How Suicidal ALP Spawned a Saviour Simon Benson the Daily Telegraph March 02, 2012 12:00AM
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How suicidal ALP spawned a saviour Simon Benson The Daily Telegraph March 02, 2012 12:00AM THE Gillard government has ended the week the same way it started it. In a shambles. The events of past days have exposed the Prime Minister as lacking any authority or political judgment. Cabinet solidarity has become a national joke. And her caucus is now more fractured than it has ever been, with the dominant NSW right faction now officially at war with the Victorians. For once, Rudd cannot be blamed for any of it. Paul Keating recently remarked to a Labor colleague that there was an intellectual "smallness" about the current federal Labor Party. How small it has become was on full display this week with Julia Gillard's calamitous attempt to recruit Bob Carr to her cabinet. How she could botch this beggars belief. Carr could have been the injection of intellectual capital, statesmanship and political commonsense that the Gillard government needed to turn around its political misfortunes. He would have provided a different narrative, defending the government and selling its message far beyond just the foreign policy agenda. Carr would have come with a well- prepared foreign policy plan. He would have restored diplomatic representation in our region and dropped the pursuit of a UN Security Council seat and the expensive vote-buying exercise in Africa. Carr was also an honorary scholar of the US Australian American Leadership dialogue. There is probably not another Australian better suited to the job of foreign minister. Carr is also a big name for Labor. He is the party's longest-serving NSW Labor premier. Whatever one may say about the government he led, Carr governed in a style and with a policy rigour that turned around the public perception that Labor government's were poor economic managers. He was also considered highly enough by the party to conduct the official review of Labor's 2010 election campaign. Carr is on a long-standing offer from Labor to come to Canberra, as is former Queensland premier Peter Beattie and former Victorian premier Steve Bracks. Carr has long made it known that the only way he would consider it would be as foreign minister. When the NSW party secretary Sam Dastyari called him at 5pm on Monday after Mark Arbib resigned from the ministry and the senate, he didn't need to spell out what was on offer. Carr was at first ambivalent - until Gillard called him twice that night. By the end of it, Carr was prepared to do it. What happened next is a mystery which the PM has yet to explain. What is known is that the Victorian right, notably Simon Crean, argued aggressively against it. Stephen Smith is also reported to have baulked at bringing in Carr to the job he wanted for himself. Carr himself was torn. He probably fantasised about the offer being withdrawn so he wouldn't have to make the decision. It is the job he has always wanted but he had reservations about joining what he himself acknowledges is a rabble of a government. The handling of this affair has probably confirmed in his own mind that he is lucky he didn't take it. But the fact is Carr was prepared to do it. He was preparing to go to Canberra for an announcement. He was expecting to have been sworn in as the foreign minister before the week was out. Dastyari claims Carr called him on Tuesday morning and said thanks but no thanks. Carr had clearly been sent a message from the PM's office that it wasn't on. In her handling of this, Gillard has demonstrated a complete lack of authority - a stark contradiction to her claims of a new assertiveness following Monday's defeat of Rudd in the leadership ballot. She chose to embarrass one of the party's leading figures and deny her government someone who could have made the difference rather than argue her case against a couple of petty-minded ministers. Carr is rightly furious. So is Dastyari, although he might want to consider his own role in how this all went pear-shaped. It has been an incomprehensible stuff-up. It has also confirmed what Rudd's supporters knew; that Gillard would trip up. They believed that it could take weeks or months but ultimately another political misjudgment would catch the PM out. They didn't expect a stuff up within hours. With Rudd sitting on the backbench, the lie has quickly been exposed that all the government's problems could be traced back to him and his alleged destabilisation. The fallout from this could be deep and long-running and potentially fatal for Gillard. The NSW right is 18 members strong. It is the single largest grouping within the Labor caucus and has historically been the most influential. During the Keating years it provided the intellectual ballast to the government and almost always was responsible for protecting the leader. For the past five years it has been divided. Its lack of unity and leadership has allowed the Victorian right - most notably Bill Shorten and Stephen Conroy and their minions (the Shortcons) - to assert its authority. Carr would have provided the figure in the NSW right to rally its troops and reassert its strength against an aggressive Victorian right. Under Carr, it could have become again the potent unified force in the federal caucus. Perhaps this is what Gillard and the Victorians were really afraid of. Because under a unified NSW right, Gillard would probably be finished. Simon Benson is National Political Editor .