphan around the boulevards of the national capital. After more than three years crunching policies in 1 Treasury Place, the Victorians knew what area they wanted to target – ‘human capital’. Their thinking went like this: Hawke created the first ‘wave’ of national reform in the 1980s

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when he opened up the Australian economy to global competition; Keating created the second ‘wave’ when he established the National Competition Policy; now, there was a need for a ‘third’ wave of national reform that boosted productivity and workforce participation by implementing major reforms in education and training, healthcare and work incentives – in other words, making the economy stronger in the long run by investing time and money today to create a healthier, happier, more educated workforce. Listening to Moran speak of the benefits of human capital reform, it’s impossible not to think of the working-class boys he rubbed shoulders with at Parade College in the 1960s. ‘We know from the policy research that if a kid gets to Year 12 or equivalent, it makes a difference to the rest of their life,’ he says. ‘They do better in the labour market. They have higher lifetime earnings. They’re less inclined to have health problems, less likely to go to jail. All these things – it’s a break point.’ The problem was that Moran’s break point was more intangible than both Hawke’s and Keating’s reforms. Hawke’s were courageous, but comparatively simple, requiring the pulling of one-off policy levers, such as floating the Australian dollar. Keating’s were an example of how federal factionalism can work, with the Commonwealth using its regulatory powers and deep pockets to prod the states and territories to commit to, then implement, reforms that made their economies more competitive. Both reform agendas were tangible, with the lag time between cause and effect minimal, and were proposed at a time when Australia remembered what a recession felt like. As a consequence, they were relatively straightforward to explain to unions, business leaders and the electorate. Victoria’s reform agenda was harder to visualise. It wasn’t something you could see, like a new freeway, or could track on the nightly news, like a floated national currency. A nation-building project internalised in the hearts and minds of the next generation of Australian workers, rather than externalised in something as concrete as a Snowy Mountains Scheme. Not only that, by 2005, Australia had enjoyed

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14 consecutive years of uninterrupted economic growth – and the birthing pains of the Hawke–Keating reforms were distant memories, although Howard’s near-miscarriage of the GST in the 1998 election was still fresh in the minds of Coalition politicians. Now, with the economy booming, the Victorians wanted the other governments in the federation to sign up to an economic reform package that, counterintuitively, was all about schools and hospitals and where, paradoxically, the lag time between cause and measurable effect would be at least a decade. ‘The kinds of reforms we’re talking about,’ says Barrett, ‘they pay off over a very, very long time period. So it’s quite hard to tell.’ Peter Dawkins, then deputy secretary of the DTF, with expertise in the socio-economic benefits of early childhood development and school reform, could see the benefits but understood the difficulties: The third wave – once you get into these big issues of the way that the health system and the education system operate, then you’re getting into areas where there’s very large amounts of Commonwealth and state budgets involved and I think the politics get a bit harder [than the Hawke–Keating reforms] … It’s a more challenging agenda to pull off in some ways than the first two because of the federal–state complexities. These are hugely important issues but take quite a while to implement … and it can be a long time before it feeds through to labour market effects and productivity effects in the workplace. There is a long gestation period … This is a persistent effort that needs to be systematically pushed through over a long period of time.

To cajole the prime minister out of his kennel and get him running faster and faster around the reform track, the Victorians needed a lure – the political equivalent of live bait in greyhound racing. The bait they chose was regulatory reform – or, to use the vernacular of newspaper journalists, ‘cutting red tape’. In a three-tiered federation such as Australia’s, built on axles designed to hold the weight of a Furphy water cart trundling along a country road rather than a road train barrelling its way across the Pilbara, there were generations of

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regulations that, like Paterson’s curse, needed constant tending. It was thankless work, but necessary if the ex-colonies were ever going to throw off their parochial ways and compete against regional powerhouses like Singapore. Cutting red tape was also near and dear to the business community. The Victorians weren’t against regulatory reform. If anything, deregulation gave them a home ground advantage because, after the tough love of the Kennett years, Victoria was ahead of the other states. ‘Brumby really believed in it and so did Steve,’ says Barrett. ‘We were pushing on an open door.’ It was just that, for them, the bigger doors were elsewhere – and they were harder to open. ‘I think that’s of fairly marginal benefit,’ Barrett says of regulatory reform. It was the stuff Howard was most interested in … There’s a reasonable argument that says, ‘All of the deregulatory reforms were done in the ’80s and ’90s and we are now talking about the high-hanging fruit and the marginal benefit’s just not as big.’ The really big benefits are in the human capital area, and that’s where the really big investments went in.

Still, he says, the Victorians decided to roll regulatory reform in with their human capital agenda ‘to get Howard out onto the dance floor’. Moran’s bureaucrats met with the Business Council of Australia and the Australian Industry Group, briefing both on the need for investment in human capital and offering regulatory reform as a carrot. Their message: if you want red tape cut, back healthcare and education reform. The ACTU and Brotherhood of St Laurence were also briefed, with the bureaucrats arguing that the reforms would deliver social justice. ‘We said to them quite explicitly that the way we’d conceived this thing right from the start is that when we’re talking participation we’re talking social inclusion, and when we’re talking productivity we’re talking social mobility,’ says Glover. ‘That’s where we’re going to take them [the Commonwealth]. And they were excellent in their ability to see the big picture.’

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Victorian bureaucrats from the DPC and DTF also set out to catch and kill the federal Treasury. Having decided the way to federal Treasury’s heart was through its data, they used Treasury’s own stats to argue the case for the national reform agenda. And, on the prompting of the DPC’s Silver, they decided to use modelling from the DTF to quantify the economic benefits of national reforms built around the lure of regulatory reform and the prize of a generation-long investment in the nation’s human capital. In August 2005 – the same month that Bob Carr retired from state politics – Bracks released A Third Wave of National Reform, the product of the collective enterprise of the DPC and DTF. A Third Wave of National Reform was a piece of marketing as well as the product of years of policy development. It was 52 pages long, laid out in an easy-to-read A4 format, with plenty of room in the margins for note taking. ‘The idea was they were all to be readable on a plane trip from Melbourne to Sydney,’ says Moran. ‘They were all to get the problem down and propose the solution. My argument was the longer the report there’s an exponential decline in the number of readers. The shorter the report … there’s an exponential increase in the number of readers.’ A Third Wave of National Reform may have been short in length, but it more than made up for its brevity with its ambition. This was a state government document with global and generational designs, as Barrett explains: Globalisation has enormously increased the returns to high skills, and enormously increased the returns to decent human capital. And decent human capital is not just high skills, it’s good health – it’s all of those kinds of things … These reforms are much bigger in that sense [than the NCP], but they’re investing in the right thing at the right time. They’re investing in human capital … and then increasing the development of human capital at a time when the returns to higher human capital have never been greater. And our opportunities as a country, finally having the preponderance of economic activity located in our time zone, are just mindboggling. Now, we’re quite capable of

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fucking all of this up, of course, because the mining boom will hold the dollar high for a long period of time … So, we may find that when the China boom runs out in ten weeks or ten years or 20 years or whatever that all of the industries that would have employed these people in delivering services to the Asia-Pacific have been crushed under the weight of a high dollar and we are an empty quarry with no one working in it … I see it in those really big terms.

Thanks to the DTF’s modelling, the report came up with big numbers to match those big terms. If implemented, the DTF found, Victoria’s proposed national reform agenda would boost Australia’s national income by $65 billion a year by 2015, or around $3000 per person.1 ‘The economic modelling showed that it could have a huge positive impact on GDP,’ says Moran. The Victorians also prepared the ground for the document’s release by sending Moran and other senior bureaucrats to brief editors and commentators at The Australian and the Australian Financial Review. Then, on 19 August, Bracks closed the loop by publishing a comment piece in The Australian that compared Victoria’s proposed reforms to the Snowy Mountains Scheme: Sixty years ago this week Prime Minister Ben Chifley made a speech announcing the end of World War II that … warned that peace, like conflict, had to be won – and called on the community and state governments of the day to co-operate in solving the problems that lay ahead. ‘Let us join together,’ he said, ‘in the march of our nation to future greatness.’ To its credit, post-war Australia won the peace, investing in nation-building projects such as the Snowy Mountains Scheme and throwing open its doors to a wave of innovative, hardworking immigrants. It was co-operative federalism, 1940s style. Fast-forward 60 years, and the challenges that confront our nation are no less onerous than they were in 1945. We face the challenge of a global economy that is set to become more competitive with the rapid rise of China and India. We face the challenge of an ageing population, which will reduce overall labour-force participation rates. We face the

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challenge of rebuilding our national infrastructure. And we face the danger, if we fail to respond to these challenges in a co-ordinated, co-operative manner, of slipping back down the global income ladder. Australia has responded well to such challenges in the recent past. In the ’80s and ’90s, the Australian economy underwent two waves of substantial reform – floating the dollar, deregulating the financial markets, pulling down tariff barriers and implementing the National Competition Policy – and in doing so laid the foundations for the 15 years of economic growth that have followed. As a result of those reforms, living standards across a broad range of the community have risen significantly, with Australia’s income per head rising from 18th in the OECD in the early ’90s to eighth today. Imagine what our economy would look like now if we hadn’t opened it up in the ’80s and early ’90s. Likewise, consider the headache we are creating for our children if we fail to keep pace, economically. Like it or not, there is no standing still in the global marketplace. Our choice is stark: we can either keep moving forward with reforms or wait to be overtaken by our international competitors. If we stand still, we are, in effect, going backwards. We are now overdue for the next wave of national reform. A third wave to follow the reforms of the ’80s and ’90s.

A week later, Paul Kelly, one of Murdoch’s most senior journalists, fell in behind Bracks in The Weekend Australian, with an article titled ‘New federalism’ that said Bracks had offered Howard a ‘deal’ – ‘joint ownership of a new economic reform agenda for Australia along with the political dividends that flow from such a project’. Kelly wrote: Bracks is operating on two assumptions: first, that Labor must press ahead with a new pro-skill and pro-market reform agenda for Australia, despite some resistance within its ranks; and, second, that this new agenda must be a bipartisan Commonwealth–State exercise representing a collaboration between Howard and the ALP premiers that has not previously existed.

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Victoria’s reform agenda was now on the national stage. Geoff Gallop, premier of Western Australia at the time, recalls it as a significant moment: .

It was very sophisticated because it kept the Commonwealth in the loop, but made the states relaxed about it because it was going to give them the flexibility that they had always wanted … what the Victorians did was say, ‘Well, there is a problem here with federalism, you know, and let’s just work out how we can get around it. Now, we’re not going to overcome the burden of fiscal imbalance. We’d like to, but it’s just not going to happen. So, if that’s not going to happen, what can we do that will still be helpful?’

Not everyone within the Labor family was convinced. In November 2005, the Socialist Left’s Policy Development Group posted a 24-page critique of A Third Wave of National Reform. In its critique, the Left said the national reform agenda ‘represents the Premier’s personal view, not an ALP-endorsed view … The Premier’s paper hints at support for reducing the top marginal rates of taxation. We strongly oppose reducing the top marginal income tax rate in Australia from 47 per cent.’ The Left’s paper also dismissed the goal of cutting regulation by 25 per cent as ‘narrow and ideological’; raised concerns about the costs of public–private partnerships; welcomed the focus on preventative healthcare; and criticised the overemphasis on vocational education. In conclusion, the Left’s paper stated, ‘Many of these proposals do not sit well or are contrary to ALP policy or platform.’2 The author of the paper was Peter Holding, a lawyer and the son of former Hawke minister Clyde Holding. Shortly after the release of his critique, Holding was invited to 1 Treasury Place for a meeting with two of the premier’s advisors, Tim Pallas and Nick Reece, and one of the secretary’s leading lights, Rod Glover. The four men debated the Bracks reform agenda without either side giving ground. When, a few months later, a position became vacant in the premier’s office for a Left-aligned policy advisor, Holding was hired.

One Crowded Year, Part Two

In December 2004, with the Eureka jamboree still warm in Victoria’s collective memory, Jane-Frances Kelly made an epic presentation to the cabinet of the Bracks government. Kelly is Scottish. She’d moved to Melbourne from the United Kingdom, where, as a part of Prime Minister Tony Blair’s strategy unit, she led the team that produced the first strategic audit of the UK government. Terry Moran had recruited Kelly to audit Victoria, and, now, she was delivering the results. Kelly’s audit showed Australia’s strong economic and productivity performance in the decade leading up to 2004, but detailed concerns about the nation’s income inequity, the more than 13 per cent of children living in jobless households, high rates of teenage pregnancy, high rates of waste generated by Australian households and industry, very low levels of innovation and invention, the world’s highest levels of carbon emissions per capita, and relatively high rates of crime. In Victoria, there was a lower crime rate, higher levels of cultural diversity and better water conservation, but by far the highest rates of carbon emissions and less than 30 per cent of native vegetation remaining. Although lauding the increased prosperity in Victoria, Kelly warned of increased income inequality, increased suicide rates among teens and an underclass of long-term unemployed (representing more than 13 per cent of the total number of unemployed).1 ‘Inner and outer Melbourne,’ the Kelly audit said, ‘are strikingly 235

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different, suggesting the emergence of “two Melbournes” ’ – the wealthier, more educated inner city and the poorer, less educated outer suburbs. ‘People in the outer suburbs often travel long distances to work,’ it said, but, ‘government is potentially under-investing in “community infrastructure” for the fast growing outer suburbs.’ The audit’s warnings of the emergence of ‘two Melbournes’ and underinvestment in community infrastructure were prescient: within two years those ‘challenges’ would escalate to crises due to overcrowding on metropolitan trains and a rise in racially motivated assaults on international students. The audit captured how far Victoria had come since 1992 – through the national reforms of Hawke and Keating, the radicalism of Kennett and the restoration of Bracks and Brumby – but also showed how much more needed to be done. To maintain Melbourne’s primacy, the brief asked: ‘Would a greater willingness to take on new public debt (balanced over the economic cycle) for major capital projects give Melbourne further growth impetus and a competitive advantage?’ Kelly also spent one-on-one time with every member of cabinet to gauge their thoughts on how the government was tracking. ‘That was confidential,’ says John Thwaites, ‘so I don’t know what all the ministers said, but I do know that the net view, the overall view, was we were going well, economically, as a government, we were going quite strongly, but there were still areas of entrenched disadvantage in Victoria and as Labor people, and as a Labor government, that was not acceptable.’ Thwaites says: That was one of the most useful things we did in government … So often in government, and in cabinet, what you do, you deal with just an individual submission – today, it was child protection, tomorrow it was Indigenous health, or channel deepening, or jobs in regions – this presented a holistic picture of what was going on and identified where the gaps were and, on the one hand, it showed us Victoria and Australia was doing all right in a lot of areas, but it did highlight

one crowded year, part two

that there were other areas – and disadvantage in particular areas and locations that were particularly disadvantaged – and we needed to do something about them.

The we Thwaites refers to were cabinet’s social policy ministers who, in 2004, included Mary Delahunty, Sherryl Garbutt, Lynne Kosky, Bronwyn Pike, Gavin Jennings and Rob Hulls. Up until then, Thwaites says, the social policy ministers acted individually, rather than collectively, and that lack of a corporate approach was holding them back: What was tending to happen was those ministers were putting their bids up individually into [cabinet’s Expenditure Review Committee] and pushing them – and they were being accepted or rejected – but they did not have any common voice, or didn’t have sufficient common voice, whereas the feeling was that the economic ministers were strongly coordinated by John Brumby and that he, being treasurer as well, was in a very strong position to progress their agenda. And, I think, the view was that was a good agenda, but the social agenda needed to be pushed as well.

Thwaites wasn’t alone in this view. There was a growing feeling within the cabinet that the government – elected on a promise to be financially conservative and socially progressive – was excelling at the fiscal conservatism side of the equation, but needed to do much more on the social progress side if it wanted to qualify as a Labor administration.2 The level of that dissatisfaction was reflected in Challenges in Addressing Disadvantage in Victoria, a report released by Thwaites and Bracks in March 2005. Government reports tend to be sanitised, downplaying the problems and overplaying achievements. This one wasn’t. Although more than enough ink was used to detail the government’s initiatives – such as the laudable $105 million Latrobe Valley revitalisation project overseen by Brumby in 2000 and 2001 – more space was given over to an unvarnished presentation of disadvantage and social dislocation.

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Grim statistics were presented, such as the fact that 200,000 lowincome households in the state spent more than 30 per cent of their income on rent, or that 32 per cent of female sexual assault victims were not just repeatedly victimised but also tended to be poor or live in a socially disadvantaged area, or that more than 150,000 children were growing up in families where no one had a job. ‘A funny thing happened to the Bracks Government on the way to the 2006 election,’ wrote The Age’s Paul Austin on 25 March 2005, following the report’s release, ‘it started to look more like a Labor government.’ Austin went on to detail the ‘excitement’ felt by the Victorian Council of Social Service about the government’s change in attitude. The cabinet was also influenced by new thinking on the connections that existed between childhood development, community engagement, and disadvantage. A few months before Kelly delivered her audit, Garbutt had invited a visiting American paediatrician and researcher, Dr Jack Shonkoff, to talk to cabinet’s Social Development Committee. Shonkoff was director of Harvard University’s Center on the Developing Child and co-editor of From Neurons to Neighborhoods, a report from the US Committee on Integrating the Science of Early Childhood Development. From Neurons to Neighborhoods used brain research to argue the case for greater investment in earlier intervention in childhood education. The report found that children from disadvantaged backgrounds or with intellectual disabilities were more likely to reach their full potential if resources were spent in the first six years of their life, when the neural pathways of the brain are being developed. Shonkoff spoke to the cabinet subcommittee for an hour and a half. Usually, Bracks didn’t sit in on subcommittee meetings. This time he stayed until the end. ‘He was fascinating,’ Thwaites says of Shonkoff. ‘People who saw it had a light-bulb moment.’ More than a decade on, Thwaites still recalls one of Shonkoff’s slides: comparing the brain scan of a baby, which had almost no neural pathways, with the brain scan of a six-year-old, which had a spaghetti bowl of pathways. ‘His story was it’s in those first six years when all those neuron connections are made and your future is determined,’ Thwaites says.

one crowded year, part two

Another major influence was the work of social scientist Tony Vinson. In March 2004, Vinson authored Community Adversity and Resilience, a report for the Jesuit Social Services that mapped social disadvantage in Victoria and New South Wales according to postcode and examined how disadvantage could be partly overcome by strengthening local communities. Vinson’s report found that there were geographic concentrations of disadvantage – starting with low birth weight and failing to finish high school, ending with a greater likelihood of dying young. ‘What was also interesting in that research,’ says Thwaites, ‘was that there was a link between social cohesion, or lack of social cohesion, and disadvantage. So, in the 5 per cent of postcodes that were responsible for 25 per cent of the disadvantage, they also had very low social cohesion.’ Vinson and Peter Norden, also from the Jesuit Social Services, and Tony Nicholson, from the Brotherhood of St Laurence, were invited to speak to the Social Development Committee. ‘That was quite influential,’ Thwaites says. By December 2004, Thwaites and the other social policy ministers were ready to put into action the ideas they’d gained from the work of Kelly, Shonkoff and Vinson. On 20 November, Bracks had announced his government would release a social policy statement around the time of the budget in May 2005. Now, the Social Development Committee had to decide what shape that statement would take. In government, the best policy statements have a sense of history, and enough money and muscle to create a future. They’re all about, as Keating once said, the vision thing. Pulling the vision thing together was Thwaites’s job. In opposition, Thwaites had operated more as a media tart than a policy wonk, displaying a pitbull-like ability to latch on to the ankle of an issue and lock his jaw. Government was different from opposition, but there was still a place for the kind of tenacity Thwaites displayed as a shadow minister. During the early years of the Bracks government, Thwaites wasn’t given many chances to find a vision. Instead, he’d called a fruitless royal commission into the Metropolitan Ambulance

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Service and bulldozed through mountains of work to rebuild the health portfolio. By the time he left health in late 2002, the deputy premier was keen to chase more than ambulances. Once he’d beaten Brumby to the water portfolio, Thwaites spent more than a year developing a policy paper that became, on its release on 23 June 2004, Securing Our Water Future Together. The report was promoted as Australia’s ‘most comprehensive water action plan’ designed to ‘secure Victoria’s water future for the next 50 years’. It promised to achieve those aims by creating a $225 million water fund, giving legal water rights to rivers and groundwater systems, introducing a pricing system for water that provided an incentive for users to save water, boosting water saving and recycling, and creating new water allocation and trading systems. All in all, since 1999, the government had spent or committed to spend $800 million on water security.3 Could Thwaites pull off a similar coup for Labor’s social policy heartland? Moran jumped at the chance to lend a hand. One of his senior lieutenants, Ben Rimmer, was pulled across to provide Thwaites with additional policy grunt. Andrew Herington, by now Bracks’s director of social policy, and Maria Katsonis, a policy writer from the DPC, were also brought in to pull the policy together. With so much policy ground to cover – from health to housing to justice to community services to Aboriginal affairs – the ministers didn’t have time to travel around the state talking to individual groups. On 10 December, Thwaites chaired a Social Policy Roundtable – a gathering of the tribe of community organisations and not-for-profit groups – and appealed for help: When he announced this initiative on November 20 this is how the Premier characterised the social policy statement: ‘An action plan to address disadvantage across many areas’ … But what does ‘action plan’ exactly mean? It means formulating a very real, very concrete strategy to tackle priority areas of disadvantage – priority areas that we hope you will help us identify; it means targeting those priority areas of disadvantage, and over time – whether it takes weeks, months or years – improving them; and it requires the Government refocusing

one crowded year, part two

its energies, because we must do more to improve the lot of our most disadvantaged citizens.

The ministers then had what Thwaites describes as a ‘speed dating consultation’, where dozens of community organisations and NGOs were invited to make 15-minute presentations to the Social Develop­ ment Committee. The ministers also decided to develop new policy initiatives beneath the banner of five aspirations – making services universally accessible, reducing barriers to opportunity, supporting disadvantaged groups, supporting disadvantaged places and making it easier for communities to work in partnership with the government. ‘One of the key reasons for that was, for the punters out there, they don’t care what portfolio they’re in, they just want an outcome,’ says Thwaites. ‘And there was a lot of – well, there was quite a view that the different portfolios weren’t working together. They were in silos. That programs weren’t coordinated.’ Bracks and Brumby both supported Thwaites’s enterprise. ‘It was a good mixture of politics and theory,’ says Herington, ‘and it basically boiled down to a budget bid and for a lot of ministers it was a way of getting into that 2005 budget in a big way with something demonstrating very Labor values.’ The end result was unprecedented in Victorian politics. A Fairer Victoria – the final name for what began as the social policy statement – committed $788 million in funding to a raft of social policy commitments, including $84.6 million for neighbourhood renewal programs in disadvantaged areas and a $101.8 million increase in funding for early childhood development, disabilities and childhood protection. ‘One of the justifications for A Fairer Victoria,’ says Thwaites, ‘apart from all the basic human rights and equity, is that it makes financial sense, because, if you leave social problems until they’ve become really serious it’s going to cost more.’ He says: It’s going to cost you $30,000 a year, plus, to keep someone in prison … compared to a few thousand a year when they’re in their

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early years or their teens to prevent them getting into trouble in the first place. So, A Fairer Victoria’s got a strong demand management justification as well, and it’s all about thinking ahead and using the resources you’ve got cleverly, rather than waiting until you’ve got a problem and then throwing money at the problem.

With A Fairer Victoria, the Bracks government passed the benchmark, qualifying as a socially progressive Labor government, but they kept an eye on the economy. On 3 May 2005, Brumby delivered his fifth budget speech from the floor of the Legislative Assembly. A Fairer Victoria, he said, was ‘at the heart of this budget and at the heart of the government’s forward agenda’, with ‘85 detailed actions across 14 strategies as part of a sustained effort over the next five years to create new opportunities for disadvantaged people, families and places across Victoria’. Naturally, Brumby didn’t miss the opportunity to spruik the government’s leadership in other areas, including infrastructure investment and tax reform. He said: No other Australian state can match our record on taxation reform. We have cut payroll tax by 9 per cent. We have abolished stamp duty on mortgages. We’ve cut the top rate of land tax from 5 per cent to 4 per cent. And we’ve abolished a raft of taxes identified in the InterGovernmental Agreement between the states and the Commonwealth. All up, the government has announced tax cuts worth around $3 billion – a massive reduction in costs for Victorian businesses.

But Brumby wanted to go further. Much further. One of the frustrations of being a politician like Brumby – a doer with an insatiable appetite for reform – is that dance partners are hard to find. By 2005, the Victorian treasurer was jack of his interstate contemporaries and sick of, to quote Billy Idol, dancing with himself. ‘They basically couldn’t give a fuck,’ he says. ‘There was no one very interested in policy. I’m not a big fan of my state counterparts. You know, the reason people used to write Steve’s government

one crowded year, part two

and my government up as the best government in Australia and the best policy reformist government was we actually did have an interest in policy.’ Thwaites holds a similar view: ‘Unlike New South Wales, we didn’t have all of these people who were just warriors who would rather have a fight than a fuck and would rather stick it up someone than work with them.’ In January 2005, Brumby finally found a dance partner when Andrew Refshauge, deputy premier of New South Wales, was appointed treasurer. Refshauge – a physician and, like Brumby, scion of one of Melbourne’s grandest private schools – was an atypical Sydneysider: he was more interested in reform than a fight. Refshauge took over from Michael Egan at a time when the NSW budget was beginning to spiral out of control. In 2004, the Carr and Bracks governments had gone their separate ways over enterprise bargaining agreements (EBAs) with their public servants. During their government’s first term, Bracks and Brumby had been relatively relaxed about EBA negotiations. ‘Public servants were on individual contracts and some had been disadvantaged enormously, so we brought back a general award, or pay level, and we had a catch-up for the ones who had dropped behind because their bargaining power was less, say, than prison wardens and others,’ says Bracks. After those catch-up pay increases, intended to partially ameliorate the austerities of the Kennett government, Bracks and Brumby both wanted to knuckle down on pay increases. The premier and the treasurer both instinctively felt that, if Victoria lost control of public service pay increases, the state would lose its financial independence – and be at the mercy of Canberra. The Carr government seemed to have no such qualms. By 2004, New South Wales had a habit of caving in during EBA negotiations, giving its public sector unions wage increases over and above rises in the consumer price index (CPI). For a state government with relatively few revenue streams outside the GST, this was a dangerous approach – risking long-term financial pain for short-term industrial peace. After all, something as seemingly

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insignificant as a 1 per cent rise in the public sector wage bill ended up costing a budget the size of Victoria’s around $1 billion as the pay rises accumulated over the four-year life of an EBA. That was $1 billion that couldn’t be invested in schools, hospitals, roads, rail or kindergartens. In the lead-up to the 2004 EBAs, Brumby spoke to Egan to see whether the Carr and Bracks governments could agree to forge an agreement to limit pay increases to the CPI, with any additional increases pegged to proven productivity gains. Egan told Brumby the Carr government’s industrial relations policy was simple: the unions ask, the government gives. ‘From then on we went our own way,’ says Bracks. The Victorians’ way was tough. Bracks explains: ‘Second term we said, “We’ve done that. Now we’re going to have reasonable, 2.5 per cent, CPI-pegged wage increases with productivity. If it’s proven.” That’s when we had the blues.’ At Trades Hall, Brian Boyd wasn’t happy. During Bracks’s first term, the unions had access to Tim Pallas, the premier’s chief of staff and a former ACTU assistant secretary, who operated as a de facto industrial relations minister. Now, with the EBA on the table, Pallas’s door was closed. Once again, Moran was behind the new approach. After the 2002 election, Bracks asked his secretary to take over EBA negotiations. Moran begged off that hand grenade, instead suggesting the adoption of a more corporate approach to EBAs, such as keeping a log of claims and creating a government wages policy. Moran also suggested handling all EBA negotiations through one point, rather than allowing unions to cut side deals. As a result, the departmental secretaries and heads of agencies such as Victoria Police handled negotiations under the oversight of a committee and within the confines of a rigid wages policy. ‘We got a pretty good deal,’ says Brumby. Bracks agrees: ‘We gave them CPI plus a bit, so it wasn’t disastrous.’ ‘It was very successful,’ says Moran. ‘Then we started to have annual increases that meant New South Wales was one or two percentage points more expensive, and that quickly accumulated into hundreds and then billions of dollars. They brought about their own demise.’

one crowded year, part two

Bracks puts the decline and eventual fall of NSW Labor down to three decisions made during the Carr administration. He says: One was that they said that Sydney was too full and they didn’t go for population. We went for population – a bigger share of overseas migration, bigger interstate migration. And, so, we had population increases, and demand underneath the economy increased. The second one was wage policy, where they said, ‘Let it rip.’ We said, ‘No, we can’t afford that. We want to invest in services. We want to keep the budget in surplus, and so on.’ And the third one was average taxation levels, where they were not only the outrider on paying public sector wages, they were the outrider on taxes. They were the highest taxing in payroll tax, in land tax, in a range of others … They’re the three things that were different on economic policy and those three mattered. Now, I reckon the underpinnings of that were the previous Labor government and our defeat … It was imprinted on our heads, the problems of the Cain and Kirner governments … That was a motivator because we didn’t want to slip back into a preconceived impression of what people thought Labor governments were.

The motivation to exorcise the demons of the Cain–Kirner years drove Bracks to reject party machine politics. Factional Brahmins weren’t welcome in 1 Treasury Place without an appointment, the door to the unions was closed on EBA negotiations, and the public service executives – rather than the politicians – were given the task of negotiating pay rises. This cold-shouldering of the industrial wing did more than bruise feelings. ‘It got narky,’ says Boyd. ‘The teachers weren’t happy, the nurses weren’t happy, the Police Association – everyone got narky and had a go.’ The narky mood darkened during 2005 and 2006, when, while publicly decrying the Howard government’s WorkChoices laws, the Bracks government privately used the laws as leverage in negotiations. ‘It started to go a bit south,’ Boyd says. ‘Hullsy, I think, was IR minister around that time … Hullsy had a smirk on his face: “What do you want me to do? The law’s the law.” ’ Brumby was the one who

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would pay for Bracks’s stance, but that day of reckoning was five years away. In 2005, Brumby was thinking about national reform – as was Refshauge. Refshauge had kept an eye on the Victorians from Sydney. He thought Bracks a ‘fantastic’ premier, with his charm and personal touch, admired Thwaites for his intelligence and work rate, and, now, found Brumby to be ‘focused always’ and brimming with ideas. One of those ideas involved using the collective muscle of the Victorian and NSW economies to drive tax reform across the federation. ‘Victoria and New South Wales were 60 per cent of the national economy,’ says Brumby. ‘If we could work together, harmonise payroll tax together, which we did, then that was good for business, good for cutting regulation red tape.’ Brumby had bigger fish to fry than payroll tax. He wanted to push the Commonwealth to reform horizontal fiscal equalisation (HFE) – the fancy name for the carving-up of the revenue raised by the GST. Under horizontal fiscal equalisation, some of the money raised by the more prosperous states – traditionally Victoria and New South Wales – is distributed to mendicant jurisdictions, such as South Australia, Tasmania and the Northern Territory, to ensure their governments can maintain service levels. ‘I went up to see Andrew for a proposition to put to [federal treasurer Peter] Costello in relation to the horizontal fiscal equalisation,’ says Brumby. Refshauge and I agreed on a proposition to put to Costello that in return for reform of HFE – that is, to give Victoria and New South Wales a better deal – we would bring forward all of the remaining tax cuts under the GST agreement which would have meant … between Victoria and New South Wales, virtually overnight, tax cuts of around $2 billion mainly for business to boost competitiveness. And, in return, we wanted reform over time – not immediately – to the HFE agreement.

one crowded year, part two

The point, Refshauge says, was to encourage the local economies of the states and territories to be more efficient, instead of creating perverse incentives for the governments of jurisdictions that received bonus GST payments to be inefficient. ‘We thought it best if it was just me meeting with Costello rather than with Refshauge as well,’ Brumby says. He went to Costello’s Melbourne office in the winter of 2005, and the two warmed up with the requisite small talk about football – Costello barracked for Essendon; Brumby was a Collingwood man – before getting down to business. According to Brumby, Costello was interested in the horizontal fiscal equalisation deal, but said he needed a few weeks to speak to his colleagues (‘which was code for he needed to speak to the PM’). Two weeks later, the answer from Costello’s colleagues came back: no. Politically, the reason for Howard walking away from an offer that would have delivered $2 billion in tax cuts to businesses in New South Wales and Victoria, and caused a stampede as the rest of the states and territories hurried to catch up, was obvious. In 2005, two states critical to the political survival of the Howard government – Western Australia and Queensland – were beneficiaries of horizontal fiscal equalisation, receiving bonus GST revenue at the expense of Victoria and New South Wales. Ironically, within a few years, Western Australia would begin subsidising other states and territories as a result of horizontal fiscal equalisation. ‘I put a lot of work into that,’ says Brumby. I always thought that was one of the great lost opportunities of reform in Australia; Commonwealth–state relations reform and tax reform. It would have driven substantial new investment. I mean, you’re talking about big tax cuts. Would have sent a signal to markets. Would have ensured that the two biggest economies in Australia were well positioned to meet the challenges of the next decade … If you were casting forward you’d say we would have been exactly right back then to make those reforms to HFE because, while there may have been a very temporary impact on WA, it would have just been temporary because the trend was going to see their allocation reduce in any case.

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At the time, Brumby was disappointed and wondered why Costello didn’t fight harder for the deal. ‘He was always in the market as a person who cut taxes, so, for him, this was a deal that he could have had his fingerprints all over – reform, tax cuts and building a competitive Australia.’ In 2006, a meeting with a businessman who was a senior figure in the Victorian branch of the Liberal Party gave Brumby a possible explanation. The businessman wanted Brumby to press the case for the development of nuclear energy. Brumby told him he couldn’t. Then the two men talked politics. Brumby says: This person revealed to me that by the end of the year – that was, by the end of 2006 – Costello would be prime minister. Categoric. No doubt at all. And it was mentioned in the context that Peter might have a broader view about these things [nuclear energy], particularly in the context of the environment and greenhouse emissions and things like that … I think for Peter there was a lot more reform to do and he didn’t do it and I think one of the reasons is, the last 12 to 18 months he was very focused on dotting his i’s and crossing his t’s and preparing, in his own mind, for what he thought would be the prime ministership. And then it never happened.

By August, Brumby was dancing with himself again. After a decade as premier, Carr retired from state politics. Refshauge went as well, beginning NSW Labor’s long descent into ‘Bongo Land’. From Melbourne, Sydney began to look like a city at war with itself. On 11 December, eight days after the 151st anniversary of the multicultural Eureka rebellion, the beachside suburb of Cronulla staged a monocultural uprising, with a wave of ugly race riots, fought under the collective banner of Southern Cross tattoos worn by a phalanx of sunburned, bare-chested young men. The irony of the image – bigots fighting beneath a rebel banner designed by a migrant and bled for by migrants – appeared lost on the participants. South of the Murray, the xenophobic scenes at Cronulla confirmed to many Victorians that the post-Carr government of New South Wales was rudderless and pandering to racists.

one crowded year, part two

‘I reckon Cronulla occurred for several reasons. I’ve actually thought about this quite a bit,’ says Bracks. There are four different reasons. The first is that Sydney’s had a much – Sydney’s got a similar multicultural make-up to Victoria, about 40 per cent from a non–English speaking background in Sydney, 40 per cent in Melbourne, but ours is longer and older. That is, we had a wave of migration post the gold rush, a wave post the Second World War and a steady increase on family reunions since. They’ve had a significant increase from the 1980s onwards, so you’ve got a different complexion … Secondly, it’s demographic cost base – that you can live in Melbourne and be a migrant on little money and you can live in about twelve different suburbs. You can live at Springvale, you can live at Clayton, you can live at Hoppers Crossing, you can live at Coburg, you can live in Footscray, and so on and so on. If you live in Sydney you’re pushed into an enclave in the west of Sydney – so you get a concentration … The third one is leadership. The political, business and media leadership in Victoria, as it turns out, is also, because of that longevity, because of that influence of Greeks and Italians on our community, more generally, are now paving the way for everyone else. And the Jewish community have been very good, historically, in Victoria – very good in promoting tolerance. You don’t have an Alan Jones calling on his radio for people to take back a beach. Neil Mitchell and Jon Faine would never want to do that, the business leaders believe that it’s important, all the political parties, the National Party, Labor Party, Liberal Party, are all the same. So it’s quite different … And the last reason is a frivolous reason. You know, if you compare Cronulla to, say, St Kilda beach. St Kilda’s already occupied by multiculturalists; no one’s going to take back St Kilda beach.

Cronulla, Bracks concludes, ‘can only occur if the conditions in a place like Sydney, New South Wales, allow it to happen. And they did.’

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A Death in the Family

Chicago and Melbourne are unofficial sister cities. Both were founded in 1835; Chicago as the railhead of Midwestern commerce, Melbourne as an entrepreneurial (and illegal) start-up settlement. Melbourne’s first great epoch was dead and buried, the city having lost people and prestige in the aftermath of the depression of the 1890s, when Chicago became one of the great cities of the early twentieth century, and the setting for a sociological study of 1313 street gangs. The sociologist who catalogued those gangs was a former newspaper journalist called Frederic M Thrasher. Thrasher, like so many citizens of Chicago, was a blow-in to the windy city. Born and raised in Indiana, he spent seven years in the Prohibition era mapping the gangs of Chicago, then, in 1927, published the fruits of his labour in The Gang. ‘It,’ Thrasher wrote of his book, ‘deals with the relation of the gang to the problems of juvenile demoralization, crime, and politics in a great city. It may be used also as a supplementary textbook in courses of study dealing with the city, collective behavior, juvenile delinquency, and social pathology.’1 It can also be used to study the inner workings of political parties. The Gang was brought to my attention by Robert Doyle. A teacher before he entered parliament, Doyle is a natural raconteur with an abiding interest in ideas and theories on just about everything, including politics. When I asked him about the leadership style of 250

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his former opponent, Steve Bracks, he instinctively reached back in time and across the expanses of the Pacific Ocean to make the lateral connection to Thrasher. Doyle mentioned one of Thrasher’s key findings, that different gangs chose different kinds of leaders. Thrasher described gangs as organisms, where members perform individual roles, but where those roles ‘must be constantly changing to accommodate losses and additions of personnel, changes in its members due to growth and increasing experience, and other changes within and without a gang … The inner circle is usually composed of a constellation of especially intimate pals formed about the leader.’2 The gang was a place where individuals came to struggle for status, Thrasher said, with different types of gang members rising to the leadership at different times – depending on the circumstances of the gang. ‘Thrasher found that the leader grew out of the gang,’ says Doyle. There was no way of being able to predict from the gang who the leader would be if you had to pick an archetype. It grew out of the needs of the gang at a particular time. So it’s like all of these things coming together in an almost unified leadership theory. When that happens powerful leadership evolves. That, to me, is what happened with Steve Bracks.

Doyle’s lateral connection of the dynamics of street gangs and the dynamics of political parties is insightful. Reading The Gang, if you replace the word ‘gang’ with the word ‘Liberal’ or ‘Labor’ or ‘Green’, many of Thrasher’s thoughts about the streets of Chicago in the twentieth century could just as easily apply to Australian politics in the twenty-first century. In this passage, for example, he could just as easily be referring to Bracks, Brumby, Thwaites and Hulls: In some cases leadership is actually diffused among a number of strong ‘personalities’, who share the honors and responsibilities. Leadership once concentrated may become diffused owing to the

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gradual development of abilities across the rank and file. A group of outstanding boys, whose individual abilities are supplementary, may combine to form a dominating inner circle … No matter how great the leader, however, his tenure of power is never certain.3

By 30 April 2006, this much was certain: Doyle’s tenure as opposition leader was over. He was finished. Doyle was down in the polls and being leaked against internally, and there were only seven months to go to the 2006 state election. It was a matter of when, not if, he would be replaced. Doyle had become, like John Brumby before him, a political piñata. He says: ‘I thought to myself, “This is not going anywhere.” So I made the decision myself.’ The decision was to resign. On Thursday 4 May, Doyle called a media conference and announced that his time was up. He then soldiered through his last Question Time without incident and returned to his parliamentary office. ‘I was feeling a bit shaky,’ he says. Shortly after, Doyle was alone in his office when the phone rang. He was told the treasurer was on the line. Doyle says: Of course, I expected it to be Peter Costello. It wasn’t Peter Costello. It was John Brumby. And John said to me, ‘You going to have me around for a cup of tea?’ I said, ‘Come around now.’ So John came around and we had a cup of tea and we talked for about 30, 35 minutes … I  don’t remember a whole lot of the conversation, because, at that stage, your mind is somewhere out there, but I’ve remembered it to this day, because, basically, what he was saying was, ‘Mate, I’ve been opposition leader. I’ve stood down. I know what it’s like.’ Despite that we’re on different sides I thought it was a really generous gesture. I’ve never forgotten it.

Within a few months, Brumby was planning to follow Doyle into political retirement. I knew something was up during the winter of 2006. Brumby invited a battalion of past and present staffers – men

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and women who had worked for him during his 13 years in state politics – to dinner. Dozens of Labor people invaded the family home of Brumby and Rosemary McKenzie, drinking their beer and wine, eating their barbecued and roasted meat, talking about elections won and lost. The night felt like a valediction. Driving home, I told my wife, Kirsten, I was sure the treasurer was getting ready to retire at the November 2006 election. I was right. Brumby had told Bracks he wouldn’t contest the 2006 poll. ‘After you’ve been in government for a while,’ he says, ‘it’s not uncommon for ministers who’ve been doing a shitload of the work – you get a bit tired.’ There was more to the indefatigable Brumby’s decision to retire than fatigue. It was a time when the treasurer – a man who never wanted to be seen to shirk an unpleasant task – could leave with a relatively clean slate. With Victoria’s proposed national reform agenda released and Terry  Moran by his side, Bracks began to dominate national policy debates, taking the mantle of the leading Labor premier. It was Bracks who responded when – in an inflammatory speech to the Sydney Institute on 23 February 2006 – Costello lashed out at ‘mushy misguided multiculturalism’ and, in essence, called for Muslim migrants who preferred sharia law to Australian law to be stripped of their citizenship. ‘Our heritage does not belong to any one individual or group,’ Bracks wrote in The Age on 2 March. ‘That is the bargain that Australia strikes with all its citizens, new and old. Live as you choose, wear what you choose, speak your mind, practise your beliefs – and allow your fellow Australians to do the same.’ The government was also travelling smoothly at a state level. Brumby delivered his sixth budget on 30 May, his speech sounding like a valediction. The economy was forecast to grow by 3.25 per cent in 2006–07, and building approvals and business investments were at record levels. The state’s population was growing faster than the nation’s for the first time in 41 years. The treasurer had found another $200 million to reboot the Regional Infrastructure Development Fund – a pet project he’d used to direct capital works to regional and

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rural areas. Money had finally been found for Melbourne’s struggling train system, with more than $10.5 billion in funding over the next decade.4 And Brumby didn’t yet know that the good news story of the Bracks government – growth – was about to metastasise, causing public safety concerns and a public transport overload. All in all, 2006 was the time when Brumby could walk away from politics with a light conscience but a heavy heart. The days and weeks immediately after a budget speech are always frantic. The treasurer, together with his staff and the senior public servants of the DTF, would have been working towards the release of the budget papers since before Christmas. That’s half a year of late nights and long weekends crunching numbers and sifting through budget bids, planning and arguing about the next financial year, while keeping an eagle eye on the second half of the current financial year. Once the budget is delivered, the treasurer and his entourage begin the laborious sales job – stakeholder by stakeholder – at corporate breakfasts and lunches, one-on-one meetings and roundtable summits, and via endless media interviews. On 4 June, Brumby and Ian Little, the secretary of his department, worked late in preparation for one of those sales opportunities – a joint hearing before parliament’s Public Accounts and Estimates Committee. Speaking to parliament on 15 June, Brumby set out the events of the evening in staccato detail: We were preparing for the Public Accounts and Estimates Committee hearing. It was, I suppose, a normal day, although a reasonably long day in some respects. I sat down with Ian and the Treasury team at about half past six for the briefing on the PAEC. We finished at about eight o’clock, and we were all in good spirits. I remember speaking to Ian for 15 or 20 minutes after that, just chewing the fat and discussing the budget, Snowy Hydro and various things. He then went home, and eight hours later he was not with us.

Ian William Little died of a heart attack in the early hours of 5 June. He was 50. It was a terrible loss. Little, like Moran, was one of the

a death in the family

secret weapons of the Bracks government and one of the driving forces behind the Victorians’ gambit to create a national reform agenda. ‘He was a genius,’ says Bracks staffer Kim McGrath. In the eulogies that followed, Brumby spoke of Little as a mentor and friend. He told parliament: I worked alongside him for six years, and if you work alongside someone for that time you get to know them very well. I still recall our first meetings after Labor won government in 1999. I recall visiting New York with the premier and Ian, particularly our first visits, when, with a bit of trepidation, we went to Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s, essentially relying on Ian’s experience at those meetings. I remember our weekly meetings, our annual pilgrimage to Canberra for the treasurers’ conference, the annual economic review committee process, the budget process, the budget drinks and the annual strategy meetings – and, of course, the regular dinners with the governor of the Reserve Bank … Ian was a gentleman in every sense of the word.

And now Brumby told Bracks he wanted to retire. The premier urged his treasurer to reconsider. ‘He was unequivocal in saying how much he wanted me to stay on and, you know, how crucial it was to the team and how there was still plenty to do,’ Brumby says of Bracks. And, so, at the end of the day I decided to stay on – and that was the extent of the discussion. So, I stayed on, knowing of course that I’d be treasurer and fully expecting, if we won, that Steve would continue on. That was a judgement that I made, but it is true that I did think about it long and hard, but at the end of the day I made the call after a discussion with Rosemary and the family and everyone else to do one more term. I mean, bear in mind, I had plenty of people in my ear telling me that there were great opportunities on the outside … and that, at that age, 54, 55, it was the perfect age [to start a new career]. Having said that, at 57, 58, it’s not the end of the world, either. I decided to stay on. I had no idea the Global Financial Crisis

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was a year away. And I had no idea that, within the year, I’d have the opportunity to become premier. Life can be like that. It can be full of surprises.

Bracks and Brumby both insist there was no Kirribilli-style agreement, that the premier made no promises about handing over the leadership to the treasurer after the 2006 election. But their conversation did remain a secret, with Thwaites one of the few members of the government to know of Brumby’s flirtation with retirement. Meanwhile, the machinery of government had been grinding on. In March 2006, Victoria hosted the Commonwealth Games without incident. In April, a $230 million life sciences ‘action plan’ was released and Professor David de Kretser was appointed governor, becoming Victoria’s first migrant head of state. In May, the budget was released. In June, the premier made a parliamentary statement on multiculturalism that was, in effect, an extended defence of tolerance. ‘There is nothing more democratic than multiculturalism. And there is nothing more Australian than a migrant,’ Bracks told parliament. Bracks also stared down the factions again to secure parliamentary seats for two potential ministers, Tim Pallas and dot-com millionaire Evan Thornley, but failed to find a safe seat for Geelong-based upper-house MP Elaine Carbines. Moran, meanwhile, kept carrying the flame of the national reform agenda, in June releasing yet another document, Governments Working Together?: Assessing specific purpose payment arrangements, again designed to be read on a Melbourne–Sydney flight. Prepared by Allen Consulting, the report had specific purpose payments (SPPs) in its sights. SPPs were the key way Canberra turned the federation into a faction. The Commonwealth used more than 90 SPP programs to give funding to the states for everything from hospitals to schools and set stringent conditions about how that money could be spent. The Howard government’s own National Commission of Audit had found that SPPs blurred roles and responsibilities between the state and national governments, caused administrative overlap and duplication, cost too

a death in the family

much to negotiate and report on, and were rorted by both the states and the Commonwealth. The Victorians used that damning assessment to argue for a dramatic overhaul of the entire system. ‘What we put to [Treasury secretary Ken] Henry was a reworking of Commonwealth–state relations based on the proposition that there should be a massive reduction in the number of SPPs,’ says Moran. That we should define the key outcomes we want in strategic areas like health and education, that we should be able to measure whether those strategic outcomes are being achieved, that the states and territories should be given more freedom as to what they did to enable them to pursue innovation to improve their services, and that they be held to account through an independent body that would check how they were going against measurable outcomes.

Not everyone was enamoured with the idea. ‘Terry was a huge driver of it and he was getting all of the policy work underneath it,’ says Sharon McCrohan. ‘The government probably took its eye off the local stage a little bit. I started to think that the balance was a little bit off.’ McCrohan considered the national reform agenda ‘worthy, but dull’. She says the view of the premier’s media unit was, ‘No one out in the suburbs gives a shit about it, so why are we spending so much time on it?’ By September, Bracks had a new chief of staff, with Geoff Walsh stepping in as Pallas departed to concentrate on his burgeoning political career. Walsh – a former advisor to Hawke and Keating, former diplomat, former consul-general and former national secretary of the ALP – was better equipped than most to assess the state of the Bracks administration. He liked what he saw. ‘The cabinet meetings were very, very well run,’ Walsh says. ‘Steve was a good, inclusive sort of chair. The debates were very high quality, there weren’t people making trivial points … The public style of the government was an activist model. If there was a problem in the paper, you fixed it during the day and it was reported on the news that night.’

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On 4 October, Doyle – by now a backbencher – gave his farewell speech and singled out Bracks for thanks (‘Your political opponents are not necessarily the same people as your political enemies’), before finishing on a note of candour and generosity: If there is one regret I have, it is that in traversing the chamber I did not get the chance to pause and stop on the front bench in government. I envy those of you who have had that responsibility and privilege. But still I am well satisfied with this journey, because I have come to recognise one thing, and it is why I can leave as I do, without regret or rancour but with satisfaction and clarity. We are all ambitious here. An election is coming on. We are ambitious to retain our seats or be elected as members, to win government or to be returned to office – or perhaps to be a minister or part of the leadership team, or even to be premier. We are politicians. We tend to measure success in that way and in those terms. Over the last year I have come finally to understand one thing: the only real success is to be a success as a person. For those of you who wish it, I hope you find that success here, in the parliament of Victoria. I am sure that is possible for some of you, but not for me. So, goodbye, and my very best wishes to all of you.

Sitting in the public gallery and listening to Doyle speak as the fiftyfifth Victorian parliament wound down and the remaining politicians wound up for another campaign, I was overcome by melancholia, and felt privy to a secret I could not quite yet divine. I often felt that way in the lead-up to an election – a sense of expectation and foreboding. No matter how bullish the polling, I always felt every election was a fingertip away from disaster, that, sooner or later, power was bound to return to its nomadic ways.

Heading for Armageddon

Nothing could stop Steve Bracks at the 2006 election. The new Liberal leader, Ted Baillieu, campaigned well, but was cruelled by a $700  million costing error in the last week of the campaign, just when soft voters were deciding whom to back. Bracks, meanwhile, stuck to the four ‘pillars’ of the 1999 campaign – health, education, public safety, regional Victoria – under the slogan ‘When It Matters’. Speaking at the ALP’s campaign launch at Her Majesty’s Theatre in Ballarat, Bracks managed to be a policy wonk without sounding like a policy wonk, building his conclusion around the central idea of the national reform agenda – human capital. He said: ‘Nations are not monuments. They are not made out of stone. They are works-inprogress made – and remade – each and every generation out of the hard work and hope of our men and women. And that is why there is more to be done, because the work of good government never ends.’ One policy idea – to rebuild or modernise every public school in the state by 2016 – caused a minor stand-off between Bracks and Brumby, with policy director Andrew Herington in the middle. One of the earlier drafts of the campaign speech, which I wrote, didn’t say that the government would rebuild or modernise all public schools. This annoyed Bracks. He called Herington into his office. ‘The speech is wrong. It doesn’t say all schools,’ the premier said. Herington explained that he couldn’t get the policy sign-off. Bracks wrote ‘all schools’ on his 259

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copy of the speech and gave it back to Herington. ‘Go and retype it. That’s what it’s going to be,’ he said. Herington did as he was told, only to receive a phone call from an irate Brumby. ‘That is a huge commitment. You pushed Steve into this,’ Brumby said. Herington pleaded that he was operating under instructions. ‘And then,’ Herington says, ‘a day or so after the speech, Brumby says, “The absolute winner for this election was making the commitment to all schools.” ’ Herington laughs: The role of a real leader is where Steve was really fantastic. He just made the calls at the right moment and he did things like that … He’s quite decisive. He knows in the back of his mind what he wants and often he keeps it there for a couple of years and then he’ll say, ‘Remember how we used to talk about that population stuff? I want to do something. I want to have a summit.’ … Both of them [Brumby and Bracks] were originators of ideas.

‘2006 was very close,’ says Brumby, ‘Up until the last week it was neck and neck. Baillieu performed very well. It was just that last week their wheels fell off.’ In the end, Bracks won easily, with Victorian Labor winning a two-party preferred vote of 54.39 per cent to the Coalition’s 45.61 per cent – although not everything went to plan. In the newly democratised upper house, the Greens, as expected, won their first seats in the Victorian parliament, but so too did the Democratic Labor Party on the back of preferences from the ALP. And, in the lower house, two of the seven seats Labor lost – Morwell and Narracan – were in the Latrobe Valley, where the combination of divisive local Labor MP Brendan Jenkins and a clever scare campaign by the Nationals caught Bracks and Brumby off guard. The Nationals’ scare campaign started with a good idea. Bangholme  –  one of the sand-belt suburbs on the south-eastern fringe of Melbourne – is home to the Eastern Treatment Plant, which treats more than 40 per cent of the city’s sewage. Around 120 billion litres of treated water a year are pumped from the plant into the ocean off Gunnamatta, a popular surf beach on the Mornington Peninsula.

heading for armageddon

Thwaites wasn’t happy to see so much water pumped into the ocean in the middle of a drought. Neither was the Environment Protection Authority (EPA). The EPA told Melbourne Water the treated water needed to be upgraded to Class A – one step below drinking quality – by 2012. This created an opportunity to use all that treated water for something other than giving surfers gastroenteritis. The proposal Thwaites came up with was worthy, but expensive. In the Latrobe Valley, 150 kilometres to the east of the Eastern Treatment Plant, millions of litres of drinking water were being used to cool down the coal-fired generators of Loy Yang, the largest power station in Australia. ‘It does seem pretty silly to be cooling power stations with the highest quality river water,’ says Thwaites, ‘and there was also, at the time, a risk, potentially in the future, that they could run out of river water. So, the proposal was to pump the recycled water down there and then use the clean river water that they were using for cooling the stations for drinking.’ He says: We went through a feasibility study for that and it showed it was a reasonably good project but the two main issues were cost [around $1 billion] and risks around timing – how long it would take to do all that. And, in 2006, we did our Central Region Sustainable Water Strategy, which was a government strategy, and that recognised that we would need extra water by about 2015. And there were three proposals for finding that extra water, which were: one, that recycled project; two, desalination;1 and, three, a stormwater proposal which had been up for harvesting water out of the Yarra at Dights Falls. And what we committed to do was a business case on those or a feasibility study first, then a business case on each of those.

At the time, in the run-up up to the 2006 election, the cabinet thought they had time to act to secure Melbourne’s water supply. Melbourne’s dams were at almost 60 per cent capacity, per capita water consumption was down by 22 per cent, and the city was not on water restrictions. ‘We were looking at having a proper process to get the best form of

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long-term augmentation of supply, with a view to implementing that by 2015,’ says Thwaites. ‘We thought we had eight years.’ Regional Victoria, by comparison, was bone dry. Bendigo and Ballarat – two gold-rush cities developed for their proximity to alluvial gold, rather than water, were projected to run out of drinking water within three summers. In early October, on the eve of the election campaign, Thwaites chaired a cabinet committee meeting at parliament. At issue was a proposal to save Ballarat and Bendigo by piping water from the Goulburn–Murray irrigation system. Kim McGrath was there. ‘The room was packed with advisors and bureaucrats,’ she says. Normally you would have got Treasury and DPC pushing back with advice about, ‘Has this been tested?’ ‘Has this been costed?’ ‘How come we don’t have enough notice?’ ‘It can’t be that urgent.’ The entire bureaucracy was locked in behind this decision. I don’t know what the trigger was, and I still to this day don’t understand how it got to be such a crisis, but we had a matter of, like, a couple of weeks to get started building this pipe or Bendigo would have run out of water. And the tipping point happened really quickly.

The construction of the Goldfields Superpipe reached Bendigo in 2007 and Ballarat in 2008, saving the cities from running dry. Back in Melbourne, meanwhile, Thwaites and Brumby argued over the costs and benefits of the various proposals that would secure Melbourne’s water supply – especially the option to pipe treated water to Loy Yang. Down in the Valley, though, Russell Northe, the Nationals’ candidate for Morwell, demonised the government for taking local drinking water and giving back glorified sewage. ‘Thwaitesy was set on taking water off the generators,’ says Brumby, ‘pumping that back to Melbourne and then sending recycled water back down there, and that got mixed up in the 2006 election, which cost us the seat of Morwell. The Nats turned that into a “Labor wants to dump shit in your backyard” thing. And I never thought that was a good scheme anyway – it was just too costly.’

heading for armageddon

‘That was a pretty good scare campaign. Didn’t pick that,’ says Bracks. ‘I thought the logic in that was straightforward, but they managed to distort it very cleverly. So, I underestimated the Nats’ ability to do a scare campaign.’ In hindsight, Bracks sees the lead-up to the 2006 campaign as a lost opportunity: John Thwaites was warning, ‘Well, this looks like it’s going to be the best option, but you can’t guarantee it.’ And Brumby was a bit worried about it, too, but you’ve got to remember that was before an election. We had to offer something substantial and significant for the next term. We were running out of water. We had nothing else. And we had to do something. If a proposal had have been worked through on a desal – a large desal – we would have done that as well … But it wasn’t there … I was disappointed … [Thwaites] or his department should have brought forward the desal proposal earlier. It wasn’t on the table. There was a bit of a reference to it in some of the water options, I think, but a little thing. And then it became all very political because the Libs committed to a desal – a little one – and we said, ‘Oh, that’s stupid, let’s recycle.’ And, so, once you were on that track then you had to come up with the proposal that was in the plan and we picked it. It was a classic case of a lot of things coming together at the one time; a difficult, prolonged drought, and low inflows to streams, a desperate situation; an election coming up; not sufficient options being examined in detail.

Ironically, having lost two seats for considering to pump treated water to Loy Yang during the 2006 election, the government abandoned the plan after the election. Thwaites explains the circumstances behind the change: From June 2006 to February 2007, there was zero rain and we had the worst ever rainfall by, I think it was 20 per cent below the worst ever. So, it was about 70 per cent below the long-term average. And the water plummeted from a situation where we weren’t on restrictions to

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where there was a threat of stage four restrictions, and I think we were down to around 30 per cent. And what really caused concern was that we looked across at Perth and in Perth they had had a step change in time, which scientists were linking to climate change. So, it wasn’t a gradual decline, it was a sudden step down in their water supply and there was a risk that Melbourne was going through the same situation. So, we changed the risk approach that we were taking to water so that, instead of taking the previous ten years as a scenario, which was lower than the long-term average, we said we’ll take the last three years. And when you did that you saw that you needed about more than 200 billion litres of water – not by 2015, but by 2012.

It was a water crisis as acute as the one facing Bendigo and Ballarat when the decision to build the superpipe was made – but on a far larger scale. ‘By the time you got past 2006, there was a fair bit of intensity in this whole issue – Thwaites, Brumby, myself. It was pretty hot,’ says Bracks. With Melbourne needing 200 billion litres of water by 2012 instead of 2015, time as well as cost counted against the Loy Yang project. It was shelved. Instead, Bracks, Brumby and Thwaites began thrashing out options that could deliver the extra water to Melbourne within six years. Thwaites pushed for the only other viable option – the construction of a desalination plant. Brumby, meanwhile, opted for a water project in the vein of the Wimmera Mallee Pipeline – modernising the massive Goulburn Valley irrigation system, which lost up to 900  billion litres of water a year through waste and evaporation. Under Brumby’s plan, of the 225 billion litres of the water recovered, a third would be used for irrigation, a third to revitalise local rivers, and a third piped south to Melbourne as drinking water. Irrigators would only have to pay 10 per cent of the costs – with the remainder underwritten by the government and Melbourne Water. Bracks’s advisor on water was McGrath. She went to see Brumby about his plan: ‘I said, “John, it might be good public policy but it’s fucking disastrous politics. It will cost us so many votes.” And he did

heading for armageddon

not give a fuck, “It is good public policy. We need the north–south pipe.” … That whole irrigation scheme of his, it’s just insane.’ ‘It was just like getting on a bike and you’re going faster and faster,’ says Bracks. I can remember John Thwaites coming in one day to see me and he said, ‘We’re basing all our work on averages, 100-year averages. The 100-year average is useless. It’s not going to tell us anything anymore. We can’t do it anymore.’ So we looked at the last ten years, it wasn’t good enough. So we came with a whole different set of principles. That caused a whole other set of studies to be done – and that’s when we came up with the big recycling project for the north-east of the state and eventually desal and the north–south pipeline.

Back in 1999, Bill Scales, then head of the DPC, had warned that water security would be a defining issue for the decade ahead. Now, despite months spent debating options in cabinet, years of planning, and hundreds of millions of dollars in expenditure, the Bracks government was staring into a bone-dry abyss. They had to do something big, fast. ‘I thought it was very healthy for the government to have contestability, very strong contestability, from the treasurer and the deputy premier as the water minister,’ says Bracks. I dealt with it on a couple of levels. One was letting the debate go on but making sure it was an informed debate. So, we had key government agencies, Treasury, sustainability and environment, premiers, all engaged in that. We had good sound, solid information on what the projections were, what the options were. In the end – it was actually because no one else was in a position to do this – it was left to me to decide who to back, but I wanted to go through a significant process before I did that. A lot of debate. A lot of discussion. I’d even pull in John and John from time to time and we’d just have private meetings and try to resolve a lot of the issues.

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By the time the water issue came back to cabinet, it was presented as a fait accompli. Victoria would build a desalination plant with the capacity to produce 150 billion litres of drinking water a year, and – as an insurance policy to ensure there was enough water while the city waited for the desalination plant to come online in 2012 – the government would also modernise the irrigation system of the Goulburn and build a north– south pipeline to bring 75 billion litres of drinking water a year down to Melbourne. All of the options were controversial, all were prohibitively expensive, all came with incalculable political risks. What if the Nationals ran a scare campaign in the Goulburn Valley in 2010 like the one they’d run in the Latrobe Valley in 2006? What if the drought broke and the desalination plant wasn’t needed? And what would Melbourne water users say when their water bills rose to pay for the desalination plant? ‘There were people opposed to every part of that plan,’ says Tim Holding. ‘It was hard to get heard above the cacophony of protest and concern and scepticism about the projects, but the notion that we were a do-nothing government was, I think, forever put to bed. You never heard it again.’ ‘It came as a package. It came as a press release,’ says Bob Cameron. ‘The basic internals of that were had behind closed doors.’ ‘The only debate was whether it should be 100 or 150 [billion litres a year produced by the desalination plant],’ says Thwaites. We went with 150 because that was the water authority’s advice … because the water authority advised it and Rob Skinner, the head of Melbourne Water, and all of the water authorities advised that we should because if the situation continued as it had in Perth with that lower level we would need 240 gigalitres by 2012 – the Perth scenario was very prominent … The other point was that the increase in cost between 100 gigalitres and 150 gigalitres was not proportional. The extra 50 gigalitres was much cheaper than the first 100.

‘We went for the bigger one. That was debated. Treasury were against that,’ Bracks says of the desalination plant. ‘If you’re going to do it you

heading for armageddon

do it properly, is my view. Victoria has always done that. You don’t do it half-baked like other states. We build things well. We plan for the future well … In 20 years’ time – if we’re still alive – we’ll be looking back and say it was a pretty good decision, I’m sure.’ Brumby holds a similar view: ‘You could have identified the desal a little bit earlier and started a bit earlier, but I’m pretty comfortable about what we did.’ Not every member of the Bracks government is quite as comfortable. In fact, views are mixed. One key advisor feels that, as with metropolitan trains, the government took too long to respond to a problem that evolved into a crisis. He says: I go back to that early part of the drought. I remember in that initial phase, there was a bit of a panic, ‘Oh what are we going to do? We’re going to do this and that.’ But, when it started raining, people were like, ‘Let’s put all these big projects, all these big issues we need to deal with, let’s just put them away. Let’s put them away for another day.’ And by the time they started to resurrect them in 2005–06, 2006–07, by the time we started to execute those projects like a desal, you know, costs had blown out.

By the time a decision had to be made, according to senior advisor Nick Reece, panic had set in. ‘You’ve got to understand the pressure the government was under,’ says Reece. ‘If a government can’t deliver potable water to the people, it’s really failed the very, very first test of government, which is to provide basic services.’ He continues: We did panic in making the decision on the desal. The decision to make the desal was the right decision. The size that we went for was wrong. We panicked because, quite frankly, on the objective evidence available to us at the time of making the decision, we had good cause to panic. If you believed the analysis that was coming in – that was, we need to reset the state’s rain forecasts from long-term average to the last ten years because climate change is real and the current ten

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years is what we can expect in the future – there was enough evidence there to sort of suggest that that was true, then building the desal to the size that it was was the right thing to do. If, however, that wasn’t true and this was a drought and, yes, there was climate change occurring but maybe not quite on the scale that we all thought at the time, then a more sensible thing to do would have been to go for option one, which was to build a desal to a certain specification but with the capacity to go bigger. But the judgement was, ‘No, we’re heading for Armageddon and if we’re going to build this thing we’re going to build it right the first time and it’s going to be big.’ And so we went for the biggest possible version that was available.

Andrew Herington says: Sometimes, in the psychology of governments it’s important that they feel that they’re winning and that they’re doing the right thing. And, so, they take big gambles – and sometimes big gambles don’t pay off. Desal was like that. They thought, ‘We’re not going to run out of water. We’re not going to be constrained like an Adelaide.’ They wanted to avoid that for Melbourne and they overshot. Big time … It would be a Harvard Business School model about how not to make decisions … We had three choices and we took two of them and did them both, badly.

Thwaites gives an alternative analysis: In terms of a legacy for the government, a core thing is we’ll now have a diversity of supply. All our eggs were in the rainfall basket before. If it stopped raining, you had a major problem … The idea of desal or recycling is to have an alternative form of water. And when you’ve got diversity of supply you have much, much lower risks that you’re going to have problems of security of supply … And it actually, over time, is cheaper to have that. There’s economic analysis that shows where you’ve got a diversity of supply you’ll have cheaper overall costs.

heading for armageddon

On 19 June 2007, Bracks made what would be the last major announcement of his premiership. His government would build a $3.1 billion desalination plant near Wonthaggi, spend $1 billion upgrading the Goulburn irrigation system, and build a 250-kilometre water ‘grid’ so that water could be moved from one end of the state to another, depending on need. Consumer water bills would double to pay for the water works. ‘This water is for growth. This water is for population which is expected to increase by 1.2 million people over the next 25 years, and an economy which is growing, and we don’t want to hold back that growth,’ Bracks said.2 As a policy, the desalination plant was defensible. But the politics were messy. The day after the announcement, The Age’s Paul Austin penned a hard-nosed analysis that encapsulated the government’s position. To be fair, the severity and longevity of the drought caught not just government ministers but every water boffin in the country on the hop. But Labor’s response has been characterised by prevarication, U-turns and policy on the run. In November’s election campaign, Bracks condemned the Liberal proposal for a desalination plant. Yesterday he said his government would build such a plant near Wonthaggi. Before the election, Labor promised never to use water from the ‘food bowl’ in the state’s north to augment Melbourne’s supplies … Yesterday’s $5 billion package contains no guarantees that the painful drip, drip, drip on Bracks and his cabinet will stop.

To bastardise the epitaph of romantic poet John Keats, the future of the government was writ in water.

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‘Jesus Fucking Bananas’

It was a rainy Friday in July 2007: winter in Melbourne. Geoff Walsh was running late. He’d been to a funeral in Moorabbin and was trying to get back to 1 Treasury Place. His boss, Steve Bracks, was waiting at the office. The premier had something he wanted to discuss with his chief of staff. Walsh called ahead to make his apologies and suggested to Bracks he shouldn’t wait for him. ‘Oh, no, I’ll wait,’ Bracks replied. When Walsh finally made it to the premier’s office, he discovered why Bracks was prepared to wait. He told Walsh he wanted to quit politics. ‘I want to know what you think,’ he said. ‘Well,’ Walsh replied, ‘the truth is in this game, if that’s where your heart is and that’s where your head is, you ought to go. You can’t do it properly and well unless you are fully committed.’ Bracks seemed relieved. The days leading up to the conversation with Walsh had been difficult for Bracks. His oldest son, Nick, had been involved in a car crash on 13 July. Drink-driving charges were pending against the 20-year-old. Bracks didn’t decide to retire because of Nick – secretly, he had always intended to resign during his third term – but his son’s troubles helped determine the timing. Walsh worked quickly. John Brumby and John Thwaites were told, but no one else. Not even Rob Hulls. Walsh, a former journalist and speechwriter, helped Bracks write his final speech as premier. 270

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When Brumby was told, he considered leaving with Bracks. Staying wasn’t a ‘no-brainer’, he says. I’d had a good think the year before about moving on and made up my mind, ‘I’ll stick and do another stretch,’ but in my head, firmly, I’d be out of the place by the end of 2010 by the latest. And to take the position of premier, there was probably an even-money chance I’d be around until, potentially, the end of 2014 … It wasn’t as clearcut a decision as you want. And from a family point of view there’s questions as well. They had a long time, long time, with me away, me interstate, me in at parliament – particularly for Ro. So, it wasn’t as clear-cut as it looks, but, having made that call, it’s then just in the nature of my personality to approach that task with a great deal of energy and application and enthusiasm to get the job done. I decided to contest the leadership and to take the opportunity of being premier.

Thwaites was shocked: You could have knocked me over with a feather. I couldn’t believe it. So, I asked him why. At that time he had the issues with Nick, which probably precipitated it, but, also, his whole political strategy was to do things ahead of expectation. He knew that there’d be speculation if he hung around for another year … and he wasn’t going to be forced to respond. He wanted to be in advance of any media speculation … We discussed the fact that it would be John taking over as leader. I then had to consider my position and decided that it was the best thing for me to go, too.

The night before the resignations, Bracks, Brumby and Thwaites met in the premier’s office at 1 Treasury Place. It was here in 1999, on the day that they were first sworn in as ministers, that Bracks had called for Brumby to come down to his first-floor office urgently. When Brumby arrived, Bracks had showed him a TV news clip about the opposition being in turmoil. ‘And I said to Bracksy, “Fuck, mate. What’s gone

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wrong?” And he said, “Mate, it’s not us.” It was the Liberal opposition.’ Since 1991, the three men had been friends, colleagues and, at times, unspoken competitors. But now it was over. Thwaites – the social historian of the group – pulled out a pledge card, one of the wallet-sized pieces of political paraphernalia produced for Brumby when he was opposition leader, then remade for Bracks when he took over, which condensed Victorian Labor’s election promise to deliver reform in the four ‘pillars’ of health, education, public safety and regional development. They shared a joke about the pledge card, then had a group hug. ‘A matey sort of blokey group hug and it was one of the most emotional, moving things,’ says Sharon McCrohan, who was in the room at the time. ‘I still get a bit emotional when I think about it now, because it epitomised the decade of friendship, solidarity. The success of the government was right there in that … These three very close people who’d been to war together – and it was all coming to an end. The era was over.’ The next day was Friday 27 July. Cabinet usually sat on a Monday, but was switched to 9 am Friday. Some ministers were shitty that they had to front up after a week of late nights in parliament. And not everyone could make it: Hulls was in Hobart for a meeting of the Standing Committee of Attorneys-General. Richard Wynne noticed that the premier seemed ‘quite agitated’. When he became impatient, Jacinta Allan was suspicious: ‘People were very straggly, a bit slower to get started, and Steve was like, “Well, come on.” He was not usually like that … He was agitated that people were not there.’ When the cabinet doors finally closed, Bracks broke the news. Allan continues: And then he started, and what he said publicly was what he said privately … And then when John Thwaites opened his mouth and we could see John had notes, and John started giving a tribute to Steve, and then, partway through, when John flicked the switch to telling his own story – that broke the dam walls. There were tears from the boys and the girls … We were witnessing two men make a momentous

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personal, professional decision that had huge impacts on all of us. And the way that they did it was just, again, very respectful and calm and considered.

Bracks responded to Thwaites’s speech and mentioned, in passing, the strengths of Brumby. ‘It wasn’t orchestrated,’ says Allan. ‘It was just very natural … It was absolutely remarkable about the way it was handled.’ ‘People were gobsmacked,’ says Wynne. ‘There was no shadow of doubt about who was going to be leader.’ Eight years after being deposed as leader, Brumby was back. I was in my office when the news broke. By then, I’d retreated from the day-to-day throng of the office, burrowing into a book cave at the north-west corner of the first floor of 1 Treasury Place – an 80-metre walk down an L-shaped driveway of green carpet from the premier’s office on the south-east corner of the building. I made the long walk and found Bracks standing in the doorway of his office. Alone. He smiled and gave me a hug. We spoke briefly. I asked him where everyone was. He raised his eyes to the ceiling. They were up on the fourth floor with Brumby. The seat of power had moved already. ‘It’s good,’ Bracks told me. ‘It’s how it should be.’ It wasn’t good for the attorney-general. Hulls was at the SCAG meeting table when Julie Ligeti – by now his chief of staff – interrupted him. The premier wanted a word. Hulls didn’t want to leave, telling Ligeti, ‘What’s more important? Getting stuck into Ruddock, conservative bastard that he is, or taking the premier’s call?’ Ligeti insisted. ‘So, in full flight I had to say, “Sorry, I have to leave the room.” ’ When Hulls called, the premier sounded ‘as relaxed as usual’. Hulls was peeved, telling Bracks: ‘Mate, you’ve stopped me. I’m getting into Ruddock.’ And he said, ‘Oh, I won’t stop you, that’s a good cause.’ He said, ‘I just want to let you know, I’m resigning.’ I said, ‘No, what’s up?’ ‘No, I’m resigning.’ ‘Bullshit. Seriously, what’s up?’ ‘Mate. I’m about to do a press

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conference, resigning, and I wanted to let you know.’ I said, ‘You are kidding.’ And he said, ‘So’s Thwaitesy.’ He said, ‘Sorry to tell you in Tasmania. I remember the last time you were in Tasmania I rang you to tell you that I was giving you industrial relations.’ I said, ‘Yeah, thanks for that.’ I asked him what was going to happen and he said, ‘Well, I expect John will be taking over.’

Now Hulls was desperate to get back to Melbourne. The fastest way home was to charter a flight on a propeller aircraft. ‘It was the most horrific flight,’ he says. It took so long because of headwinds that the commercial flight that took off a few hours after us landed about ten minutes after we did. I thought, ‘I’m going to be just an aftermath to the story of Bracks and Thwaites resigning.’ I could see the headlines – ‘Premier resigns, deputy premier resigns’ – taking up most of the front page, then down at the bottom, ‘Meanwhile, Hulls dies in a plane crash.’

When he arrived back in Melbourne, Hulls went to see Brumby. There was talk of appointing Lynne Kosky as deputy premier. Hulls made a pitch for the job, telling the new premier, in essence, that he needed a loyal headkicker. There was never any doubt – just as Thwaites was Bracks’s closest friend in politics, Hulls was Brumby’s. ‘Hullsy and I are a good example of a completely trusting relationship,’ says Brumby, ‘but to be honest, with Rob that’s because I never saw him as directly threatening me. And in politics you never know who it is that’s going to stand up for the job, so those relationships are few and far between.’ After almost eight years in government, Hulls – for so long the outer satellite of the ‘golden four’ that had won power for Victorian Labor – finally moved his ministerial office into 1 Treasury Place, setting up shop two floors above the new premier. ‘I didn’t even know there was a lift joining the two offices,’ he says. ‘It was almost, if you like, the bookends to our careers, in some ways, in that, as a foursome, we were the ones who did a lot of work to get us elected, and when

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half the team left, the other half took over. So, it was exciting … It was great to be working with such a close friend.’ Channel 7 reporter Brendan Donohoe tracked down Brumby’s old nemesis, Trades Hall’s Brian Boyd, for comment. Boyd told Donohoe that he looked forward to working with the new premier. Ten minutes after Donohoe’s story went to air, Boyd’s phone rang. It was Brumby. ‘I’m taking you up on that offer, Brian,’ Brumby said. ‘Bygones will be bygones.’ Boyd recalls: ‘We literally shook hands on the phone.’1 The resignations of Bracks and Thwaites also caused excitement in caucus. Within hours of Thwaites’s final cabinet meeting, one of his former staffers, Maxine Morand, was angling to fill his ministerial boots. The news of the resignations shook Morand. ‘I was in tears and was in complete shock,’ she says. Then, two caucus members, Don Nardella and Danielle Green, telephoned. They told Morand that, as Thwaites was an independent, the factions had no call on the cabinet position. It was hers for the taking. Thwaites’s resignation wouldn’t be made public until 2 pm. Morand had until then to make her case, but, in the meantime, she also had to deliver a speech at Monash University’s Frankston campus. Her electorate officer drove her to Frankston and back while she worked the phones, starting with a call to Thwaites. Morand asked the departing deputy premier whether she could lobby for his seat in cabinet. He gave her his blessing. Then she called Brumby, John Lenders and Fiona Richardson, a factional leader in Labor Unity. Brumby called Morand back the next day – a Saturday – and told the independent she was in the running. By Sunday night, she was being mentioned on the TV news as a potential minister. ‘It was quite surreal. I was really, really excited about it. I never thought I would be a minister,’ Morand says. Among the political advisors – a tribe specialising in snap judgements and Olympian disdain – few were surprised by Morand’s elevation. She was widely seen as a minister in waiting. On Monday 30  July, Brumby was elected leader of the Victorian Parliamentary Labor Party. He was unopposed. Morand quickly found herself face to

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face with the new premier. Brumby asked her about her interests. Morand mentioned the innovation portfolio. He asked whether she would consider early childhood development – a key portfolio for the government’s ‘human capital’ agenda. Morand said that would be great. Brumby also gave Morand the plum portfolio of women’s affairs. ‘We didn’t talk about abortion,’ Morand says. They didn’t have to. In 2007, abortion was available in Victoria, but not legal. In fact, it was still listed in the Crimes Act 1958 as an offence. Decriminalising abortion had been on Victorian Labor’s policy platform since 1985 and a cause célèbre of Emily’s List, a network of progressive Labor women, but had been riding around in a figurative taxi. ‘Putting it in the taxi’ was a term used within Victorian Labor during the Bracks years to describe what happened when an issue was set aside or sent figuratively away, hopefully never to return. Backbenchers (Carolyn Hirsh) and ministers (Mary Delahunty) had tried to pay the fare, but the premier’s office had stymied their attempts. In A Premier’s State, Bracks explained why: I wasn’t against reforming those laws, but it wasn’t part of our platform for that term of office – and I was resolute on sticking to that platform. I said at the time that I would vote for abortion law reform if it came up, but I didn’t want to devote political capital to that issue when we hadn’t gone to the election on it.2

‘This thing was a classic Steve,’ says one cabinet minister. ‘Put it in the taxi and hope the bastard doesn’t come back.’ But the abortion taxi did come back. On 19 July, eight days before Bracks’s resignation, Candy Broad – a former minister and assistant national secretary of the ALP, as well as a mainstay of Emily’s List – introduced a private member’s Bill designed to strike abortion from the criminal statutes. Broad’s Bill was an attempt to revive the work of Hirsh, whose own private member’s Bill had been quashed by the premier’s office in the lead-up to the 2006 election. ‘It is estimated,’ Broad told the Legislative Council,

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‘that one-third of all Australian women will undergo a therapeutic termination of pregnancy, otherwise known as abortion, at some stage during their lives. These women are our friends, our sisters, our partners, our children. We have a responsibility to ensure the provision of safe, legal and accessible medical services to them.’ Broad went on: Safe, if not legal, abortion became a reality for women in Victoria in 1969 when Justice Menhennitt ruled in the Victorian Supreme Court that abortion was lawful if it was considered necessary to safeguard the physical and mental health of the pregnant woman and that the circumstances were not out of proportion to the danger to be averted … While the Menhennitt ruling was an important development in the provision of safe abortions, the ongoing inclusion of abortion in the Crimes Act means that women seeking an abortion and the health professionals who assist them are open to the risk of prosecution … Now, almost 40 years since the Menhennitt ruling, it is time to modernise the legislation and bring it into line with current community attitudes.

Caucus was split on abortion, with many MPs – including former community services minister Christine Campbell  –  opposed to decriminalisation. Supporters of decriminalisation, meanwhile, were concerned that if the Bill failed, it would set back the pro-choice agenda. When Broad’s Bill was introduced to parliament, Brumby spoke to caucus. It was, according to those who were there, an impassioned speech. He was upset by the lack of consultation on such an important piece of legislation. Morand approached him as the caucus meeting broke up: ‘I remember speaking to him after that caucus meeting and saying, “John, I absolutely 100 per cent agree with you. It was not appropriate for Candy to stand up there and not have people to second it and say how important it was.” I think at that point he would have known about Steve and John leaving.’ Morand’s right; Brumby did know. With decriminalisation, he knew it was going to be up to him to either pay for this taxi or send it back out for another ride.

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Brumby had two options: let Broad’s Bill live or die on its merits in parliament, or intervene and present a government-sponsored Bill to decriminalise abortion. It wasn’t in Brumby’s nature to let unfinished business lie. He had to intervene. On 20 August, the premier announced that the Law Reform Commission would be given until March 2008 to advise the government on how to remove abortion offences from the Crimes Act. ‘Our existing laws are out of step with community sentiment,’ Brumby said. ‘It is essential that the law reflects contemporary community standards and that it is simple, clear and transparent.’3 Once the legislation was introduced to parliament, MPs would be able to vote according to their conscience, rather than along party lines. It was, says Delahunty, typical of Brumby: ‘He’s very courageous and he doesn’t mind a fight.’ The passage of the legislation was up to Morand – a second-term MP and rookie minister. Her first hurdle was getting cabinet to agree on the terms of reference for the Law Reform Commission. Given that several members of cabinet – including Lenders, Theo Theophanous and Bob Cameron – were opposed to decriminalisation, the terms of reference were a subject of debate. On 28 March 2008, the commission came back with its report, presenting three ‘models’ for decriminalisation: model A, write the common law of the Menhennitt ruling on the legality of abortion into the statutes; model B, make abortion in the first 24 weeks of pregnancy legal with the woman’s consent, and, after 24 weeks, legal so long as it was necessary to prevent harm to the woman; and model C, make abortion at any stage of pregnancy lawful with the woman’s consent. Cabinet decided to pursue model B. Next, Morand and health minister Daniel Andrews – with the support of Hulls’s office – developed the cabinet papers to gain approval in principle for the laws. Morand reached across the aisle, receiving strong support from the Greens’ Colleen Hartland as well as the Liberals’ Mary Wooldridge, Helen Shardey and Louise Asher. Morand knew that Hulls and Justin Madden, the minister for planning, were troubled by decriminalisation. She was concerned that the

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legislation could be opposed on the floor of parliament by both the attorney-general (Hulls) and the police minister (Cameron). Morand spoke to more than 40 members of caucus to lobby for support. Former premier Joan Kirner and former Cain government minister Kay Setches also lobbied furiously behind the scenes. ‘One of the biggest influences on people who were struggling with the decision was the fact that the premier was going to vote for it,’ Morand says. ‘That, I think, was incredibly important. It gave people comfort that – if John Brumby was supporting it, then they felt comfortable in supporting it, too.’ ‘People knowing that the leader did support it was important,’ says another minister. ‘Clearly, Steve was happy to leave it in the taxi, whereas John had clearly given the nod that he did support it and wanted to see it happen.’ When the Abortion Law Reform Bill was introduced to parliament in September 2008, there was nowhere to hide. Stripped of the relative anonymity of party affiliation, MPs had to speak for themselves. The Liberals’ Wooldridge spoke for decriminalisation: ‘Many women over many years have fought hard for the right of women to have choices. Today, too, I believe we stand up for a woman’s right to make choices about her fertility, and I believe that is the fundamental achievement of this legislation for all Victorian women.’ Labor’s Campbell spoke against: Surely we can find common ground in recognising that this Bill fails to address the human rights of both the pregnant woman and the unborn. All pregnant women should be provided with support options, not simply told, ‘It is your choice, and we have decriminalised abortion.’ This bill ignores research such as Thomas Strahan’s 260-page annotated bibliography Detrimental Effects of Abortion, which documents over 1000 studies covering the psychological effects of abortion … This legislation is not women focused. When a pregnancy ends, motherhood does not end.

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Brumby supported the Bill and called for civility: I know there are people with very strong views on this issue, and I respect the right of each and every member of our parliament and each and every member of our community to hold those views and to speak their mind. But there is one thing that I would ask in return, which I have stressed publicly and in the discussions we have had about this legislation; that is, to remember that with rights come responsibilities. Members should exercise their right to free speech and they should vote as their conscience dictates, but they should respect the rights of others to hold a different view and to vote in a different manner.

When it came time to vote in the Legislative Assembly, the leaders of the major political parties, Brumby and Baillieu, voted for decriminalisation. Hulls was among those who voted against. ‘It was clear that it was a very difficult time for Rob,’ says one minister. ‘Many people thought that when it came to the vote he’d vote for it. So, when he didn’t it was a great shock. It was a big shock to a lot of people.’ ‘What was extraordinary to me was that Rob voted against the legislation,’ says another minister. ‘Why he did this, I don’t know.’ The Bill cleared the Legislative Assembly, but with Madden yet to declare his hand, the vote in the Legislative Council was too close to call. Morand was advised to compromise, to grease the Bill’s passage through the council by accepting amendments. She refused to budge: ‘I said, “No amendments,” because if you start unwinding it, you get unintended consequences and you go backwards. It had to get through unamended.’ Again, the debate was heated. The Liberals’ Bernie Finn spoke for six hours against the Bill, ending with the words, ‘If this Bill is passed, the parliament that we sit in will be one that will forever live in infamy.’ The most memorable contribution, however, was made by the Greens’ Hartland: ‘An estimated one in three women in Australia has had an abortion. I am one of those women, and I have no regrets about my decision to do that 27 years ago … I want to dedicate my

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speech today to women who have died or have been maimed by illegal backyard abortions.’ Two Brumby ministers – Lenders and Theophanous – voted against decriminalisation in the upper house, but Madden voted yes. The Bill passed, 23 to 17. ‘The greatest hero of the whole thing was Justin Madden,’ says one minister. ‘He saved it. It was going down in the upper house. He stood up and he was under enormous pressure … He stood up.’ As the vote was announced on 10 October 2008, two prolife campaigners called out from the public gallery. One called: ‘You’ve got blood on your hands.’ Bob Smith, the president of the Legislative Council, exploded: ‘Where is the security? … For God’s sake do your job. Jesus fucking bananas. Amateur hour up here.’4 It was done. The crime of abortion – a law that had been part of Victoria’s criminal code since the colony was created in 1851 – was no more. Whether people agreed with decriminalisation or not, this much was beyond dispute: Morand had achieved more in 15 months as a minister than most politicians did in a career. Morand – who held her marginal seat by just 205 votes – knew she would pay a price for her part in what was an historic reform. She knew she would be targeted by pro-life campaigners at the 2010 election. She didn’t care. ‘If that was the price, I was prepared to pay it,’ she says. ‘Your achievement is not getting elected.’

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The week after he became premier, John Brumby called together the staff of his private office – men and women who up until the previous Friday had worked for Steve Bracks. I was one of those staffers. We assembled in the Melbourne Room on the first floor of 1 Treasury Place. What I saw was vintage Brumby. The new premier told us the government had just over three years to go until the next election and not a day to waste. He told us we should work with the expectation that, in 2010, Labor would lose and we would be out of a job. He told us we should remember what Gough Whitlam was able to achieve in less than three years. He told us to get back to work. Cabinet received a similar pep talk. Having contemplated political mortality before the 2006 election, Brumby was hell-bent on making one last run at the barricades. ‘To be honest, in government, if you can’t get stuff done and don’t use the opportunity, you’re a mug,’ he says. ‘You’ve got a whole big department there of people with good minds and brains, and you ask them to do something and they’ve got to do it. And then you’ve got a whole world of people out there in the private sector, and if you ask them to do something they’ll do it. So, if you can’t make the most of it you’re a mug.’ With Bracks and John Thwaites gone, the complexion of the cabinet changed. The ‘green’ versus ‘brown’ adversarial model, institutionalised under Bracks, was broken. Brumby was now the judge, rather 282

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than the prosecutor. The replacements in the Treasury and environment portfolios, John Lenders and Gavin Jennings, were not as inclined to take up the cudgels as Thwaites and Brumby had been. Brumby’s biggest problem, however, was the fact that he didn’t have another Brumby in his cabinet – a manic doer of a minister prepared to jump, boots and all, into any issue, fight any battle. Rob Hulls was that kind of minister, but he was contained in the justice portfolio – a long way from the increasingly make-or-break issue of transport. Meanwhile, the incumbent transport minister, Lynne Kosky, had the misfortune of walking into the portfolio just as the metropolitan train system, with patronage having almost doubled since 1999, ground to a halt and the implementation of the new myki ticketing system fell apart. ‘She was pilloried for the transport stuff, none of which was of her making,’ says one minister. The fundamental failure [of myki] was – apart from the cost blowouts, which are just unbelievable – there’s a big lesson for public policy, I  reckon, around being deeply suspicious of anything around technology, whether it’s new computer systems or new ticketing systems or any of this stuff, or, you know, new phones that we can’t even answer. They are fundamentally flawed. They always will be. And the cost blowouts are enormous … The cabinet was bewitched by this thing and, in truth, you couldn’t get the bloody thing to work. And the shocking tragedy, again, and it sounds like I’m being defensive of Kosky, is she inherited a bucket of shit … With public transport, it was a fucking smouldering wreck and the myki thing was just a basket case and I don’t think she knew how to get out of it.

Brumby says: The real problem with myki was the [transport] department’s recommendation about the successful tender was just wrong. It was just the wrong team. And I remember I wanted to reject the department’s recommendation, but to do that would have been a huge, huge thing

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and we would probably have been accused of being on the take and all of those sorts of things. And in the end the advice was ‘it’s just not worth the trouble’ and we went with it. In hindsight, it was the wrong decision.

Without Thwaites or Bracks in the cabinet, and with Hulls remaining as attorney-general, the new premier, says police minister Bob Cameron, ‘became the go-to man for everything’. ‘John suffered for not having people like a Brumby or a Thwaites by his side,’ says staffer Sharon McCrohan, who stepped away from day-to-day media duties during his reign. I was always very critical of Rob for not putting his hand up to do something else. I thought that he could have done a lot more to contribute to the government by taking on other things, whether it was public transport or whatever it was … I remember talking to John about it probably just before he took over and I said, ‘You need to have a reshuffle and you need to get Rob out of there. You need to actually put him to work on an area that’s tough for the government. Public transport is an obvious one. It’ll be seen as the hard man going in to clean up the public transport system … You can’t just leave him in cushy Snoozeville. How many more women can he appoint to the bench?’

There were also concerns about Brumby’s decision to make Lenders the new treasurer. The thinking goes like this: the ideal treasurer is a Peter Costello/Paul Keating model – someone able to not just balance the books (Costello) or drive reform (Keating), but also defend the leader on the floor of parliament and in the media. Brumby, as treasurer, was a blend of Keating and Costello – a reformer who’d kill for a surplus, a chainsaw in parliament and an advocate in the public arena. Lenders – a wily strategist, proven manager and consensus builder from his time as state secretary of Victorian Labor – was able to balance the books but lacked Brumby’s verve. As a member of the Legislative

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Council, he was also in the wrong house. ‘We had a treasurer’s office that wasn’t up to the job,’ says one advisor. I think that John Lenders was the wrong choice to be treasurer. Lenders wasn’t up to the job of delivering whacks. Holding would have been perfect – independent, interventionist – and would have, at times, driven the leader’s office crazy, as all good treasurers should … John chose to surround himself with some people that weren’t going to challenge him. Why did he choose John Lenders and not Tim Holding as his treasurer? Why was Helen Silver his secretary of the DPC? Helen’s fantastic. She’s not Terry Moran. She wasn’t bowling up stuff that was going to challenge the premier.

Under Brumby’s direction, cabinet also ran differently; became rowdier, more argumentative, more democratic. ‘John’s cabinet meetings were far more consultative than Steve’s. He would test the cabinet,’ says one minister. ‘I felt more comfortable having an argument in John’s cabinet,’ says a male minister. While a female minister says: ‘Steve ran the cabinet with an iron fist compared to John – it descended into a bit of a boys’ own free-for-all. It was the one thing that I found quite annoying was the fact that some of those young blokes, like Daniel [Andrews] and Tim Holding and Tony Robinson and all that, really misbehaved.’ Another minister says there was nowhere to hide in the Brumby cabinet: ‘John was just all over the detail of every damn submission. Every submission. He’d drive you mad … And if you weren’t on top of your brief he’d carve you up. He’d. Carve. You. Up.’ ‘I’ve never worked with a bloke who’s extracted that much value out of people as John Brumby did,’ says Tim Pallas, by now minister for major projects and roads and ports, ‘because he was there cracking the whip over the top of you and setting ridiculously ambitious agendas … I’ve never worked so hard in my life.’ Holding – who held the major portfolios of finance and water under Brumby – says that, although the two premiers shared similar political views, they were different political personalities:

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Steve always worked very hard to get a consensus in cabinet … He was quite authoritarian, but he didn’t want to see people humiliated in cabinet meetings … Steve – very little ego. He got the best out of people by finding a space for everyone and really making them feel like they were contributing to the team. Steve’s political judgement is just unbelievable … John was, in many respects, a very different personality. Firstly, John is incredibly intense – the work ethic is just prodigious. He just drove his ministers hard and you did not want to let him down … With John, you didn’t walk, you ran. That’s the sort of government he led. Secondly, he was forensic and exhaustive in his consideration of public policy issues … The guy had incredible rigour. Meetings always went over time. With Steve, meetings never went over time … With John, he always went over time, because he kept asking questions, he kept seeking information … It was exhausting to be a minister in that process, but it brought the best out of people. It made all of us work harder … I did see situations where ministers were beaten down in a way that Steve Bracks would never have permitted. Steve would get to a point where he’d call time so that the minister could escape and lick their wounds and come back … John wouldn’t call time. He’d keep going … He allowed the process to take people apart.

Hulls also noticed that Brumby, as premier, operated differently than he had as state opposition leader. ‘I think as leader of the opposition, whilst he didn’t show it, he was constantly under threat of people with nowhere near as much ability as him trying to undermine him,’ says Hulls. ‘Whereas, as premier, he was the obvious successor to Steve; he was, in my view, the only one with the ability to take over from Steve. And, I think, there was a general view that that was the case and as a result he was very comfortable in the role.’ Brumby may have been comfortable in the role of premier, but the role itself was anything but comfortable. Dan O’Brien – having left politics to work in the bureaucracy – was brought back to be Brumby’s chief of staff. His riding instructions were plain. ‘He wanted

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to get on with it. I suspect with John, whether he lost or won [in 2010], he was only there for a three- or four-year period. He wanted to make sure that he left a legacy,’ says O’Brien. ‘John knew we were running out of time … What did he want from me? He wanted me to get people cracking, get people moving, get people motivated. That was it. It wasn’t a feigned thing, the action-man persona. It was John.’ The trouble for Brumby, from 2007 onwards, was that he often didn’t get to choose the action. Political taxis long ago sent out to drive around suburban and regional Victoria began arriving back at the doors of 1 Treasury Place. Melbourne’s train system ground to a halt; the costs of the myki public transport ticketing system blew out; the implementation of another much-heralded information technology project, Ultranet, was dogged by scandal and cost blowouts; the rollout of smart meters to 2.5 million houses to gauge electricity usage was politically disastrous; alcohol- and drug-fuelled violence flared in the CBD; legislation restricting live music venues was mishandled; assaults on international students, many of them Indian nationals, became international news, together with concerns that at least some of the attacks were racially motivated; and the premier’s own office became entangled in a byzantine, tortuous campaign to replace Victorian Labor state secretary Stephen Newnham with one of his staff members, Nick Reece. Allegations of political interference with the Windsor Hotel redevelopment by the office of planning minister Justin Madden, together with the (ultimately dismissed) rape allegations made against major projects, industry and trade minister Theo Theophanous, were also controversial. Not only that, the state was hit by three disasters during Brumby’s term – one environmental (the Millennium Drought), one economic (the Global Financial Crisis) and one catastrophic (the Black Saturday bushfires). And, last but not least, the media – kept on a short chain during McCrohan’s tenure as media director – began to rebel, especially Fairfax’s The Age, which rightly believed Murdoch’s Herald Sun received preferential treatment with leaked ‘exclusives’.

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‘That last term, it was a hell of a ride,’ says O’Brien. And I can tell you that one thing that shook me was the complete difference – you know, I was deputy chief of staff [to Bracks] in the first term – the complete difference in the ability to manage issues, the media and attitude around the government … Didn’t get any breaks, not even a honeymoon period. There was no space for breathing.

One of the political taxis that most haunted Brumby was as unexpected as it was uncontrollable. It was a rogue taxi partially assembled by the Victorians that was a long time coming – and a longer time going. That taxi was called Kevin Rudd. Rudd first appeared on my radar during the 2004 federal election campaign, when the then shadow minister for foreign affairs launched his policy at Melbourne University’s Sidney Myer Asia Centre. When a clutch of advisors from Bracks’s office announced they were heading over to lend their support to federal Labor, I tagged along. It was the first time I’d seen Rudd in the flesh. My first impression was that the shadow foreign minister appeared to be all on his own – fronting an event that seemed superfluous to Mark Latham’s doomed campaign. My second impression was that Rudd loved the sound of his own voice – the man’s policy speech went for more than 40 minutes. My third impression was that, judging by the size of his policy document, Rudd didn’t know how or when to stop. Most campaign policy documents are short and sharp – a few dozen pages of prose at most that, hopefully, condense months of policy graft. Every idea should be supported with a fact and endorsed by a third party, every narrative flourish related to a larger story of where the state or nation is going and where it needs to go. If a policy document can’t, in 20 pages, tell the reader what’s right or wrong, and explain how what is right can be improved or what is wrong can be fixed, it is a failure. Rudd’s policy document, The Three Pillars, was a 145-page failure. It spoke of a pedagogue who didn’t know what to leave out. Journalist Annabel Crabb wrote, tongue-in-cheek:

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Highlights include an 86-year projection, in graph form, of estimated working-age populations in four Asian countries, and a solemn promise on page 126 that Labor would ‘reaffirm the policy of nonrecognition of the secessionist Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus’. News editors around the country quaked as Mr Rudd’s office offered to fax it through.1

In 2005, and increasingly through 2006, Rudd lapped the country, touching base with unions and factional players as he used the Sunrise morning television show to build a national profile. Trades Hall’s Brian Boyd says: What people don’t know is he did the rounds in 2006, all the way through ’05, ’06 – especially ’06. Rudd was doing all the factions round the country, and he’d been to Melbourne twice, and I was in meetings with him and others, and he was trying to persuade the Left to back him in – that Beazley wouldn’t win [the 2007 election]. It always sounds familiar, doesn’t it? … He didn’t look like a Labor person or whatever. He never impressed me.

Rudd was methodical – a hunter stalking prey. The kind of politician who might, when first meeting someone, type the particulars of that person – including pertinent family details – into his personal organiser while still talking to them. The kind of politician who, knowing that the Young Labor leaders of today are often the caucus members of tomorrow, would assiduously foster relationships with those fine young things. ‘He nagged the party into it, kept insisting,’ Bob Carr said in 2010. ‘He willed himself there. He couldn’t be overlooked. He was always in your diary or at your door.’2 Rudd was, in short, everything the recycled federal Labor leader of 2005 and 2006, Kim Beazley, was not: a politician prepared to do anything to win. At the time of Rudd’s first great hunt for the Labor leadership, Beazley’s press secretary was George Svigos, an unflappable South Australian recruited from the Bracks government. During his first

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week on the job, Svigos received a crash course in internal bastardry – trying to kill an anti-Beazley story leaked to the media by a member of federal Labor. He says: That was really surprising for me, because it had been virtually eradicated at a state level, that sort of backgrounding against your own side. So, it was a very different way of operating. And I guess that goes to how I was viewed up there, as a Victorian as well, which is, one, that we played with the gloves on in Victoria in politics, compared to the – sort of the bare-knuckled macho Sydney-style politics. And that macho Sydney-style politics was very much in vogue in Canberra at that time and Victoria was viewed as this – I don’t know – quaint, bohemian enclave of Australia, quite unlike anywhere else.3 I  remember people saying having too many Victorians in the leader’s office was a bad thing because it just made the leader’s office so out of touch with western Sydney … western Sydney being the focus group.

By November 2006, Rudd had joined forces with another unstoppable political force, Julia Gillard, and the focus group that was western Sydney had decided it was time for a change. Both Mark Arbib, general secretary of the NSW branch of the ALP, and Tim Gartrell, national secretary of the ALP, commissioned separate polling research and, according to Paul Kelly in his book Triumph and Demise, came to the same conclusion: the biggest single issue holding back the ALP from beating John Howard was Kim Beazley. He had to go. All that remained was to get Rudd’s story straight. Prepare him, like Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, for his close-up. The ALP’s then assistant national secretary, David Feeney, was recruited to lend a hand. Feeney called an old friend from his days in Victorian politics, Bill Shannon – the advertising maestro behind Bracks’s 1999, 2002 and 2006 campaign wins. Back in 1997, when Brumby, Bracks, Thwaites and Hulls holed up in a Kew hotel to thrash out the plans to defeat Kennett, Shannon was

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the one who helped turn those plans into a story that reflected what he calls the collective sentiment of Victorian Labor. ‘The world is driven by narrative, and it’s not just politics,’ Shannon says. ‘I really placed a lot of emphasis on what we did in those early days with the collective sentiment and the narrative and the story development – even if it was only to assist Steve.’ What Shannon is getting at is the power of simplicity. Whether it’s in a political advertisement or a speech, the temptation with many politicians is to try to say everything and, as a consequence, they say nothing. The most important decisions a politician makes are the ones about what part of their story they can leave unsaid. In short, the hardest part of political communications is having the confidence to say just one thing – and say it plainly. To explain who you are, where you come from and what you want to do, in everyday language rather than jargon. The NSW Right wanted to give Rudd a screen test before they backed him against Beazley. Feeney and Rudd flew down to Melbourne and spent a day in the studio with Shannon and Steve Crabb, an elder statesman of Labor Unity and a former minister in the Cain and Kirner governments. Shannon says: It always seemed a bit sneaky, but we agreed to do it. We spent a day with him filming him and developing his story and I think that was a pretty important point in time for Rudd because we were able to get from him – and he was quite obliging, I’ve got to say – an emotional connection that I don’t think had been there until that particular day … That was a pretty important session. Those tapes are pretty bloody valuable because it was one of the best-kept secrets. It never got out that there was a piece of campaigning happening to a then shadow minister, to go as far as actually filming to see how he could perform and how he could tell his story.

Arbib must have liked what he saw on those tapes, because, on 4  December 2006, Rudd replaced Beazley as leader of the federal opposition.

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Seven weeks later, in January 2007, the ALP released a 91-second advertisement.4 Rudd, dressed in chinos and a pale blue shirt, stands with an elbow on a fencepost and a hand in his pocket. As he moves from the personal (his family’s experience with education) to the political (an Australia-wide education revolution), his friendly tone becomes firmer, more like a leader’s. He concludes with a vision for Australia’s future as ‘a strong economy, but one where we don’t throw the “fair go” out the back door’. The advertisement, written by Rudd and building on his work with Shannon, is a lo-fi masterpiece, the campaign equivalent of Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged, with the Labor leader looking and sounding like a bookish everyman, someone’s nerdy dad. What Shannon did with Rudd – as he had done with Bracks – was perform an act of political alchemy, helping turn naked ambition into narrative gold. Rudd rode to victory on the back of the kernel of a story captured in that 91-second ad, becoming the phenomenon that was ‘Kevin ’07’ followed by the monster that was almost everything after. The Victorians hadn’t finished tinkering with Rudd. In 2006, Bracks, together with SA premier Mike Rann, established an alternative to COAG – the Council for the Australian Federation (CAF). Based on a Canadian model, CAF became a forum for the state and territory governments to come up with new policy ideas free of federal intervention. In April 2007, CAF decided, due to the inaction of the Howard government, to tackle climate change by creating Australia’s answer to the UK’s Stern Review. Rudd was asked to commission the review through CAF, and Professor Ross Garnaut was chosen to produce what became the Garnaut Climate Change Review. Garnaut’s review – which laid the groundwork for the Gillard government’s carbon emissions trading scheme – was run out of Moran’s DPC. Why? ‘I knew I’d be working with a very strong public service,’ Garnaut says. ‘It was an excellent state government … Bracks and Brumby were both people who were comfortable with reform ideas.’ The Victorians may have been, as Garnaut says, an excellent state government, but they were behaving more and more like a federal government in waiting. On Australia Day 2007, Howard

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had delivered a speech outlining a poorly constructed, but richly endowed, plan to save the Murray–Darling river basin – spending $10 billion buying up water entitlements, mostly in New South Wales and Queensland, and taking over the states’ powers to regulate the river system. Bracks showed some initial interest, but the more the Victorians investigated Howard’s plan, the more alarmed they became by its lack of detail. Not to mention the fact that Howard was acting without cabinet approval. When Howard met the premiers to discuss his Murray–Darling plan on 8 February, Bracks gave the prime minister a bollocking for being vague and ill-prepared. Bracks told the PM, ‘You wouldn’t operate a cabinet in this way. I would throw out any proposal from a minister that had not been tested in cabinet.’5 Bracks’s intransigence won wide support in regional Victoria. ‘The stance taken by Victorian Premier Steve Bracks … is the only course of action a responsible government could take,’ wrote Simon Ramsay of the Victorian Farmers Federation in The Age on 2 March 2007. Moran then facilitated the production of a Victorian rescue plan for the Murray–Darling basin – a plan that would, ultimately, be adopted by the Rudd government. Bracks says: ‘We had a more developed irrigation system, we had better farm-gate improvements, we had better water savings, which we gave to the national agenda. We didn’t want to see it as a one-size-fits-all policy, which advantaged the poorest performing states. There was an agenda to it.’ When COAG met, Bracks was now the leader of the premiers, and Moran the leader of the premiers’ secretaries – pitting Bracks against Howard and Moran against Peter Shergold, the head of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet. ‘Not everyone was entirely comfortable with the extent of the Victorian leadership of it,’ says Rod Glover. ‘That’s the Terry style. To give you an example, the senior ministers, heads of premiers’ [departments] – Terry controlled those meetings. There’s no question about that. COAG meetings, the precursors to COAG meetings, the heads of departments of premiers and prime ministers – that was basically a Shergold–Terry clash. It was a battle.’

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Howard’s last COAG – held in Canberra’s Parliament House on 13  April 2007 – was fascinating to watch unfold for Chris Barrett, by now deputy secretary of the DPC. COAG was meeting to discuss Victoria’s proposed national reform agenda. Howard was playing passive-aggressive politics – giving public support to the agenda, but holding back from committing the funding needed to start investing in the education and health services that would drive national improvements in ‘human capital’. Barrett says: The difficulty was [the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet] didn’t want to hand over any money for it, because they were under instructions from the prime minister. And I used to have these hilarious conversations in back corridors, where Commonwealth Treasury people would pull me aside and say, ‘There’s money for this. You just need to keep pushing.’

Barrett couldn’t help but be impressed by Howard’s political skills: It was the first time I’d ever been in the cabinet room … It was the first time I’d seen John Howard in the flesh, which was exciting and weird at the same time. And Howard then sat around the table and completely stonewalled. The whole deal was on a silver platter and he wouldn’t do anything … It was really interesting to watch his technique, too. I had to admire it. Because he’s known as being a bit deaf he was really clever at, occasionally, just pretending not to hear something. It was quite masterful, watching how he operated.

Finally, Howard blinked – committing $200 million to a national initiative to tackle type 2 diabetes and another $40 million over four years for education and training programs for Indigenous Australians living in remote areas. It was $100 billion short of the total commitment in funding needed to make the national reform agenda a reality, but it was a start. In the end, the prime minister couldn’t resist the Victorian proposal, because – after almost six years of national mania

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over border security – the Commonwealth didn’t have a domestic policy reform agenda to call its own. ‘Howard was the great opportunist,’ Bracks says. He’d seize on something to illustrate a narrative, and Tampa was a good example of that – GST was saving his leadership from crumbling when he was in trouble in his first term. So, he was an opportunist, grabbing hold of things, but that’s not to denigrate him. He was very good at it. He was one of the best opportunists you’ll ever see, but the cost of that is that you don’t have coherent, long-term policy development. That was not his strong suit. It was surprising, therefore, that he would accept from a state Labor government a policy prescription, which he did.

Pallas, formerly an internal critic of Moran’s policy crusade, was happy to be proven wrong: Terry kept going away and bringing back consultant study after consultant study. I’m going, ‘Tell me how this actually converts into anything, because we’ve got to convince John Howard to introduce our agenda of reform for the nation. People might think we’re getting a  little bit ahead of ourselves.’ But, as it transpired, they were so bereft of an agenda themselves to drive the next wave of productivity reforms they needed it.

Then again, federal Labor wasn’t any better than Howard. They had fought and lost three elections over 11 years as an alternative government and had next to nothing to show for it – other than a toxic caucus. When Rudd became leader, the Victorians saw a chance to start again, and define the policy thinking of a man who could be the next prime minister. In 2007, Bracks made an irregular request of Moran’s department. Would they brief the leader of the federal opposition on Victoria’s proposed national reform agenda? Moran’s response was artfully

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apolitical. He invited both Rudd and Howard to come to the DPC for an in-depth briefing. Howard declined the invitation; Rudd jumped at the chance. It was March 2007 – three months into Rudd’s leadership – when he arrived at 1 Treasury Place with an exhausted entourage of political staffers in tow. A dozen of the best and brightest members of Moran’s policy machine were waiting for the federal opposition leader on the second floor. They spent four hours walking Rudd through a briefing pack with more than 100 detailed PowerPoint slides. It was a remarkable moment in the history of the federation – a future prime minister being briefed on his domestic policy agenda by a roomful of Victorian public servants. ‘It’s not standard bureaucratic process, I’ll put it that way,’ says one of the DPC public servants in the room that day. Moran says: We just methodically went through a whole lot of topics, policy topics, in the slide deck, and Kevin, the day after or the day after that, was going to give a major speech on education, so he got [a DPC official] to do more work with him later that night to shape aspects of that because [that official] had done work on early childhood and spoke on its importance and that took Kevin’s fancy. What Kevin did was characterise Commonwealth–state relations, which he’d been involved with earlier in his life, as dysfunctional, and he would stop the blame game and fix it. But he, early on, had a passing understanding of what Steve Bracks and myself had been bowling up to Howard.

Rudd, one DPC official says, was a quick learner: ‘The argument that Steve ran about social policy through economic means became a very key national argument because at the time the economy was booming – right? – but in fact the economy was capacity constrained and inflation was a risk … And Rudd latched on to that kind of stuff.’ A few days after his DPC briefing, on 8 March 2007, Rudd delivered a major speech at a breakfast hosted by the Global Foundation. The ‘human capital’ ideas developed and honed by the DPC over the previous four years featured prominently. ‘Our competitor nations are

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investing heavily in education, and they are leaving us behind,’ Rudd said. ‘That is why we need new investment at all levels of education, training and skills – from early learning and pre-school to schools, TAFEs, universities and research … We must have a total focus on long-term policies that will prepare us for life beyond the mining boom. We need a new wave of reform.’6 The thinking, even the language, was straight from the DPC’s A Third Wave of National Reform. Rudd was now inside the Victorian tent. Brumby advisor Nick Reece remembers sitting in a meeting with Rudd, Brumby and Rudd staffer David Epstein: ‘He bowled in at Treasury Place and said, “We’re going to implement the national reform agenda” … From the very start there was an acknowledgement from federal Labor that this model was how they wanted to approach it.’ As the 2007 federal election campaign drew close, the Victorians’ policy influence increased. Reece flew to Sydney to work out of the ALP’s campaign headquarters near Central Station. Glover took a twomonth unpaid sabbatical from the DPC and flew to Sydney, working as part of a 12-person policy unit in the campaign headquarters. Once he was there, Glover handled rapid responses to Howard government policy announcements and wrote what became the bedrock of Labor’s campaign platform along Victorian lines. ‘They didn’t need a lot of convincing. Rudd would just listen to everything we said on federalism,’ Glover says. ‘What we were trying to do in that campaign was differentiation [from Howard], but minimum differentiation … Part of what you were trying to do with Kevin was [demonstrate] he’s a very, very safe pair of hands. He’s not radically different.’ Brumby saw the Kevin ’07 version of Rudd as an updated version of Howard. ‘He was modern, he was fresher, he was cleaner – he was all of those things to a lot of voters,’ he says. ‘And his message for Australia about a responsible budget, a strong economy, a place in the [Asia-Pacific] region, the broadband revolution, the education revolution, attack on climate change – all of those things were consistent with where we were. His whole positioning was right. And he told that story pretty well.’

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Despite their influence, the Victorians still weren’t sure about Rudd. In August 2007, the Labor premiers started caucusing among themselves when Rudd said, if elected, he might call a referendum for the power to take over the running of the nation’s hospitals from the states. It was an indicator of Rudd’s unilateralist mode of governance. ‘All of the state premiers at the time agreed to just let him go, that he was just grandstanding,’ says Brumby. ‘He was just looking for a fight with the states and we wouldn’t appease him by giving him that fight. We’d just ignore it.’ On election night – 24 November 2007 – Steve and Terry Bracks hosted a party at their home in Williamstown. After Howard conceded, Rudd gave his victory speech in front of a crowd at Suncorp Stadium in Brisbane. In the annals of victory speeches, it was a joyless dirge. ‘Everyone in the room was quite flat,’ says one party guest, ‘when they should have been bouncing off the walls.’ While watching the speech, Bracks remarked: ‘Isn’t this a weird feeling? You want to be so excited that we’ve beaten Howard and Howard’s gone, but I just can’t get excited about this bloke.’

The Smartest Person in the Room

I received two job offers during the life of the first Rudd government. The first came in the summer of 2007–08 from Peter Garrett, the newly minted minister for the environment. I flew to Sydney and met Garrett. Found him to be the kind of down-to-earth, principled politician worth upending my personal life for, which is what working in a political office entails – the surrender of the enlistee’s life, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to the vagaries of the political gods. There were just two problems: Kirsten and I, together with our kids – Sophie, seven; Noah, five; and Zoe, six months – would have to move from Melbourne to either Sydney or Canberra; and, rather than work as a speechwriter, I would have to suit up again as a press secretary. It was a demotion. I knew it was a dumb job offer and an unworkable arrangement, but, much to the exasperation of Kirsten, was desperate to say yes. Blame Rupert Murdoch for my desperation. In 1990, as a young journalist, I had just been appointed to move from the Melbourne newsroom of The Sun News-Pictorial to the Canberra press gallery when Rupert flew in from New York, sacked my editor, Colin Duck, and merged The Sun and The Herald – creating the tabloid behemoth now known as the Herald Sun. My Canberra job walked out the door with Duck. There would be no press gallery for me. Canberra was a mirage. Within two years, I was working as a departmental speechwriter. 299

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In 2007–08, part of me – the part that never grew up – saw the Garrett job offer as an opportunity to finally experience national politics from the inside. I sought out my old boss, Sharon McCrohan, hoping that she could help me find a way to work an unworkable situation. McCrohan shook some sense into me. I was, she told me, too old and had too many young kids to be a federal press secretary. ‘Don’t be a fucking idiot,’ Sharon said. I knocked back the Garrett job. The second job offer wasn’t so dumb. Following his pro bono work in the 2007 campaign, Rod Glover was hired by Kevin Rudd, joining his private office as a strategic advisor with responsibility for COAG. One of the first things Glover did was start lobbying for Rudd to bring his old boss, Terry Moran, up to Canberra to run the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet. Glover explains the rationale behind poaching Moran: ‘Terry’s good to blow something up and rebuild it. And that – building something big and grand – is what he does brilliantly. No one does it as well.’ Chris Barrett, who followed Glover up to Canberra to become chief of staff to treasurer Wayne Swan, says Moran was ‘a guy who had this enormous energy and was a fountain of ideas’. When Moran worked with Bracks, Barrett says, the premier ‘understood instinctively in a way that Kevin Rudd never did – even though it wasn’t like he wasn’t told by people – that this is a guy who’s a racehorse. He’s incredibly high performance, but impatient and you need to align that impatience with what you want to get done. If you do that you’ll get amazing results.’ Moran became secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet in March 2008. His former deputy, Helen Silver, replaced him at the Department of Premier and Cabinet. Soon, other members of Moran’s policy machine were drifting north to Canberra, including Ben Rimmer. They were moving on because Victoria’s era of policy invention was over – the time for implementation had begun. The changeover from invention to implementation began on 20 December 2007, when, for the first time, COAG met outside

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Canberra. The venue was Melbourne’s Government House – the whitewashed, Italianate-style mansion that, from the Flinders Street side of the Yarra, can be seen peeping over the treed canopy of the Botanical Gardens. Given that the meeting was being held to finalise the national reform agenda deal that Howard had baulked at in April, Rudd’s decision to bring the federation back to its first home1 was, in effect, a genuflection towards the Victorians. It proved to be an historic COAG, with the communiqué announcing that the Commonwealth, states and territories – all Labor governments – had signed up to a reform working bee. COAG would meet four times in 2008. Seven working groups, each overseen by a Rudd minister, would tackle reform in the areas of health and ageing, productivity, climate change and water, infrastructure, business regulation and competition, housing, and Indigenous affairs. The working groups had until March 2008 to develop implementation plans for national reform, with the first target the Victorian suggestion to radically reform and reduce the number of specific purpose payments. The communiqué said: ‘COAG agreed to a new model of cooperation underpinned by more effective working arrangements … COAG agreed on the urgency of progressing the reform work program to increase the productive capacity of the economy, address the inflationary pressures that are emerging, and to deliver a higher quality of service to the Australian community.’ Glover says: ‘The final deal was almost the perfect deal … There was politics in it. There was a little bit of moving at the edges, but it was pretty much the deal we wanted four years earlier – and it still sticks. It’s $130 billion of Commonwealth expenditure that’s refocused. It’s big, big bucks. It will just take time.’ Barrett says: They lifted it entirely from the work that we had done. And that was the intention … It’s to Rudd’s great credit that he did just basically pick it up, basically, lock, stock and barrel, and then pretty much implemented it. The fact that it was done fairly quickly and without

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too much blueing skewers really how fundamentally powerful that agenda will be over time.

With Rudd adopting Victoria’s reform agenda, it made sense for Moran and many of his stormtroopers to be closer to the action in Canberra. One bureaucrat explains: ‘2008 was a kind of euphoric period where there were these fantastic ideas and there was money – and most big policy reform relies on money to grease the wheels of change.’ I was also given a chance to be closer to the flame when Moran telephoned in December 2008. The secretary told me that James Button – a wellregarded Melbourne journalist and son of the late John Button – had been hired to write speeches for Rudd in the prime minister’s department. Did I want to join James in Canberra and write speeches for the PM as well? There were two catches: Button would be the senior speechwriter, and I would have to move my family to Canberra. Once again, I was tempted; once again, there were problems. The pinnacle for a speechwriter is to write for a prime minister. However, I would be working in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, not Rudd’s office in Parliament House, where he already had a speechwriter, Tim Dixon. I would be in the wrong building and third in line, behind Dixon and Button, in the speechwriting pecking order. I didn’t see how I could make it work. I flew to Canberra and met with Mike Mrdak, the department’s deputy secretary, bumping into a surprising number of people I knew from 1 Treasury Place. I spent a few sleepless nights searching the internet for an affordable home. I was tempted, but, in the end, said no. One of the main reasons I did say no was, by late 2008, I doubted that Rudd – unlike Bracks and Brumby – was worth the trouble. The word from Canberra was that the Rudd government was shambolic. Barrett saw it firsthand from the vantage point of the treasurer’s office. ‘There was really only one centre to that government and it was in one bloke’s head, and no one else could work inside it, and it was extremely badly run,’ he says. ‘Julia [Gillard] and Wayne [Swan] were the two who had to kind of go in and stop every mad idea. And

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basically, at a certain point, as he got more and more Colonel Kurtz, over time they couldn’t influence him. And at that point, once their political capital with him dwindled to zero, then you know there was no prime ministership anymore.’ For Barrett, the comparison with Victoria was stark: I used to watch Steve in cabinet and just be so impressed by the emotional intelligence of the guy. To understand where each person was coming from, whether they had a sufficient hearing, whether they had their nose out of joint because someone had said ‘X’, whether it mattered that they had their nose out of joint or whether they were just being precious. How he could strategically use the fact that Brumby was always happy to run headfirst at 100 miles an hour at a brick wall and see if he could knock it down – same with Hulls. Different skills that Thwaites had. Understanding how all that came together. And understanding, also, when he couldn’t get a decision that day and he needed to push it off. How he used the public service to make sure that he was briefed twice before cabinet … And, you know, cabinet, in the end, was this relatively short meeting – two or three hours. Contrast that with Canberra, where it was an entirely one-man show, entirely top down, where the person at the top didn’t have any regard for the skills of the people around the table. As far as he was concerned, they could all be vegetables. Everything had to proceed only to the extent that he had been briefed on it – and he refused, usually, to be briefed. And, so, the cabinet meetings, and cabinet committee meetings, which he insisted on attending most of, ended up being briefing sessions for the PM, and meant that huge amounts of new papers needed to be commissioned on the spot – and we’d come back to things three and four times over. Meetings would go for seven hours. Longer. And everyone – the whole government – would have to fly around Australia to wherever he was. Sometimes, inter­ nationally. Meetings on planes to Papua New Guinea and all sorts of stuff like that. And no respect for the public service’s advice. No ability to commission Terry to crack heads together and get results.

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Almost zero political work being done, other than being called up by a 25-year-old advisor and being told that your boss just had to agree to this. All that kind of stuff. They are almost polar opposites. I find it difficult to imagine two more different governments.

Glover lasted only ten months in Rudd’s office, quitting in October 2008. ‘My main job, apart from delivering the reform agenda, the main job, was to make him prioritise. And I left because I couldn’t manage that – “I give up” – and that role was never filled again,’ he says of Rudd. He did a lot of things that were actually great, and I’m sure his heart’s in the right place and his values are good. And he would do surprising things like, I was his health advisor as well, and every time he’d go to a hospital, he’d be on the phone for an hour to parents of kids who are dying … but he couldn’t take that humility into a context where he could sit in a room and listen to a range of opinions and not think he’s the smartest guy in the room. It’s such a problem … Rather than listen to many views and massage a view, he would actually be smack bang in the middle of the debate on everything, on micro issues that should have been a million miles away from him.

Rudd wasn’t the only one who felt the need to be the smartest person in the room. Of the people who worked with and for him, the most common criticism people make of Brumby is his intellectual pride. Nobody worked as long or as hard, covered as much ground, spoke to as many people, read as many briefing notes. Nobody. And that work rate, sustained through 25 years of public life, coupled to a ferocious competitive drive, made Brumby more than just a formidable opponent in an argument – the man was a Panzer tank. Sooner or later, he was always going to tackle Rudd. Under Rudd, COAG met ten times in the two-and-a-half years between December 2007 and April 2010. That’s a meeting every few months. Under Howard, the previous ten meetings had taken almost

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six years to accrue, between June 2001 and April 2007. On the face of it, Rudd took cooperative federalism seriously, more than doubling the work rate of COAG, but how he and Brumby behaved towards each other became less and less cooperative. ‘You could have predicted that it would have got to that point without knowing how it was going to get to that point,’ says one federal Labor identity who knows both men. ‘I say that because of the styles of the two people … Forget what issue it is, but Kevin would want to have his way and in a way that wouldn’t show any respect or regard – and John would respond, as anyone would, and then you add the Brumby character on top of that and then you’ve got a pretty volatile mix.’ Tim Holding says: John Howard and Steve Bracks both had the capacity – Steve because of his innate values and style and Howard because of the decades he’d spent in politics and the disappointments and vicissitudes of his political life – neither of them let ego get in the way of the outcomes that were politically necessary for each of them … John Brumby and Kevin Rudd were not like that. On the national stage, I think the two of them just ran into each other like irresistible forces and immovable objects, because both of them believed they were the smartest person in the room. Out of the two of them, John Brumby is the smarter person.

‘In the COAG meetings,’ Brumby says, the reality is, for most of those other premiers at the time, none of them said anything or thought anything or introduced any new ideas. They were just go-alongs … I had two jobs. One, was to introduce new ideas and to test Rudd and make sure that the idea worked, but, when we agreed on a strategy, to round up the other states as well and make sure that they were all in line. I would have thought that my role was constructive.

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Rudd thought otherwise. In the lead-up to the first COAG of 2008 – held in Adelaide on 26 March – Rudd’s private office warned him about Brumby. Rudd wanted to succeed where Howard had failed – signing Queensland, New South Wales, South Australia and Victoria up to a Commonwealth-controlled plan to rescue the droughtravaged Murray–Darling basin. Rudd was told to leave Brumby alone in the COAG meeting room and let the bureaucrats work out a side deal with the Victorians. Glover says: It was basically saying, ‘You’re smarter than everyone in the room – apart from Brumby – and he will tear you apart in Commonwealth–state relations.’ And he did. He’s just tougher. And Kevin thought he was tough in that space and he could run rings around the other premiers, but not Brumby … That was the one instruction at COAG, ‘You have the fight in the room with everyone else, because you’ll win, and we’ll work it out in advance with Victoria because you don’t want to fight Brumby in the room.’ He went and fought and lost and learned the lesson $1 billion later.

‘Brumby,’ says another participant in the COAG meeting, ‘literally pulled out a big map and explained it to Kevin. Actually showed him on the map, “Let me explain it to you.” … And he was actually explaining some basic concepts as well, because Kevin was quite a bit behind the eight ball … It really pricked that, “How dare he?” And that stuck for quite a while.’ Brumby walked away from the COAG meeting with an agreement from Rudd that the Commonwealth would kick in $1 billion to complete stage two of his pet project to modernise the irrigation system in the Goulburn Valley – which, by this time, had been branded as the Foodbowl Modernisation project. Brumby was delighted. A few months later, when some irrigators in the Valley began protesting about water being sent from north of the Great Dividing Range to Melbourne, Brumby drove up the Hume Highway to Shepparton and, on 26 August, delivered a landmark speech, like Bracks before him,

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linking the project to the Snowy Mountains Scheme and bragging about his ability to ‘leverage’ money for the Valley from Canberra: ‘Our government has used Stage 1 to leverage another $1 billion in investment from the federal government. This Commonwealth funding, which will enable us to save 425 billion litres of water, is unprecedented, and makes the Foodbowl Modernisation project one of the largest regional investment projects ever undertaken in Victoria.’ Over the next two years, Rudd became Brumby’s personal ATM: spitting out money for research into a carbon capture and storage pilot project to combat climate change, the development of a hybrid Camry by Toyota, and the construction of the Comprehensive Cancer Centre. ‘I want to come back in a future life and negotiate things with Kevin Rudd,’ says one Canberra player who witnessed the negotiations. It’s amazing. He just gives away absolutely everything. He just thinks it’s all about money … Kevin underestimated everyone. Kevin genuinely thinks everyone in the rest of the world is a fuckwit … He doesn’t think there’s a single other intelligent being on this planet. I’m not overstating that. And, particularly, people who are self-evidently smart and on top of their brief and don’t kowtow to him, he despises. He’s deeply threatened by. Deeply angry at. It became a very toxic relationship very quickly.

Behind closed doors, Rudd started referring to the People’s Republic of Victoria and calling Brumby a terrorist. In one meeting, Rudd complained that every conversation with the Victorian premier ended up costing $1 billion. The prime minister was not amused when another participant in the meeting quipped that their conversations with Brumby usually cost $100 million. Rudd’s mistake, according to one senior bureaucrat with state and federal experience, is common among the Commonwealth politicians and public servants:

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Canberra has an entirely unrealistic sense of its own importance. They genuinely – and this is Canberra ministers in the Howard government and the Labor government – they believe that if they’re the health minister, they’re responsible for the health system of the country in every respect … They just don’t understand that they’re a long way away from systems that actually have to work on the ground. They’re a long way away from real economies. Economies are regional, they’re not national, but no one thinks in that space. And they have a presumption that they have to be heavily involved in a detailed sense at the Commonwealth level because the states can’t do it, and it’s kind of the other way around … They need to be less involved. Their role is to be selective in the way they use their authority.

On 11 October 2008, Rudd gave a petulant display of his sense of authority at the ALP state conference in Melbourne. State conferences in Melbourne bear little resemblance to their glitzier cousins in Sydney. They’re held on Saturdays in dowdy venues – such as the World Trade Centre, with its East Berlin architectural stylings, or the Moonee Valley Racecourse, where tracksuits are formalwear – and have the feel of a low-rent trade show rather than a place of political revival. On 11 October, Australia was just beginning to wake up to the Global Financial Crisis. I’d spent three days working on Brumby’s speech for the state conference, cranking through ten drafts. Like most of my Brumby speeches, it was more perspiration than inspiration – crammed with detail, reading more like an essay than a script for a spoken-word performance. That was the way Brumby worked, leaving nothing unsaid, going through every possible permutation right up until the last minute. The premier’s speech teed off with the recent $500 million in public housing funding – an historic reform pushed through by housing minister Richard Wynne – then, in typical Brumby fashion, unloaded a truckload of information about almost everything that the government was doing. The most important part of the speech, for me, was the part where he spoke about the upcoming Transport Plan for

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Victoria – a $38 billion program for improving Melbourne’s roads, rail, trams and buses. The stand-out initiatives of the plan were $4 billion for a new train line through Melbourne’s western suburbs and $4.5 billion for a rail tunnel under the CBD, linking the east and west of the city.2 It was a good policy, but years too late. At the end of his speech, Brumby was supposed to introduce Rudd. As he approached the end, though, he noticed something strange. George Svigos3 – who had returned to Melbourne to serve as the premier’s media director after Beazley lost the leadership to Rudd – was standing at the front of the stage, waving a piece of paper, trying to get his attention with a message. Rudd wasn’t ready to come onstage. Tom Cargill,4 one of Brumby’s senior advisors, had gone to the green room and told Rudd that it was time to come downstairs and deliver his speech. Rudd said, sure, he just had to finish something. Rudd was still writing his speech. Cargill rushed downstairs and told Svigos there was a problem. That’s when Svigos wrote a message on a piece of paper and went to the front of the stage. Cargill says: This is all with the cameras rolling, and George is standing there trying not to let Brendan [Donohoe, a Channel 7 journalist] see the sign. It was like a minute to go and I’m, like – panic stations! – and, so, run upstairs and say, ‘Really, he’s just gotta come! You know, dead air’ … And he’s getting his hairspray on. And so I turn to Julia [Gillard] and say, ‘Can you come down?’ And she said, ‘Well, what am I going to do?’ ‘Don’t know. But, right now, nothing’s going to happen, so can you come down and pad or something?’ So, unbeknownst to me, downstairs, John’s got to the end of his speech and said, ‘Now welcome to the stage the Labor Party’s newest hero’ – and Stephen Newnham walks out.

Gillard ended up on the stage with Brumby. The premier and his former chief of staff traded banter until the prime minister descended from the green room. Unfortunately, Rudd’s speech wasn’t worth the

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wait. It was long and tedious, only coming to life in the middle when a fire alarm started ringing incessantly, and Rudd riffed brilliantly about why the bell was tolling for the Liberal Party. The trouble was that, as soon as the bell stopped ringing, Rudd, like a somnambulist, returned to the monotony of his prepared speech. The tight, bright, firm Labor leader who had featured in that 91-second TV advertisement back in January 2007 was nowhere to be seen.

Running Out of Friends

Governments are like dogs: they age quickly. The sins of omission and commission accumulate, the passage of time accelerates, the arteries of opportunity narrow and the ambition to chase cars to Canberra diminishes. Some governments stay in their flea-bitten beds and chew old toys. Others strain at the enclosures of their yards, and become liable to bark or bite without warning. Whatever the case, sooner or later all are put to sleep when the electorate takes a liking to a new puppy. I was inside the Kirner government as the day of its political euthanasia approached. The feeling was unforgettable. Many of the members of that – and other – governments have likened the sensation to the fall of Rome. From where I sat – as a 23-year-old public servant churning out speeches and media releases – it felt more like being on a commercial airliner attempting a crash landing. In the countdown to the 2010 state election, many of the hardheads in the premier’s office buckled themselves into their seats and prepared for landing. I started looking for an emergency exit. My decision to leave politics was made for me on Friday 22 May 2009. I’d driven west to the Mansion Hotel and Spa at Werribee Park for an off-site retreat with a few dozen senior staffers – chiefs of staff, directors of policy or strategy; those kinds of people. I had dinner and listened to Mike Kaiser, former assistant national secretary of the ALP, make a 311

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presentation where he said that, to win the next election, Victorian Labor needed to focus on themes rather than policies, and … nothing. I  didn’t feel anything other than an overwhelming need to get out of the room and drive back across the West Gate Bridge and see my family. I just didn’t want to be there anymore. I sat through Kaiser’s presentation and became quietly drunk. Slept in one of the overstuffed beds at the Mansion. Woke up, hung-over, on the Saturday morning. By breakfast time, a battalion of staffers had arrived at the Mansion to spend the day war-gaming for the 2010 election. At one point, Brumby’s chief of staff, Dan O’Brien, spoke to the crowd and mentioned, in passing, that climate change wasn’t going to be an important issue in the campaign. I thought he was wrong and stood up and said so – and was politely ignored. There were 533 days to the next election, O’Brien told the room. ‘If we’re not staying for the campaign we have to be gone by November,’ I wrote in my diary that night. I was gone by August. Before I left, I sent around a long email, and said in closing: I’ve always considered my office to be a bus stop. Why, you ask? Simple: I am not part of the civil service. I am not permanent. I am here today, but someday soon I will be gone and someone else (maybe Ted Baillieu’s speechwriter) will be sitting at my desk looking out the side window at the back of the Old Treasury Building while the flashes go off intermittently inside the Registry Office, signifying the forging of a new union. In other words, the time at our disposal is finite. Governments – unlike the timeless eternity of the public service – have limited life spans and need to behave accordingly: agitating for progress, focusing on defining issues and moments, and realising that, although politics may be, as Bismarck said, the art of the possible, that does not mean, as Havel pointed out, that we should stop striving for the impossible.

Brumby kept striving for the impossible, even when, in the aftermath of the GFC, Canberra retreated from the national reform agenda – binning the idea of working collaboratively with the states

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and reverting to a command-and-control style of governance. By April 2010, John Brumby and WA premier Colin Barnett were the last premiers left standing up to an increasingly imperial Kevin Rudd. Relations hit an all-time low that April, when – after extensive COAG discussions about new models of funding and control, where hospitals would be paid according to the number of patients they treated and be directed by regional health boards – Rudd unilaterally decided to instead take over the running of hospitals from the states, and take back 30 per cent of GST revenue to pay for the hijacking. ‘It was the health stuff that just demolished the relationship. Demolished it completely,’ says Brumby. ‘Someone had a brain snap.’ In the lead-up to a two-day COAG meeting scheduled for 19 and 20 April 2010, Victoria responded by releasing a 32-page policy document that proposed local control of health services, a more equitable funding model and the national rollout of preventative health measures such as WorkHealth – a Brumby initiative to run preventative health checks on every employee in a Victorian workplace. ‘I know [Brumby] got a lot of pressure to do the deal over health,’ says Rod Glover. ‘He was right to fight on health. Health was a mess. It was a dumb idea. It was a Kevin special. [The Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet] should have said no … [Brumby] was fighting for a legacy, and not his own legacy. He was fighting for Steve’s legacy – he was fighting for the whole federalism debate. He believed it.’ ‘It ended up the whole cabinet was very negative about John and Victoria,’ says one member of the Rudd cabinet. ‘It didn’t have to be like that. John, just on a number of important things, like water, either didn’t quite know when to cut the deal – he just wanted to keep fighting – or, having cut the deal, would try and dodge some of the more detailed requirements of the deal. And that caused profound irritation.’ The usual ritual before a COAG meeting is for the prime minister, premiers and chief ministers to have dinner together at the Lodge. This time, Brumby came early for pre-dinner drinks with Rudd. They spoke for 45 minutes. ‘That was all part of trying to persuade me, to get

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me across the line,’ says Brumby. The other premiers were banking on the Victorian’s negotiating skills and native intransigence. During the day, Brumby had caucused with the other premiers, including NSW’s Kristina Keneally. Keneally told Brumby she wasn’t signing the health deal. By the next morning, her mind was changed. Brumby says: She rings up at about 7.15 in the morning and said she was just ringing as a courtesy. She’d had breakfast with the prime minister and she was going to sign the deal. And I said, ‘What the fuck did you do that for?’ I said, ‘Why did you do that? We won the debate. We won it. Why did you do that? Why did you snatch defeat from the jaws of victory?’ She said, ‘I got what I wanted.’ And I thought, ‘Of all the reasons why the public hates politicians.’ I thought, ‘What a classic answer. I got what I wanted.’ So, it wasn’t about health reform or anything else like that. It was just her support was contingent on something else, which would have been a frigging infrastructure deal or something for a rail line or some bullshit. So, ‘I got what I wanted.’ Great. I went back and I saw Colin Barnett and said we weren’t going to sign, and then the rest of the day disintegrated and then recovered. Around lunchtime it got adjourned, so I went in for a meeting with Rudd and we dragged Julia [Gillard] in as well, whose view was I should sign. We got a whole lot of compromises agreed, in terms of removing duplication, maintaining state autonomy, we got extra funding for hospital beds as well, and reluctantly I said I would sign – for which he was very grateful. Rudd was still adamant that if I didn’t sign, he would go to the Australian people with a referendum … It would have been just a catastrophe, apart from a shocking waste of money.

A week later, Rudd engineered his own demise when, instead of calling a double-dissolution election to break the federal opposition’s blockade of the legislation that would bring to life the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, he shelved the Bill. Within two months, following his mishandling of the Resource Super Profits Tax and a

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crash in the opinion polls, caucus removed Rudd from the Lodge. Seven months later, the Victorian electorate removed Brumby from 1 Treasury Place. Brumby lost to the Liberals’ Ted Baillieu by just two seats. Of all the issues that cost the Brumby government votes, I suspect the deciding blow was the economy. Too many Victorian families were finding life too hard. In the aftermath of the GFC, Brumby fast-tracked the construction of the Frankston Bypass to help stimulate the economy. Still, the state slowed. In 2009–10, Victoria’s population grew faster than its economy. On a per capita basis, the economy shrank. In other words, the year leading to the 2010 state election was not technically a recession, it just felt like one, and, with GST revenues down and $1 billion committed to bushfire restoration work, Brumby had no new money to spend. ‘The GFC fucked us in the biggest, most damaging way possible,’ says George Svigos. ‘It paralysed our ability to spend … So many of those ministers went through such brutal [Expenditure Review Committee] processes, that it just crushed them.’ Looking back at the third term of government, Rob Hulls says: It was more difficult because of the longevity and, as a result, the more conservative people in the show were of the view that we should move more to the right to get re-elected – and many of them, I suspect, would take the view that the social-justice reform agenda should take a back seat … I worked within that. I fought for us to be a real Labor movement, real Labor Party, because, if you stop reforming when it comes to access to justice or equality of rights, you’ve got to ask what you really do stand for.

The surest indication of the mental state of the government was the insipid policies it took to the 2010 election. Internally, the policy development process was driven by budgetary, rather than political, considerations. Andrew Herington, the policy guru of the previous two campaigns, was locked out of the policy development and relegated to a supporting role during the campaign. ‘My time was up. I’d had my

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turn and so I accepted it. I didn’t complain about it. I was just out of that loop,’ Herington says. As another Brumby staffer puts it: ‘Andrew was out of sync with the political zeitgeist.’ In Herington’s stead, Cressida Wall  –  a flame-haired South Australian working as chief of staff to major-projects minister Tim Pallas – was shanghaied into the premier’s office to coordinate policy development. Wall had six months to find, then finalise, the policies of an 11-year-old government. The pickings were slim, Wall says: We had several sessions – brainstorming sessions – where we’d go, ‘Well, what do we think Ms Narre Warren wants?’ And you’d try to come up with things but that was really hard … We had those documents about what we stand for and they had key lines, and they were really good but they were often reduced to a level of abstraction where anyone could have said that. You know, like, ‘We’re about health and education.’ As time goes on it’s just hard to identify things that we as a Labor movement really believe in that are actually reflective of how we act in government that are also popular … We just weren’t exciting enough to re-elect.

In the end, the process threw up only one policy that would qualify as popular – a Brumby idea to introduce mandatory two-week ‘boot camps’ for Year 9 students at every state secondary school in Victoria. ‘The reality is we ran out of puff a little bit towards the end, particularly in terms of new policy,’ says Brumby. ‘We needed two or three big fresh ideas and we couldn’t find them.’ During the campaign, Mary Delahunty – by now retired from politics – volunteered to help Maxine Morand’s re-election campaign, cold-calling hundreds of voters in Mount Waverley. Delahunty found the people she spoke to were sullen. ‘They didn’t want to talk,’ she says. ‘I’ve never encountered it in any doorknocking I’ve done, in any canvassing I’ve done. The door was closed.’ Morand lost her seat. Brumby staffer Tom Cargill felt a similar sentiment when he travelled to a Frankston polling booth with the premier on election day.

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This bloke walked past. He was probably a chippy. And he walked past with his mate and John went to hand him a how-to-vote card and he said, ‘Nah, thanks, John. I voted for you the last couple of times. That’s enough don’t you reckon, mate? That’s enough. Time for another lot.’ And as he walked past, I thought, ‘We could fucking really be in trouble today.’ Because it all summed it up. And he’d said it to the premier. And he’d said it straight to John’s face. And I thought, ‘Fuck, it’s not a good sign.’

In the end, the good sign that turned bad for the government was growth. Population growth and economic growth had been the mantra of the Bracks–Brumby years, but now, with the state growing by around 1500 people a week and the economy contracting, pockets of the community were becoming agitated. That agitation played out in different ways. Two old friends of mine – men who are born and bred Australians with Indian parents – told me, during the last few years of the Brumby government, they became magnets for racial abuse. Neither blamed Brumby. What they were experiencing was far more complicated than state politics. Victoria – like Australia – was growing and changing, and some people felt left out or left behind. Brumby’s cabinet was briefed on the issues bubbling to the surface a year out from the state election. According to the DPC’s polling, voters were concerned about housing affordability, law and order, immigration and population, and services such as public transport. ‘It was all about population growth,’ says Rod Glover, by now back at the department as a public servant, ‘which was what our research really came through clearly on.’ By then, though, it was too late. Politically, the passengers were strapped into their seats, the luggage was safely stowed, and the concrete of the runway was rising to kiss the rubber lips of the undercarriage. Brumby says: Our biggest fear was always that it would be a referendum on us and we knew if it was a referendum on us the likelihood is that after

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11-and-a-half years, you’ve got a shitload of baggage there, the wear and tear of time – bang – you’re likely to end up below the line. But how do you change that? There’s only two ways you can change it. You can have big, bold new ideas and you can make your alternative the focus of the campaign … We had a lot of big, bold new ideas; we had some but not enough. And, secondly, could we make Baillieu the target? We tried and we tried but we just couldn’t hit him.

There was, however, one tactic Brumby refused to try. At one point – before Stephen Newnham was replaced as state secretary by Nick Reece – ALP head office asked Brumby to approve a political ad that attacked Baillieu for owning works by renowned artist Bill Henson. The thinking behind the attack ad was crude: Baillieu would be damned by association because Henson had been the target of a tabloid media campaign after an exhibition of his work featured images of partially clothed adolescents. Brumby hated the idea and killed the attack ads. ‘There were people around who thought we should go much harder on Baillieu and link him to his comments on Henson, and so on, which I just thought was wrong for dozens of reasons,’ says Brumby. ‘It’s just the wrong thing to do.’ Brumby was also approached by a senior Labor figure in early 2010 and advised to dump up to four ministers and promote four young MPs to the cabinet. The four names put forward for the chop were Lynne  Kosky, Bob Cameron, Peter Batchelor and Tony Robinson. ‘There was a view put to me – four months out, six months out – I should have had a big bang and got rid of three or four like that, and done a generational change and brought in people like Wade Noonan and so on,’ says Brumby. I thought about that. I thought about that long and hard, because the proposition was put to me by a very well respected source in the party … but at the end of the day, you know, if I’d jumped a generation I think the instability running up to the election would have been too difficult to manage.

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Rudd’s failure to hold the line on climate change also hurt Victorian Labor. ‘[Climate change] should have been an issue that was much more owned as a party policy rather than the chop and change, really, around personalities and polling that we’ve seen at a national level, which seems to have driven the agenda,’ says Brumby. ‘It should have come up through the party, it should have been developed through the party, it should have been unambiguous in the party as one of the things that Labor stood for – not just Labor governments.’ Inevitably, there were recriminations after the election loss. Some blamed Brumby, some blamed Reece, some blamed Rudd, some blamed the premier’s private office for being factionally one-eyed and out of touch with the backbench, some blamed the advertising campaign for not being negative enough, some blamed the policies for not being good enough, some blamed everything and everyone. Ultimately, though, the words of legendary Labor Unity powerbroker Greg Sword come to mind when considering the 2010 result: ‘It’s got a lot to do with sentiment and circumstance.’ In other words, the sentiment among the majority of Victorians was that the Brumby government had run its race – that it was time to put the dog to sleep. Looking back on the final act of the government he led, Brumby is philosophical: We left the party in pretty good nick in Victoria, you know. Not perfect by a long shot, but I wouldn’t accept it’s a cot case, either. It’s in reasonable nick. We left the party finances in reasonable nick. Left the caucus in reasonable nick. And left our reputation with the public in reasonable nick. And, above all else, left the state in good nick … I don’t know if there’s much more you can do.

Brumby did manage to do one more thing before losing office – come to an unlikely reconciliation. ‘It wouldn’t be fair to say that it was always acrimonious, but it became’ – Brumby pauses, searching for the right word to explain his relationship with Rudd – ‘you know, it became poisonous,’ he says.

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Ironically with Kevin, after I finally signed on the health agreement, he was extraordinarily grateful and made the point to me that he wouldn’t forget … And when he started getting into trouble – particularly when he started getting into trouble, when his numbers started dropping away in the polls, when he walked away from climate change, when he was in deep shit – he used to come down here regularly and he’d always to ring me up and say, ‘I’ll be in Melbourne on Thursday’ or whenever, ‘Do you have an hour to spare?’ So, two or three times I went down to Treasury Place and it was just me and Kevin – talking about the world, chewing the fat. Everybody else had stopped talking to him … He ran out of friends.

Postscript: The Road to Ithaka

It was Friday 12 December 2014 – a beautiful summer’s day – and Williamstown Town Hall was packed for a state funeral. Every seat was taken in the auditorium, right up to the balcony. Outside, police were diverting traffic. Inside, despite the vaulted ceiling, the air in the hall was stifling. Bill Shorten was in attendance, Steve Bracks and John Brumby, too, together with John Cain, Joan Kirner, former Liberal premier Ted Baillieu and newly elected Labor premier Daniel Andrews. Almost all the ministers from the Bracks–Brumby years, including John Thwaites, Rob Hulls and Peter Batchelor, were seated near the front. Those who couldn’t make it – such as Andre Haermeyer, the former police minister now living in Germany – had good reasons for their absence. State funerals are often an odd mix of public and private. At times, it can be difficult to know which came first – the acknowledgement of a public life lived or the grief of a private life lost. With this funeral, it was easy to see what came first. The state funeral of Lynne Kosky – the Left minister who braved the barbs of her own faction to take a seat in the inner sanctum of the Bracks government, then volunteered for a bruising tour of duty as transport minister under Brumby – was a family affair. Kosky had died just five days after Victorian Labor, under the leadership of Andrews, had achieved what, at the time, was thought mission 321

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impossible in modern politics – the defeat of a first-term government. The ramifications of Andrews’s victory would reverberate. They were felt in Queensland, where Campbell Newman’s first-term state government was routed in January 2015, then Canberra, where, by February 2015, the first-term conservative government of Tony Abbott would become embroiled in an existential crisis over leadership and direction. That was all yet to play out on 29 November 2014, the night of the Victorian election, when a gravely ill Kosky sent Andrews a text message: ‘Well done Daniel Andrews. I can sleep well tonight.’ On 4 December, at the age of just 56, Kosky passed away at her home, surrounded by her family and friends. And now, a week on, their grief was public property. Kosky’s husband, Jim Williamson, didn’t speak at the funeral, but their children, Hana and Jackson, climbed the stairs to the wooden stage and gave heartfelt testimonies of the private side of a woman who had risen from the public schools of Melbourne’s industrial west to become a political powerbroker. Bracks spoke of her public life, Western Bulldogs president and lawyer Peter Gordon spoke of the young Kosky and her community campaigns for the western suburbs, while Andrews read ‘Ithaka’ – a poem about the journey of life by the great Greek poet CP Cavafy. ‘Ithaka’ was a poem I’d read but not fully appreciated until I heard it brought to life by the voice of the new premier. The poem begins with the lines: As you set out for Ithaka hope your road is a long one, full of adventure, full of discovery.

For Kosky, the road had been rocky at times, adventurous, and full of discovery – but not so long. Sitting in the crowd, I thought of the last time I’d seen her. It had been two-and-a-half years before, when I was researching this book. At the time, I knew Kosky was battling breast cancer. Knew the prognosis was poor. And, frankly, didn’t want to

postscript: the road to ithaka

intrude while she was receiving chemotherapy. Instead, I kept talking to other people, including Maxine Morand – a Kosky confidant. At the end of my interview with Morand, she asked whether I’d spoken to Kosky. I said I hadn’t. She told me to get in touch. Another former ministerial colleague called and told me to speak to Kosky before it was too late. I sent Kosky a text message and within a few weeks was sitting next to her in an oncology ward. We spoke for an hour while she received treatment for her cancer. What struck me, besides the detail of her recall and the smart, sharp, at times acidic take she had on the public events she lived through, was how unflinching Kosky was in the face of what proved to be a terminal diagnosis. She didn’t betray a flicker of self-pity in my presence. Instead, she laughed, gossiped, kept confidences and drew me into hers – enlisting me as an accomplice after the fact on a few of her hard-fought campaigns. She was a woman full of life. It was by far the most memorable interview I had in the preparation of this book. When I left Kosky’s side that day, I asked her whether it would be possible to come back and speak again. She smiled a megawatt smile and said, ‘Absolutely.’ But we never had that conversation. That’s because one cold winter morning a few weeks after our interview I walked outside to find where the paperboy had flung my newspapers and fell over. Couldn’t get up. Whenever I tried to stand, it felt as though I was halfway up a skateboard ramp. And then I started to vomit. And then I started to slur my words. Later that morning, a neurologist visited me in the emergency ward of Box Hill Hospital and informed me I’d had a stroke. I was 43. For much of the next two years, many things were put on hold, including my follow-up conversation with Lynne Kosky. Back in the Williamstown Town Hall, a slideshow of family snaps of Kosky was shown on a giant screen above the stage. The pictures were the kinds of images you’d find on any iPhone, except for the last frame. That last shot – an image that flashed on the screen, then disappeared – showed a woman who was unrecognisable from the smart, sharp former politician I’d sat next to in a hospital ward back in 2012. I thought, ‘That wasn’t Lynne.’ But it was. The same unflinching eyes

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were staring out from a face bloated by illness. And I thought showing that image at a state funeral was typical of the woman I’d known. Without apology or pretension, Lynne Kosky wanted to be seen as she was. After my stroke, I learned many lessons during my travels in the land of malady. For the purposes of this conclusion, I’ll restrict myself to three of those lessons. First, the road to Ithaka – whether it’s for governments or individuals – is short: we all have to make every mile count. Second, the measure of a person is how they respond to life in extremis. That’s why you never truly know a politician’s weaknesses until they have power, and you never truly know a person’s strengths until they are powerless. Third, given the brevity of the journey, there’s nothing to be scared of – not in life, not in politics. Sooner or later, we all will die and return to the earth, just as, sooner or later, every government will lose and return to opposition. What matters most, then, is not how much time we have, but what we do with the time we are given. Not a day can be wasted.

Acknowledgements

Catch and Kill is not the story of the Bracks–Brumby years, but a story. There are dozens of people – ministers and minders, bureaucrats and businesspeople, unionists and citizens – not mentioned in these pages who made sizeable contributions to progressive causes both within and without Victoria between 1993 and 2010. To tell this story of the leaders of the Parliamentary Labor Party within the confines of one volume, I had to leave unnamed many of those people and leave untold many of their stories. I hope other writers are able to tell those stories. For instance, there’s a powerful story waiting to be told about the long, unfinished march to equality by the women of Victorian Labor. Unless otherwise noted, the stories told within the pages of this book stem from my interviews with dozens of politicians, staffers and bureaucrats. I thank all of those who made the time to sit down with me. For the record, Kevin Rudd, Bob Hawke, Paul Keating and Peter Costello declined interview requests. One of the first people I spoke to was one of the great men of the Victorian branch of the ALP, John Cain. When I told Cain my sketchy plans for a book about power and progressive politics, he chimed in and said, ‘Then you’re going to have to talk about the factions.’ At the time, I politely disagreed with the former premier, but he was right – Catch and Kill is about the factions as much as anything else. 325

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Regarding factions, I feel the need to state that I am not and have never been a member of any faction of the ALP. Nor am I in the paid employ of the ALP or any of its affiliates. I am aligned to no one and beholden to no one; I work and write for myself. It is true that John Brumby asked me to tell a story about the Bracks–Brumby years, but, to his credit, Brumby never suggested what that story might be – although he did suggest I might go easy on the four-letter words. By the way, I make no apology for the profanity in the book. I wanted this story to be told in the private language of the political tribe, and that’s how political people speak. That’s because politicians and their staffers live in each other’s pockets, become family (in the best and worst meanings of the word) and speak to each other with a familial familiarity, with leaders playing the role of the big brother or sister and everyone else an obsequious or preening or annoying or rebellious or alienated younger sibling. There are no parents in politics. In writing this book, I have taken liberties with the time of many people. The person I have taken the most liberties with – at times without asking – was without a doubt my wife, Kirsten. To Kirsten I offer my humblest apologies and thanks. I am grateful to the principals of this book – Steve Bracks, John Brumby, John Thwaites and Rob Hulls – for the generosity of their time and their thoughtful contributions. I am indebted to Terry Moran for his time and input as well. I also want to thank, for a variety of reasons, Kim McGrath, Rod Glover, Richard Wynne, Brian Tee, Ben Hart, Elena Campbell, Mark Madden, Aileen Muldoon, Sharon McCrohan, Andrew Butcher and George Megalogenis. On the publishing front, John Hunter deserves credit for giving me the green light for what, at the time, seemed a nebulous endeavour, and my publisher, Alexandra Payne, deserves a medal for persevering with me through the long gestation of what, for a time, became a hopeless endeavour. As for my editor, Nikki Lusk, she has earned my thanks for her keen eye, and for making the editorial process a collaborative

acknowledgements

process. I’d also like to thank UQP editor Ian See for shepherding the manuscript through the production process. Much appreciated. I want to take this opportunity to name the sophists with whom I have travelled: Stephen Smyth, Kris Gough, Daniel Nellor, Tom Clark, my favourite speechwriter Sarah Dolan and my mentor Michael Gurr. I want to acknowledge the influence of Alf Batchelder – another inspiring teacher from St Kevin’s – in the construction of this roughand-ready history. Alf, I hope you approve. And, finally, I want to thank the people who helped this Humpty Dumpty put himself back together again after falling off the wall: Dr Kathryn Theodossiou; Professor Christopher Bladen; my mother, Penny Powell; my children, Sophie, Noah and Zoe; and my wife, Kirsten. Kirsten, you have saved my life in more ways than one. Being a speechwriter by trade, I’ll leave you with a quote. This one is from Steve Bracks’s 2006 campaign speech: Nations are not monuments. They are not made out of stone. They are works-in-progress made and remade each and every generation.

Progress must never sleep.

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Prologue: First Memories 1 The Split was a political civil war largely responsible for keeping Labor out of power from 1949 to 1972. One of the chief players in the civil war was Santamaria – a Catholic layperson who, from 1941, gradually became a leader of a predominantly Catholic group of anti-communists. That group, known as the Movement, was concerned the labour movement had been infiltrated by communists, and gained control of the Industrial Groups in the unions. The Industrial Groups had been formed by the ALP to guard against Communist Party influence in the union movement. Under the control of the Movement, though, the Industrial Groups, or groupers, began to oppose those in the ALP who were considered soft on the communists. Santamaria laid out his ambition for the Movement in a 1952 letter to Melbourne archbishop Daniel Mannix: ‘Completely transform the leadership of the Labor movement, and to introduce into federal and state spheres large numbers of members who … should be able to implement a Christian social program.’ Santamaria almost succeeded. As commentator Gerard Henderson said, ‘Santamaria was accepted, albeit temporarily, as a kind of quasi-bishop who ran a political machine and reported directly to the bishops.’ On 5 October 1954, though, with the Cold War at its height, the leader of the federal Labor Party, HV ‘Doc’ Evatt – having, that May, lost the federal election to the Liberal Party’s Robert Menzies – brought matters to a head when he issued a statement accusing a small minority of Labor members, ‘located particularly in Victoria’, of being disloyal to the ALP. Their methods, Evatt said, ‘strikingly resemble both Communist and Fascist infiltration and create an almost intolerable situation’. After that statement, the ‘intolerable situation’ split the ALP in Victoria, then Queensland. The Catholic faction created a new political party, the Democratic Labor Party, with the express purpose of keeping Labor out of power. 328

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Charlie Foxtrot Politics 1 I became tangentially connected to Gillard during her prime ministership via the photography of my daughter Sophie. In May 2013, Sophie and my wife, Kirsten Deane, were invited to a media event to mark the state of Victoria becoming a signatory to the National Disability Insurance Scheme; I tagged along, together with Sophie’s younger siblings, Noah and Zoe. We were invited to the launch because, at the time, Kirsten was deputy director of Every Australian Counts  –  the campaign to convince the Commonwealth to adopt the NDIS. Every Australian Counts was a roaring success, thanks to the work of Kirsten and her colleagues, and, along the way, Sophie – who has Down syndrome – became the campaign’s unofficial mascot. A few days before Victoria signed up to the NDIS, Sophie had met Gillard at an Every Australian Counts campaign and taken a shine to the PM, holding her hand and sitting on her knee. (Sophie’s best friend, Julian McAlpine, followed Sophie’s lead and plonked himself on the lap of a startled Wayne Swan, then showed the treasurer how his toy car worked.) At the NDIS signing, Sophie decided she wanted to take Gillard’s photograph. She borrowed my Nikon, walked up to the PM and snapped four frames as Gillard bent down to meet her eye then stood upright again, smiling all the while. Later that afternoon, I published one of Sophie’s pictures of Gillard via Twitter, and it went viral. Thousands of people responded to that picture. Why? Perhaps because it captures a real connection between two people, a 12-year-old girl and Australia’s first female prime minister. Sophie doesn’t discriminate. She has a radar for people. She can tell whether or not they’re genuine, and if they are, she loves them. That’s what Sophie’s portrait of the former PM, since acquired by the Museum of Australian Democracy, is all about.

Cops and Cockroaches 1 ‘25th anniversary and lasting legacy of Brisbane’s World Expo 88. 1988 marked Brisbane’s coming of age and the city has not looked back’, The Sunday Mail, 28 April 2013, http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/ th-anniversary-and-lasting-legacy-of-brisbanes-world-expo-88-1988marked-brisbanes-coming-of-age-and-the-city-has-not-looked-back/ story-e6frf7jo-1226630746038. 2 To illustrate his point about how alien and hostile the justice system can be to Indigenous Australians, Hulls recalls a time he had an Aboriginal man appear as a witness in a trial. When the witness was called to the stand, he took one look at the white lawyers and judge and said, ‘I plead guilty.’ 3 Colston resigned from the ALP in 1996 after the party refused to nominate him to become deputy president of the Senate. He was elected deputy president

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with the backing of the Howard government and voted for Coalition policies such as the privatisation of Telstra.

Memo from ‘Bongo Land’ 1 It was an experience Brumby recalled in a speech he made to the 2008 national conference of the Australian Council of Social Service (ACOSS). I worked with Brumby on that ACOSS speech when I was his chief speechwriter. Brumby could be a pain to work with as a speechwriter, often coming out with a starburst of ideas, lists and statistics impossible to contain in a clean, clear story. For once, though, the premier didn’t want numbers. He wanted to explain where he came from and what he stood for. Tell a story. The reason for that change in tack was simple. The Brumby of 2008 – like Keating of 1991 – was a former treasurer trying to reinvent himself as the new leader of an old government, and, for him, that reinvention began at Eaglehawk, when the son of Malcolm Brumby began to cast his own shadow. The ACOSS speech came together surprisingly easily, with only a half-dozen drafts. When it was finalised, I was curious to see how it would be delivered. I caught a taxi to a bland hotel on Queens Road, across the street from Albert Park Lake, and slipped into the back of a nondescript conference room. The room was a beige box with high ceilings and carpeted floor, with a few hundred stackable chairs lined up before a stage. It was hardly the setting for the Gettysburg Address, but, in Australian politics, speeches rarely are – the Australian agora has more in common with backyard barbecues than spent battlefields. Brumby had a habit of sounding like Keating’s kid brother when he spoke publicly – a trait picked up unconsciously during the seven years he spent as a backbencher in Canberra, watching Labor’s Placido Domingo strut the parliamentary stage. On that day, as he took the crowd back in time, my boss sounded more like Whitlam – the flawed giant who captured the imagination of so many progressive baby boomers: Eaglehawk is an old goldmining town on the fringe of Bendigo. By the time I arrived in 1976, the gold was long gone. Economically speaking, Eaglehawk was disadvantaged. Mind you, that state of affairs was not the fault of the local community. Eaglehawk was a town with good families and good kids, but without good enough facilities or good enough opportunities. It was a situation that reminds me of what Professor Ronald Henderson’s Commission of Inquiry into Poverty said about poverty in 1975, the year before I arrived in Eaglehawk, ‘Its continuance is a judgement on the society which condones conditions causing poverty.’

endnotes

Brumby said Eaglehawk taught him that education and community building were two of the best ways to overcome disadvantage, then explained why he believed the economy mattered: What I’ve always said about the economy, whether it’s financial management or job creation or infrastructure investment, is that it’s a means to an end – and that end is a stronger, fairer society. You want a strong economy because you understand that economic growth creates the capacity for better services and social infrastructure, like hospitals, schools and community centres. But you also understand that you can’t have a strong economy without a strong community; that, while economic growth may pay for social progress, social progress enables economic growth.

2 3 4

5

Social progress enables economic growth. That, right there, was the master wheel that made Brumby’s internal Antikythera mechanism spin around – the virtuous circle where economic progress and social progress are mutually reliant, mutually beneficial. It was the pursuit of that ideal that propelled Brumby – an idealist disguised as a pragmatist – from the classroom to the parliamentary chamber. John Button, As It Happened, Text Publishing, Melbourne, 1999, p. 141. Brumby denies ever wearing an earring. As one factional powerbroker put it when speaking about the role of the factions: ‘What matters is the people who have influence. It’s a question of how they want to use their influence. Do they want to use it to bring cronies in they can control? Or do they want to bring people in who have, you know, high quality, high ability?’ Brumby says it’s easy to forget how difficult the reforms of the Hawke government were to implement: The most striking thing was just how hard reform can be, but how essential it is. If you think of that first year we were in government, we inherited the deficit in prospect of $9.6 billion from Fraser. That’d be like $30 billion today, $40 billion today – like, a big fucking deficit – [and a] pretty average economy, although starting to come out of the stagflation and recession. So, that first year, there were major budget cuts … and big reforms, like floating the dollar, letting in foreign banks, starting to lower tariffs. I still remember the debate in caucus on the tariffs … one after another, caucus members would get up to question and challenge … It’s hard. It’s hard in your own caucus. Looking back, you wouldn’t do anything different, but it was hard.

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6 Reid made his political mark in 1993 when he stood against John Howard and John Hewson as a candidate for the leadership of the Liberal Party and received just one vote – his own. 7 According to one federal Labor identity of the 1980s and 1990s, there were three reasons why Brumby wasn’t elevated to the Hawke ministry in 1987: he was in the wrong faction, he was from the wrong state and he was the wrong gender. The ALP figure says: ‘He was clearly one of the more impressive backbenchers. He was clearly fit for and would have had every expectation to go higher. The injustice of politics couldn’t be more demonstrated that John misses out on a ministry because he’s from the Right, because he’s from Victoria, because he’s a bloke … Politics isn’t a fair game, but John certainly didn’t get what he would have been reasonably expected to get on the basis of talent and work rate.’ Brumby takes a pragmatic view on his missed chances to become a federal minister: ‘To be honest, I didn’t have any factional basis of support … My best mate up there was Griffo  – Alan Griffiths [then member for Maribyrnong]  –  and the difference between a safe seat like Maribyrnong and a marginal seat like Bendigo is just – they are so fundamentally different. So, I never had time to work with the factions, appease the factions or anything else like that. I worked my electorate.’

Enter the Independents 1 John Cain, John Cain’s Years, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1995, p. 104. 2 ibid., p. 105. 3 I saw the last days of Cain’s premiership up close as a young journalist for The Sunday Sun. On 3 February 1990, eight weeks before John Brumby lost the seat of Bendigo, a by-election was being held for the state seat of Thomastown. The seat was comfortably held by Labor; there was no chance of an upset. Given Victoria’s economic strife, though, The Sunday Sun was expecting a huge protest vote against the Cain government. So sure were we about the result, our political reporter – who’d worked as press secretary to the leader of the state opposition, Jeff Kennett – wrote his story before the polls closed. According to our report, the by-election result had already given Cain an ‘almighty kick in the pants’. The only thing our state political reporter needed to finish the job was some quotes from Cain and his candidate, Peter Batchelor – a former state secretary of the ALP. The trouble was that our reporter was hopeless at taking notes. That’s where I – at the time a 20-year-old D-grade reporter with good shorthand – came in. My job would be to attend the media conference in Thomastown, use my shorthand to record the utterances of Cain and Batchelor, then call the newsroom and read out the appropriate quotes to a copytaker, who would then slot those quotes into the pre-packaged story. Two memories

endnotes

of that night have stayed with me. First, I remember the carnivorous mood of the journos. We waited outside the electorate office like a hunting party waiting for the bugle. One journo in particular, a portly TV reporter who paced up and down talking on his brick-like mobile phone, was venomous in his appraisal of Labor – it was impossible to disagree. My second memory is of Cain himself. When we were finally ushered inside the Thomastown electorate office for a media conference with Cain and Batchelor, the premier appeared shell-shocked. It was the middle of summer, but Cain was trembling as though from a chill no one else could feel. Within six months, he would resign. More than one former Cain minister likens the period from 1990 to 1992 to the fall of Rome. As one former minister told me: ‘We know we’re going to get defeated. We’re fucking gone.’ 4 Cain, John Cain’s Years, p. 259. 5 In 1985, while campaigning for the South Melbourne council, Thwaites knocked on the door of future Victorian Labor political staffer Colin Radford. Radford took one look at the handsome, blond thirty-something, sporting a moustache that recalled a young Robert Redford in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and said, ‘Sorry, mate, I don’t vote Liberal.’

Shellbacks and Troglodytes 1 Casemix funding was implemented in Victoria in 1993–94 by the Kennett government under the direction of economist and health services manager Stephen Duckett. Since then it has been replicated by most Australian states and territories. 2 Brumby’s definition of ‘shellback’ is better than most: ‘There were quite a few of what they called the shellbacks. Shellbacks, I think, because they were always protecting their own positions; never going to be ministers, never going to be anything.’ 3 Cain resented the Left’s meddling, telling Carr in 1991, when the two men crossed paths one day in the corridors of state parliament, that he could take a lot of the credit for the destruction of his government. 4 ‘Chicago’ is a reference to the neoliberal ideas that come from the Chicago School of Economics. 5 According to this Socialist Left factional leader, the three most important people to have come out of the Victorian branch of the ALP in the past 25 years are Kim Carr, Stephen Conroy and Steve Bracks. Carr for the way he led the Left from the wilderness in the 1970s back to the centre of Victorian Labor in the 1980s and 1990s; Conroy (‘the best machine politician of his generation’) for the way in which he built Labor back into a powerhouse in the 1990s; and Bracks for his electoral victory in 1999 and his deft handling of the factions.

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Choking the Piñata 1 ‘On the outside looking in’, The Age, Agenda section, 23 April 1994, p. 4. 2 ‘Why Kennan walked away from $400,000’, The Sunday Age, 3 July 1993, p. 1. 3 Within the Labor fold, the prevailing view is that Kennan threw in the towel. Speaking to The Age on 27 March 1994, Joan Kirner said Kennan had ‘spat the dummy’: ‘I could not believe it. Jim had been the one pushing for me to go, and I intended to … It made me so angry.’ According to then NSW premier Bob Carr: Jim Kennan came up to see me … I told him how tough it was to prepare him for the worst. I said, ‘You’ll bring forth policies as opposition leader, trying to be positive, the press won’t report them but then close to your first election they’ll attack you for not having had policies.’ I said, ‘This is what they did to me’ – and showed him a copy of an article from The [Sydney Morning] Herald on the eve of the 1991 election campaign entitled ‘Headed for a Carr Crash’, which counted my failings as opposition leader predicting that [Liberal premier Nick] Greiner was going to really thump us. I led him through all of this then he went back to Melbourne and gave it up. We thought that was very funny. I was just trying to prepare him for how tough opposition was. Toughen him up. Prepare him for the worst.

4 ‘Why Kennan walked away from $400,000’. 5 Due to the number of factional meetings held there, 4 Treasury Place was sometimes referred to as Treachery Place. 6 ‘Outnumbered: the human side of a political battle’, Inside Story, ABC TV, 22 April 1997. 7 John Menadue, private secretary to then federal opposition leader Gough Whitlam, coined the mantra ‘party, policy, people’ in 1967 to simplify the ALP’s mission for the 1969 election: 1967, modernise the party; 1968, modernise the policy platform; 1969, take the modernised party and its policies to the people. In 2013, when Bill Shorten ran against Anthony Albanese in the public campaign for the leadership of federal Labor, I suggested that he could pay homage to Whitlam’s legacy by adopting the ‘party, policy, people’ mantra as his campaign slogan. He did.

Treachery Place 1 ‘Joan of Heart’, The Age, 27 March 1994, p. 11. 2 Some ALP branches become magnets for certain ethnic communities. With Victorian Labor, the first ethnic group that had a reputation for voting en masse was Irish Catholic. The Irish Catholic vote lost much of its numerical strength after the Split of 1954–55. Since then, other ethnicities – Greeks,

endnotes

Italians, Vietnamese and Latin Americans – have gained reputations for block voting, giving the factional leaders they’re loyal to immense power. Understandably, when an ethnic branch emerges, claims of branch stacking often follow. Those claims sometimes have merit and sometimes are just sour grapes. In my experience, no one has the high moral ground when it comes to the internal workings of any political party – be they Labor, Liberal, National or Green. 3 Thwaites on why he backed Bracks’s preselection: ‘I can remember people saying to me, “Why are you destroying the independents? Steve Bracks is just going to be a competitor for you” – that sort of stuff. Basically, my view, as well as Steve’s, was Labor had to get the best people we could. It wasn’t like we were overburdened with talent, we had to get the best talent we could.’ 4 ‘Shadow ministers attack Brumby’, The Age, 2 May 1994, p. 1. 5 ibid. 6 Neil Cole, Stability in Mind: A memoir of politics and plays in the shadow of bipolar disorder, New Holland, Sydney, 2012, pp. 164–5. 7 Steve Bracks with Ellen Whinett, A Premier’s State, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2012, p. 1.

Outnumbered 1 In his maiden speech to state parliament, delivered on 14 May 1996, Hulls broke with convention and made no mention of the previous member for Niddrie, Bob Sercombe. Instead, he spoke powerfully about his defining experiences in Queensland, including the story about cops and cockroaches in Mount Isa. 2 Factions are all about power. Among the rank and file, philosophical views matter – a member of the Right, for instance, can sound a lot like a progressive member of the Liberal Party, whereas a member of the Left can easily be mistaken for a Green. Among factional leaders, though, what matters most is gaining and maintaining control of branches and seats, creating a power base that enables the leader or leaders of that power base to, first, control their faction and, ultimately, control their party. It’s raw politics. There’s nothing wrong with a faction, so long as people are guided by something other than self-interest or animosity. Unfortunately, factions are often guided by selfinterest and animosity. As a consequence, factional battles in any political party (and, despite claims to the contrary, every political party has factions) are usually internecine. 3 ‘MPs scuffle in chamber’, The Age, 31 May 1995, p. 3. 4 Matt Viney was one of many progressives driven back into the Labor fold by the radicalism of the Kennett government. In 1993, the Kennett government tried to close the primary school in Somers, a seaside town an hour’s drive from Melbourne. Viney – an old rocker with bad hearing who had been involved

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in Labor campaigns in the 1970s – was galvanised into action because his oldest son was in prep at Somers. The community campaign to save the school succeeded. Afterwards, Viney, who ran a market research business focusing on customer satisfaction and analysis, went to see John Brumby and offered to help the state opposition. Within a week,Viney was conducting polling for Brumby on a pro bono basis.Victorian Labor wasn’t able to start covering Viney’s polling costs until after the 1996 election. ‘I didn’t realise how broke the party was,’ he says. 5 Keddie was fortunate that the Brumby campaign was run out of his parliamentary office.The opposition staff tried moving to ALP head office at Drummond Street – the venue that Keddie’s film crew was forbidden to enter – but abandoned ship after just one day, because, among the myriad problems, there weren’t enough phone lines to go around. 6 Brumby himself sees the 1996 campaign as the foundation of the 1999 victory: ‘The things that undid Kennett at the end – the arrogance, the neglect of country Victoria – that was all really locked in in the ’96 campaign.’

Julia, Boudicca 1 One of the most notorious examples of the old guard’s intransigence was during the state election of 1974, when, a few hours before he was due to launch Victorian Labor’s campaign, state opposition leader Clyde Holding’s campaign speech was rewritten by the ALP Administration Committee, then under the control of Hartley, to explicitly state that Labor would not give state funding to Catholic schools. ‘The show was fucked,’ Brumby says. ‘A lot of [Labor] people up north looked down on Victoria as the last bastion of socialism.’ 2 Julia Gillard, My Story, Knopf, Sydney, 2014, p. 116. 3 ibid., pp. 117–18. 4 ibid., p. 119. 5 ibid., p. 120. 6 Bracks’s ascension was quick but, given his experience and the lack of depth in Labor ranks, inevitable. ‘I was in shadow cabinet pretty quickly and I became one of the key players, I think, pretty early on,’ Bracks tells me, pausing to consider the words he has just spoken before ploughing on. You know, that sounds a bit arrogant, but it wasn’t, really, because you know I wasn’t coming in with a lack of political experience in a whole range of areas. I was coming in with pretty advanced political capabilities. One of the things I did early on when I got the first portfolio – industrial relations, employment, assistant treasurer – I set about, I’ve always been a bit deterministic, as you can tell, so I set about to contact two or three people who I knew had

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reasonably senior positions in town. One worked for Rio Tinto. Another one was, I think, Deloitte. They were Labor supporters. And I asked them to draw up a list for me of the key and important business leaders around Victoria – Melbourne – who I would systematically go and see …  I went around in my early period – as well as the union leaders, because I had industrial relations – I went around Rod Carnegie and Richard Pratt and Don Argus, all these people. So, I sat with them. I said, ‘I’m here. Part of being an effective government is to have an effective opposition and develop policies. And I think it’s important and I want to work with you’ … I developed pretty good relationships. Those relationships I still have … So, I was bringing something to the table for John.

7 ‘Brumby rallies party’, Sunday Herald Sun, 5 May 1996, p. 23. 8 ‘Labor moves to the middle’, The Age, 15 July 1996, p. 1. 9 ‘Left MP dumped from ALP faction’, Herald Sun, 20 November 1996, p. 13. 10 ‘State ALP shaken by angry split’, The Age, 16 December 1996, p. 1. 11 The bid failed. Theophanous never made it to Canberra. 12 Gillard, My Story, p. 120. 13 Named after Martin Ferguson, former president of the ACTU and federal member for Batman. 14 Australian Story, ABC TV, 6 March 2006. 15 On 22 December 1996, the Sunday Herald Sun’s David Wilson reported on the spill of leadership positions: Mr Brumby said despite the significant support from within the party and the wider community for modernisation and renewal, ‘certain elements of the party continue to destabilise and frustrate the process of change’. ‘As leader of the party, I have a responsibility to put issues on the table, to ensure we don’t stand still, that we don’t sweep the hard issues under the carpet,’ he said. ‘Throughout the Victorian community, many are thinking Labor but voting Liberal because they will only endorse this party when it endorses itself. I intend to continue the job of renewal, to keep rebuilding and to continue the process of party modernisation.’ Mr Brumby said he had been strongly supported by the Labor Party’s upper house leader, Mr Theo Theophanous. The Socialist Left has attacked Mr Theophanous in recent months, accusing him of constant destabilisation. Mr Brumby said the treatment of Mr Theophanous at the hands of the Socialist Left had created unnecessary divisions as well as uncertainty within the party. Mr Brumby also called for new blood to be brought into the Labor Party.

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The Golden Four 1 Lenders on Gillard: ‘The 18 months I worked with her, she was one of the best people I ever worked with.’ 2 Lenders on Sword: He was wise. He used to say to me, Greg, ‘It’s the people you put in place.’ And I’d say, ‘You’ve got to have the rules,’ and [he’d say], ‘Yes, you’ve got to have the rules, but, in the end, you’ve got to put good people in and then have the rules around them that do have the right governance. But, basically, it’s getting people in’ … He’s one of the greats of the Victorian Labor Party and unsung in a lot of ways because he’s never had a high public profile and never been elected.

3 Lenders located the ideal property – a two-storeyed brick building one block north of Flagstaff Gardens on a bend of King Street that, with its secure perimeter and painted white exterior, resembled a discreet bordello – on 3 December 1998, two days after his self-imposed deadline. By early 1999, King Street was the new head office of Victorian Labor – its purchase and fit-out covered by the $1.8 million sale of the Drummond Street townhouses. 4 The preselection battle for the seat of Mitcham marked the arrival of Bronwyn Pike, who ran against Tony Robinson. Pike won strong local support but was rolled by Labor Unity. Although Robinson beat her into parliament, within two years she would catapult past him and become a minister in the first Bracks government. 5 ‘Judgment day for Jeff ’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 22 November 1997, p. 35.

The Picture of Dorian Gray 1 Brumby is referring to the number of Victorians who, in their preferential votes, sided with Labor over the Coalition in 1996. The actual number of two-party preferred votes Labor won was 1.28 million. 2 Cole, Stability in Mind, p. 193. 3 Boyd is referring to the Labor campaign against the Kennett government’s decision to remove common law rights of injured workers. 4 Bracks’s take on how ‘The Quartet’ worked together is worth recording: It would look like we were one, but we had slightly different views. Rob Hulls had the view that there is a silver bullet there that we could find that would bring down the Kennett government – if only we could find it. It might be the casino, it might be Intergraph, might be something else … There was a continuum from that to me which said, ‘Look, there is no silver bullet. It’s simply an excuse for not doing the hard work of saying what

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you stand for and having an alternative proposition. Any negative campaign against the government will only get you a certain way. We should do it, but to get that last bit over the top, the one or two, people have to say, “Yes, I think the Kennett government is arrogant and has gone too far, and, look, Labor seems to have improved and they have a reasonable proposition.” You have to have that last bit in my view.’ So, there’s a continuum of views from that and, so, at times Brumby would be with me, at times he would be with Hulls, more often he was with Hulls. Thwaites was probably more towards me. It came down to a lot of debates in Question Time committee.

5 Delahunty’s maiden speech to parliament, delivered on 2 September 1998, captures the spirit of the times – comparing the Kennett government in Victoria to the excesses of the Bjelke-Petersen era in Queensland – and arguing that ‘government is more than just a business’: I have been propelled into parliament because of the damage to our civic culture in Victoria at this time. Victorians have witnessed contempt for the citizen, the cruel silencing of critics and disdain for the democratic discussion and debate that we know is the lifeblood of democracy. We have witnessed bullying of the media and there have been attempts to neuter parliament and de-legitimise the role of the opposition. There has been an obsession with the artifice of commercial-in-confidence. It is a clause we hear a lot about, yet it denies parliament, and thus the public of Victoria, essential information about the government’s spending priorities and the administration of the state. It represents a corporatist view of government, not a civic view of government. The distinction is very important. The corporatist view of government shuns openness and accountability; it knows the cost of everything but in many ways the value of very little, particularly very little that is public and is prized by the public.The language of the corporatist state – of client, customer, user pays – denies citizens an understanding of what the government is saying and doing. Governments must be fiscally responsible, conscious of the bottom line, but government is more than just a business. Every decision the government makes rolls out of the cabinet room and affects the very tone and texture of our society. I am not a client of the government. I am a citizen in this state with rights and responsibilities, as are the people of Northcote who put me here.

6 Russell Savage had sounded a similar warning in his maiden speech on 16 May 1996. Savage noted that Mildura was one of the most remote and disadvantaged

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electorates in the state. He said: ‘What do the people of the Mildura electorate want? They want equity of service and funding to the same extent as our city counterparts … Democracy is alive and well and there are some lessons to be learnt by all the parties from my election.’ 7 The ALP backbencher expelled from his Chook Shed office was David Cunningham, the member for Melton. Cunningham was told to share a room with Ian Baker, but ended up operating out of the pigeonhole in the caucus room until he retired from parliament in 1999. 8 As one Left powerbroker says, ‘Brumby grasped that [regional anti-Kennett] change more than anyone. It took a while for the party to value the strategy.’ 9 A representative from EMC went to see Labor’s advertising man, Bill Shannon, to garner his support for a push to replace Brumby as Labor leader. Shannon asked EMC to leave his office. 10 ‘All right now – but for how long?’ The Age, 20 February 1999, p. 1. 11 ‘Brumby blasts unionist again’, Herald Sun, 16 February 1999, p. 5. 12 ‘Brumby bucks frontbencher’, The Australian, 18 February 1999, p. 6. 13 With Lenders preparing to enter state parliament, his replacement as state secretary – David Feeney – was in situ from February 1999. Nevertheless, Lenders remained in control of the campaign. Head office ‘was in pretty good shape’, Feeney says. ‘As John Brumby had been reforming the parliamentary party, John Lenders had been busy reforming the organisational wing.’ 14 ‘Walkout loosens Labor leader’s pre-election grip’, The Sunday Age, 28 February 1999, p. 3. 15 Tony Parkinson, Jeff:The rise and fall of a political phenomenon, Penguin, Melbourne, 2000, p. 368. 16 Ironically, after his lunch with Sword, Brumby did a media conference about knife control with Andre Haermeyer – one of the ringleaders of the campaign to install Bracks. 17 ‘Alone, a felled leader makes his final ascent’, The Age, 20 March 1999, p. 8. 18 ‘Bracks win fails to end brawling’, The Age, 23 March 1999, p. 1.

A Dark Horse 1 Jacinta Allan, Labor’s 25-year-old candidate for the regional seat of Bendigo East, saw the benefits of Lenders’s reforms up close. For the first time, candidates were given lists of phone numbers in the electorate. Allan called more than 1200 constituents in just ten days. Her conversations told her that although anti-Kennett sentiment was strong, so, too, were the concerns about the ‘Guilty Party’ (a hangover from Kennett’s brilliant ad campaign in 1992). The work that John Brumby and Steve Bracks had done to recover some of Labor’s financial credibility (including the decision to have Allen Consulting analyse their policy commitments) helped alleviate some of the ‘Guilty Party’

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concerns. Finally, the elevation of Bracks to the leadership was incisive. ‘The change of leadership sparked new energy and new interest in Labor,’ she says. 2 Bill Shannon was much more than an advertising man for Victorian Labor. Under Brumby and Bracks, he also did more than almost anyone else to – with an image or a catchphrase – turn years of research and policy development into a story, or, as political apparatchiks are fond of putting it, ‘a narrative’. In the lead-up to 1999, Labor pollster Matt Viney prepared a summary report for the campaign committee, compiling the insights he’d gleaned from five years of qualitative polling, which, in essence, said the election would be fought on leadership. Shannon picked up on that line and made ‘New Leadership’ a mantra of his television advertisements. Shannon also asked Viney to focus test another slogan – ‘Labor Cares’. The response was overwhelmingly positive. It was also used in the campaign. Besides his famous ‘two taps’ advertisement, Shannon’s ads also included a short clip of Jeff Kennett sarcastically saying, ‘Have a nice day,’ to a TV camera as he climbed into a car. Viney was taken off guard by the response he received when he showed one of the advertisements that contained Kennett’s ‘have a nice day’ grab to a focus group. When the ad finished, one of the voters in the focus group turned to Viney and said, ‘You know what Kennett’s really saying when he says, “Have a nice day?” “Go and get fucked.” ’ ‘That’s exactly what was said to me,’ Viney says. ‘That meant we were putting 200 ads on during the campaign where people were thinking Kennett was telling them to go and get fucked … We didn’t know that. We thought we were just showing Kennett being Jeff.’ Within Victorian Labor, Shannon’s ‘two taps’ advertisement is considered his masterpiece. Jill Hennessy, the state president at the time, was on the campaign committee for 1999 and remembers the first time she saw the ad: ‘I remember it kind of being this allegory of the Kennett government. And [I thought], “If it could overwhelm me that much, could it possibly overwhelm people in regional Victoria and people in suburban Melbourne that had not touched us with a ten-foot pole?” … It kind of crystallised all the questions people have about Kennett.’ The advertisement, which was only aired in regional Victoria (and can now be found on YouTube), drove home the political point that regional Victoria was getting left behind by the Kennett government. It shows two taps: one is gushing water and is captioned ‘Melbourne: $2 billion’; the other is giving barely a trickle and is captioned ‘Country: $Zero’. The advertisement’s premise was rammed home by Kennett when he described Melbourne as the heart of Victoria and rural areas the ‘toenails’. 3 Michael Gurr, Days like These, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2006, p. 29.

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4 Labor Unity was expecting to lose. Before the election, Right factional players discussed replacing Steve Bracks with Rob Hulls after the election. Given Hulls’s reluctance to lead, this scenario would probably have failed. 5 Bracks arranged a 12 October meeting in Sydney between Ingram and NSW premier Bob Carr. ‘[Ingram] wanted a guarantee from me that we would make this happen,’ Carr says. Carr gave Ingram that guarantee. On 27 August 2002, Carr and Bracks stood thigh deep in the Snowy at the Mowamba Aqueduct to mark the beginning of a $300 million regeneration of the Snowy River. ‘The assistance that Bob Carr gave in working out the water [for the Snowy] was really very pivotal because it gave Craig Ingram the solution to his electoral commitment to saving the Snowy,’ says Peter Batchelor. 6 Russell Savage was the unofficial leader of the independents. In Tony Parkinson’s Jeff: the rise and fall of a political phenomenon (p. 428), Savage explained why Kennett never stood a chance after the 18 September election: ‘They were obviously a bit thick if they thought we could deal with Jeff Kennett. The relationship I had with Kennett was very bad. I didn’t respect him as a premier or as a person … If Kennett wasn’t there we would have been hard pressed to justify our decision to support the ALP.’ 7 Parkinson, Jeff, p. 414. 8 George Megalogenis, The Longest Decade, Scribe, Melbourne, 2006, pp. 53–4. 9 In his ebook, How PR Works but Often Doesn’t (NS & JS Turnbull Pty Ltd, Melbourne, 2010), former Victorian Labor speechwriter and public relations guru Noel Turnbull gave a fascinating insight into the genesis of the ‘Labor Listens’ slogan, as well as modern political campaigning in general: The involvement with campaigns, through campaign slogans, probably illustrated how there is little new in politics. Shortly before I went to work with Clyde Holding the Victorian ALP had run an election campaign around the slogan A Better Way provided by advertising man, Philip Adams. Unfortunately the campaign took place around the same time as the Robert Redford film, The Candidate, came out in Australia. The film featured the slogan A Better Way. Years later, when a colleague asked me to provide some advice to the WA Labor Opposition, the slogan seemed particularly apposite for their position. Research showed that the Court government was unpopular but the Gallup [sic] Opposition was not being embraced. I recommended a modest slogan, A Better Government. The slogan offered something better, but not too much. It had worked for Robert Redford in the film, didn’t work for Clyde Holding but did work for Geoff Gallop. During the Kennett years one of our staff, Michael O’Connell, was working on a voluntary basis with John Thwaites, then ALP deputy leader. Michael had helped him get elected to South Melbourne Council and was

endnotes

helping him now he was in Parliament. Michael brought John to our office for some advice. John said the problem was that they simply couldn’t get heard above the Kennett voice. I had recently been reading an Economist article about a British Tory party campaign called ‘we listen’ which was designed to suggest that the Tories had learnt the lessons of their defeats. Having been heavily influenced by Saul Alinsky’s ideas as a student activist, I had been thinking about how the ‘listening’ concept might work at a grassroots level. I suggested to John that the ALP could develop a grassroots campaign by going out to local community groups around the slogan Labor Listens. The message was a contrast to the fact that many people thought Jeff Kennett didn’t listen to anyone and it also meant that rather than wasting their time trying to get media coverage MPs could reach out to community groups.The ALP, under John Brumby’s leadership, took the idea and actually made it work. The problem I had foreseen was that they would probably never be able to sustain the long grind to make it more than a slogan. But some time later, when John Brumby was in government, he was the guest speaker at Leadership Victoria (an organisation whose Board I was on) welcoming a new group of 32 young Victorians who were about to undertake a year long leadership program. As he read out the names of the participants, who came from all around Victoria, it became clear that he knew or had met almost all of them. He did it through the days and nights spent out listening to people. The slogan went on to be used by the ALP in a couple of election campaigns and over the years I have been amused by the number of people who claimed credit for developing it. There didn’t seem much point in saying that they hadn’t because I hadn’t either. I picked it up from another country. Recounting the episode to Kevin Luscombe, a legendary Australian marketing man, he laughed and said that the Tories had probably stolen it themselves, because he remembered the slogan being used in a Pennsylvanian Senate campaign.

Skylab 1 Hulls on Wynne: ‘We were good cop, bad cop … In negotiations, I was far blunter than him and he was a really good foil. It was a good team.’ 2 Pallas started working for Bracks on his first day as state opposition leader.Well connected across the union movement and within the Labor Unity faction, in government Pallas became Bracks’s closest advisor and resident Mr Fix-It. One former staffer explains: ‘Whenever anything fucked up, he would just employ another person and make it their job to be responsible for that so it doesn’t fuck up again.’ 3 Rosa Silvestro was Bracks’s executive assistant for the entirety of his time as premier.

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4 Kosky and Batchelor were the only Socialist Left ministers close to the inner sanctum during the first half of the Bracks–Brumby government. Leaders of the Left faction, such as cabinet secretary Gavin Jennings, weren’t trusted. One minister says: ‘There were residual suspicions around Gavin. They never used him properly.’ 5 One example of how Hulls stretched dollars in the justice portfolio was pro bono work. Private law firms tender for tens of millions of dollars of work with the Victorian government every year. Hulls required every law firm that tendered to have a substantial pro bono practice. The attorney-general called it ‘leveraging’ the government’s purchasing power; others might call it strongarming. 6 Parkinson, Jeff, p. 399.

An Unholy Trinity 1 Herington was born in 1952, a few months before Britain detonated its first nuclear weapon off the coast of Western Australia. His father, John Herington, was later put in charge of security for Britain’s atomic bomb tests carried out in South Australia. He died of a rare cancer at the age of 50. Andrew attended Caulfield Grammar, then the University of Melbourne, studying mathematics and quantum mechanics before dropping out of university to campaign against the Vietnam War. ‘I was basically an anarchist in university and I was opposed to anything parliamentary,’ he says. Herington ran a health food cooperative at Maleny, in the hinterland of the Sunshine Coast, before moving to Brisbane and running a community campaign against a freeway the Bjelke-Petersen government was ploughing through the working-class suburb of Bowen Hills. By 1976, Herington was back in Melbourne, working as an activist against the construction of the Eastern Freeway and uranium mining, and for public transport expansion and lead-free petrol. He ran Labor’s transport campaign in the 1982 state election, which Cain won. At 30, the anarchist came in from the cold, joining the ALP and becoming chief of staff to David White, the Cain government’s minister for water supply, mines, and minerals and energy. 2 John Howard, Lazarus Rising, HarperCollins, Sydney, 2010, p. 398. 3 The Millennium Drought ran from 1997 to 2007 in south-eastern Australia. 4 The Regional Fast Rail project wasn’t completed until 2006 and was controversial for its cost. However, the introduction of more services and trains able to travel at speeds up to 160 kilometres per hour saw patronage on the regional rail services increase by more than 30 per cent. 5 Synchrotrons are scientific machines the size of an Australian Rules football oval that accelerate electrons almost to the speed of light, enabling molecular research on everything from bioscience to agriculture to engineering to forensics.

endnotes

6 ‘States fight for huge microscope’, The Age, 24 May 2001, p. 9. 7 ‘Scientists hail a brave new Victorian project’, The Age, 22 June 2001, p. 2.

A Machine Made of People 1 ‘The wedge’, in Selected Essays of William Carlos Williams, New Directions, New York, 1969, p. 256. 2 In The Longest Decade (p. 51), author George Megalogenis provides fascinating insight into the symbiotic relationship between Keating and Kennett, men from opposing political camps who joined forces to force through national reform. Megalogenis writes that Keating and Kennett ‘double-teamed the other state premiers to introduce competition policy … Keating working on the Queensland Labor premier Wayne Goss; Kennett, on the WA Liberal Richard Court. Goss thought Keating was screwing the Liberal states; Court thought Kennett was giving Canberra a black eye.’ After politics, Keating and Kennett came together for semi-regular luncheons. 3 As Australia’s first prime minister, Sir Edmund Barton, told federal parliament (which, at the time, resided in Melbourne’s state parliament) on 26 September 1901: ‘I do not think either that the doctrine of equality of man was really ever intended to include racial equality.’ 4 Patrick Weller, Joanne Scott and Bronwyn Stevens, From Postbox to Powerhouse:A centenary history of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2011, p. 73. 5 In 2002, during a period when policy development was sluggish, the federal Treasury – with the blessing of treasurer Peter Costello – released its first, landmark Intergenerational Report. 6 Weller et al., From Postbox to Powerhouse, p. 126. 7 ibid., p. 241. 8 The residual of that view persisted when I was a child. I remember being sat down by my Catholic grandfather (the other grandfather was a Freemason) and told about the time his Protestant clients walked out on his law practice. The moral of Poppa Deane’s story? Micks need to stick together. 9 McCarthy himself – the son of Justin McCarthy, a dual premiership player for Essendon in the 1920s – was a working-class boy who attended Parade on a scholarship. By the time I met Brother McCarthy at St Kevin’s, it was the 1980s and he was well into his sixties – still loquacious and cosmopolitan, but no longer teaching English literature. He never taught me, but did read some of my short fiction. I also asked for his guidance on viticulture and never regretted following his advice regarding cabernet sauvignon. 10 Terry Moran, ‘Growing Victoria Together – development and use in improving government performance’, submission to the NSW parliament’s Public Accounts Committee, 20 December 2007.

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Citizen Steve 1 The three state bureaucrats that played key roles in the creation of the NCP were Victoria’s Ken Baxter, New South Wales’s Gary Sturgess and Queensland’s Kevin Rudd. 2 Dr Ken Henry, ‘Realising the vision’, Ian Little Memorial Lecture, 4 March 2008. 3 Debt aversion is a recent, bipartisan phenomenon, as Tim Colebatch points out in Dick Hamer: The liberal Liberal, Scribe, Melbourne, 2014, p. 170: ‘Victorian Governments since the Kennett era have become too debt-averse to allow rail infrastructure to keep pace with population growth, let alone make up the backlog of the lost decades.’

A Blinding Aura 1 ‘Kennett says operator paid too much’, The Age, 18 December 2002, p. 2.

Crossing the Rubicon 1 Alfred Deakin, The Federal Story:The inner history of the federal cause, 1880–1900, JA La Nauze (ed.), Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1963, p. 173. 2 George Megalogenis, Faultlines: Race, work, and the politics of changing Australia, Scribe, Melbourne, 2003, p. 60. 3 Megalogenis, Faultlines, p. 55. 4 Mark Latham, The Latham Diaries, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2005, p. 175. 5 Latham, The Latham Diaries, p. 208.

Broken Glass 1 David Ipp, ‘Themes in the law of torts’, paper given at Judges Review Conference 2007, 16 March 2007. 2 Of course, Hulls being Hulls, he never quit chewing the bone over tort law reform, using his platform in the Standing Committee of AttorneysGeneral to take aim at the Howard government for its lack of oversight of the insurance industry. ‘Insurance companies have an obligation to explain to Australians what the benefits of tort law reform have been,’ Hulls told SCAG on 22 March 2005. His Queensland counterpart, Rod Welford, went further, calling on the Howard government to give the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission the power to control insurance pricing. 3 One apocryphal Bracks–Hulls exchange was often repeated among the political staffers. ‘You are the most progressive attorney-general this state has ever had,’ the premier once told Hulls. ‘Now, stop.’

endnotes

One Crowded Year, Part One 1 The Productivity Commission ran its own modelling on Victoria’s proposed reforms and came back with similar results. 2 SL Policy Development Group of the Victorian Branch of the ALP, ‘National reform priorities’, November 2005.

One Crowded Year, Part Two 1 Long-term unemployed: having been out of work for more than 12 months. 2 Labor governments are traditionally marked hard by their supporters as well as their critics. Progressive voters expect that a Labor administration won’t just accept the status quo, but will at least try to implement policies designed to make the Australian way of life more accessible to more Australians – not just the lucky ones. 3 Despite those investments, a biblical drought would soon see the state facing an unprecedented water crisis.

A Death in the Family 1 Frederic M Thrasher, The Gang, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1963, p. xiii. 2 ibid., p. 229. 3 ibid., pp. 245–6. 4 The $10.5 billion metropolitan transport package was too little, too late to improve train services. The decision, in June 2005, to choose the Kamco consortium to introduce a new public transport ticketing system called myki would also prove disastrous.

Heading for Armageddon 1 When the Liberals proposed building a desalination plant during the 2006 campaign, the government ridiculed the idea, even though, internally, the cabinet was debating the merits of a similar plan. 2 ‘Bracks’ $4.9 billion water plan’, The Age, 20 June 2007, p. 1.

‘Jesus Fucking Bananas’ 1 Brumby and Boyd stayed in touch after that phone conversation, eventually arranging a clear-the-air dinner at Marchetti’s early in 2008.When they sat down for dinner, both men noticed something odd. All of the tables were romantically arranged, with flowers and candles, and the restaurant was filled with happy couples. Then the penny dropped. Their political make-up dinner inadvertently coincided with Valentine’s Day. ‘We both cacked ourselves laughing,’ says Brumby. 2 Bracks, A Premier’s State, p. 121.

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3 ‘Brumby takes stand on abortion’, The Age, 21 August 2007, p. 1. 4 ‘Abort Bill saga reaches its final act’, The Age, 11 October 2008, p. 4.

A Taxi Called Kevin 1 ‘On the campaign trail’, The Age, 4 October 2004, p. 8. 2 David Marr, Quarterly Essay 38: Power Trip, Black Inc., Melbourne, 2010, p. 40. 3 George and I press sec’d for opposing camps in the justice portfolio in the early 2000s. George worked for a law-and-order minded police minister (Andre Haermeyer) while I worked for an aggressively progressive attorney-general (Rob Hulls). The offices of Andre and Rob were on the same floor of 44 St Andrews Place, with the police minister, appropriately, on the right-hand side of the corridor and the AG on the left. George was a smart-mouthed, chain-smoking pragmatist, straight out of the Sharon McCrohan school of political advising: anything but quaint or bohemian. The only thing suspect about George (other than his Adelaide roots) was his tendency to wear Birkenstocks on casual Fridays. 4 You can find it on YouTube here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2ujP6p9f-g. 5 ‘The Murray–Darling rescue plan’, The Age, 22 February 2007, p. 15. 6 ‘Rudd lays out his platform as Clayton’s election campaign rolls on’, The Age, 9 March 2007, p. 4.

The Smartest Person in the Room 1 Melbourne was the interim home of the Commonwealth, and therefore the de facto capital of Australia, until 1927. 2 Despite five years of planning, the Baillieu government shelved the train tunnel as it became ready for construction. 3 By the time Svigos landed back in Melbourne, he’d been discombobulated by Canberra and its leadership battles: I misinterpreted a lot of signals from [Brumby’s] colleagues. I thought there were people angling to try and knock him off as leader, but what they were actually angling to be was to be his next closest confidant. I thought Tim Holding was having a crack at the time in particular. I thought that Daniel Andrews was positioning himself … having come from a mindset of a leader who’d just got knocked over. But it became pretty clear to me, all they wanted to be was the bloke on the other end of the phone to John, and that John really had a really dominant, paternal influence over the cabinet.

4 Cargill was a friend of Alister Jordan, Rudd’s chief of staff, and knew the PM from his time as president of Victorian Young Labor. Advisors in the office used to tease Cargill for being a federal plant in the Brumby office.

Index

1996 state election 93–6 1999 state election 131–8 2002 state election 174–9, 186 2006 state election 259–60 2007 federal election 297–8 2014 state election 321–2 9/11 terrorist attacks 156, 162, 165, 200–1

Labor Renewal Alliance 105 Labor Unity 40, 54, 58, 66, 67, 79–81, 85, 90, 98, 102–5, 118, 122, 125, 127, 129, 182, 275, 291 NSW Right 19, 43, 87, 88, 98 Pledge 58, 84, 102, 105, 116, 117, 147 Socialist Left 18, 47, 52, 53, 57–8, 66, 79, 82–5, 97–106, 122, 182, 234 Andrews, Daniel 146, 178, 182, 278, 285, 321–2 Andrianopoulos, Alex 104 Arbib, Mark 19, 290 Asher, Louise 126, 278 Australian Labor Party (ALP) 3, 4, 8, 15 factions see ALP factions National Conference 1994 87–9 NSW branch 199–202, 211, 243–9 state conference walkout 123–5 Victorian branch 7, 8, 14, 16, 27, 38–130 Whitlam reforms 163–4

A Fairer Victoria 241–2 A Strategy for Labor in Government 146 A Third Wave of National Reform 231, 234, 297 Abbott, Tony 15, 17, 22, 68, 92, 179–80, 322 Aboriginal Justice Agreement 143 Aboriginal people 24–9, 63, 143, 215 Abortion Bill 276–81 Acton, Lord 185 affirmative action policy 78, 83 Albert Park 52–5, 71, 101, 111, 125 Allan, Jacinta 129–30, 191, 213, 272–3 Allen Consulting 204, 206, 208, 226, 256 ALP factions 32–4, 40, 48, 57–66, 78–106, 112, 125

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Bacon, Jim 198 Baillieu, Ted 37, 259, 260, 280, 315, 318, 321 Baker, Ian 66, 81–7, 117 coup attempt 84–7, 89, 90, 106, 117 Barnett, Colin 313, 314 Barrett, Chris 184, 224, 229, 230, 231, 294, 300–3 Batchelor, Peter 18, 49, 57, 66, 74, 118–20, 147, 151, 176, 180, 188, 192, 193, 318, 321 Beacham, Jenny 58, 59, 78, 91, 94 Beattie, Peter 22, 28, 159–61, 198, 202–3, 210 Beazley, Kim 110, 153–6, 161–2, 165, 200, 201, 209, 289–91, 309 Bildstien, Craig 96, 120 Bishop, Julie 22–3 Blainey, Geoffrey 222 Blair, Tony 50, 200, 235 Bolkus, Nick 88 Bolt, Andrew 121 Bolte, Sir Henry 189–90 Bourchier, John 40 Boyd, Brian 112, 113, 117, 121–4, 244, 245, 275, 289 Bracks, Nick 270, 271 Bracks, Steve 9, 10, 14, 15, 18, 20–3, 49–55, 67, 71, 78–324 ambitions 86 appearance and character 20–1, 49, 127, 132–3, 137, 150, 221 Big Four 14–15, 108–14, 118, 127, 136, 251 Brumby and 148–9, 200, 205, 259–60, 285–6 Cain/Kirner’s office 50–2 candidacy for Williamstown 78–83 career after politics 14, 15, 19

Carr and 199–203 consul-general in New York 14, 22–3 Eureka speech 220–3 leadership style 147, 150, 205, 285–6, 303 member for Williamstown 86 multicultural affairs portfolio 201 polling video 126–7 premier of Victoria 131, 146–270, 292–303 resignation as premier 270–5 sacked by Bishop 23 shadow treasurer 100, 131 state opposition leader 130 Thwaites and 55, 186, 191 winning 1999 election 131–8 Bracks, Terry 50, 130, 162, 298 Bracks–Brumby government 9, 14, 18, 137, 146–320 Bracks as premier 146–270, 292–303 Brumby as premier 275–320 first budget 151–2 first ministry 146–7 independence from Canberra 158–9 learning about government 146–7 national reform agenda 228–34, 242–3, 246 policy pillars 156, 170, 259 branch stacking 103–4, 122 Brereton, Laurie 142 Broad, Candy 113, 146, 276–7 Brookdale, Dick 25 Brouwer, George 147 Brown, Bob 120 Brumby, Alison 37 Brumby, Elizabeth 44, 66 Brumby, Georgia 44, 66

index

Brumby, John 7–9, 14, 17, 18, 32, 36–45, 59–324 attempted coup against 82–90, 106 background 37–40 Big Four 14–15, 108–14, 118, 127, 136, 251 Bracks and 148–9, 200, 205, 259–60, 285–6 campaigning in regional Victoria 92–4, 137 career after politics 14 documentary of 1996 campaign 94–6, 115 entering state politics 61–2 Kennett and 70, 72, 92–6, 100, 116, 121–2, 137 leadership style 285–6 member for Bendigo 40–4, 60 member for Doutta Galla 62, 67 premier of Victoria 275–320 reaction to Bracks’ resignation 271–5 reformer 242–8, 284 resignation as opposition leader 130, 148–9 retirement from politics 252–6 Rudd and 304–10, 313–15, 319–20 state opposition leader 66–131, 137–8, 286 Thwaites and 151–2, 189–90, 223 treasurer 151, 156–61, 180, 186, 190–4, 204–5, 223–5, 237, 242–8, 253–4, 284 Brumby, Malcolm 36–8, 83 Brumby, Nicholas 66 budget surplus guarantee 100, 152, 206 Bunting, Sir John 164 Burke, Anna 209 Burke, Denis 143–5 Burke, Joe 95

Button, James 302 Button, John 36, 42, 44, 50, 54, 65, 66, 73, 81, 98, 147 Cain, John 18, 30, 39, 41–4, 47, 49–55, 81, 168, 321 Cain–Kirner government 61, 71, 92, 102, 116, 175, 181, 187, 245, 311 Cameron, Bob 8, 43, 91, 120, 151, 189, 190, 266, 278–9, 284, 318 Campbell, Christine 90, 277, 279 Carbines, Elaine 256 Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme 20, 226, 314 Cargill, Tom 309, 316 Carr, Bob 19, 21–2, 137, 159, 198, 199–203, 210, 211, 231, 243–4, 248, 289 Carr, Kim 57–8, 65–6, 97, 99, 104, 105, 113, 131, 182 CFMEU 123, 124 Challenges in Addressing Disadvantage in Victoria report 237–8 Chifley, Ben 232 Chook Shed 119–20 climate change 20, 264, 267–8, 292, 297, 301, 307, 312, 319 Coghill, Ken 81 Cohen, Bruce 77 Cole, Neil 84, 117, 123 Collins, Jacinta 80 Colston, Mal 32 Commonwealth Games 2006 100, 165, 179, 180, 204, 216, 256 Commonwealth–state relations 158–9, 179–81, 196–9, 207–10, 233, 292–6, 300–10 Conroy, Stephen 58, 66, 67, 75, 78, 80, 81, 87, 89, 103 Constitution (Parliamentary Reform) Bill 2003 188

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Coonan, Helen 211 cooperative federalism 207, 225 corruption 185–6 Costello, Peter 194, 208, 246–8, 252, 253, 284 Council for the Australian Federation (CAF) 292 Council of Australian Governments (COAG) 165, 183, 198–9, 215, 224–7, 292–4, 300–6, 313 counter-terrorism laws 215–17 Court, Sir Charles 37 Crabb, Steve 291 Crean, Frank 53 Crean, Simon 60, 201, 202 Cronulla riots 248–9 Curtin, John 190 Davies, Susan 119, 134–7 Dawkins, Peter 229 de Kretser, David 256 Deakin, Alfred 189, 190, 196 Dean, Robert 174–5, 178 Debus, Bob 145 Delahunty, Mary 90, 117, 118, 123, 150, 153, 176, 216, 237, 276, 278, 316 Della Bosca, John 199 Delzoppo, John 85 Democratic Labor Party (DLP) 3, 4, 6, 8, 27, 260 democratic reform 186–8 Department of Premier and Cabinet (DPC) 147, 150, 157, 167–9, 174, 183, 206, 225, 226, 231, 292, 300 Department of Treasury and Finance (DTF) 157, 168, 172, 173, 229, 231, 232 desalination plant 266–9 Dixon, Tim 302 Dolan, Sarah 220–2

Dollis, Demetri 63, 66, 83–6, 99, 106, 117 Donohoe, Brendan 275, 309 Doran, Jenny 175 Dorrington, Petrina 35 Doyle, Robert 21, 71, 108, 137–8, 150, 174–5, 250–2, 258 Duck, Colin 299 Duffy, Charles Gavan 5 Duffy, Michael 50, 80, 81, 98 early childhood development 173, 238, 276 EastLink/Scoresby Freeway 193–5, 209 education 43, 121, 133, 167, 173, 207, 208, 228, 238, 259, 297 Egan, Michael 211, 243, 244 Emily’s List 276 enterprise bargaining agreements 243–5 Epstein, David 297 Eren, Tayfun 117 Essential Media Communications 121 Eureka 150 Democracy Conference 220–3 Evans, Gareth 40, 98, 110 Expenditure Review Committee 151, 180, 237, 315 factions see ALP factions Faulkner, John 209 Feeney, David 67–8, 73–5, 78, 82, 85, 86, 182–4, 205, 290–1 Ferguson, Martin 103, 106 Finn, Bernie 280 FitzGerald,Vince 203–4, 206, 225 Foodbowl Modernisation project 306, 307 Frankston East supplementary election 135–6, 138, 146, 148 Fraser, Malcolm 17, 18, 164

index

Gallop, Geoff 198, 210, 234 Garbutt, Sherryl 71, 147, 149, 157, 189, 237, 238 Garnaut, Ross 292 Garrett, Peter 299, 300 Gartrell, Tim 290 George, Horace 25–6 Gillard, Julia 16–22, 57, 68, 97–9, 104–6, 108–9, 112, 138, 162, 226, 290, 302, 309, 314 Global Financial Crisis 255, 287, 308, 312, 315 Glover, Rod 184, 206, 208, 226, 230, 234, 293, 297, 300, 301, 304, 306, 313, 317 Goddard, Jenny 165 Gordon, Peter 322 Goss, Wayne 29, 172, 198 Goulburn Valley irrigation system 189, 264, 269, 306 Governments Working Together 207–9, 225, 227 Grattan, Michelle 33 Green, Danielle 275 Greiner, Nick 172 Griffiths, Alan 60–1, 72, 90, 93 Growing Victoria Together 169–70, 182 GST 154, 163, 197, 201, 229, 243, 246–7, 313 Gude, Phil 7, 126 ‘Guilty Party’ 58, 64, 65 Gurr, Michael 134 Haermeyer, Andre 66, 127, 321 Hamilton, Keith 141 Hand, Gerry 98 Hanson, Pauline 68 Hartland, Colleen 278, 280 Hartley, Bill 16, 97 Hawke, Bob 31–4, 39, 42, 44–5, 60, 62, 73, 74, 90, 93, 110, 116, 163, 174, 191, 227–9, 236

Heads of Treasuries (HoTs) 173 healthcare 41, 179, 198, 201, 205, 207, 228 Hennessy, Jill 113, 124 Henry, Ken 173, 227, 257 Henson, Bill 318 Herington, Andrew 154, 156, 175, 240, 241, 259–60, 268, 315–16 Higgins, James 126 Hirsh, Carolyn 276 Hogan, James Francis 5 Hogg, Bob 38–9, 44, 97 Hogg, Caroline 63, 65, 73 Holding, Clyde 234 Holding, Peter 234 Holding, Tim 70–1, 116, 148, 198, 213, 217, 266, 285, 305 horizontal fiscal equalisation (HFE) 246–7 Howard, John 68, 87, 154–6, 159, 162–5, 180–1, 197, 198, 202, 225, 227, 229, 233, 247, 290, 292–8, 301, 304–6 Howe, Brian 39, 43, 98 Hubbard, Ben 21, 99, 108, 111, 146, 156, 174 Hubbard, Leigh 122–3 Hudson, Rob 132, 169 Hulls, Frank 27 Hulls, Rob 8, 9, 14, 18, 26–36, 62–81, 90, 95, 99, 100, 108–11, 118, 122, 125–34, 141–6, 151, 170, 178, 186, 188, 189, 191, 205, 237, 245, 270–80, 283, 286, 315, 321 Aboriginal legal aid lawyer 26–9, 63, 215 attorney-general 141–6, 151, 189, 205, 211–16, 272, 279 background 27–30 Big Four 14–15, 108–14, 118, 127, 136, 251

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Hulls, Rob (cont.) career after politics 14 civil libertarian 211–19 human rights charter 214–19 member for Kennedy 31–5, 62, 72, 77, 79 member for Niddrie 90, 99, 125 Meyers Place incident 125–6 Mount Isa 26–35, 63 office 178 reaction to Bracks’ resignation 273–5 shadow attorney-general 100, 126 ‘human capital’ 227–8, 231, 294 human rights charter 214–19 immigration 201 income inequity 235–8 infrastructure investment 226, 253 Ingram, Craig 134–7 inter-government relations 158–9, 196–210, 225, 233 Ipp, Justice David 213 Jacob,Victor 25 Jenkins, Brendan 260 Jennings, Gavin 146, 237, 283 Jolly, Rob 43 Jones, Barry 50, 54, 81 Jones, Ian 103 Kaiser, Mike 311, 312 Katsonis, Maria 240 Katter, Bob Jr 30, 62, 63 Katter, Bob Sr 30, 62 Keating, Paul 32, 41–5, 60–2, 68, 69, 73, 87–9, 93, 94, 98, 163, 172, 174, 198, 204, 228, 229, 236, 239, 284 Keddie, Richard 94–5, 115 Kelly, Jane-Frances 235–6, 239 Kelly, Ros 45

Keneally, Kristina 314 Kennan, Jim 50, 52–4, 61, 63–7, 71 Kennedy, seat of 30–5, 62–3, 77 Kennett, Jeff 7, 8, 20, 64, 68–72, 86, 87, 92–6, 100, 107, 112, 114, 116, 119–22, 126, 131–7, 143, 152, 153, 172, 174, 176, 178, 186, 189, 192, 201, 236 Kerin, John 32, 60, 73 Kerr, John 17 Kew meetings 107–14, 170, 290 Kingham, Martin 124 Kirner, Joan 48–9, 51–2, 56–9, 64–5, 78–9, 85, 102, 125, 131, 174, 279, 321 Knowles, Rob 126 Kosky, Lynne 18, 90, 127, 151, 179, 180, 237, 274, 283, 318, 321–4 Labor Renewal Alliance 105 Labor Resource Centre 39, 154 Labor Unity 40, 54, 58, 66, 67, 79–81, 85, 90, 98, 102–5, 118, 122, 125, 127, 129, 182, 275, 291 Lampe, Garth 168 Landeryou, Bill 61 Landy, John 193 Languiller, Telmo 103, 117 Latham, Mark 201–2, 208–10, 221, 222, 288 Lenders, John 59, 91, 94, 108, 112–14, 116, 124, 131, 135, 179, 188, 212–14, 275, 278, 281, 283–5 Ligeti, Julie 34, 76–7, 92, 98, 273 Little, Ian 160, 168, 172–4, 225, 254–5 McCarthy, Frank 166, 167, 171, 172 McCrohan, Sharon 141–2, 148, 170, 186, 190, 201, 212, 257, 272, 284, 287, 300 McCutcheon, Andrew 52–5

index

McEwen, John ‘Black Jack’ 3 McGarvey, James 95, 135 McGinty, Jim 144–5, 211 McGrady, Tony 28, 30, 31, 34–5, 63 McGrath, Kim 33, 34, 62, 77, 92, 132, 137, 157, 255, 262, 264 McKenzie, Andrew 135 McKenzie, Rosemary 44, 60, 61, 66, 67, 148, 253, 271 Macklin, Jenny 39, 154, 175 McLellan, Peter 135–6 McLeod, Robyn 54 Madden, Justin 90, 117, 146, 278, 280, 281, 287 Madden, Mark 77, 92, 132, 141 Madison, James 71 Mannix, Archbishop 107 Marles, Richard 73–4 Martin, Clare 143, 198 MCG redevelopment 179–81 Melbourne 2030 176 Menhennitt, Justice 277, 278 Menzies, Robert 107 Micallef, Eddie 66, 85, 104, 116 Mier, Brian 92 Mitchell, Peter 31 Money, Lawrence 126 Moore-Wilton, Max 164 Moran, Terry 150, 160, 166–71, 174, 182–4, 186, 191, 192, 200, 204–10, 223–32, 235, 244, 253–7, 285, 292–6, 300, 302 Morand, Maxine 178–9, 275–81, 316, 323 Morgan, David 45 Morris, Stuart 54 Mount Isa 27–35, 63 Mount Waverley 179, 316 Mowlam, Mo 222 Mrdak, Mike 302 Muldoon, Aileen 92, 95

multiculturalism 201, 221, 223, 248–9, 253, 256 Murray–Darling Scheme 293, 306 Nardella, Don 275 National Competition Policy (NCP) 172–3, 198, 228, 231, 233 National Express 192, 195 national reform agenda 228–34, 242–3, 246 new federalism 233 NSW Labor 199–202, 211, 243–9 NSW Right 19, 43, 87, 88, 98 Newman, Campbell 322 Newnham, Stephen 287, 318 Nicholson, Tony 239 Noonan, Wade 318 Norden, Peter 239 Oakes, Laurie 88 O’Brien, Dan 137, 158, 286–8, 312 O’Connor, Michael 98 O’Keefe, Neil 54 O’Sullivan, Sheila 54, 80 Outnumbered documentary 94–6, 115 Pallas, Tim 136, 142, 146, 148, 169, 192, 221–2, 234, 244, 256, 257, 285, 295, 316 parliamentary reforms 186–8 Peacock, Andrew 31 Pescott, Roger 114 Pike, Bronwyn 117, 121, 146, 147, 150, 237 planning policy 176–7 Pledge 58, 84, 102, 105, 116, 117, 147 policy pillars 156, 170, 259 polling videos 126 Pratt, Richard 107 preselections in 1998 116–17

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public transport 176–8, 181–2, 192–3, 199, 204–5, 283–4, 287, 308–9 Pyramid Building Society collapse 41, 44, 50, 59 Radford, Colin 94 rail services 157–8, 177, 181–2, 192–3, 283, 309 Ramos-Horta, José 222 Ramsay, Simon 293 Rann, Mike 198, 210, 292 Ray, Robert 40, 58, 59, 61–2, 67, 70, 75, 79, 80 Red Book 174, 182 Redlich, Peter 59 Reece, Nick 234, 267, 287, 297, 319 Reed, Phil 74, 94, 113, 124 Refshauge, Andrew 243, 246–8 refugees 154–6, 201 Regional Fast Rail 158, 161, 177 regional Victoria 92–4, 119–20, 134–7, 156–7, 262 regulatory reform 229–30 Reid, Bruce 44 Resource Super Profits Tax 20, 314 Richardson, Fiona 275 Rimmer, Ben 183, 184, 206, 208, 210, 240, 300 Riversleigh, Alistair 25–6, 29 Robinson, Tony 114, 285, 318 Roper, Tom 81 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody 25–9 Rudd, Kevin 15, 16–22, 68, 226, 288–98, 300–10, 313–15, 319–20 Ruddock, Philip 145, 273 Ryan, Susan 73 Santamaria, Bob 3, 6, 8, 27 Savage, Russell 96, 119, 120, 121, 134–7

Scales, Bill 157, 167, 265 Scoresby Freeway see EastLink Scullin, James 198 Securing Our Water Future Together 240 Seitz, George 84, 91 Sercombe, Bob 63, 66, 81–6, 90 Setches, Kay 279 Shannon, Bill 49, 108, 109, 131, 290–2 Shannon, Ross 30 Shardey, Helen 278 Sheehan, Tony 84, 117 shellbacks 57, 73, 75, 118 Shergold, Peter 293 Shongkoff, Dr Jack 238, 239 Shorten, Bill 16–17, 73–4, 89, 321 Silver, Helen 184, 206, 227, 231, 285, 300 Silvestro, Rosa 148 Sinodinos, Arthur 202 Skinner, Rob 266 Smith, Bob 281 Smyth, Stephen 19 Snowy Mountains Scheme 134, 136, 228, 232, 254, 307 Social Development Committee 238, 239, 241 social policy 235–42 Socialist Left 18, 47, 52, 53, 57–8, 66, 79, 82–5, 97–106, 122, 182, 234 special purpose payments (SPPs) 256–7 Standing Committee of AttorneysGeneral (SCAG) 143–6, 211, 272 Stanhope, Jon 198 Staples, Peter 34, 76 Stockdale, Alan 95 Svigos, George 289–90, 309, 315 Swan, Wayne 184, 300, 302 Sword, Greg 57–9, 61, 65–7, 70, 75, 78, 81, 83, 87, 89–91, 103, 113, 127–9, 131, 138, 182, 187–8, 319 synchrotron 159–61

index

Tampa incident 154–6, 200, 201, 210, 295 Tanner, Lindsay 98, 99, 105 terrorist attacks 156, 162, 165, 200–1, 215 Theophanous, Andrew 103, 104 Theophanous, Theo 66, 92, 100–5, 108, 117, 122, 123, 131, 278, 281, 287 Thomson, Kelvin 56, 69, 90 Thomson, Marsha 146 Thornley, Evan 256 ‘Thwaico’ 178–9 Thwaites, John 9, 14, 15, 18, 22, 48, 50, 52–5, 71–2, 78, 80, 81, 100, 106, 108–11, 118, 125–7, 131, 136, 143, 151, 170, 178–82, 186, 188–91, 198, 205, 223–4, 236–43, 256, 260–73, 282–4, 321 background 52–3 Big Four 14–15, 108–14, 118, 127, 136, 251 Bracks and 55, 186, 191, 205 Brumby and 151–2, 189–90, 223 career after politics 14 deputy opposition leader 111 deputy premier 189 member for Albert Park 52–5, 71, 125 office 178–9 reaction to Bracks’ resignation 271–2 resignation 271–5 shadow health minister 78, 100 social policy 236–41 water portfolio 189–90, 240, 260–9 tort law reform 211–14 Transition to Government 146 Treasure, David 135 uranium mining 87–9

Vaughan, Gerard 81 VicHealth 41 Victorian crisis of 1990 41–2, 64 Victorian Trades Hall Council 112, 113, 118, 244 Victorian Water Trust 175, 189, 204 Viney, Matt 94, 95, 108, 110–11, 126, 135–6, 146 Vinson, Tony 239 Walker, Evan 54 Walker, Ron 180 Wall, Cressida 316 Walsh, Bunna 27, 46–8, 52 Walsh, Geoff 257, 270 water 189–90, 240, 260–9 Welford, Rod 145 White, David 39, 54, 63, 75, 85, 90, 127 Whitlam, Gough 3, 16, 17, 38, 39, 43, 48, 53, 163–4, 166, 187, 222, 282 Williams, Daryl 144, 145 Williamson, Hanna 322 Williamson, Jackson 322 Williamson, Jim 322 Wilson, Jan 71, 73, 116 Wilson, Ron 179 Wimmera Mallee Pipeline 157, 161, 175, 189, 264 Wong, Penny 17 Wooldridge, Mary 278, 279 WorkCover reforms 47, 124 workforce training 225–6 Wren, John 107 Wynne, Richard 142, 188, 272–3, 308 Wyvill, LF 25, 26 Young, Andrew 53

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