Of all the comments made after Mark Latham’s surprise ascension to the Labor leadership, Paul Keating’s remark—that it represented a defeat for the bankrupt ALP factional system and its operatives—was the most sound. All but two of the factional chieftains (John Faulkner, from the left in NSW, and Kim il Carr, from the left in Victoria) had voted to put Kim Beazley into the leadership. The ALP machine in every state bar Victoria and Tasmania is under the strong control of men who desperately wanted Beazley in the job. Nor had they taken his victory for granted, even if they had assumed he would win. Every politician whose preselection was capable of being upset by a block of Transport Workers Union or Australian Workers Union votes was threatened, and by people who mean even now to deliver on their promises.
Some of the old hacks put more effort into getting Kim Beazley up than they had in trying to install their own children, or spouses, in safe seats in parliament. The hardened factional chiefs in parliament who had decided that the Simon Crean show was terminal, their union overlords who control the big branches, the relentless party apparatchiks in state branch secretaryships who had been leaking damaging poll results to undermine Crean, and the reflexive plotters, schemers and finaglers, such as Stephen Smith, Wayne Swan and Stephen Conroy, were all on the wrong side when the votes were counted. Even Carmen Lawrence voted for the man whose moral compromises in 2001 had rendered the party, in the minds of many who voted for her as party president, unfit for government.
Mark Latham has been in a forgiving mood, pretending to welcome Stephen Smith back to the front bench. In January, however, he faces a national party conference which will be controlled by the forces he has just defeated—indeed, the same forces that Carmen Lawrence had just defeated, had anyone wanted any evidence that the party machines are on the nose, even with paid-up Labor members.
But the controlling factions are not of a mood to surrender their power lightly, least of all on the economic issues where Latham must make an impact with the electorate. The chieftains enjoy most of their power from patronage and corruption at state government level, and there Labor is comfortably entrenched.
Of course not all of those who campaigned against him did so because they were in thrall to