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Richardson: Labor can’t blame others for its failure to reform

Mar 27, 2015
Jay Weatherill has talked up the Upper House reform his party has thus far failed to achieve.

Jay Weatherill has talked up the Upper House reform his party has thus far failed to achieve.

Bob Sneath is suddenly a marked man.

Some three years since he hung up that proverbial Gone Fishin’ sign and jumped into his jalopy to chug off into the sunset, the roguish, avuncular former Upper House president has become the target of more intense Labor ire than I usually hear directed at the Opposition’s most stellar performers (if that is not an oxymoron).

By contacting InDaily this week to vent over a penalty rates deal brokered by the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees’ Association, Sneath appears to have unleashed the pent-up ire of the SDA-controlled Labor right.

He mused, indeed, that he’d probably get a few angry calls. If the volume of angry calls about him directed to me was any guide, he wasn’t kidding.

There seemed to be a lot of sentences containing the words “Sneath” and “asleep”, or some variation thereof.

It wasn’t, on the whole, a charitable assessment of someone whose union, the Australian Workers Union, elected him as secretary and whose party, the ALP, elevated to be the presiding officer of the Legislative Council. He was an unreformed leftie elevated to oversee Labor’s unreformed chamber.

Sneath this week bemoaned that SA Unions, the state’s major conglomeration of left-aligned unions, had not stridently opposed the SDA deal: “Where are the other unions? What are they saying about this character wanting to weaken penalty rates?”

It seems he touched a nerve: last night SA Unions president and Maritime Union secretary Jamie Newlyn jumped onto Twitter for only the second time since 2013 to tweet: “Bob Sneath on the money in InDaily.”

However specious and ill-informed the right may consider Sneath’s critique, he seems to have opened some cracks in the Labor façade.

More importantly, though, the backlash reminds us, yet again, of Labor’s pusillanimous pragmatism when it comes to the Upper House.

Ideologically, the ALP has long been opposed to its very existence. So opposed, apparently, that it treats the place as a “Years Of Service” gift for various factional hacks owed a parliamentary tilt under that old, revered system of Labor Crony-ocracy, Buggin’s Turn.

Much as I like the guy, I wasn’t a fan of the way Sneath’s successor John Gazzola had to be blasted from the president’s chair after Labor decided to give right-winger Russell Wortley a go instead in “a secret factional deal” (is there any other kind?).

If nothing else, squabbling over who gets to preside over an institution they all think should be abolished appears just a tad unseemly.

But again, the episode prompted much head-shaking and audible sighing from their Labor colleagues, none of whom were very complimentary about anyone in particular.

Which again raises the point: Labor can’t distance itself from the scenario it has created in the Upper House.

Insiders can’t now privately claim that Sneath is some irrelevant irritant when they only recently elevated him to one of the higher-paid gigs in State Parliament.

It was Mike Rann who, in Labor-imposed political retirement, delivered a Hawke Centre Lecture at Adelaide Town Hall, wherein he lamented that not abolishing the Leg Co was his biggest regret.

“I feel one of my greatest failures will have been my inability to reform, even to abolish, our State Parliament’s Upper House,” he mused.

“We’ve seen single-issue ideology blown out of proportion by minority interests and the major parties appointing factional hacks who might as well have hung a ‘gone fishing’ sign on their door, and substituted their briefcase for an Esky.”

It was a pointed dig at some of his own colleagues; which is, I suppose, easy to do when you don’t have to rely on their caucus votes anymore.

But in truth, it was Rann’s Government that had the opportunity to reform the Council and, by prevaricating, effectively chose not to take it.

It talked up plans to slash terms and reduce the number of members, but in the end left any meaningful action way too late. A lower house vote to establish a referendum on the matter was left till only months out from the 2010 state election – the proposed referendum date. Then-Attorney-General Mick Atkinson’s bill failed on the first go because, in a symphony of poor management, “one member left the House to attend to a sick child, others were late back from dinner engagements (and) were walking back to the House and were close but not close enough”.

Close but not close enough is a generous way to describe the attempted reform, which was ultimately soundly defeated anyway, in…yep, you guessed it…the Upper House!

Jay Weatherill now talks up his own parliamentary shake-up, wrapped in his “bold” policy agenda, which also includes potentially bolstering the salaries of backbench MPs, who currently languish on the breadline on $150K for 52 dedicated working days a year.

(Incidentally, I’d support modest reform which distinguished Opposition frontbenchers – of any political hue – who are currently on a backbench wage and don’t have entire departments of bureaucrats to help/hinder them).

Rann’s own rueful reflection again seems apposite: “I hope my successors will be more successful in reforming our Parliament and making it more relevant to the state’s future.”

In the meantime, Rann’s successors should avoid trying to divorce themselves from the Upper House.

If Sneath speaks with authority, it is because of the authority bestowed upon him by the ALP machine.

And the Legislative Council we have now is Labor’s legacy to South Australia.

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