Vince Catania’s got them all stirred up out west. The ALP North-West MP’s defection to the National Party has stirred up a circus, complete with a traditional circular firing squad.
Like most thing in politics, the events and atmosphere leading up to Catania’s about face are all about ego, with a healthy dash of institutional culture thrown in. And the culture of the WA ALP is a battered and broken one.
For years, the WA ALP has rewarded incompetence, so long as it comes wrapped in either State Executive votes or the loyalty of the craven, arse-licking variety. There is more than a hint of a Fuhrerprinzip pervading the party, which prevents advice from reaching a leadership in dire need of it.
It’s unsurprising, though, when considered from an historical perspective.
Labor won office in Western Australia at 2001 election through the agency of One Nation’s rather spiteful ‘scorched earth’ preference allocation policy. The inconvenient truth is that Geoff Gallop owed his Premiership not to his advisors but to Pauline Hanson and David Oldfield.
Subsequently, the ALP’s performance at the ’05 poll fell far short of comparable sophomore results in every other state in the nation. Yet from one lucky result and one sub-par one, the Party generally and the Premier’s Office specifically, bought into the notion they were political savants.
Complaints were heard as far back as 2007 that the Premier’s Office was ignoring or sidelining back-benchers, staffers and anyone else not on Chief of Staff Rita Saffioti’s (very short) Christmas card list. The privileged inner circle contained, regrettably, the people who then lost the 2008 State Election to the Liberals, lost the Fremantle by-election to the Greens and are now losing marginal seat MPs to the Nationals.
WA Labor has to admit some hard facts to itself, and recognise that arrogance is no substitute for talent when it comes to decision-makers and the Party elite.
It also needs to stop entertaining the notion that internal criticism is evil and must be punished through excommunication. It’s exactly that thinking that led the Premier’s Office to blow the ’08 campaign, and it is still doing incalculable damage.
To borrow a Lathamism, the party has been reduced to a conga line of suckholes … and while Catania’s been a rat, he has a point about the party’s capacity to hear and act on dissenting voices from within its own ranks.
Rather infamously in the SA ALP, I was the senior electorate staffer to the last SA ALP MP to jump ship – in that case, to the Greens in 2003. That situation was similar to this one inasmuch as my then boss was adamant that his decision was about how to best represent his local constituency, yet the recent change in government (in this case from Government to opposition and in the case of my former boss from Oppostion to Government) must also be a factor in a decision like this. The bottom line remains: the ALP is a famously tribal beast, and both the MP and his supporters will be pariahs. Meanwhile, they will be treated with some suspicion by their new colleagues. It’s a tough experience to have and I don’t envy anyone involved.
… not to mention, the WA ALP loss in 2008 breached the flimsy walls of state government level resistance against open slather uranium mining.
Brian Bourke’s ongoing legacy surely has alot to answer for too, but the unrestrained flow of yellowcake ore trains now must surely rank up there as one of the worst unintended historic disasters for the nation: WA as the next international nuke waste dump?
With all the terrorism threats around lines of transport that implies?
Continuation of the stalled base load clean energy alternatives as Ziggy promotes nuke energy investment NOW, ineffective even in its own terms for 20 years regarding climate issues. Take a bow major parties gorging into those corporate troughs.