Labor on Self-Destruct?


SENATOR STEPHEN CONROY: You can't get away with overaffiliating and
overaffiliating. It will come to a vote and you won't be able to hide. So
those of you who want to turn your back on this resolution because you
think it serves your short-term factional interests now, as Bill Shorten
says, what goes around comes around. You will be called to account.

JOHN LYONS: This is what the factional warriors of the Australian Labor
Party look like when they go to war. SENATOR STEPHEN CONROY: Come and
tell us. We've got 35,000 members. JOHN LYONS: They've come together at
their Victorian conference to decide policies and rules that will help
Simon Crean become PM.

MAN IN CROWD: The maladministration of this party in recent years has
been a disgrace. The people who've been appointed... JOHN LYONS: Instead,
it's a weekend of insult, punch-ups, payback and acrimony. But what's
happening here today is not just an argument over rule changes. It's a
nasty shadow play of the guerrilla war engulfing Labor's Federal
leadership, as the rival supporters of Simon Crean and Kim Beazley fight
to the death.

SENATOR STEPHEN CONROY: There is no place for violence in the ALP at all.
It is unacceptable behaviour by any delegate.

JOHN LYONS: This man, Senator Stephen Conroy, the leader of the
right-wing Labor unity faction wants Kim Beazley as leader. This man,
Greg Sword, the powerful national president of the Labor Party, wants
Simon Crean as leader.

GREG SWORD: I know it's been a long day.

JOHN LYONS: Conroy wants revenge on Greg Sword for causing an earthquake
in the Victorian ALP by withdrawing from the Labor unity faction and
forming an alliance with his old enemies - the socialist left.

GREG SWORD: Because that's what elections to these positions will mean.

CROWD JEERS JOHN LYONS: Elder statesmen of the party say things are now
so bad the Labor Party is dying.

JOHN BUTTON: FORMER LABOR SENATOR: Well, I'm not saying that rigormortis
has set in, but I'm saying that it looks fairly terminal at times.

RODNEY CAVALIER, FORMER LABOR MINISTER: If the Labor Party was a nation,
it would be on a IMF watch.

SUSAN RYAN, FEDERAL LABOR MINISTER: It's very hard to explain how very
able and principled people such as we have in the Labor leadership have
lost the plot. But it seems that they have.

GEOFF JACKSON: The previous government destroyed health. JOHN LYONS: And
Labor's problems are about to get much worse. Union boss Geoff Jackson is
launching a war against Greg Sword over serious allegations to be tested
in court later this year.

GEOFF JACKSON: I think large sums of money being offered anywhere makes
most people nervous and they wanted to get out of that meeting as quickly
as possible once that proposition was put.

JOHN LYONS: While many people will not talk publicly about Greg Sword,
Geoff Jackson who runs the Health Services Union of Australia knows the
course he has embarked upon today could bring down the national president
of the ALP.

GEOFF JACKSON: He who casts the first stone should be prepared,
particularly in this environment, to probably see a hailstorm of items
coming back his way.

SPORTS COMMENTATOR: Here's a chance from behind. Takes a screamer!

JOHN LYONS: Labor's marauding tribes have often resembled Melbourne's
best-known tribes - its community-based football teams. But as the AFL
has grown, the ALP has shrunk. More people now turn up to any given
football match in Melbourne than the party's entire national membership.
Labor's links with the community is breaking. Its players have turned
professional, now led by the white shirts in corporate boxes. Morale is
low and it's becoming so divided, it's mutating into factions within
factions. The hard men of the game - the factional warriors - are jostling
each other for the spoils. And the party faithful feel they've been
sidelined.

DR PETER BOTSMAN, LABOR HISTORIAN: Well, it's not only marauding tribes,
it's marauding archaic tribes that really no longer represent anything
proper for our country. They simply don't have any substance in either
views of the world, or in things that represent meaningful actions or
changes for the majority of Australians. JOHN LYONS: Die-hard members, in
turn, are losing faith with their own party. Head of the Electrical
Trades Union, Dean Mighell should be one of Labor's most loyal sons.
Instead, he's quit the party in disgust.

DEAN MIGHELL: I'm a Labor boy, I'm a Footscray boy. I'm a unionist. All
the things that I ought to be believing in Labor, but they lost me and
they lost thousands of people and continue to do so. The Labor Party as
we've known it, as unions have known it, is dead. I think we'd better
wake up to that. JOHN LYONS: Labor's problems begin at grassroots level.
Here in Newtown, an inner city suburb of Sydney that should be a Labor
stronghold, only nine people bothered to attend a recent branch meeting.
MAN: You can wonder if there's any point turning up. You put your motions
up and you send off motions from the branch hoping that something will
happen.

JOHN BUTTON: I went to a branch meeting one night, there were eight
people there, two of them were members of parliament. One or two of them
enunciated their fears about the Labor Party and how they couldn't remain
much longer if things can't get better sort of stuff. The two members of
parliament spoke and I remember one woman saying after, "I'm more
depressed than ever."

JOHN LYONS: It's estimated Labor's total membership around Australia is
about 50,000, but only 20,000 to 25,000 are recognised as genuine. Branch
stacked members signed on at the lowest concessional rate of $25, form
the majority. In Victoria, of its 12,000 members 70% are at the
concessional rate, and they don't sign on for long. Three-quarters of all
new members resign within five years, leaving the party with a dwindling
and rapidly-ageing membership. Rod Cavalier rose to become Education
Minister in NSW. He joined the Labor Party when a membership was a
membership. ROD CAVALIER: I was privileged to join the Hunters Hill branch
in 1968. When I joined at age 19, not surprisingly, I was the youngest
member of the branch. When I transferred out to Gladesville in 1978 as a
new member of parliament, I was still among the youngest members of the
branch. I covered to the Southern Highlands, covering Bowral in 1992. I
was among the youngest members of the branch and 11 years on in 2003, I'm
still among the youngest members of the Southern Highlands branch and the
local area. The difference is I'm not 19, I'm 55. This is a party that's
ageing.

SUSAN RYAN: The Labor needs its branches and branch members. They're the
lifeblood. If you don't have a vigorous, vital, numerous branch
structure, raising money, having chook raffles, having barbecues and so
on, you go elsewhere for your money. You go to the big end of town. Now
some Labor people worry about that.

JOHN LYONS: A principal reason for Labor's decline is its system of
choosing candidates to run for parliament. These preselections are now
rigidly controlled by ranks rather than local members. The Labor faithful
despair at the poor calibre of candidates ending up in the country's
parliaments.

DEAN MIGHELL: You see great Labor people out there who should be in
parliament and hacks and duds get put up too many times to represent
people and it weakens the party.

JOHN LYONS: Sunday's own analysis confirms the narrowness of the ALP's
recruiting. Of the 30 people on Labor's frontbench in Canberra, only
three have had jobs other than union officials or political staffers.

RODNEY CAVALIER: There's a serious problem in our parliaments now, which
is only going to get worse as the catchment, the gene pool becomes
narrower and narrower. People going into school, into university, where
they get cased by a faction and they go into a trade union office, into
the party office, the member of parliament's office - that is their sum
experience of life. And from the time they get that job they seek to
position themselves to take a Labor seat in parliament.

JOHN LYONS: It's an issue identified in a report on the party's problems
by former PM Bob Hawke and former NSW Premier Neville Wran.

BOB HAWKE: We want to say in our recommendations that we want to attract
the best possible candidates.

JOHN LYONS: Bob Hawke acknowledges he benefited from a rigid factional
system during his government, but now says they have developed
interpersonal fifedoms, serving only the interests of themselves.

BOB HAWKE: And it's more about power and that's what the Wran and Hawke
recommendations are about, trying to make sure that it's the interests of
the party that are put first - put first not the pursuit of the powers of
particular little groups.

SUSAN RYAN: The factions have become the dominant decisionmakers and
almost the only decisionmakers. So that the factions say you can't have
this policy, or the factions say, you can't have that rank and file
candidate, you can't have that person that comes from the community with
a whole lot of passions, you've got to have No.3 on our list of faction
hacks, that's who you're getting.

JOHN LYONS: What do you think the public thinks in general of the
factional system? JOHN BUTTON: I think it regards it rather like a sort
of brawl in a pub, which they don't want to know about. You walk past on
the foot path and look in the other direction.

SPEAKER: The leader of the Government, Senator Button.

JOHN LYONS: John Button was a dominating intellectual influence in the
Hawke Government. He makes the wry observation that Britain's new Labor
PM Tony Blair would not have made it through the ALP's factional system.

JOHN BUTTON: Why would he be bothered? Factions reward people for loyalty
to the group, not ideas about the country.

SPEAKER: When the House has come to order.

JOHN LYONS: It's the product of the factions in Labor's frontbench in
Canberra that's wringing alarm bells in the membership. Even the master
of factions, Graham Richardson, concedes Labor's frontbench is
lacklustre.

GRAHAM RICHARDSON: The ones in the frontbench so far haven't performed.
How many Liberal ministers have been in trouble because of the
performance of their counterparts, and the answer is not too many. SUSAN
RYAN: Well, my natural inclination is to say to them in a very
exasperated tone, "Look, what do you think you're there for?" You know,
"What's your core mission here?" I don't want to hear about you can't do
that because this faction said this or that. Why are you there? When you
wake up in the morning tired and exhausted from a late night at the
parliament, what is it that you think you're going to do today to make
your position in the Federal Parliament worth something?

RODNEY CAVALIER: If, however, your entire advancement is about adhering
to an orthodoxy, the normal processes of maturity do not occur. That's
the single greatest degeneration that's taking place in our ranks. People
whose minds do not move forward.

JOHN LYONS: Closed minded people?

RODNEY CAVALIER: It's not so much that they're close minded, there is
simply no opportunity for light to get through.

JOHN LYONS: They're hardly the people who we want representing us.
RODNEY CAVALIER: Exactly.

JOHN LYONS: After he took over the leadership in 2001, Simon Crean chose
his frontbench strictly on factional lines. Only three of the 30 members
have had a real job that wasn't as a union official or in a political
staffer's office.

SIMON CREAN: So, that's not a real job. Lawyers are real jobs, are they,
like all of the frontbench...

JOHN LYONS: In the days gone past you had shearers and all sorts of
people in the Labor Party. Only three of the 30 have had a job outside
the political game.

SIMON CREAN: Look, the Labor Party is open to anyone to join.

JOHN LYONS: But 90% of your frontbench are from that narrow background.
How did that happen? SIMON CREAN: It's a very effective frontbench. It's
a frontbench that compared to their side, person to person, will eat
them. JOHN LYONS: But every opinion poll for the past 18 months says
Crean and his team have failed to connect with voters. Labor no longer
owns the proverbial man in the street. Those voters are either swinging
or new coalition voters. There is a disconnection between a Labor Party
that recruits so narrowly and a wider community.

DR NICK ECONOMOU, POLITICS, MONASH UNIVERSITY: It's actually the Liberal
Party that seems to be connecting better with the community because it's
drawing so many of its future MPs from small business and from local
government in particular. No wonder Mr Howard succeeds so well when he
uses the rhetoric of the battlers.

GRAHAM RICHARDSON: This is a very different John Howard. He's done
extremely well and he has good instincts. These days, he picks the mood.
This is a bloke who stands for things. I think they've got used to
politicians who talk and don't actually seem to stand for much and they
like the fact that John Howard stands for something. JOHN LYONS: Labor
historian Peter Botsman says the party now fails to rely on instinct,
instead placing its faith in focus groups, pioneered by Bob Hawke and
pollster Rod Cameron.

DR PETER BOTSMAN: Rod Cameron and Bob Hawke really changed the whole
nature of the Labor Party through opinion polls and it became less
important to worry about what rank and file people were thinking in the
branches than to really go through focus groups.

JOHN BUTTON: And focus groups for a politician seemed to me not to be
about leadership, but about followership. You go to a focus group to try
and find out what you ought to do, rather than saying, "Well, I've
thought this through and this is what I'm going to do, and I'll change the
focus group in time."

JOHN LYONS: After Labor's loss in 2001, its third in a row, the new
leader went in search of why the party had lost its heartland. He also
announced a policy review by his deputy Jenny Macklin.

SIMON CREAN: You always learn if you're prepared to listen to people, and
so it's a great side of politics, I think, if you're prepared to get out,
listen and understand.

JOHN LYONS: But still today, no action. The results meant to be put to
the next national conference are now lost in administrative limbo.
SUSAN RYAN: Where are the policies? Why haven't we been having a big
debate about Labor's view on higher education for the last six months? We
could have been.

SIMON CREAN: Well, it's a continuing piece of work.

JOHN LYONS: Do we ever see anything from it?

SIMON CREAN: Of course you do, because its timetable was always in the
context of the national conference. JOHN LYONS: But no-one seems to know
where it is?

SIMON CREAN: Well, I know where it is. JOHN LYONS: Can you tell me where
it is? You say you know where it is, where is it?

SIMON CREAN: It's a work in progress.

JOHN BUTTON: The question that hurts me most as a lifetime member of the
Labor Party is not so much people who criticise Simon Crean or Kim
Beazley or somebody else, but people who say to me, "But I can't
understand what it stands for anymore." That is a hard question to
answer.

MAN IN CROWD: ...play games next weekend, you're going to find out all
about it.

JOHN LYONS: The recent conference in Victoria showed this - the passion,
the punch-ups came with debates over rules and the spoils of political
life - who got what jobs. But when it came to policy, delegates were more
interested in their newspapers. The debate on women's policy lasted half
a second.

MAN ON PANEL: A move seconded, the adoption of the women's affairs
report. All those in favour, all those against. Carried.

DR NICK ECONOMOU: That is typical behaviour of a party that is moving
away from seeing policy as being really important and is instead all
about struggles for power, struggles for power internally. In that way,
the Labor Party is becoming more and more like the Democrats in the
United States, where policy is not such a big issue. It's really about
machine politics and who controls the machine.

SIMON CREAN: Delegates, we're not a Social Democratic Party, we're a
Labor Party and that's what we will stay.

JOHN LYONS: Central to Labor's identity crisis is its historical link to
trade unions. Union membership has slumped and some now say the ALP
should divorce itself from unions. Simon Crean has taken a great amount
of heat reducing the vote unions have on party policy from 60% to 50% of
delegates at conferences. But if this was to reflect the size of their
enrolled membership, it would be reduced to between 8% and 12%.
RODNEY CAVALIER: The central problem of the Labor Party is trade union
affiliation, trade union control.

JOHN LYONS: Rod Cavalier from the left of the party says if Labor is to
survive it must sever its ties from the unions.

RODNEY CAVALIER: The only losers from that equation would be union
officials. The union themselves would be huge beneficiaries. For a start,
instead of their officials spending an inordinate amount of time worrying
about their political careers and delivering for friends, they could
concentrate on serving their members and growing their base. They
represent now fewer than 25% of the workforce across Australia. A
diabolical decline which is no-one's fault but their own.

JOHN BUTTON: The most sensible thing to do would be to do what the
Swedish party has done and that is to separate the two, separate the
party from the unions. They each stand on their own feet and I think
that's good for both of them, rather than this sort of propping each
other up.

GREG SWORD: Well, I think that's silly. I think this is the Labor Party.
It can't be a Labor Party without unions, if John Button wants to go and
construct a Social Democrat party he's welcome to try and do it. What
would happen is it would be an absolute failure.

JOHN LYONS: John Button's proposal for a divorce, however, is gaining
support, even among some union heavyweights.

MAN: Maybe there does need to be a divorce. Maybe the unions need to say,
if Labor really doesn't want us, let's face it Simon Crean tapped us on
the shoulder and said, "Hey we'll put you down to 50%, the next step's
out on your bum."

SIMON CREAN: I can't imagine a Labor Party without the trade union
movement. I remember John Button arguing this 26 years ago, 1977 after
the Whitlam defeat post-the '75 election. John Button's argument was
wrong then, and he's still wrong.

JOHN LYONS: But Simon Crean may not get the chance to take the Labor
Party in any direction. Events of recent months, culminating in the
challenge from Kim Beazley, may be merely about who gets the chance to
lead a depleted army, out of touch and losing focus, against the forces
led by John Howard.

JOHN BUTTON: Well, I have criticisms of each of them. And if there is a
joint criticism about it, I think it would be that in those five or six
years the Labor Party let something slip in terms of renewing its
identity and its structure and all those things, and they were there at
the top when that happened.

JOHN LYONS: Do they deserve to win now?

DR PETER BOTSMAN: They deserve - no, they don't.

JOHN LYONS: How much does it hurt you to say that?

DR PETER BOTSMAN: Um, it hurts a lot.

JOHN LYONS: After the break, we look at Greg Sword - the real power
behind Simon Crean and a time bomb ticking away beneath the two men.

JOHN LYONS: When Steve Bracks was re-elected last year as Premier of
Victoria, he was triumphant. It was the largest win Labor had ever had in
Victoria. In his victory speech he singled out one person - David Feeney,
who had run his campaign.

STEVE BRACKS: Could I say particularly to David a great campaign,
professionally run. Probably the best campaign you have seen from
Victoria from the Labor Party ever. A great campaign, a great result. Well
done to David.

JOHN LYONS: Clearly, though, such a glowing tribute counts for nothing in
today's ALP. Feeney was sacked as state secretary by someone, who many
say, is far more powerful than either Steve Bracks or Simon Crean. Greg
Sword, the national president of the Labor Party, presided over Feeney's
sacking while he was overseas on honeymoon.

DEAN MIGHELL, SECRETARY ELECTRICAL TRADES UNION: They just cut his head
off, I think. It was a pretty brutal power play and it was just a payback
- it was just a payback - and I've got no respect for that.
JOHN LYONS: So dirty did it become, that not only was Feeney dead but he
was buried before he returned to Australia. Someone placed a death notice
in 'The Age', causing great distress to his relatives, many of whom
thought he had actually died. It made great play of Greg Sword's
involvement in his sacking. (Excerpt from obituaries): "Nor shall my sword
sleep in my hand." The fake death notice caused waves of disgust.

SUSAN RYAN, FORMER FEDERAL LABOR MINISTER: I would think that should be
some sort of criminal offence and the person should be convicted. That's
absolutely terrible and when something like that happens, the damage to
the party's standing is severe.

JOHN LYONS: Have you seen this? Are you aware of this?

GREG SWORD: Yeah. JOHN LYONS: David Feeney's death notice. GREG SWORD: Yeah.

JOHN LYONS: Do you have any idea who put that in 'The Age'? GREG SWORD:
No, I don't.

JOHN LYONS: No idea at all.

GREG SWORD: No, I don't.

JOHN LYONS: Feeney was of a group of new young warriors challenging his
control of the Victorian branch of the Labor Party. David Feeney, Bill
Shorten, the head of the Australian Workers' Union and Senator Stephen
Conroy, the powerful factional player. Sword took his block of votes and
made a new alliance with his ancient enemy - the socialist Left and its
leader Senator Kim Carr.

DEAN MIGHELL: The factional realignment in Victoria of Sword moving over
in alliance with Carr with the Left, was simply Sword getting a bit
squeezed in the right, the young Turks, the Bill Shortens and Stephen
Conroys, becoming powerful in their group and maybe challenging the old
bull, if you like. Young bull versus new bull. So that old bull went into
the next paddock with another old bull. JOHN LYONS: Greg Sword has given
as his reason for defection a desire to back Simon Crean's reforms of the
party. But many see his move as a cynical act of self-preservation. They
argue he has turned a blind eye to a system in which rorting had become
endemic.

MAN (DISGUISED IDENTITY): The machinery in play would be hiring out hotel
rooms, forging identification cards, printing out false documents for the
purpose of internal ballots within the ALP. I mean, we're small
operations.

JOHN LYONS: This man asked for anonymity but spent years involved in the
Network - a youth arm of the party identified with Greg Sword's faction.
He admits taking part in an operation at the Downtowner Hotel in inner
city Melbourne, forging identities to help elect Tim Holding to a party
position. Holding is now a minister in the Bracks Government.

MAN (DISGUISED): About 30 people crammed into a boardroom. Equipment,
laminating machines, computers, printers, scanners, photocopiers, digital
cameras; all for the sole purpose of pumping out false documents, false
people, false identification cards to rig the elections. And when the
network became aware of ALP officials coming to inspect, then the
equipment, the photocopiers and scanning equipment and machinery was
bundled into the boot of the car. JOHN LYONS: He also says that at Greg
Sword's direction, he and a number of other networkers used the office of
the NUW to solicit votes for Sword's candidates in a health services
union election.

MAN (DISGUISED): We were asked by Greg and his staff, his private staff
at the NUW, to hop on the phones. We were there to purport to be health
services union members. In fact, none of us were health services union
members.

JOHN LYONS: Have you ever yourself in your union career played any of
those games with numbers?

GREG SWORD: No, I haven't. I've been asked this question many times
before. I've never been involved in branch stacking, no.

MAN (DISGUISED): At the time there were public proclamations from Greg
that he would have no involvement in internal elections within the ALP,
let alone any internal trade union elections. The truth was something
quite different. An army of workers, both from the NUW and from Network,
on phone banks, work stations, day in, day out for about a week, all in
support of one particular candidate of a rival union's election.

JOHN LYONS: Greg Sword denies ever influencing the affairs of another
union. But he faces more allegations to be canvassed in a defamation case
later this year. The claims arise from an allegation of a campaign to
take over the health services union by a group of Greg Sword-supported
candidates, including his own brother Malcolm. They allege an inducement
to rat on their colleagues.

JEFF JACKSON, SECRETARY VICTORIA HEALTH SERVICES UNION: People who are
running on my ticket were invited to a meeting at the NUW's office, which
Greg Sword attended. And at that meeting, five other people who were
involved in our ticket were offered an inducement of $190,000 to continue
not supporting our ticket, basically to change sides.

JOHN LYONS: The meeting occurred in the Melbourne offices of Greg Sword's
NUW. Jeff Jackson's version is that his members were offered money, but
they were not clear what it was to be used for.

JEFF JACKSON: And I think that was because the people that attended the
meeting at the time became extremely nervous at the mention of such a
large sum of money, and I think their preference was to not partake or
continue that process at the time.

JOHN LYONS: Jeff Jackson wrote to Premier Steve Bracks some time later,
saying his members had been offered an inducement to switch sides. Greg
Sword denied to a journalist that any money was offered. That's incensed
the five people who made the claim, one of whom is now suing for
defamation.

GREG SWORD: What I've done is to say, already, that what they say didn't
happen.

JOHN LYONS: You're not denying that a meeting happened, are you?

GREG SWORD: No, of course not, but what they say was the import of that
meeting, wasn't. And I'm in the process of defending myself against their
allegation. So I can't - I can't say more than that.

JOHN LYONS: Were you in any way trying to support your brother's campaign?

GREG SWORD: Um, of course. Of course. He was trying to defend good people.

JOHN LYONS: Wasn't that, though, interfering in another union's election?

GREG SWORD: But I didn't. JOHN LYONS: How did you support him, then?
GREG SWORD: Well, I think as I said to you, it's very difficult for me to
talk about these matters because all of them are subject, all of the
circumstances are subject to a court hearing.

JOHN LYONS: The case is potentially explosive, because Jeff Jackson is
about to do something considered out of bounds in union circles. To force
another union boss, Greg Sword, to reveal his union's most secret
financial affairs.

JEFF JACKSON: The legal process, I guess we'll probably investigate,
whether those sums of money do exist or not.

JOHN LYONS: Jackson himself in happier times has written cheques to Greg
Sword's renowned fundraising ventures - lavish luncheons and dinners
where guests are invited to buy access to Labor politicians and union
leaders at $390 a seat. The cheques, sometimes made payable to a company
called Workplace 2002 are sent, not to the union office, but an anonymous
PO Box further down the road. The events are said to raise hundreds of
thousands of dollars. Could you tell me about the company Workplace 2002?
How does that work?

GREG SWORD: It's an organisation which we use to try and raise money to
defend ourselves in union elections.

JOHN LYONS: Are they slush funds?

GREG SWORD: Oh, people call them all sorts of things, but if you looked
at the last election, which the people in Victoria in the National Union
of Workers went through, people who ran campaigns against us, spent we
estimate, something like $450,000.

JOHN LYONS: But are they slush funds?

GREG SWORD: No, I wouldn't call them a slush fund.

JOHN LYONS: The NSW branch of the NUW took Sword's national office to
court last year, concerned that members' funds were being paid into
Workplace 2002. Although the money was repaid shortly before the case got
to court, the judge was scathing about the way Sword's union ran its
books. He concluded: "It is a matter of concern that a large union should
have been found to be so wanting in ordinary standards of financial
care." Do you accept that charge? That there was sloppy accounting?

GREG SWORD: Yes, I do. What happened was as I said, a couple of cheques
which should have gone to Workplace 2002 were banked by the union and on
the other hand, a bill which should have been paid by Workplace 2002 was
paid by the union.

JOHN LYONS: But a draft audit of Sword's national office leaked to
Sunday, indicates a more fundamental problem with his union accounts. The
auditors founds that the "official receipts book was missing." That there
has been "no regular reconciliation for the suspense account and wage
clearing account." There was "no evidence of review of bank
reconciliations by an independent official." And "certain transactions
were found to be misallocated." Even though the financial affairs of Greg
Sword's union are about to become a major public issue in the courts,
Simon Crean wanted to avoid the subject. Surely Australians would be
interested if the national president of the Labor Party is running slush
funds?

SIMON CREAN: Look, you want to keep focusing on these issues. Quite
frankly, they are irrelevant to the Australian people.

JOHN LYONS: Yeah, but do you support, do you know whether Greg Sword's
union runs slush funds?

SIMON CREAN: I don't. I don't.

JOHN LYONS: As the leader of the Labor Party will you try to find out?
SIMON CREAN: As the leader of the Labor Party, what I'll be doing is
advancing an agenda for the Australian people, an agenda of reform, an
agenda of hope, an agenda of opportunity. That's what the Australian
people want.

JOHN LYONS: But clearly, what many in the Labor Party do not want is a
factional warrior as national president. SUSAN RYAN: I think he's seen as
a trade union official, one of what Whitlam used to call "the faceless
men". The national president of the party should be someone who is above
factions.

JOHN BUTTON: You know, if you drain the water out of a pond, gradually,
you get fish left who've been there for a long time. Greg Sword has
retained his connection with the Labor Party and his union's connection,
through a process when there has been a gradual erosion of all that.

JOHN LYONS: Union boss Dean Mighall says Greg Sword is unquestionably
more powerful than Simon Crean.

DEAN MIGHALL: If Greg Sword was to withdraw that support and certainly,
if that translated publicly, then that would be all over. JOHN LYONS: So
if Greg Sword decided to cut off Simon Crean's head, he could probably do
it?

DEAN MIGHALL: He'd be playing footy with it in the street. JOHN LYONS:
Who's more powerful - you or Greg Sword?

SIMON CREAN: The elected leader of the Federal parliamentary Labor Party
is the person that speaks for the party.

JOHN LYONS: But who's more powerful, not the spokesman. Who's more powerful?

SIMON CREAN: Again, you just want to play a semantic game about power.
I'm saying that what the Australian people want to vote for is the
political party.

JOHN LYONS: But it's a simple question, isn't it?

SIMON CREAN: No, it's not a simple question.

JOHN LYONS: The truth of the matter is the party's problems are unlikely
to be resolved at next week's caucus showdown. Kim Beazley will have
first go at playing footy with Simon Crean's head. Greg Sword will be
working hard to prop up his friend, Simon Crean, while Sword's factional
rival, Stephen Conroy, wants Crean beheaded and replaced by Beazley. And
the despair of party members grows ever deeper.

GRAHAM RICHARDSON: I find it hard to believe that John Howard won't win
the next election.

RODNEY CAVALIER: Until such time as the dramatic surgery we're talking
about and then the pumping in of oxygen, then there is no way of
reversing the death and the dying.

SUSAN RYAN: I don't think that changing the leadership is going to change
the fortunes of the party, whether it's a change to Kim or a change to
any of the other contenders.

JOHN LYONS: Are you sad at the moment for the state of the Labor Party?
JOHN BUTTON: Of the country. The state of the country would be vastly
improved if the Labor Party was more progressive, modern, free-wheeling
party than it is at the moment.