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The Labor Party would do well to try to address some of the former minister's criticisms rather than attacking him, but it won't
LINDSAY Tanner has copped a super-sized bagging, from his own party and the media, over the past few days.
Of course it's easy to dismiss his criticisms of Labor as structurally deficient, increasingly hollow and poll-driven as a case of reverse mirror philosophy from a bloke who's just biting the hand that fed him for so long.
Hell, if he wanted to change the great party that gave him such a career (a career in which he was sometimes cast as a putative prime minister) why didn't he just stay there and fight the structural and ideological battles from within
Bob Carr cast him, indirectly, as another one of the galahs in the pet shop, just mouthing off nonsense about the Labor Party. Sweet, that is, coming from a bloke who left successive Labor premiers to put the bins out after him while he entered a restless, temporary retirement during which he often passed commentary on federal Labor machinations. Sweet, too, from a bloke who helped write a report into the dysfunction of Labor at the last election - a report which remains partially secret, presumably because its contents are so damaging.
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The galahs in the pet shop line made a lovely little grab for TV news, which Carr seemed to recognise in a self-satisfied way while he delivered it. But it didn't really mean anything at all. Which goes, in part, to the nub of Tanner's recent critiques of modern Labor - and modern politics more generally - as being crafted for the nightly news and trail-blazed by pollsters rather than leaders.
Tanner's criticisms echo those made repeatedly by Barry Jones, John Faulkner and others. His cause might have been aided had he offered prescriptions to fix the problems. But then again, some criticisms - for example that big reforms like the national disability insurance scheme are effectively being outsourced to agencies such as the Productivity Commission rather than being internally driven - are, actually, prescriptions in themselves.
Yes, he's got a book to sell. But books of essays that muse about policy, about life in the political ranks, don't sell hugely - especially if, like Tanner's, they're not kiss and tell numbers. And why buy the book when you've already read so much and heard so much about it?
Tanner has been attacked for telling the discomfiting truth: Labor ministers, hell-bent on stopping a return of Kevin Rudd earlier this year, trashed his achievements and the style of his government from 2007 to 2010.
Tanner points out that the legacy of that could be profound. A year out from an election, that's an observation Labor could do well to debate rather than just react angrily to. But the truth sometimes rankles so as to make us curl into a ball rather than self-assess.
And as much as Tanner dislikes the media circus of the 24-hour political news cycle, his comments will be a distraction for a Labor Party that has, finally, won some clear air and moved positively in - you guessed it - the polls. So, Labor will be keen to move on, rather than extract any medium-term positives from the Tanner prognosis.
Tanner never made a secret of the fact that he loathed the onerous personal pressures that federal politics brings to bear not only on its practitioners.
''This decision is driven entirely, absolutely by matters of personal circumstances. There are, frankly, two little girls and two older kids who need me more than the country needs me,'' Tanner said in June 2010, when he announced his retirement on the same day Gillard became PM.
Amid all the heart-wrenching and anger of the anti-Rudd coup, while some of Tanner's colleagues in the parliamentary Labor Party and the union movement gloated about how they had brought down an incumbent prime minister, Tanner wished everyone well and prepared to walk off the stage.
Addressing Tanner's decision to quit, Tony Abbott made the point: ''Our families deserve us as well as our constituents but they do not see us as much as they should.''
Eyebrows routinely raise when a politician says he's quitting for family reasons. Federal politicians don't often talk about their personal lives beyond their maiden and last speeches.
Most novice MPs say that they go into politics with eyes wide open - that they will somehow manage to juggle the public and the private and to pull out all stops to be with their kids at those critical moments.
But the inhuman demands of big-stage - and especially big-party - politics soon make them reflect on whether they have done the right thing.
The shadow treasurer, Joe Hockey, put it pretty succinctly recently when he explained: '' … I am always hit by a terrible guilt when I usually walk out the door at 6.45am and head off to work. My wife and children may not believe it but when I walk out the door I really feel 'the guilts' every single day. And the truth of it is, that guilt stays with me throughout the days, the months, the years of my life that I am away as an absent father.''
Lots of politicians know ''the guilts'' too well - ''guilts'' that they can't do their jobs properly if they spend too much time with their families, and ''guilts'' that their families will suffer if they do their jobs properly.
A few days ago Tanner reiterated his reasons for leaving politics: ''When I left politics I did so for family reasons and believe it or not they were real. I know a lot of people sneer at those kinds of things, they s******. Typically these are people who sleep in the same bed every night, who work nine to five jobs, who don't work the ridiculous hours and don't make the absurd sacrifices … that many politicians have to make.''
http://www.canberratimes.com.au/opinion/tanners-truths-fall-on-deaf-ears-20120929-26s0z.html
LINDSAY Tanner has copped a super-sized bagging, from his own party and the media, over the past few days.
Of course it's easy to dismiss his criticisms of Labor as structurally deficient, increasingly hollow and poll-driven as a case of reverse mirror philosophy from a bloke who's just biting the hand that fed him for so long.
Hell, if he wanted to change the great party that gave him such a career (a career in which he was sometimes cast as a putative prime minister) why didn't he just stay there and fight the structural and ideological battles from within
Bob Carr cast him, indirectly, as another one of the galahs in the pet shop, just mouthing off nonsense about the Labor Party. Sweet, that is, coming from a bloke who left successive Labor premiers to put the bins out after him while he entered a restless, temporary retirement during which he often passed commentary on federal Labor machinations. Sweet, too, from a bloke who helped write a report into the dysfunction of Labor at the last election - a report which remains partially secret, presumably because its contents are so damaging.
Advertisement
The galahs in the pet shop line made a lovely little grab for TV news, which Carr seemed to recognise in a self-satisfied way while he delivered it. But it didn't really mean anything at all. Which goes, in part, to the nub of Tanner's recent critiques of modern Labor - and modern politics more generally - as being crafted for the nightly news and trail-blazed by pollsters rather than leaders.
Tanner's criticisms echo those made repeatedly by Barry Jones, John Faulkner and others. His cause might have been aided had he offered prescriptions to fix the problems. But then again, some criticisms - for example that big reforms like the national disability insurance scheme are effectively being outsourced to agencies such as the Productivity Commission rather than being internally driven - are, actually, prescriptions in themselves.
Yes, he's got a book to sell. But books of essays that muse about policy, about life in the political ranks, don't sell hugely - especially if, like Tanner's, they're not kiss and tell numbers. And why buy the book when you've already read so much and heard so much about it?
Tanner has been attacked for telling the discomfiting truth: Labor ministers, hell-bent on stopping a return of Kevin Rudd earlier this year, trashed his achievements and the style of his government from 2007 to 2010.
Tanner points out that the legacy of that could be profound. A year out from an election, that's an observation Labor could do well to debate rather than just react angrily to. But the truth sometimes rankles so as to make us curl into a ball rather than self-assess.
And as much as Tanner dislikes the media circus of the 24-hour political news cycle, his comments will be a distraction for a Labor Party that has, finally, won some clear air and moved positively in - you guessed it - the polls. So, Labor will be keen to move on, rather than extract any medium-term positives from the Tanner prognosis.
Tanner never made a secret of the fact that he loathed the onerous personal pressures that federal politics brings to bear not only on its practitioners.
''This decision is driven entirely, absolutely by matters of personal circumstances. There are, frankly, two little girls and two older kids who need me more than the country needs me,'' Tanner said in June 2010, when he announced his retirement on the same day Gillard became PM.
Amid all the heart-wrenching and anger of the anti-Rudd coup, while some of Tanner's colleagues in the parliamentary Labor Party and the union movement gloated about how they had brought down an incumbent prime minister, Tanner wished everyone well and prepared to walk off the stage.
Addressing Tanner's decision to quit, Tony Abbott made the point: ''Our families deserve us as well as our constituents but they do not see us as much as they should.''
Eyebrows routinely raise when a politician says he's quitting for family reasons. Federal politicians don't often talk about their personal lives beyond their maiden and last speeches.
Most novice MPs say that they go into politics with eyes wide open - that they will somehow manage to juggle the public and the private and to pull out all stops to be with their kids at those critical moments.
But the inhuman demands of big-stage - and especially big-party - politics soon make them reflect on whether they have done the right thing.
The shadow treasurer, Joe Hockey, put it pretty succinctly recently when he explained: '' … I am always hit by a terrible guilt when I usually walk out the door at 6.45am and head off to work. My wife and children may not believe it but when I walk out the door I really feel 'the guilts' every single day. And the truth of it is, that guilt stays with me throughout the days, the months, the years of my life that I am away as an absent father.''
Lots of politicians know ''the guilts'' too well - ''guilts'' that they can't do their jobs properly if they spend too much time with their families, and ''guilts'' that their families will suffer if they do their jobs properly.
A few days ago Tanner reiterated his reasons for leaving politics: ''When I left politics I did so for family reasons and believe it or not they were real. I know a lot of people sneer at those kinds of things, they s******. Typically these are people who sleep in the same bed every night, who work nine to five jobs, who don't work the ridiculous hours and don't make the absurd sacrifices … that many politicians have to make.''
http://www.canberratimes.com.au/opinion/tanners-truths-fall-on-deaf-ears-20120929-26s0z.html
