Carr no trailblazer on state-federal path

Bob Carr is hardly blazing a new trail. He will be the fifth premier of New South Wales to seek a new life in Federal Parliament - and the seventh former premier or chief minister to do so in the past 50 years.

But few former premiers have succeeded in Canberra. Federal politics is far more diverse, and newcomers can win partyroom support only by taking it from those already entrenched.

Some succeed. An example was Mr Carr's predecessor in Macquarie Street, John Fahey, who became a respected finance minister in the Howard government, until a cancer scare forced him out of politics in 2001.

Carmen Lawrence followed her stint as Western Australia's first female premier by becoming minister for health and human services in the Keating government. But her years in Canberra were dominated by a partisan campaign and court charges over the suicide of Perth woman Penny Easton. Lawrence was acquitted on all counts, but it crippled her politically.

Former South Australian premier Steele Hall went on to Canberra, first for the centrist Liberal Movement, then back in the Liberal Party. But despite his high profile, he ended up in the outer, not the members'.

One-time Queensland premier Vince Gair certainly made an impact. Dethroned as Queensland premier in 1957 after he broke with Labor, he was elected as a Democratic Labor Party senator in 1964 and took over as party leader. But after losing the leadership, he accepted an appointment from arch-enemy Gough Whitlam as ambassador to Ireland. His irate colleagues then joined the Liberals to force an election, in which the DLP was wiped out entirely.

State premiers used to have more clout. The first Federal Parliament had at least 10 former premiers, including the only Victorian premier ever to make the move, Sir George Turner, who became the first federal treasurer. But only former NSW Premier Sir George Reid became prime minister, and for a brief, precarious year.

The most successful was Tasmanian Labor premier Joe Lyons. He became a minister in the Scullin government, then acting treasurer when E.G. Theodore, a former Queensland premier, was bogged down by more muckraking. When Theodore was cleared and reinstated as treasurer, Lyons quit the cabinet, then quit Labor and took over as leader of the conservative side, becoming prime minister in 1932 until his death in 1939.

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Clyde Holding - a true Labor guy'

National Archives

BENEATH the brilliantly coloured stained-glass ceiling, a galaxy of Labor and Aboriginal leaders past and present gathered yesterday in the Great Hall of the National Gallery of Victoria to farewell their quick-witted, combative, arts-loving larrikin mate, Clyde Holding.

Victoria's Labor leader from 1967 to 1977, then a federal minister in the Hawke government from 1983 to 1990, Mr Holding died aged 80 on July 31 in a Castlemaine nursing home. Yesterday, he was honoured with a state memorial service, where Premier Ted Baillieu sat stoically as former prime minister Paul Keating and others poured praise on a man remembered as "a true Labor guy".

Aboriginal leaders Mick Dodson and Marcia Langton paid tribute to the former minister for Aboriginal affairs who first put forward a national land rights act and handed Uluru back to its traditional owners.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard recalled that while Mr Holding's push for a land rights act was blocked by his boss, Bob Hawke, Mr Holding responded with typical cheek and courage by funding Eddie Mabo's ground-breaking native title claim in the courts  although the Commonwealth was the defendant.

Mr Keating led the mourners, recalling his old friend's elation when the High Court eventually upheld the Mabo claim and the Federal Parliament finally recognised native land title in law.

"He was a character, but a character with a heart and a soul and a sense of mission," Mr Keating said.

"He was funny, he was a raconteur, he was a showy man, but he was always a very serious man . . . He had the fight in him, he had integrity of purpose and he had compassion and understanding.

"He had imagination. Everyone imagines things, but Clyde was one of those who develop their own model of how the world could be made better and had the courage to follow it through thick and thin."

Professor Dodson said he had crossed swords with Mr Holding during his four years as minister for Aboriginal affairs, but found him "a thoroughly decent man, a man of his word . . . He gave us hope, he gave us some vision that the future might be different for us."

Former foreign minister Gareth Evans recalled other sides of Clyde Holding, such as the night they first met at a vigil outside Pentridge on the night before Ronald Ryan was hanged in 1967.

A video of Mr Holding's life ends with an image that sums him up. After the speeches at the Uluru handover  from which Mr Hawke, fearful of the white backlash, stayed away  a plane flies overhead trailing a hostile banner: "Ayers Rock for all Australians."

Mr Holding stayed watching it, his eyes squinting into the sun, his jaw jutting out in defiance.

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Control fetish stifles ALP

OPPOSITIONS don't win elections, governments lose them. It's an old saying but a good one. Governments are well-resourced, oppositions poorly resourced. So governments normally win re-election. If they lose, it's usually because they made a bad mistake.

Were it not for WorkChoices, our prime minister now would be John Howard or Peter Costello. Had the Kennett government kept its promises to regional Victorians instead of cutting their services, our premier might still be Jeff Kennett.

Longevity is a factor, too. I recall Dick Hamer reflecting that every decision you make in government costs you support from someone, and eventually you end up with more opponents than supporters. But that shouldn't trouble a first-term government.

So why is the Rudd government at risk of becoming Australia's first one-term government since the Great Depression? What big mistakes has Labor made that has cost it so much support in the polls?

First, an essential caution. I've looked back over 25 years of polling, and in every one of the past eight federal elections, the opposition was leading in the polls at or around this stage. But in only two of those - Howard in 1996, and Kevin Rudd in 2007 - did the opposition win the election. In the other six, voters came back to the government by election day in sufficient numbers to re-elect it.

That's not a forecast of what will happen this time. But it's a strong reminder that what we tell opinion polls months before the contest may not be the way we vote in the polling booth. Opinion polls at this time are a verdict on the government. Our votes on election day are also, in part, a verdict on the opposition.

A Newspoll yesterday implied that voters could be already turning back to Labor, which led by 52 to 48 in two-party terms. But that lead was due entirely to Newspoll's incorrect assumption that the 25 per cent of Australians now supporting the Greens or minor parties will distribute their preferences in the same way as the 15 per cent who voted that way in 2007.

The Age/Nielsen poll instead asks those supporting smaller parties which major party they prefer. In its last poll, a third of Greens preferences were going to the Liberals (up from a fifth in 2007), as were half of those from minor parties and independents. Replace Newspoll's wrong assumption with Nielsen's data, and its bottom line should read 50-50.

Labor is still in trouble. What went wrong?

Opinions will differ. To me, it's a combination of four specific policy failures, with a related set of broader underlying problems about how this government operates.

The first problem was the lack of qualitative controls in Labor's stimulus spending, which opened the way for rorts and poor workmanship by contractors on the insulation and school building programs. This has left Labor looking incompetent, and many voters don't forgive that.

Second, as the refugee boats returned, Rudd vacated the policy debate on how they should be treated, leaving the ground free for the Coalition and the shock jocks to fan Australians' fears that we are being swamped by refugees, and that the only solution is to keep them out of Australia.

Third, the dumping of the emissions trading scheme was an act of breathtaking cynicism from a Prime Minister who had told us that tackling global warming was the great moral issue of our time.

In part, the ETS was sacrificed to meet the government's self-imposed 2 per cent spending cap, a prime case of the tail wagging the dog. It mattered, because it cost Rudd and Labor respect. It told Australians that what this government cares about is keeping power, and anything else is expendable to that end.

The fight over emissions trading, like the fight over the resource rent tax, erupted because Rudd and his inner circle had no political strategy to get difficult reforms through the Senate - and for an opposition, the easiest choice is always to oppose.

A reforming government has two choices: accept battle, and fight like tigers to educate the public and win the debate - or bring the opposition into negotiations early, sharing the credit for reform, but also the responsibility. Rudd did neither.

By instinct, the PM is a manager, and a hands-on, untrusting manager. His ministers are not free to make policy in their areas, as in the distant past. They are advisers before policy is made, then sales reps afterwards. Like Paul Keating, like Howard, Rudd makes the decisions, using cabinet at best as a sounding board, or at worst - as when deciding to ditch the ETS, and impose a resource rent tax - ignoring it completely.

The common thread to all this is an overriding desire to control events. The ministerial press flacks consult at 5.30 each morning, having already read the papers, to decide what the government's lines will be, and to ensure that all ministers say the same thing. The stifling of individual initiative is one reason why the government is so ineffective at selling its message.

Labor, the party of reform, needs to reform itself. It needs to stand for the things it believes in. It needs to have the courage to go out and confront a sceptical public, and make the case for the reforms it knows we need. It needs to free up its frontbench and backbench talent, and use it better.

It needs to convince Australians that it stands for something more than just staying in power.

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