Catch and Kill: The Politics of Power

by Deane

Overview

Power is the only measure of a politician that matters: how they win power, how they use power, how they lose power. Catch and Kill is an inside account of the beguiling and nomadic nature of the unholy trinity of politics—the winning, the using, the losing. Joel Deane’s gripping study of the politics of power takes us into the inner sanctum of state and national politics in Australia, investigating how four friends—Steve Bracks, John Brumby, John Thwaites, and Rob Hulls—beat the factions, won office in Victoria, then tried to hijack Canberra. It delivers a slice of political gothic, exploring the heart of the contemporary Labor Party in search of the nature of power. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780702251634
Publisher:	University of Queensland Press
Publication date:	07/29/2015
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	368
File size:	904 KB

About the Author

Joel Deane is a poet, novelist, journalist, essayist, and speechwriter. He is a former producer for the MSNBC technology news show The Site, has penned reviews and essays for Australian Book Review, and written speeches for Labor politicians such as Bill Shorten, Steve Bracks, and John Brumby. He is the author of the novel The Norseman’s Song and the collection of poetry Magisterium, which was a finalist for the Melbourne Prize for Literature.

Read an Excerpt

Catch and Kill

The Politics of Power

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By Joel Deane

University of Queensland Press

Copyright © 2015 Joel Deane
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7022-5163-4

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CHAPTER 1

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 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 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.

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 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 Victorian 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 Gillard 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 Governor-General John Kerr's dismissal of Whitlam's government in 1975; 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.

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 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 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.'

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Catch and Kill by Joel Deane. Copyright © 2015 Joel Deane. Excerpted by permission of University of Queensland Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents

Contents

Prologue: First Memories,
CATCH,
Charlie Foxtrot Politics,
Cops and Cockroaches,
Memo from 'Bongo Land',
Enter the Independents,
Shellbacks and Troglodytes,
Choking the Piñata,
Treachery Place,
Outnumbered,
Julia, Boudicca,
The Golden Four,
The Picture of Dorian Gray,
A Dark Horse,
KILL,
Skylab,
An Unholy Trinity,
A Machine Made of People,
Citizen Steve,
A Blinding Aura,
Crossing the Rubicon,
Broken Glass,
One Crowded Year, Part One,
One Crowded Year, Part Two,
A Death in the Family,
Heading for Armageddon,
'Jesus Fucking Bananas',
A Taxi Called Kevin,
The Smartest Person in the Room,
Running Out of Friends,
Postscript: The Road to Ithaka,
Acknowledgements,
Endnotes,
Index,