The most decisive event of this ACT election campaign was on February 12, 1996.
If Kate Carnell retains the chief ministership, as is almost certain, it will be largely due to that event two years ago.
On that day she appointed sitting Labor MLA Terry Connolly to the judicial office of Master of the Supreme Court of the ACT, and he accepted.
If Connolly had stayed, there was a good chance that he, rather than Wayne Berry, would be Leader of the Opposition, taking Labor into this campaign. Connolly was a polished media performer, had no Vitab baggage and did not carry ideological and union commitment that jeopadised responsible government. In short he was all the things Berry is not and would have been electable.
As it is, he is presiding over crash and bash cases down the Master’s court while the Labor Party he left behind is huddled in ideological self-righteousness, remote from the people it was supposed to serve.
Wayne Berry is the Arthur Calwell of the ACT; the dogmatically pure but unelectable face of Labor.
Of course, the Connolly desertion (for want of a better word) is as much Labor’s fault as due to Carnell’s clever excision of a potential rival. If Labor had given Connolly half a hope of getting the leadership he would have stayed around. But he did not get the deputy leadership on Berry’s departure from the ministry in the wake of the Vitab fiasco. As it was, the parliamentary party was swamped by the left and the 1500 members in the ACT branches were dominated by the left. They would not have someone like Connolly — on the pragmatic right of the party — as leader. They are now paying the price. They are going in to this election with little prospect of obtaining government. The latest polling puts the result, on my best guess, as: Liberal 7, Labor 6, Osborne group 2, Green 1 and one too hard to call (Moore or Democrat, most likely).
That gives Carnell stable government with support of the Osborne two. Moreover it delivers the ACT into the hands of the Christian right, to whom Carnell will owe government. Hitherto she has managed not to give in to their demands.
Carnell herself, on the social left and economic right, will have even fewer friends in social policy if Michael Moore is no longer there or no longer forms part of the balance of power.
It may be that the Liberals get only six seats, or the Osborne group gets only one. In which case it will be down the Democrats and Greens. Berry has gone out of his way to attack the cross-benches in the past three years. The theory was that Labor was aiming for majority government. Instead, Berry has alienated his one hope of government: an alliance with the Greens and the Democrats.
He should have been buttering them up, like Graham Richardson did in 1990 to save the Labor Government. That could have prevented the Democrats from putting their present position: they will support as Chief Minister the leader of the party with the most seats, and if the seats are even the party with the most votes. That is almost certainly going to be Carnell.
Neither Berry nor Andrew Whitecross before him used a leftish majority in the House to get legislation they wanted through. They taunted Michael Moore and the Greens Kerrie Tucker instead of working with them. Moore (if he is there) and Tucker (who certainly will be) will not forget.
The attitude of David Lamont epitomises ACT Labor’s deep trouble. Lamont was Labor’s No 3 candidate in Molonglo in the 1995 election and lost his seat in the Carnell swing.
When Connolly left for the bench, Lamont did not let his name go forward in the count-back to get back into the Assembly. He would have easily won it. Then 10 months later when Carnell offered Rosemary Follett the job and Discrimination Commissioner, Lamont one again declined to put his name forward.
The reason, presumably, was because he baulked at the prospect of returning to endless fights in the backrooms with the left — the so-called Troika of Berry, Sue Robinson and ACT party secretary Doug Thompson — over non-mainstream policy instead of getting out and selling saleable policy in the community.
So Labor lost Lamont’s services. Sure, the man has his faults, but he would politically eat any of the present six sitting members.
Factional tribalism cost the party Annette Ellis (from the Right) in 1995 when it promoted the Left’s (diligent but charismatically deprived) Andrew Whitecross to the No 1 position on its ticket in Brindabella. It was an avoidable loss.
Labor has since dropped the ticket practice, but the Left still used strong-arm tactics to support its sitting members with money and publicity over any non-sitting candidate from the right. And look what that has resulted in. A disorganised and unplanned exercise by several frustrated candidates from the right to muscle in on the publicity. The charge was led by Steve Garth, one of the so-called Labor B team of non-sitting members, who look more appealing than most of the sitting members if the voters can be bothered to investigate. Jon Stanhope is another in Ginninderra.
Labor would be polling higher now if Ellis had been in the Assembly. She proved her general electoral appeal by winning back the southern seat federally at the March 1996 federal election with a first-preference vote Berry can only dream about.
Remember, the seat had been catastrophically lost to the Liberals’ Brendan Smyth in the by-election caused by the departure of Ros Kelly in the wake of the sports rorts affair by Berry’s present adviser Sue Robinson.
Symth, incidentally, will return to politics in Brindabella on Saturday.
You would have thought Labor would have learned from that fiasco and cleared the ACT of that approach to policy and personnel who supported it. The ACT Left, of course, blames the Labor pragmatic Right in the form of Ros Kelly and Paul Keating and the nasty push polling. It was not the ACT Left’s fault.
Well, who will the ACT Labor Left blame this time, if the election is a fiasco for Labor as the polls suggest? My guess is anyone or thing other than themselves.
By excluding the mild Labor right so comprehensively from Labor’s ranks over the past six years, the Labor left might succeed in delivering the whole territory into the hands of the Christian real right. A high price for ideological purity.