BY ANY measure, the past four years of government and public administration in Australia’s largest state, New South Wales, have been extraordinary. When voters go to the polls on 26 March, the real interest will be not in the actual outcome, which is a foregone conclusion, but the magnitude of the defeat inflicted (or self-inflicted) on the Labor Party, which has held the reins of government for sixteen years.
Since the victory in 2007 under leader Morris Iemma, who succeeded long-time premier Bob Carr in 2005, the government has been buffeted by scandal after scandal. Resignations, rebellions and dismissals have occurred with alarming frequency, so much so that by the time Kristina Keneally dissolved parliament the political landscape bore little resemblance to how it had looked at the start of the term. Iemma, whom some thought had won against the odds in 2007, is no longer in parliament. A first-term MP, Nathan Rees, had succeeded him in 2008, but by 2011 had returned to the backbench, deposed after just fifteen months at the helm. A junior minister in 2007, Kristina Keneally, had taken his place and become the first female premier in the state’s history.
The abrupt rise and fall of Rees established two records: he was the shortest-serving member of the New South Wales parliament to become premier since Federation, and he enjoys the dubious distinction of being the only Labor premier not to have led the party into an election. If Rees’s tenure was short, it was anything but uneventful, taking in four cabinet reshuffles, with ministers scarcely warming their seats before being moved on or moved out. It was not an atmosphere in any way conducive to sound policy-making or rational administration, and public confidence in the government simply collapsed.
Labor and government have been virtually synonymous in New South Wales, punctuated by comparatively brief conservative interregnums. Since sweeping back into office in 1941 after the destructive Lang years, Labor has been in power for all but eighteen of seventy years. But with opinion polls predicting a primary vote below 25 per cent and, in worst case scenario, the party holding as few as thirteen seats in a Legislative Assembly of eighty-nine, the next period out of office is likely to be a long one.
Clearly, 26 March will signal the end of another Labor era, but an end quite unlike those that befell the party in 1965 and 1988, the last two times it lost office. Most long-term governments decay through a kind of sclerosis and a growing sense of distance from the voters, and are generally made up of ministers who have grown weary in office and stayed too long. But this doomed administration is different. Certainly there has been a growing distance between it and the electorate, but a most curious aspect of the end of sixteen years of Labor rule is that after four consecutive terms in government, the outgoing administration is remarkably inexperienced. Only nine of the twenty current cabinet ministers were there, under Morris Iemma, at the start of the term in 2007. Of those, five had been new ministers in 2007. The average length of time that ministers had spent in their substantive portfolios was just one year and nine months – that is, less than half the life of the parliament. It’s a record that challenges the conventional view about long-term governments dying from a lack of rejuvenation.
This is in complete contrast to the end of the first extended Labor era, the twenty-four years from 1941. In 1965, when Labor lost office, fourteen of the sixteen ministers had been there since at least the 1959 election, and some of them much longer. Two ministers had even been members of every government since Labor won office in 1941. It was a ministry deep in experience that had grown weary under the burden of office. The current NSW cabinet, by contrast, much changed through scandal and sackings, is a ministry shallow in experience that had worn the responsibilities of office too lightly.
The end of the Wran–Unsworth era in 1988 was also different, though not to the same extent as 1965. Of the twenty ministers who returned their commissions after losing the 1988 election to Nick Greiner’s Liberals, all but three had been members of the past two governments and six had served continuously since Labor won office in 1976.
The attrition rate of ministers, especially in the period 2007–10, did not augur well for strategic administration at any level, and the rapid changes at the top negated any sense of a consistent vision for the state. And it was not only premiers that came and went with unusual rapidity; three different directors-general headed the Department of Premier and Cabinet during that time, diminishing the steadying effect that a bureaucracy might normally be expected to exercise during political turmoil.
The reasons for Labor’s fall from grace are many and varied, but one stands out prominently, and has been examined at length by historian and former Labor minister, Rodney Cavalier in his book, Power Crisis. This is the rise of a political “new class,” a ruthless and self-serving oligarchy, which had come to dominate the Labor Party.
Office was seen as a given in Labor’s New South Wales; it was conferred permanently on the clique that controlled the party, and those exercising power all too often placed themselves beyond accountability. Factional manoeuvring took precedence over policy and the scramble for spoils trumped process; all too frequently the standards of behaviour expected in public life were flouted before an ever-despairing electorate. It was not so much what the government did that made the headlines, but the government itself became the story.
The rapid turnover at the top has given New South Wales another distinction: it now has eight former premiers living, a feat unmatched in any other state. Come 27 March, that number will be nine with Kristina Keneally joining Nathan Rees (2009), Morris Iemma (2008), Bob Carr (2005), John Fahey (1995), Nick Greiner (1992), Barrie Unsworth (1988), Neville Wran (1986) and Tom Lewis (1976). •
