Would Ben Chifley be pre-selected today?

by Andrew West

Several years ago at the NSW parliamentary press gallery Christmas drinks, a prominent Liberal, who knew I was a Labor true believer, spent an hour bemoaning to me the quality of candidates his party was attracting.

Labor's strength, he contended, was to have nurtured a class of professional politicians, as ministerial advisers or as trade union officials.

How wrong, how utterly misguided and deluded, he was.

If anything, modern Labor suffers from a surfeit -- and I use that word strictly as the dictionary defines it, a ''disgusting excess" -- of professional politicians.

The gene pool from which the Labor Party now chooses its candidates is so small it is unlikely a practising barrister like Gough Whitlam or Neville Wran, let alone an authentic member of the working class like Ben Chifley, would win preselection today.

Indeed, reading David Day's brilliant biography of Chifley, I'm struck by the way he literally stepped off the locomotive and into federal parliament, where he rose quickly to become Defence Minister and later our greatest nation-building prime minister. His working life of approximately 50 years was divided almost evenly between the railways and the parliament.

But today's Labor candidates increasingly spurn such a path to office.

Far too frequently, they graduate from university (absolutely nothing wrong with that in a social democratic party that believes in the innate value of education) but then sign on immediately as an electorate officer or union organiser.

New Labor MP Jennie George argues correctly that serving working people through the unions is an honourable vocation. But frankly, it would help if some of these newer officials had been working people themselves.

Ms George, who was a classroom teacher, and Manufacturing Workers Union chief Doug Cameron, a former welder, are among the rapidly diminishing number of officials who can speak with the credibility of having been on the shop floor.
Sure, some of the new breed can point to generations of blue-collar blood coursing through their veins; maybe they even had a weekend job stacking shelves at Woolworths. But how many today have ever paid their rent or met their mortgage by answering telephones in a call centre or assessing unemployment applications in a Social Security office?

Unions probably need more technically and academically skilled staff to serve their diverse membership. So why shouldn't being a professional union staffer -- expert in economics, statistics, communications or research -- be an honourable career in itself? Instead, it is a sinecure from which to stack or "manage" branches.

As for ministers' staffers, it is doubtful that many of them, on salaries of usually more than $60,000, would have been exposed to the tyranny of a bundy clock or a boss who didn't share their belief that shoring up the numbers was the day's top priority.

The issue is not the rightful place of unions in the ALP. Labor without unions -- although not necessarily without their corrosive 60-40 majority at conferences -- is a party without its heart. The issue is making sure its MPs reflect a broader constituency.

Bob Hawke's first cabinet in 1983 is widely regarded as having been the nation's best ever. It was pathetically short on women members, but look at its occupational diversity: John Kerin, the economist and chicken farmer; Peter Walsh, the wheat farmer; Don Grimes, the local doctor; Brian Howe, the firebrand Methodist minister; Gareth Evans, the academic lawyer; Bill Hayden, the policeman; John Button, the practising solicitor; John Brown, the butcher; Kim Beazley, the historian; Barry Cohen, the haberdasher; Stewart West, the wharfie; and of course, the legendary Mick Young, a shearer.
Of course, dissenters will point to Hawke himself, a union advocate. But Hawke had qualities that other union careerists do not: a charisma that made him the great communicator and consensus-builder. He was already one of the country's most popular figures before he was drafted into parliament.

Throughout the 1980s, strong MPs like Jeannette McHugh in NSW, Elaine Darling in Queensland and Helen Mayer in Victoria, none of whom had been "advisers", helped the party hold difficult seats.

Labor's parliamentary ranks can accommodate a finite number of career politicians, but they had better be as good as Bob McMullan or John Faulkner, who began working life as a teacher of disabled children, or Anthony Albanese, who was a briefly a bank teller.

I don't doubt the talent or the fidelity to Labor principles of many aspiring MPs in union and ministerial offices, but the electorate, especially in marginal seats, is beginning to question their limited life experience. The party must reach out to that crucial group of women in their late 30s and early 40s, who have not only proven to be successful vote-winners but who are often the organisational backbone of community health centres, sporting clubs and childcare groups.

The solution is harsh for those who have spent the past five to ten years toiling in a ministerial or union office.
Simon Crean, a determined leader of a party now desperate to win, can simply declare that, for the next two rounds of federal pre-selection, he will not accept as candidates anyone who has spent the previous three years as a full-time union official or political staffer. It will give aspiring MPs enough time to find jobs in community organisations, frontline public service agencies, or the private sector.

Think about how much more worldly-wise a candidate would be if he or she had managed a local Centrelink office, rather than been a backroom adviser to an Opposition parliamentary secretary for employment services.

A nurse or public hospital registrar is a far more attractive, and well-grounded, candidate than one who has written press releases on the beds shortage for the shadow minister.

The aspiring minister for education would come to the job better equipped having been a local school principal or university tutor, rather than a senator's chief of staff.
Labor has shown an enduring capacity for revival but to develop as a mass party, it must recruit candidates who have lived lives, and had jobs, outside the movement.
Simon Crean must ensure that the next Labor government looks like the Australia it seeks to represent.