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  Labor on Self-Destruct? TRANSCRIPT - PART ONE SENATOR STEPHEN CONROY: You can't get away with overaffiliating and overaffiliating. It will come to a vote and you won't be able to hide. So those of you who want to turn your back on this resolution because you think it serves your short-term factional interests now, as Bill Shorten says, what goes around comes around. You will be called to account. JOHN LYONS: This is what the factional warriors of the Australian Labor Party look like when they go to war. SENATOR STEPHEN CONROY: Come and tell us. We've got 35,000 members. JOHN LYONS: They've come together at their Victorian conference to decide policies and rules that will help Simon Crean become PM. MAN IN CROWD: The maladministration of this party in recent years has been a disgrace. The people who've been appointed. JOHN LYONS: Instead, it's a weekend of insult, punch-ups, payback and acrimony. But what's happening here today is not just an argument over rule changes. It's a nasty shadow play of the guerrilla war engulfing Labor's Federal leadership, as the rival supporters of Simon Crean and Kim Beazley fight to the death. SENATOR STEPHEN CONROY: There is no place for violence in the ALP at all. It is unacceptable behaviour by any delegate. JOHN LYONS: This man, Senator Stephen Conroy, the leader of the right-wing Labor unity faction wants Kim Beazley as leader. This man, Greg Sword, the powerful national president of the Labor Party, wants Simon Crean as leader. GREG SWORD: I know it's been a long day. JOHN LYONS: Conroy wants revenge on Greg Sword for causing an earthquake in the Victorian ALP by withdrawing from the Labor unity faction and forming an alliance with his old enemies - the socialist left. GREG SWORD: Because that's what elections to these positions will mean. Crowd jeers. JOHN LYONS: Elder statesmen of the party say things are now so bad the Labor Party is dying. JOHN BUTTON, FORMER LABOR SENATOR: Well, I'm not saying that rigor mortis has set in, but I'm saying that it looks fairly terminal at times. RODNEY CAVALIER, FORMER LABOR MINISTER: If the Labor Party was a nation, it would be on a IMF watch. SUSAN RYAN, FEDERAL LABOR MINISTER: It's very hard to explain how very able and principled people such as we have in the Labor leadership have lost the plot. But it seems that they have. JEFF JACKSON : The previous government destroyed health. JOHN LYONS: And Labor's problems are about to get much worse. Union boss Jeff Jackson is launching a war against Greg Sword over serious allegations to be tested in court later this year. JEFF JACKSON : I think large sums of money being offered anywhere makes most people nervous and they wanted to get out of that meeting as quickly as possible once that proposition was put. JOHN LYONS: While many people will not talk publicly about Greg Sword, Jeff Jackson who runs the Health Services Union of Australia knows the course he has embarked upon today could bring down the national president of the ALP. JEFF JACKSON : He who casts the first stone should be prepared, particularly in this environment, to probably see a hailstorm of items coming back his way. SPORTS COMMENTATOR: Here's a chance from behind. Takes a screamer! JOHN LYONS: Labor's marauding tribes have often resembled Melbourne's best-known tribes - its community-based football teams. But as the AFL has grown, the ALP has shrunk. More people now turn up to any given football match in Melbourne than the party's entire national membership. Labor's links with the community is breaking. Its players have turned professional, now led by the white shirts in corporate boxes. Morale is low and it's becoming so divided, it's mutating into factions within factions. The hard men of the game - the factional warriors - are jostling each other for the spoils. And the party faithful feel they've been sidelined. DR PETER BOTSMAN, LABOR HISTORIAN: Well, it's not only marauding tribes, it's marauding archaic tribes that really no longer represent anything proper for our country. They simply don't have any substance in either views of the world, or in things that represent meaningful actions or changes for the majority of Australians. JOHN LYONS: Die-hard members, in turn, are losing faith with their own party. Head of the Electrical Trades Union, Dean Mighell should be one of Labor's most loyal sons. Instead, he's quit the party in disgust. DEAN MIGHELL: I'm a Labor boy, I'm a Footscray boy. I'm a unionist. All the things that I ought to be believing in Labor, but they lost me and they lost thousands of people and continue to do so. The Labor Party as we've known it, as unions have known it, is dead. I think we'd better wake up to that. JOHN LYONS: Labor's problems begin at grassroots level. Here in Newtown, an inner city suburb of Sydney that should be a Labor stronghold, only nine people bothered to attend a recent branch meeting. MAN: You can wonder if there's any point turning up. You put your motions up and you send off motions from the branch hoping that something will happen. JOHN BUTTON: I went to a branch meeting one night, there were eight people there, two of them were members of parliament. One or two of them enunciated their fears about the Labor Party and how they couldn't remain much longer if things can't get better sort of stuff. The two members of parliament spoke and I remember one woman saying after, "I'm more depressed than ever." JOHN LYONS: It's estimated Labor's total membership around Australia is about 50,000, but only 20,000 to 25,000 are recognised as genuine. Branch stacked members signed on at the lowest concessional rate of $25, form the majority. In Victoria, of its 12,000 members 70 per cent are at the concessional rate, and they don't sign on for long. Three-quarters of all new members resign within five years, leaving the party with a dwindling and rapidly-ageing membership. Rod Cavalier rose to become Education Minister in NSW. He joined the Labor Party when a membership was a membership. ROD CAVALIER: I was privileged to join the Hunters Hill branch in 1968. When I joined at age 19, not surprisingly, I was the youngest member of the branch. When I transferred out to Gladesville in 1978 as a new member of parliament, I was still among the youngest members of the branch. I covered to the Southern Highlands, covering Bowral in 1992. I was among the youngest members of the branch and 11 years on in 2003, I'm still among the youngest members of the Southern Highlands branch and the local area. The difference is I'm not 19, I'm 55. This is a party that's ageing. SUSAN RYAN: The Labor needs its branches and branch members. They're the lifeblood. If you don't have a vigorous, vital, numerous branch structure, raising money, having chook raffles, having barbecues and so on, you go elsewhere for your money. You go to the big end of town. Now some Labor people worry about that. JOHN LYONS: A principal reason for Labor's decline is its system of choosing candidates to run for parliament. These preselections are now rigidly controlled by ranks rather than local members. The Labor faithful despair at the poor calibre of candidates ending up in the country's parliaments. DEAN MIGHELL: You see great Labor people out there who should be in parliament and hacks and duds get put up too many times to represent people and it weakens the party. JOHN LYONS: Sunday's own analysis confirms the narrowness of the ALP's recruiting. Of the 30 people on Labor's frontbench in Canberra, only three have had jobs other than union officials or political staffers. RODNEY CAVALIER: There's a serious problem in our parliaments now, which is only going to get worse as the catchment, the gene pool becomes narrower and narrower. People going into school, into university, where they get cased by a faction and they go into a trade union office, into the party office, the Member of Parliament's office - that is their sum experience of life. And from the time they get that job they seek to position themselves to take a Labor seat in parliament. JOHN LYONS: It's an issue identified in a report on the party's problems by former PM Bob Hawke and former NSW Premier Neville Wran. BOB HAWKE: We want to say in our recommendations that we want to attract the best possible candidates. JOHN LYONS: Bob Hawke acknowledges he benefited from a rigid factional system during his government, but now says they have developed interpersonal fifedoms, serving only the interests of themselves. BOB HAWKE: And it's more about power and that's what the Wran and Hawke recommendations are about, trying to make sure that it's the interests of the party that are put first - put first not the pursuit of the powers of particular little groups. SUSAN RYAN: The factions have become the dominant decisionmakers and almost the only decisionmakers. So that the factions say you can't have this policy, or the factions say, you can't have that rank and file candidate, you can't have that person that comes from the community with a whole lot of passions, you've got to have No.3 on our list of faction hacks, that's who you're getting. JOHN LYONS: What do you think the public thinks in general of the factional system? JOHN BUTTON: I think it regards it rather like a sort of brawl in a pub, which they don't want to know about. You walk past on the foot path and look in the other direction. SPEAKER: The leader of the Government, Senator Button. JOHN LYONS: John Button was a dominating intellectual influence in the Hawke Government. He makes the wry observation that Britain's new Labor PM Tony Blair would not have made it through the ALP's factional system. JOHN BUTTON: Why would he be bothered? Factions reward people for loyalty to the group, not ideas about the country. SPEAKER: When the House has come to order. JOHN LYONS: It's the product of the factions in Labor's frontbench in Canberra that's wringing alarm bells in the membership. Even the master of factions, Graham Richardson, concedes Labor's frontbench is lacklustre. GRAHAM RICHARDSON: The ones in the frontbench so far haven't performed. How many Liberal ministers have been in trouble because of the performance of their counterparts, and the answer is not too many. SUSAN RYAN: Well, my natural inclination is to say to them in a very exasperated tone, "Look, what do you think you're there for?" You know, "What's your core mission here?" I don't want to hear about you can't do that because this faction said this or that. Why are you there? When you wake up in the morning tired and exhausted from a late night at the parliament, what is it that you think you're going to do today to make your position in the Federal Parliament worth something? RODNEY CAVALIER: If, however, your entire advancement is about adhering to an orthodoxy, the normal processes of maturity do not occur. That's the single greatest degeneration that's taking place in our ranks. People whose minds do not move forward. JOHN LYONS: Closed minded people? RODNEY CAVALIER: It's not so much that they're close minded, there is simply no opportunity for light to get through. JOHN LYONS: They're hardly the people who we want representing us. RODNEY CAVALIER: Exactly. JOHN LYONS: After he took over the leadership in 2001, Simon Crean chose his frontbench strictly on factional lines. Only three of the 30 members have had a real job that wasn't as a union official or in a political staffer's office. SIMON CREAN: So, that's not a real job. Lawyers are real jobs, are they, like all of the frontbench... JOHN LYONS: In the days gone past you had shearers and all sorts of people in the Labor Party. Only three of the 30 have had a job outside the political game. SIMON CREAN: Look, the Labor Party is open to anyone to join. JOHN LYONS: But 90 per cent of your frontbench are from that narrow background. How did that happen? SIMON CREAN: It's a very effective frontbench. It's a frontbench that compared to their side, person to person, will eat them. JOHN LYONS: But every opinion poll for the past 18 months says Crean and his team have failed to connect with voters. Labor no longer owns the proverbial man in the street. Those voters are either swinging or new coalition voters. There is a disconnection between a Labor Party that recruits so narrowly and a wider community. DR NICK ECONOMOU, POLITICS, MONASH UNIVERSITY: It's actually the Liberal Party that seems to be connecting better with the community because it's drawing so many of its future MPs from small business and from local government in particular. No wonder Mr Howard succeeds so well when he uses the rhetoric of the battlers. GRAHAM RICHARDSON: This is a very different John Howard. He's done extremely well and he has good instincts. These days, he picks the mood. This is a bloke who stands for things. I think they've got used to politicians who talk and don't actually seem to stand for much and they like the fact that John Howard stands for something. JOHN LYONS: Labor historian Peter Botsman says the party now fails to rely on instinct, instead placing its faith in focus groups, pioneered by Bob Hawke and pollster Rod Cameron. DR PETER BOTSMAN: Rod Cameron and Bob Hawke really changed the whole nature of the Labor Party through opinion polls and it became less important to worry about what rank and file people were thinking in the branches than to really go through focus groups. JOHN BUTTON: And focus groups for a politician seemed to me not to be about leadership, but about followership. You go to a focus group to try and find out what you ought to do, rather than saying, "Well, I've thought this through and this is what I'm going to do, and I'll change the focus group in time.” JOHN LYONS: After Labor's loss in 2001, its third in a row, the new leader went in search of why the party had lost its heartland. He also announced a policy review by his deputy Jenny Macklin. SIMON CREAN: You always learn if you're prepared to listen to people, and so it's a great side of politics, I think, if you're prepared to get out, listen and understand. JOHN LYONS: But still today, no action. The results meant to be put to the next national conference are now lost in administrative limbo. SUSAN RYAN: Where are the policies? Why haven't we been having a big debate about Labor's view on higher education for the last six months? We could have been. SIMON CREAN: Well, it's a continuing piece of work. JOHN LYONS: Do we ever see anything from it? SIMON CREAN: Of course you do, because its timetable was always in the context of the national conference. JOHN LYONS: But no-one seems to know where it is? SIMON CREAN: Well, I know where it is. JOHN LYONS: Can you tell me where it is? You say you know where it is, where is it? SIMON CREAN: It's a work in progress. JOHN BUTTON: The question that hurts me most as a lifetime member of the Labor Party is not so much people who criticise Simon Crean or Kim Beazley or somebody else, but people who say to me, "But I can't understand what it stands for anymore." That is a hard question to answer. MAN IN CROWD: ...play games next weekend, you're going to find out all about it. JOHN LYONS: The recent conference in Victoria showed this - the passion, the punch-ups came with debates over rules and the spoils of political life - who got what jobs. But when it came to policy, delegates were more interested in their newspapers. The debate on women's policy lasted half a second. MAN ON PANEL: A move seconded, the adoption of the women's affairs report. All those in favour, all those against. Carried. DR NICK ECONOMOU: That is typical behaviour of a party that is moving away from seeing policy as being really important and is instead all about struggles for power, struggles for power internally. In that way, the Labor Party is becoming more and more like the Democrats in the United States, where policy is not such a big issue. It's really about machine politics and who controls the machine. SIMON CREAN: Delegates, we're not a Social Democratic Party, we're a Labor Party and that's what we will stay. JOHN LYONS: Central to Labor's identity crisis is its historical link to trade unions. Union membership has slumped and some now say the ALP should divorce itself from unions. Simon Crean has taken a great amount of heat reducing the vote unions have on party policy from 60 per cent to 50 per cent of delegates at conferences. But if this was to reflect the size of their enrolled membership, it would be reduced to between eight per cent and 12 per cent. RODNEY CAVALIER: The central problem of the Labor Party is trade union affiliation, trade union control. JOHN LYONS: Rod Cavalier from the left of the party says if Labor is to survive it must sever its ties from the unions. RODNEY CAVALIER: The only losers from that equation would be union officials. The union themselves would be huge beneficiaries. For a start, instead of their officials spending an inordinate amount of time worrying about their political careers and delivering for friends, they could concentrate on serving their members and growing their base. They represent now fewer than 25 per cent of the workforce across Australia. A diabolical decline which is no-one's fault but their own. JOHN BUTTON: The most sensible thing to do would be to do what the Swedish party has done and that is to separate the two, separate the party from the unions. They each stand on their own feet and I think that's good for both of them, rather than this sort of propping each other up. GREG SWORD: Well, I think that's silly. I think this is the Labor Party. It can't be a Labor Party without unions, if John Button wants to go and construct a Social Democrat party he's welcome to try and do it. What would happen is it would be an absolute failure. JOHN LYONS: John Button's proposal for a divorce, however, is gaining support, even among some union heavyweights. MAN: Maybe there does need to be a divorce. Maybe the unions need to say, if Labor really doesn't want us, let's face it Simon Crean tapped us on the shoulder and said, "Hey we'll put you down to 50 per cent, the next step's out on your bum." SIMON CREAN: I can't imagine a Labor Party without the trade union movement. I remember John Button arguing this 26 years ago, 1977 after the Whitlam defeat post-the '75 election. John Button's argument was wrong then, and he's still wrong. JOHN LYONS: But Simon Crean may not get the chance to take the Labor Party in any direction. Events of recent months, culminating in the challenge from Kim Beazley, may be merely about who gets the chance to lead a depleted army, out of touch and losing focus, against the forces led by John Howard. JOHN BUTTON: Well, I have criticisms of each of them. And if there is a joint criticism about it, I think it would be that in those five or six years the Labor Party let something slip in terms of renewing its identity and its structure and all those things, and they were there at the top when that happened. JOHN LYONS: Do they deserve to win now? DR PETER BOTSMAN: They deserve - no, they don't. JOHN LYONS: How much does it hurt you to say that? DR PETER BOTSMAN: Um, it hurts a lot. JOHN LYONS: After the break, we look at Greg Sword - the real power behind Simon Crean and a time bomb ticking away beneath the two men. END TRANSCRIPT – PART 1 TRANSCRIPT – PART 2 JOHN LYONS: When Steve Bracks was re-elected last year as Premier of Victoria, he was triumphant. It was the largest win Labor had ever had in Victoria. In his victory speech he singled out one person - David Feeney, who had run his campaign. STEVE BRACKS: Could I say particularly to David a great campaign, professionally run. Probably the best campaign you have seen from Victoria from the Labor Party ever. A great campaign, a great result. Well done to David. JOHN LYONS: Clearly, though, such a glowing tribute counts for nothing in today's ALP. Feeney was sacked as state secretary by someone, who many say, is far more powerful than either Steve Bracks or Simon Crean. Greg Sword, the national president of the Labor Party, presided over Feeney's sacking while he was overseas on honeymoon. DEAN MIGHELL, SECRETARY ELECTRICAL TRADES UNION: They just cut his head off, I think. It was a pretty brutal power play and it was just a payback - it was just a payback - and I've got no respect for that. JOHN LYONS: So dirty did it become, that not only was Feeney dead but he was buried before he returned to Australia. Someone placed a death notice in The Age, causing great distress to his relatives, many of whom thought he had actually died. It made great play of Greg Sword's involvement in his sacking. (Excerpt from obituaries): "Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand." The fake death notice caused waves of disgust. SUSAN RYAN, FORMER FEDERAL LABOR MINISTER: I would think that should be some sort of criminal offence and the person should be convicted. That's absolutely terrible and when something like that happens, the damage to the party's standing is severe. JOHN LYONS: Have you seen this? Are you aware of this? GREG SWORD: Yeah. JOHN LYONS: David Feeney's death notice. GREG SWORD: Yeah. JOHN LYONS: Do you have any idea who put that in The Age? GREG SWORD: No, I don't. JOHN LYONS: No idea at all. GREG SWORD: No, I don't. JOHN LYONS: Feeney was of a group of new young warriors challenging his control of the Victorian branch of the Labor Party. David Feeney, Bill Shorten, the head of the Australian Workers' Union and Senator Stephen Conroy, the powerful factional player. Sword took his block of votes and made a new alliance with his ancient enemy - the socialist Left and its leader Senator Kim Carr. DEAN MIGHELL: The factional realignment in Victoria of Sword moving over in alliance with Carr with the Left, was simply Sword getting a bit squeezed in the right, the young Turks, the Bill Shortens and Stephen Conroys, becoming powerful in their group and maybe challenging the old bull, if you like. Young bull versus new bull. So that old bull went into the next paddock with another old bull. JOHN LYONS: Greg Sword has given as his reason for defection a desire to back Simon Crean's reforms of the party. But many see his move as a cynical act of self-preservation. They argue he has turned a blind eye to a system in which rorting had become endemic. MAN (DISGUISED IDENTITY): The machinery in play would be hiring out hotel rooms, forging identification cards, printing out false documents for the purpose of internal ballots within the ALP. I mean, we're small operations. JOHN LYONS: This man asked for anonymity but spent years involved in the Network - a youth arm of the party identified with Greg Sword's faction. He admits taking part in an operation at the Downtowner Hotel in inner city Melbourne, forging identities to help elect Tim Holding to a party position. Holding is now a minister in the Bracks Government. MAN (DISGUISED): About 30 people crammed into a boardroom. Equipment, laminating machines, computers, printers, scanners, photocopiers, digital cameras; all for the sole purpose of pumping out false documents, false people, false identification cards to rig the elections. And when the network became aware of ALP officials coming to inspect, then the equipment, the photocopiers and scanning equipment and machinery was bundled into the boot of the car. JOHN LYONS: He also says that at Greg Sword's direction, he and a number of other networkers used the office of the NUW to solicit votes for Sword's candidates in a health services union election. MAN (DISGUISED): We were asked by Greg and his staff, his private staff at the NUW, to hop on the phones. We were there to purport to be health services union members. In fact, none of us were health services union members. JOHN LYONS: Have you ever yourself in your union career played any of those games with numbers? GREG SWORD: No, I haven't. I've been asked this question many times before. I've never been involved in branch stacking, no. MAN (DISGUISED): At the time there were public proclamations from Greg that he would have no involvement in internal elections within the ALP, let alone any internal trade union elections. The truth was something quite different. An army of workers, both from the NUW and from Network, on phone banks, work stations, day in, day out for about a week, all in support of one particular candidate of a rival union's election. JOHN LYONS: Greg Sword denies ever influencing the affairs of another union. But he faces more allegations to be canvassed in a defamation case later this year. The claims arise from an allegation of a campaign to take over the health services union by a group of Greg Sword-supported candidates, including his own brother Malcolm. They allege an inducement to rat on their colleagues. JEFF JACKSON, SECRETARY VICTORIA HEALTH SERVICES UNION: People who are running on my ticket were invited to a meeting at the NUW's office, which Greg Sword attended. And at that meeting, five other people who were involved in our ticket were offered an inducement of $190,000 to continue not supporting our ticket, basically to change sides. JOHN LYONS: The meeting occurred in the Melbourne offices of Greg Sword's NUW. Jeff Jackson's version is that his members were offered money, but they were not clear what it was to be used for. JEFF JACKSON: And I think that was because the people that attended the meeting at the time became extremely nervous at the mention of such a large sum of money, and I think their preference was to not partake or continue that process at the time. JOHN LYONS: Jeff Jackson wrote to Premier Steve Bracks some time later, saying his members had been offered an inducement to switch sides. Greg Sword denied to a journalist that any money was offered. That's incensed the five people who made the claim, one of whom is now suing for defamation. GREG SWORD: What I've done is to say, already, that what they say didn't happen. JOHN LYONS: You're not denying that a meeting happened, are you? GREG SWORD: No, of course not, but what they say was the import of that meeting, wasn't. And I'm in the process of defending myself against their allegation. So I can't - I can't say more than that. JOHN LYONS: Were you in any way trying to support your brother's campaign? GREG SWORD: Um, of course. Of course. He was trying to defend good people. JOHN LYONS: Wasn't that, though, interfering in another union's election? GREG SWORD: But I didn't. JOHN LYONS: How did you support him, then? GREG SWORD: Well, I think as I said to you, it's very difficult for me to talk about these matters because all of them are subject, all of the circumstances are subject to a court hearing. JOHN LYONS: The case is potentially explosive, because Jeff Jackson is about to do something considered out of bounds in union circles. To force another union boss, Greg Sword, to reveal his union's most secret financial affairs. JEFF JACKSON: The legal process, I guess we'll probably investigate, whether those sums of money do exist or not. JOHN LYONS: Jackson himself in happier times has written cheques to Greg Sword's renowned fundraising ventures - lavish luncheons and dinners where guests are invited to buy access to Labor politicians and union leaders at $390 a seat. The cheques, sometimes made payable to a company called Workplace 2002 are sent, not to the union office, but an anonymous PO Box further down the road. The events are said to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars. Could you tell me about the company Workplace 2002? How does that work? GREG SWORD: It's an organisation which we use to try and raise money to defend ourselves in union elections. JOHN LYONS: Are they slush funds? GREG SWORD: Oh, people call them all sorts of things, but if you looked at the last election, which the people in Victoria in the National Union of Workers went through, people who ran campaigns against us, spent we estimate, something like $450,000. JOHN LYONS: But are they slush funds? GREG SWORD: No, I wouldn't call them a slush fund. JOHN LYONS: The NSW branch of the NUW took Sword's national office to court last year, concerned that members' funds were being paid into Workplace 2002. Although the money was repaid shortly before the case got to court, the judge was scathing about the way Sword's union ran its books. He concluded: "It is a matter of concern that a large union should have been found to be so wanting in ordinary standards of financial care." Do you accept that charge? That there was sloppy accounting? GREG SWORD: Yes, I do. What happened was as I said, a couple of cheques which should have gone to Workplace 2002 were banked by the union and on the other hand, a bill which should have been paid by Workplace 2002 was paid by the union. JOHN LYONS: But a draft audit of Sword's national office leaked to Sunday, indicates a more fundamental problem with his union accounts. The auditors founds that the "official receipts book was missing." That there has been "no regular reconciliation for the suspense account and wage clearing account." There was "no evidence of review of bank reconciliations by an independent official." And "certain transactions were found to be misallocated." Even though the financial affairs of Greg Sword's union are about to become a major public issue in the courts, Simon Crean wanted to avoid the subject. Surely Australians would be interested if the national president of the Labor Party is running slush funds? SIMON CREAN: Look, you want to keep focusing on these issues. Quite frankly, they are irrelevant to the Australian people. JOHN LYONS: Yeah, but do you support, do you know whether Greg Sword's union runs slush funds? SIMON CREAN: I don't. I don't. JOHN LYONS: As the leader of the Labor Party will you try to find out? SIMON CREAN: As the leader of the Labor Party, what I'll be doing is advancing an agenda for the Australian people, an agenda of reform, an agenda of hope, an agenda of opportunity. That's what the Australian people want. JOHN LYONS: But clearly, what many in the Labor Party do not want is a factional warrior as national president. SUSAN RYAN: I think he's seen as a trade union official, one of what Whitlam used to call "the faceless men". The national president of the party should be someone who is above factions. JOHN BUTTON: You know, if you drain the water out of a pond, gradually, you get fish left who've been there for a long time. Greg Sword has retained his connection with the Labor Party and his union's connection, through a process when there has been a gradual erosion of all that. JOHN LYONS: Union boss Dean Mighell says Greg Sword is unquestionably more powerful than Simon Crean. DEAN MIGHELL: If Greg Sword was to withdraw that support and certainly, if that translated publicly, then that would be all over. JOHN LYONS: So if Greg Sword decided to cut off Simon Crean's head, he could probably do it? DEAN MIGHELL: He'd be playing footy with it in the street. JOHN LYONS: Who's more powerful - you or Greg Sword? SIMON CREAN: The elected leader of the Federal parliamentary Labor Party is the person that speaks for the party. JOHN LYONS: But who's more powerful, not the spokesman. Who's more powerful? SIMON CREAN: Again, you just want to play a semantic game about power. I'm saying that what the Australian people want to vote for is the political party. JOHN LYONS: But it's a simple question, isn't it? SIMON CREAN: No, it's not a simple question. JOHN LYONS: The truth of the matter is the party's problems are unlikely to be resolved at next week's caucus showdown. Kim Beazley will have first go at playing footy with Simon Crean's head. Greg Sword will be working hard to prop up his friend, Simon Crean, while Sword's factional rival, Stephen Conroy, wants Crean beheaded and replaced by Beazley. And the despair of party members grows ever deeper. GRAHAM RICHARDSON: I find it hard to believe that John Howard won't win the next election. RODNEY CAVALIER: Until such time as the dramatic surgery we're talking about and then the pumping in of oxygen, then there is no way of reversing the death and the dying. SUSAN RYAN: I don't think that changing the leadership is going to change the fortunes of the party, whether it's a change to Kim or a change to any of the other contenders. JOHN LYONS: Are you sad at the moment for the state of the Labor Party? JOHN BUTTON: Of the country. The state of the country would be vastly improved if the Labor Party was more progressive, modern, free-wheeling party than it is at the moment. END TRANSCRIPT – PART 2 Click here for a printer-friendly version. |
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