entertain ideas of great communion

Dear Australian Labor Party,

I am writing to you to say earnestly please, please, please preselect David Feeney (parliamentary undersecretary for the minister assisting the minister for defence support, or something) for the seat of Batman recently vacated by Martin Ferguson … sorry, the see of Bama, reently fkay b Marn Fern.

This would be an epochal moment in Australian political history. Three years after the Faulkner-Carr review, which investigated how out-of-touch, arrogant and generally loathsome Labor is perceived to be by many of its supporters, the candidacy of David Feeney for this Melbourne seat would be a chance to show that the party has learnt nothing, absolutely nothing from the last three years, that its factional leaders would rather lose an election than lose internal party power, and that it continues to treat its supporters with utter contempt.

This would be, above all, a chance to show that Labor still has not woken up to the changed nature of its core base — that it is no longer composed of a large working and lower-middle class with a small add-on of inner-urban types, but must now compete for a diminished working class, a broader middle class, and a separate social class of culture/knowledge/policy workers who are now numerically significant, and dominate inner-urban areas.

Please have as many people as possible in the local party read and learn Nick Cater’s The Lucky Culture and continue with the fantasy that the latter group of people are in some sense unreal and therefore don’t count — that there is some ghost 1950s electorate out there ready to materialise, Brigadoon-style, and vote in the last grouper to be offered to an electorate that includes the Socialist Republic of Northcote, the Hippie Demesne of Clifton Hill and the Lesbian Margravate of Thornbury.

Please, in arrogantly concluding that the seat is ALP personal property, ignore the most important lesson of US politics — that you fit the candidate to the district, and allow the candidate to adopt the district’s values. Please instead, impose one of Parliament’s most fervent Zionist-shills on a multicultural electorate with a large Middle Eastern presence.

God knows, even David Feeney could still win this seat for you. But if anything gave the Greens a chance to increase their primary vote by carving off a slice of Labor voters who just couldn’t bring themselves to support one of the most right-wing members of parliament, a fervent supporter of global domination by the US. Please give the Liberals an incentive to choose a socially liberal local candidate, and thus make it politically feasible for the Greens and Liberals to do a preference swap in good conscience, giving either the chance to win the seat, and locking Labor out.

Please impose on the local party a man so loathed within the ALP that comrades were placing fake death notices in the paper about him. A man hated as much by the Right as he is by the Left. Please ensure a situation where half the local party will simply not turn out to work for the local candidate in a formerly safe seat that will now have to be defended street-by-street. Please impose a candidate so personally loathed by semi-retired activists living in or close to the electorate that they will rouse themselves from re-reading The Slap on their Nicaraguan hand-weave beanbags, put young Jasper and Kollontai in tofu-based childcare, and ride out for one last battle.

Please give the Greens their best chance yet to lock on two contiguous inner-Melbourne seats, thus increasing the likelihood that future Labor governments will have to seek out coalitions with them. Please ignore the fact that the Greens candidate is exactly the sort of person the Faulkner-Carr review said Labor should be seeking out — local activists with deep roots in the community, instant and high recognition. The Labor candidate will have to work hard to disguise the disdain he feels for the Leftish, scruffy, alternative sector who dominate the southern half of the electorate he must win.

Please above all make this the crowning glory of a man who led the charge to depose a prime minister who retained the support of the public, and delivered them a Prime Minister who has never gained legitimacy with the public, and been subject to the rule of the microfactions ever since. Make it that Prime Minister’s crowning glory also, that she could not or would not have the political courage to call all deals off, and instead knuckled under to the rule of a cabal of men with no real support base, beyond bluster.

Please show that you are truly a sovereign party — the Louis XVI of Australian politics, you have forgotten nothing because you have learnt nothing. Please, above all, hurry on the utter disaster it appears will be necessary before you take seriously the dire state of your politics.

Yours,

Guy Rundle