There are few jobs more opaque than political staffing. What do they do? What secrets do they know? Are they the real string pullers in government, or are they the more bumbling, chaotic and dysfunctional types seen in, say, The Thick of It?
In the long 16-year reign of the New South Wales Labor government (1995-2011) I lived with a staffer who was deliberately anodyne about what he did – after all, I was a journalist. Urgent faxes would come through early in the morning and late into the night, and he spent hours on the phone, pacing the footpath outside, sometimes screaming. Newspapers were strewn about the apartment with angry red circles where his minister was named.
Later I became a staffer myself for the police minister – not for very long, and the government I worked for was not re-elected. But it was long enough to be thrilled and appalled by the experience, and to realise, why, when it’s all over, nothing in life can seem that fun and turbulent as the time when you worked for the minister.
This week at Martin Place in Sydney, former Labor staffers gathered for an alumni event in the function room of a law firm. The canapés were good and from the outside it looked like any other corporate networking event in the city.
One of the speakers – an alumni with the Keating government – talked about his career since government in banking and finance. Others I spoke to talked about how they had transitioned to law or the superannuation industry or various lobbyists’ gigs. An executive search consultant was circling and gave me his card.
Yet political staffing is not a normal job. Those I talked to spoke about their time in politics with the exhaustion and pride of those involved – however crucially or tangentially – in the great project of nation building. The corporate life that can come later can seem like that description of the hulking polo player Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby: “One of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at 21 that everything afterward savors of anti-climax.”
As so it is with this.
But what does beckon later can be money. Not always. And not for everyone – but it’s there. There are the jobs waiting for staffers at banks, superannuation funds, in the gaming industry, in mining, in retail. In the modern Labor party, there is a strong strain of neoliberalism that runs through the résumés of a lot of ex-staffers and their masters. They go on to work for the man.
The Greens’ senator Larissa Waters is keeping a log of where former political staffers and ministers go after their time in office. She writes how former the Labor resources minister Martin Ferguson became chairman of the APPEA (“the voice of Australia’s oil and gas industry”) advisory board in October 2013 – just six months after he stopped being the resources minister. Craig Emerson, a former Labor trade minister, went on to be a consultant for AGL Energy and Santos. Greg Combet, the Labor climate change minister, went on to be a consultant to AGL Energy and Santos.
Critics could argue that this is kind of thing destroys the Labor identity and what sets it apart from the Liberal party.
But the thing that makes Labor Labor – its DNA, its primitive identity, its core – still remains remarkably robust despite the corporate path trod by former staffers. The tribe is still a thing. The phrase “true believers” when said in a Labor context is yet to sound hollow. It still means something; it was still palpable in conversations I had with former staffers at the networking event.
In my brief time as a staffer, I used to attend a regular lunch at a Chinese restaurant in Sydney with a group known as the Celestials. It was people of all ages, from different ministers’ offices, or floaters – those who dipped in and out of the infrastructure of the party but were at heart Labor people.
At the lunches the talk was gossip but it was also about all things which the party and politics might be able to touch, which was pretty much all things: the arts, the environment, the economy, poverty, power, past giants, future leaders. There was a sense at those lunches of being bound together by a shared set of values, of a common purpose or project.
It was the accumulation of “rubber chicken dinners” – all the community functions you attend in the electorate, where you don’t go for the food. A Labor friend refers to it as “knowing the recipe for the chalk” – that is, all those hours spent in university or young Labor clubs chalking campus around election time, or wandering dark streets of some faraway marginal electorate and taping up signs to electricity poles the night before an election. It’s all the early, tiring, boring stuff that ties this tribe together, makes it function when in power, and holds it together – as a submerged but coherent bloc – when it’s not.
When Labor’s de facto oral historian, the late Bob Ellis, would come to Celestial lunches, I tried to get a seat near him. I loved listening to him talk about the Labor party. He spoke about it in a way that suggested there was poetry, beauty and serious duty in the rubber chicken dinners, the recipes for chalk and the midnight runs to Matraville with a ladder and boot full of party posters.
Once he was talking about school and the friends he had there, a gang. And then at university, a gang. He said, when you get older that goes, there’s no gang, there’s no group, you’re on your own. He’d get emphatic when talking about the need for a gang, to have people around you who care about the same things you do, to work on the same great project. The Labor party was his gang.
He wrote in Goodbye Jerusalem:
And then it was late, and by lamplight we were singing ‘Solidarity Forever’ on the steps, and it was Labor and it was a fuck-up and we were history. Soon we were all drunk as shit, and people driving home were running into trees and rooting total strangers, and that was it, the end of an era. The end of hope. The beginning of a new professionalism, the Wran Rethink, the Richo machine.
Ellis talked about the end of hope back in 1997 but the conversation now at the highest levels of the Labor party thinking is about the failure of neoliberalism. Wayne Swan has rejected it and is insistent on the need to focus on inclusive growth. The ACTU has rejected it, and even Paul Keating has said liberalism has nothing to offer current economic circumstances.
Supporting remarks made by the ACTU boss, Sally McManus, at the National Press Club, he said: “Liberal economics has run into a dead end and has had no answer to the contemporary malaise.”
Could the answer to the “contemporary malaise” be collectivism? Could it be the gang, but in a enlarged super-form, where anyone can be a member? If there’s a shift from “me” to “we”, then the values of old Labor might be well be highly prized again.
