Good old Kim Beazley has now been Leader of the Opposition again for six months. He gave a great speech after the Budget, even if he, and his advisers, made a complete mess of their tactics in opposing the Government’s tax cuts. The Government has been bumbling and stumbling around, and the Opposition has had much the success that one might expect of taking advantage of it, except on immigration matters, where neither the Leader nor the Spokesman had any credibility at all. Over the winter season of party conferences, Kim has been receiving rousing applause. Nothing surprising about that. These things are choreographed—actually in the script. And anyway, he was among friends. Not necessarily among that 37 per cent or so of the Australian population with a predisposition to vote Labor, or that roughly 50 per cent who might at any time prefer Labor to the alternative, but among the ever shrinking number of people who are actually members of the Labor Party. Probably about half of the names in the party books are people who have let their membership (and their payments) lapse, people whose names have been purchased (particularly from ethnic communities) and whose subscriptions are paid by corrupt power brokers, and people who have never existed, or who now reside in graveyards.
The fraud and mismanagement of membership roles is no accident; nor is the dramatic decline in the number of members. The smaller the membership, the greater the opportunities for manipulation of numbers. A high proportion of the senior officers of the party organisation are active participants in the complete corruption of the principles of democratic control of the party. What many do, routinely, would put them in jail were they dealing with a company with shareholders, or were the machinations within political parties subject to inquiries by the fraud squad.
Just as significantly, Kim Beazley (who can afford, thanks to his backers, to be at a distance from the basest frauds) has long been a favoured son of just such manipulators, and his power base in parliament is entirely dependent on the system continuing as it does. Whenever anyone makes an allegation of fraud or corruption, you can expect that Kim Beazley will be piously hoping that it is not true, and scolding the whistleblowers for not taking up their complaints inside the secretive (and totally corrupt) internal party processes. There is no better illustration