Old habits die hard. Bob Carr, unexpectedly revived from his lucrative retirement jobs last year to become Australian foreign minister, had scarcely warmed his new seat before he was talking about exercising his powers of patronage to give jobs to old cronies. On his personal staff or otherwise, so long as the public was paying the bill. Even before nightfall, the rumour mills were talking of Carr's canvassing a purely patronage appointment of John McCarthy, QC (erstwhile legal adviser to NSW Labor and close Carr mate).
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McCarthy (who is not the retired professional diplomat) is no doubt a splendid and able chap, but would not have appeared on a Department of Foreign Affairs shortlist for diplomatic appointment had it contained 10,000 names. He's a mate. He may have the capacity to do a job, but, in the tribal world of political appointments, the fit is only a secondary consideration.
Likewise another mate, former (and slightly shopsoiled) NSW minister Craig Knowles, was made chairman of the Murray-Darling Authority by Environment Minister Tony Burke. Former Queensland premier Peter Beattie was named as Australia's first resources sector supplier envoy by Julia Gillard.
There are lots of others. Even Trish Crossin, recognising her fight to hold her Senate seat is lost, has been said to be asking for a diplomatic job so she can continue her service to Australia. Had Robert McClelland kept his sense of perpetual and dynastic entitlement in order, and his mouth shut, he might be sitting on a federal court by now, or as Australia's representative to some European bushfire committee.
Perhaps Gary Humphries, ambushed by Zed Seselja, will be asking Tony Abbott for a consolation job by the end of the year. As will, later no doubt, Zed, who has yet to learn that Humphries always repays debts with interest.
Patronage is an incident of being in government, even if the Rudd government, in an early fit of virtue nominated hundreds of Commonwealth board, tribunal and other discretionary jobs as ones not for patronage, but for appointment on merit, after external and independent evaluations. Only a nominated few were for pure patronage. That was, of course, when John Faulkner was ''Minister for Integrity'', a position he occupied until he was replaced by a man in Parliament only because he is the son of an AWU powerbroker.
It may well be chains of patronage, not to mentions strings of mates' favours about unimportant things such as stays at ski lodges, which fatally undermine desperate attempts by Gillard ministers to distance themselves from the airing of the ALP's dirty laundry in NSW. There's rarely more than two or three degrees of separation between most ALP figures and Eddie Obeid and/or Ian Macdonald. Eddie, after all, controlled most ALP preselections, state and federal, in NSW for two decades. If you were in the Right, chances were you owed him, or he could snuff you out.
Bob Carr came to the premiership of NSW in 1995 having told voters that he expected that his front bench would be ministers in the portfolios they had shadowed. And that was as it was, except for one obligation Carr seemed to have accumulated but had not mentioned. After his victory, he called in Bob Martin, erstwhile shadow minister for mines and fisheries, and told him he would have to step aside. Room had to be found for Obeid, a businessman and Labor member of the Legislative Council, who was (with Joe Tripodi) the chief of the dominant subfaction of the NSW Right, known as the Terrigals from the location of one of the Obeid summer palaces. Bob Martin was a member of the other right-wing subfaction, known as the Trogs, or Troglodytes.
Martin made a fuss and refused to accept the Carr verdict. He appealed to caucus. Carr voted for Obeid. But the vote was a tie, and the names were put in a hat. Martin's came out, and he was the first Carr minister for mines and fisheries. The second, four years later, was Obeid.
But by 2003, even Carr, no slouch in overlooking peccadilloes, was sick of Obeid's relentless pursuit of his personal and family business interests. He decided to dump him from the ministry. Obeid flatly refused to go. Ultimately furniture was thrown - most say by Carr at the Obeid habit of prolonging an argument until the other side gives up in frustration or is caught by other engagements.
This confrontation allows Carr to pretend these days that the rot in NSW Labor, if there is rot, began after him, and that he was never tainted by association with him.
Carr got out of NSW politics, on an enormous but, as it turned out, inadequate pension, while the going was good. But storm clouds were already on the horizon. These came from the collapse of state infrastructure caused by the diversion of money to bread, circuses, jails and pet projects of Alan Jones, all the while blaming migration and Malthus for any shortcomings in public goods and services. Many of these were now being subcontracted out to public-private partnerships, if at ruinous cost to taxpayers. Indeed, Carr became so expert on this form of public-private financing that, in well-earned retirement, his services as a consultant were promptly, if expensively and unexpectedly, snapped up by a leading merchant bank and venturer.
Carr's successor, Morris Iemma, had been anointed by Obeid but they, alas, fell out too, and Iemma, himself now contemplating, from retirement, a move to federal politics to replace McClelland, is these days a chastened and converted player with many a story to tell about the dark rooms of the Right, the complete lack of shame of Obeid and Tripodi, and his own path to Damascus.
Iemma was followed by a member of the NSW Left - the reflection of a fear by Mark Arbib and co that the developing stench around the Labor Right might deprive it of office and power. Half a loaf is better than none.
Nathan Rees did not have Iemma as a minister, but he had Joe Tripodi, and Ian Macdonald, at least for a while. But then Rees sacked Tripodi and Macdonald, and was shortly afterwards voted out of the premiership by his own party in a coup organised by Obeid. On the way to the tumbrels he said that if he were not premier at the end of the day, the person who was would be ''a puppet of Joe Tripodi and Eddie Obeid''. Rees was replaced by Kristina Keneally, who denied that Eddie and Joe were pulling the strings but called them her ''mentors'' and people who had served the community well.
The Keneally government was resoundingly defeated at the next election. Now a different, but no less greedy, tribe of rats is gnawing at the public interest and purse of the people of NSW. As ever, since the Rum Corps at least, the primary industries are lobbying, rent-seeking, the mongering of access and influence, patronage, and the diversion of public resources and the political culture into the general direction of one's own tribe of ravening wolves, instead of the other.
Meanwhile, many of those with major roles in the transformation of the Labor Party were advancing up various trees, if not ones generally that involved any unpleasant confrontations with voters. A number came to Canberra to help implement here the techniques which had been applied so successfully to politics in NSW. For most, however, the federal ALP was only a way stop on the road to lucrative jobs peddling their knowledge of politics, access to politicians and influence to the private sector, particularly to large-scale gambling interests. The last minister for sport must have had a chuckle this week at suggestions that gambling was corrupting sport, and causing people to use illegal body-building drugs.
The overwhelming proportion of the players, Labor or Liberal, state or federal, are not crooks, or corrupt in the sense that people are now alleging of Obeid and Macdonald. If the allegations, and the appearance of the evidence now on the record, is true, they have seriously crossed lines into criminal corruption, legal corruption and indefensible political simony.
Most modern players would not dream of improperly lining their own pockets, or the pockets of their family or friends, other than by the conventional but legal and, these days, reasonably public methods of looking after old mates. They may be rorters, but they know, more or less, the difference between rorting and stealing, between fraud and stretching but not tearing public tolerance.
There's a difference between petty venality - noticeable in about half the backbench in most parliaments - and outright graft. (The petty venality is most observed with obsessions about minor entitlements, the greed for which suggests, perhaps wrongly, that they are very bribeable.)
It's a difference somewhat similar (and about as justifiable) as the old policeman's distinction between, on the one hand, taking a free hamburger at McDonald's or a tip from an untouched SP bookie, and, on the other, imposing a ''tax'' on the sale of hard drugs. Our politicians, on either side, are often rogues and knaves; only a few are outright villains.
Alas, one of the marks of the difference is willingness, by those who are clean and those who are mostly clean, to mark lines in the sand about what rorts are tolerated and what are not. It sometimes seems that no one has done this in the Labor Party - least of all in NSW - for a long time. No one in the Labor federal leadership, the organisation, or the industrial wings of the party, or from the senior chieftains of the factions, movements and seminaries of the party. Indeed, most of the imaginable checks and balances have vied with each other for sheer cynicism about the exercise of power, the romanticisation or affectionate dismissal of party roguery, or the tolerance of internal fraud, such as branch-stacking, forged or fraudulent membership, the promotion of friends and relatives, and the taking of favours and discounts from developers, and alcohol and gambling interests. There is still a pretence that there can be personal integrity even when one is beholden to others for one's preselection, or must vote as determined by a chieftain on a matter of principle.
In NSW Labor, the joke goes:
● Nothing on the level;
● Everything is a deal;
● No deal is too small.
It's
● Pay to play
● Strictly cash and carry;
● No reasonable offer refused.
The alternatives are all too often, particularly at state government level, just another tribe of the same type, regarding good government as only an incidental (not always compulsory) of the benefits of having one's hands on the steering wheel. The sheer joy of steering, of course, is much accentuated, by the complete impotence of being out of power: many of those who get it hardly care where they are going, or why, for the pleasure of having the wind flowing through their hair.
The most that one can hope for is that a new party cleans the stables in the process of getting settled into power, and that, soon after it has become comfortable and its own rorting becomes obvious, it ought to be pitched out in its turn. It's hard to imagine that a party led by John Robertson, who put as many holes in the Sussex Street boat as anyone else, will be the man to reform the party, its ethics and its manners, and lead NSW Labor back to power. It's clear that Julia Gillard is not prepared to step up to the plate either.
