In The Wee Small Hours Of The Morning

IMAGINE, if you will, that you are a member of the ALP caucus, it is already Sunday night and your mood is not as it should be on that typically most relaxed of any week’s evenings.  Your phone has been ringing for days, some calls bringing mates’ gossip and the latest word on who is said to be lining up with whom. These you don’t mind, whispers being the mother’s milk of politics. Other calls are less welcome. Those are the ones from the enforcers, the numbers men keen to be sure your vote in the morrow’s spill will be cast as promised. Of course it will be, comrade, you reply every time, perhaps adding by way of reassurance some loyalist’s gush about party discipline being the foremost virtue. The calls peter out as the clock advances, so that midnight brings the perverse luxury of undistracted reflection.

Of course you will vote as your faction dictates in the morning’s secret ballot, which isn’t secret at all, and isn’t that a grand joke! Labor rules say you must show your vote to a witness before dropping it in the hat, just so there can be no treachery. It’s the Labor way -- yes, treachery, too -- and if a head-kicker were to ring up right this second, you could supply a ready earful of boilerplate about the sanctity of party traditions. But the call doesn’t come, so your focus stays on all the polls’ message, which is unvarying and of doom, and also on the latest headlines, shockers every one.

There is that NSW police raid on the home of Craig Thomson’s printer mate, for example, the one who was so free with handing out credit cards to people who gave him extraordinarily lucrative contracts. Being a former union lawyer, like almost all your caucus colleagues, you don’t need to be told what the wallopers might find on the hard drives they hauled away. And if Thommo is for the high jump, then it’s election time and you are …. gulp…. looking for a new job. That political apprenticeship at uni, the stint as an electoral officer in some outer suburban wasteland, the Trades Hall jump and from there to a minister’s staff – you ticked every bloody box. Then it was preselection, the big day handing out how-to-votes, and your arse planted comfortably on the green upholstery ever since. If someone other than a dominatrix puts the cuffs on Craig, pffft, all those years of grease and effort wasted.

If only you weren’t tied to Gillard, how could you go past Rudd? The polls say he would give you a chance, and Gillard offers nothing of the kind. In the wee small hours of the morning you lie awake  and think of salvation in cracks and fissures. How many others in besieged electorates across the nation must be longing at that very moment for the freedom to swallow personal disdain and back that smug little twerp from Queensland?

It just isn’t fair! This isn’t the way it is supposed to work, you tell yourself as the sense of injustice builds. There was always self-interest in loyalty – rewards, promotions, your latest patron’s help to an ever-higher rung on the party’s ladder. But this time it is all wrong. Backing Gillard as promised means oblivion, and you have so much yet to give Australia and the party. This time loyalty brings a terrible cost.

If you can sleep at all, it is with dreams of Rudd regaining the leadership and how that might, just might, work out. A stunt or two – delaying the carbon tax would be a neat idea – and he really could pull it off, get you re-elected before voters begin to remember why they came to hate him the first time around. A bit of help from the press gallery would be a big assist, but that is a given.  It would be a long-shot with Rudd, but Gillard is a no-shot.

As the cock crows you wonder about betrayal, which you prefer to cast as common sense.

Who knows? The comrade who must inspect your ballot, perhaps he is having the very same thoughts, especially about cracks and fissures……

UPDATE: Apparently Albanese did his thinking last night. He's backing Rudd.