We were all here, and we all saw it. Over the past three years, Labor picked itself off the mat, consigned its toxic civil war to history, and regained its institutional sense of self – to great electoral effect. In just one cycle, Labor has put itself back in contention for government.
Progressive voters, flexible and optimistic souls, have shown themselves inclined to forgive the past transgressions and get behind the ALP once again. Recently, when I wrote a couple of stories highlighting low-level tensions between Bill Shorten and Anthony Albanese, some readers rounded on me for stirring up trouble.
In the minds of these readers, I am a person so minutely into the tortured personality politics of the Labor party that I need to invent mischief to make myself happy. This would make me an unbelievably sad person if this were true, and fortunately it isn’t. I was just shining a little torchlight into a dim corner to let you know something was coming. And sure as night follows day, the something materialised.
The something started with Albanese taking his time to rule out challenging Shorten for the Labor leadership. Just a bit of post-election theatre to raise the collective pulse rate. Then things escalated when the jockeying started around the new shadow ministry.
A clear majority of the left faction had made a decision that it did not want one of Shorten’s key supporters, the Victorian leftwinger Kim Carr, to remain on the front bench. Being a key ally of Shorten’s wasn’t seen as reason enough to keep his position on the left ticket.
The push to dethrone Carr united the key national left figure, Albanese, Labor’s deputy leader, Tanya Plibersek, and a bunch of other up-and-coming left factional power brokers – but Carr, a veteran of Labor’s internecine conflicts over many decades, was never going to take humiliation lying down.
Because Carr wouldn’t quietly vacate the field, Shorten and key rightwing figures around him were forced to go into bat for a figure that had been ostracised, and seen to be ostracised, by the majority of his own faction. Shorten getting involved didn’t dissuade the left from pressing the point. The trenches were fortified. Jaws were set. Arms were crossed. The roiling continued.
Albanese (and others) versus Shorten and Carr was the first high-stakes head-to-head we’ve seen inside Labor for quite some time. We don’t really need to parse the ins and outs of the power struggle, we don’t need to know in intimate depth who is chest-bumping and why, because these points don’t matter for Labor as much as this next question: will things now calm down, or will they escalate?
It’s too soon to say, but here’s three broad points we can make.
Bill Shorten was always going to enter a new phase of leadership, a more challenging one in many respects, post election. Outside the world of politics, being within striking distance of a major life goal is generally incentive to double down and close the deal. Politics, though, can be a perverse business. If Labor feels itself within striking distance of government, it is possible that various people will begin to prioritise their own ambitions and aspirations because it is now safer to do that than it was when the collective lore was it will take us three terms to get back.
The next point is about sliding doors. Over the past three years, Shorten went out of his way to be master of Labor’s “internals”. He worked assiduously to cultivate relationships with everyone who mattered, pursuing a collaborative leadership style that allowed him to exercise institutional leadership in a way that worked incredibly effectively for Labor. The one person he didn’t seek a relationship with or an accommodation with was Albanese. People close to Shorten insist Albanese was never the slightest bit interested in cosying up, and people close to Albanese insist Shorten was always too paranoid about him to reach a detente. In any case, Albanese was always held at arm’s length. I wonder if Shorten regrets that now? I wonder whether things would have played out any differently at this juncture if he had played that relationship differently?
The final point is about consequences. Hanging on to Kim Carr was absolutely necessary from Shorten’s perspective for a bunch of institutional reasons I won’t bore you with. It was necessary enough for the Labor leader to press the point, but the decision is not without knock-on effects. A nasty split in the left faction is now out in plain sight, and the shadow cabinet dynamic will be awkward to say the least. Perhaps everyone will shake themselves down and press on productively, perhaps they really are that grown-up, but even if they are, now Kim Carr will sit in a shadow cabinet in a diminished position, knowing a great number of senior colleagues do not want him there. That dynamic is not good for morale, or esprit de corps, or trust.
Pulling out of all the ins and outs and looking at the big picture, Labor figures individually – and the party collectively – now have some big decisions to make. The voters have had a gutful of politicians being more obsessed with their own status and entitlements than the quality of their public service. The voters have also had a gutful of political parties indulging their internals at the expense of cogent programs for government.
If Labor wants to fall back into old corrosive habits, the verdict from Australian voters will be savage and swift. Everyone – the leader, the people who might in all of the circumstances want to be leader, the newcomers, the old hands – whatever the respective merits of their various positions, need to bear that short voter fuse in mind when they gather again around the shadow cabinet table to begin the long process of muscling up for the next parliamentary term.
