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Labor leadership experiment nears end

Oct 09, 2013
The second debate between Labor leadership contenders Bill Shorten (right) and Anthony Albanese (left) at Victorian Trades Hall Council last month.

The second debate between Labor leadership contenders Bill Shorten (right) and Anthony Albanese (left) at Victorian Trades Hall Council last month.

Labor’s experiment with grassroots democracy will reach its climax on the weekend, with either Anthony Albanese or Bill Shorten elected to lead the battered party.

The votes of the 86-person caucus and up to about 43,000 party members, with each group worth 50 per cent, will be tallied and weighted and the winner announced on Sunday afternoon.

That will end the month-long contest between the two contenders who sometimes seemed to be making their campaigns up as they went along.

That’s hardly surprising as a major Australian party has never before given its rank and file members a say in who should be leader.

This has led to a strange courtesy from two politicians who are, by nature and occupational necessity, fiercely combative.

Albanese, better known for roaring insults across parliament’s despatch box and into Tony Abbott’s face, says his opponent is a friend who’d make a very good leader. Shorten reciprocated.

But behind the scenes, at the factional level, things haven’t been quite so civil. The Right, which wants to reassert its traditional dominance, has locked in behind Shorten, who’s one of its own. Nothing personal, but Albanese’s Left has had too much say in recent times.

The factional element, and with Labor there’s always a factional element, has led some unions to back one or other candidate. Thus Shorten’s old union, the Right-aligned Australian Workers’ Union, is behind its old national secretary.

But this is no show-and-tell election, and no-one knows whether ordinary members, for whom factional considerations are less important, will take much notice.

Most observers expect Shorten will win the caucus vote while Albanese will pick up a majority of the members. However the margins, which will be critical, are hard to estimate.

Some commentators, notably that old factional warrior Graham Richardson, have derided the whole process. Richardson’s said that a leader without majority support from both groups will be a lame duck.

Perhaps, but judging from the reactions at forums the two contenders have spoken at round the country, grass roots members like being involved.

The contest seems to have energised a party that, given the hiding it suffered a month ago, should be dispirited.

Members who’ve been to forums, been assailed by phone calls and received candidates’ statements with their ballot papers – paid advertising is banned – may struggle to find a decisive difference between the pair.

Albanese, at 50, is four years the elder.

Both have impeccable Labor antecedents, with Albanese’s rise mainly through the party machine and Shorten’s through the unions.

Albanese, however, also emphasises his early struggle years – brought up in council housing by a single mum on a disability pension and the first person in his family to complete high school, let alone university.

Having first been elected to parliament in 1996, Albanese has greater parliamentary experience. As a senior opposition frontbencher, he knows what opposition is like. Shorten, first elected in 2007, doesn’t.

Both were senior ministers, with Albanese also leader of the house, a job of great complexity during the three years of minority government.

Shorten, on the other hand, can point to his critical role in developing the national disability insurance scheme, perhaps the Labor government’s most worthy achievement.

Both have adopted slogans.

Albanese says he’ll bring “vision, unity and strength” to the leadership. And he draws his vision “in four big brush strokes” – jobs and economic growth, creating opportunity, a sustainable natural and urban environment and a fair go.

Shorten, channelling Gough Whitlam when he became leader in 1967, pushes the three Ps – “Party, Policy and People”.

He says the party must be brought together and grown with more members from diverse backgrounds; policy must be developed that will make Australia a better place, and Labor must rebuild the Australian people’s trust.

Both emphasise the centrality of economics, with Shorten rejecting the “simplistic binary which says that you’re either for the market or the government”.

He calls for healthy scepticism towards both the big state and the unregulated market.

Both want serious, and quiet, thinking on policy, with Shorten declaring the end of the “Era of the Labor Messiahs” and “less spin, less focus groups, more real conversations”.

Albanese has offered the radical thought that “we might even have to turn our phones off for an hour”.

Albanese’s greatest selling point is probably his long record as a loyal and passionate Labor warrior.

Shorten can’t match him on that. The man who helped dislodge and then reinstate Kevin Rudd is sometimes seen as a tad too ambitious.

But he’s smart and, on matters he really cares about, tenacious. In a rare dig at Albanese’s pugnacity, he said his specialty was turning minorities into majorities, not “throwing haymakers in the parliament”.

Both say they can lead Labor back to government in 2016 and whoever the membership judges has the better chance of pulling off this unlikely feat will probably win.

– AAP

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