Beazley's Ticker Wanting, Again

Sydney Morning Herald

Thursday June 23, 2005

Back in the Labor saddle, Kim Beazley wanted everyone to know his ticker was not suspect and that he alone could resist the tide of Howardism and march his people to the promised land. Mr Beazley must do more than play the role of tough guy in name only. Hopelessly wrong-footed on the budget tax cuts because he could not be seen to back down from a prospectless strategy, Mr Beazley stepped from bog into quicksand.

His seat-warming spokesman on immigration, Laurie Ferguson, was intent on out-Ruddocking the minister, Amanda Vanstone, when, on Tuesday, he seemed to decry her release of Australia's longest-serving immigration detainee, Peter Qasim. Rather than echo his leader's embrace of the Qasim release, Mr Ferguson bemoaned the "worrying precedent" of an asylum seeker, having refused to co-operate on establishing his true origins, being accepted as stateless.

That was bad enough, and Mr Beazley promptly flexed his muscle. "You will find Laurie has revised his position," he confidently predicted. Some revision. Yesterday Mr Ferguson said he did not oppose Mr Qasim's release. As Mr Beazley should quickly be learning, however, there are too many buts (and not enough nous) in his lacklustre line-up. "However," Mr Ferguson added, "I think there's quite a bit of debate about how co-operative he's been with the department and how co-operative he has been in basically establishing his identity and ethnicity." Effectively, back to square one, a position Mr Beazley should be heartily sick of.

The Ferguson debacle might have passed with lesser comment had it not illustrated three fundamental flaws in the Labor camp. First, there are too few initiatives, policies and ideas and too little rigour and vigour. There is nothing credible with which to brand Labor positively. Second, too many frontbenchers (and for that matter, backbenchers) don't cut the mustard - a "bunch of dills", as Robert Ray said of some. Third, Mr Beazley does not have the ticker. If he exercised the authority he purports to command, he would have demoted Mr Ferguson, along with a bunch of other uninspired and uninspiring frontbenchers, instead of extolling Mr Ferguson's phantom qualities.

Labor seeks a false comfort in asserting Mr Beazley's opinion poll slippage coincides with the popularity of last month's budget and the tangle in which Labor wrapped itself in opposing the Government's tax cuts. The trend in Mr Howard's rise and Mr Beazley's decline was evident a month ahead of the budget. Mr Beazley says he's identified cracks in the Government armour with industrial relations and infrastructure and skills shortages, but this is not enough to define a new and exploitable political divide.

With the Government minority in the Senate about to expire, Labor's claim to relevance gets even more tenuous from here. It could do worse than consider the implications of Paul Keating's observation that Labor - under Mr Beazley, Simon Crean and Mark Latham - let itself "simply focus on matters of distribution and equity and the interests of minorities" without divining "a new method by which the wealth is created in the first place". It could do a lot worse, and probably will.

© 2005 Sydney Morning Herald

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