Dregs

Middle Class Perverts, Cultural Spittoons, Dirt and the Death of Political Excellence

"When I joined the Labor Party it contained the cream of the working class. As I look about me now all I see are the dregs of the middle class. When will you middle-class perverts stop using the Labor Party as a cultural spittoon?" - Kim Beazley Snr, ALP State Conference, Perth 1970

No quote better sums up the grave moral crisis of Modern Australia than Kim Beazley’s words in 1970. Dregs of the middle class. He was criticising the Labor Party in 1970 but it quiet eloquently sums up the entire, whole derelict and crumbling super structure of Australian civil society in one sentence. The second sentence I included just because it’s so giddily perfect. Middle class perverts and cultural spittoons. It makes me smile every time I read it.

The idea of a man like Beazley Senior seems utterly, incomprehensibly alien to the modern Australian political mind. A working class intellectual and polymath who entered Parliament at 27 not as some youthful curiosity, as young people do today, but whose qualities were immediately recognised by his party and the country at large. A devoted Christian (not Catholic, unlike most of his Labor brethren), he would become Australia’s greatest advocate for Frank Buchanan’s Moral Re-Armament movement (along with NSW Premier Bertram Stevens). The MRA’s DNA cuts through the entirety of today’s New Right if you care to research it. It faded into obscurity through the 80s and 90s because quasi-gnostic cults espousing global one world fascism fell out of favour. Now, that’s just a regular afternoon on my X timeline… (Beazley would have loved The Dark Enlightenment).

Such a dance card wouldn’t look out of place on a regular right winger except Beazley was also a man of tremendous compassion borne out of his faith and spent much of his life helping the Yolngu people of Arnhem Land secure native title and campaign against their land being sold off for bauxite mines without their permission. He formed a lifelong friendship with Galarrwuy Yunupingu, who like Beazley, would be an extra dimensional political figure today, as were all his contemporaries. Eloquent, highly educated indigenous men with nuanced political views, capable of negotiation and compromise, and most importantly - winning victories are foreign to modern Australian sensibilities.

Where did men like that go?

The question goes to the heart of Australian political malaise. You’d be hard pressed to find someone of that caliber in Federal Parliament since. Beazley’s son comes close, but like many of his time he was not a man astride the political world, but a man who it rode. Somewhere along the way, as the influence of the media, as the gross complexity of the political system increased on an exponential scale, it was no longer enough to be a confident, competent man of giant intellect and vast passions. At some point, politics started requiring cloying insincerity, and other, more nebulous qualities. A pathological urge to debase oneself. Not like Beazley. He resigned as soon as he discovered Whitlam and Labor Left had been cutting deals with Saddam Hussein in the late 70s.

I spent most of my career as a Liberal staffer in NSW politics. The NSW Parliament, and NSW Labor in particular produced titans, especially in the first part of the 21st century. They’ve all fallen now, but they were there, for a moment in time. I was lucky enough to get a front seat view of Bob Carr in full flight before his ideology started degenerating into mystery meat progressivism. According to legend Bob Carr used to take his staffers and read Shakespeare with them. Supposedly that was what he did for fun. I’ve heard the story a couple of times from Labor guys, one did an impressive impersonation of Carr and he’d repeat it at the Parliament bar when the House was up “Come now gentlemen, we’re doing Troilus and Cressida, Helena has cooked us up some nice cuts of veal” it’s funnier if you do it in his voice.

I’m not sure if I entirely believe it, it could be one of those intellectual affectations Labor hacks confected for him like the time he was said to have brought a copy of War & Peace to read during the 2000 Olympics opening ceremony. But it tickles me to imagine Carr foisting roles on his top guys, making Bruce Hawker play the dim witted malcontent Thersites:

I am a bastard too; I love bastards: I am a bastard
begot, bastard instructed, bastard in mind, bastard
in valour, in every thing illegitimate!

It could be true, and like so many stories I’ve successfully spun to journalists, that’s often enough.

Spontaneous outbursts of intellectualism were a common sight in politics back then. MPs offices had walls of books. MPs would quote scripture and philosophy. The lawyers would casually mention obscure precedents in conversation and the accountants would reel off economic data from the tops of their heads. When I first started working, neophyte Members who brought written speeches would be met with jeers and a gentle reminder from the Speaker on sessional orders prohibiting tedious repetition and the reading of prepared notes . That was an actual thing. I think it still might be but they never enforce it. Politicians took real pride in their oratory.

It’s hard to pinpoint when it really went south. There were signs. Great men would retire and be replaced with unremarkable functionaries who contributed little. But it happened slowly, imperceptibly, that you didn’t notice until there were no great men left. I say men but there were great women too - but they were swiftly out numbered by women whose prerequisite quality was merely, being women.

The resignation of Carl Scully was the falling of an important domino. After Carr’s resignation Scully was widely acknowledged as the best performer in Parliament, albeit, the most unpopular Minister in the entire cabinet with actual voters. He’d been Transport Minister during the Waterfall disaster and Police Minister during the Cronulla Riots. All the rhetorical razzle dazzle in the world won’t save you if you don’t have the love of the electorate. But what brought Scully undone wasn’t his administrative failures - it was his rapid fire retorts in the Chamber. We all knew he wasn’t deliberately misleading the Parliament when he twice claimed that a report into the Cronulla Riots didn’t exist that we knew existed, because our dirt unit had it leaked to them. He was just doing his regular song and dance routine, flinging invective, throwing barbs. He got fired on a technicality. And that had a profound, cooling effect on the entire Parliament. Ministers started being careful. They started bringing in prepared, vetted speeches and didn’t stray from them.

This sounds like a small thing, but somewhere in the early 2010s, the men at Parliament stopped buying made to measure suits. For years there had been a circuit of travelling tailors you’d book to have suits made. Everyone who worked there did it. There was a swish little Italian guy who’d come in, take your measurements, send them off and a few weeks later the suits would come back from some south east Asian sweatshop. For a full year, you’d need ten shirts and at least three suits with two trousers and silk saddles. They’d wear out. Because actually working in Parliament is a lot more strenuous than you’d think, you’re walking, jogging between offices, you’re sliding on leather all day, walking up countless flights of stairs to not miss divisions.

I’d been working in the private sector when I went back to take a job with the then Leader of the House and my first thought was to get new suits made. I hadn’t been wearing them every day in my old job. I had to call around to track down the numbers of the old tailors, they’d all quit. Not enough business. When I finally got onto one he had moved to his own shop. I told him why I needed them and he laughed and said, “I haven’t been to Parliament for years to do that.”

It occurred to me later, that in my absence, the number of sitting days had decreased by half. And when they did sit, they left before the sun went down more often than not. Family friendly hours. That last lot of suits and shirts I had made I still wear, not even so much as a frayed collar because the physical strain had been completely purged from the place.

The current generation of politicians, millennial members, are obsessed with this kind of thing. They want family friendly hours, they want to breast feed in divisions. They want rules so their opponents stop being mean. The staff and functionaries demand respect. They demand an end to bullying. They want to feel safe at work.

The merits of all these desires can be debated ad nauseum, and the fact that Parliament was, by any metric, one of the most psychologically dangerous workplaces outside a police car or an emergency ward is absolutely not up for a debate. I saw people’s lives ruined there, weekly. I saw corruption, abuse, physical violence, countless instances of sexual harassment. We indulged in wanton destruction of public property and grotesque waste of taxpayer funds. I cleaned piss shit and vomit out the back of Ministerial cars with a hose. I know of former staffers bullied so hard they ended up leaving the country, because they couldn’t turn on a television or pick up a newspaper without being reminded of the abuse when they’d see politicians.

And in those days, old hands would remark to me that things have really changed for the better! You’d hear stories about the 80s and 90s that seem unbelievable. One former Labor leader told me about a Keating era budget night where a shopping trolley turned up in the corridor outside his office and more than one MP had sex in it in full view of their colleagues, staff, and journalists who wouldn’t dare report on it because they themselves indulged in worse. Another MP told me about how upon becoming a deputy whip in the 70s he had a staff member foisted on him by the leadership who wasn’t a staffer at all, but rather the SP bookie for the entire Parliament, and it had been long standing practice for the Government of the day to ensure he was employed so MPs could place bets on sitting days.

But here is a deeply uncomfortable truth. A truth no one in politics wants to reckon with, or can let themselves admit.

Australia was a more prosperous and safer country when Parliament was like that.

Has the diversity, inclusion and sensitivity training for MPs made our economy better? Have family friendly hours improved the quality of public administration? Have staff pay rises and more equitable conditions made them better at their jobs? Has the threat of compensation claims and sanctions for bad conduct, bonk bans, made our country safer?

Mediocre people are always nice to work for. But great people are terrors to work for. With a capacity for great achievement comes a capacity for great cruelty. And this cuts through the whole spectrum of politics as a profession. The greatest politicians were monsters. The best staffers were drunks and drug addicts. The constant background noise of sex and sexual tension in Parliament was not caused by power imbalance as bespectacled social studies majors would have you believe, but rather, because the people involved were all incredibly charming. As well we would expect them to be, given their job was quite literally making people like them.

Do you think the general public cares that it was a bad place to work? We were paid very well. That’s why I dropped out of university to become a staffer in the first place. I was doing an Arts degree and I went to a careers fair where the best job on offer for a Tasmanian arts graduate was a state public service clerk on $32,000 a year. The Liberals offered me $45,000. I was barely 20. When I left at 35, I earned 5 times that. My redundancy alone was double the median wage. On top of the money, those of us who stuck at it made immeasurably valuable contacts and acquired unique and sought after skill sets, which have made some of us extremely successful. The cost was turning a blind eye to terrible conduct, occassionally doing it our selves, but more often than not - being victims of it.

Do you think, if you gave the general public the choice, of Parliament as it was, with low inflation, low interest rates, a minerals boom, a well run security state, a growing economy, or the current regime… they wouldn’t want to go back?

There’s obviously a debate on the extent to which the change in culture contributes to the entropic state of Australian democracy. I think it does, but I could be wrong. My central thesis is that it takes a certain kind of person to be good at politics to thus create a good political state. And these people, aren’t good people.

“People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.”

Goes the quote (wrongly attributed to Churchill). So it goes for politics. Take away the roughness, the ruthlessness, the psychological violence of it, and what are you left with? Lawyers and Human Resources. The slow crawl of bureaucracy. The rancid stench of failure.

I once destroyed a man’s marriage and his nascent political career by exposing an affair he’d had. It wasn’t a pretty job, I’d had to push the boundary pretty hard to get what I needed to do him in. His children disowned him. His mistress worked with him so he lost his job. He turned to drink. A year or so later he was on the mend, he’d been in therapy and a “program”. He was going around apologising to everyone, there was talk he might make another tilt, building a narrative about personal reform. He came into my office, not to apologise, but to ask me for an apology. He’d obviously been practicing his speech for a while, explained how as much as he knows he did the wrong thing, he had so much bitterness and resentment toward me he wanted to put it all behind him so the party could heal.

I told him that no, I wouldn’t apologise.

He started getting biblical. The poor bastard thought the reason I’d done what I did was moral. Which I guess he could have been forgiven for, I was the Catholic Right’s chief knife man at the time. But the ten commandments had nothing to do with it.

“It’s not because you cheated on your wife. It’s because you got caught cheating on your wife.” I said.

“All these guys cheat on their wives. But you got caught. By me. Not just caught, but I could prove it to the standard I could get it in a newspaper. If I can catch you, Labor can catch you. And you’d have to step down and we’d lose the seat. If you were already far enough ahead in the polls, they would wait until you were an MP and try to cause a by election. They might even wait until you’re a Minister, or the fucking Premier - and trigger a crisis.”

At that point he tried to stammer out a weak objection about how I couldn’t possibly know what would happen, and how he knew what he was doing was wrong and he was going to stop it, I cut him off.

“I know its what they would do because it’s what I would do, and Labor’s guys are even better at this than me. Which means there’s also even better strategies I haven’t thought of, that would be worse for you, worse for the Party, worse for the Government. Protecting your dignity is not worth damaging the Government over. That’s why I did what I did and why I won’t apologise for it.”

He walked out of the office without saying anything. It was around that time I realized I had to get out of there. He had a lot of friends, senior ones. I noticed a marked change in how people treated me after that. I wasn’t just a knock around guy who was fun to get on the cans with and slung the occasional spicy yarn anymore. I think a lot of them realized that if push came to shove, I would do the same thing to any of them. That’s why the best dirt guys end up going private. An untouchable class. They need us, but they don’t like us and certainly don’t trust us. Not one bit.

He didn’t go for preselection that time. Few years after I quit he had another go, and nearly won. He ran dead for the last fortnight of the campaign while the Daily Mail were sniffing around his indiscretions. Labor found out about them somehow.

I did worse things, to get at guys, on my own side, on Labor’s side. I even stitched up a couple of Greens. There were businessmen funding our opponents I went after. Guys who were lobbying against policies, lobbyists themselves. They sent me after more than one sports person who was getting too much air time criticising the firm. I never scalped a journalist, the hardest game of all, despite a lot of trying. I nearly took out an actual newspaper editor, nearly. He clung on just long enough to make it family reasons. I joked that I’d like to take out a Governor-General. There’s not even any political reason to do it, I just wanted to prove I had the methodology perfected to the point I could target any corner of Australian civil society.

If you explained to a layman the methodology it sounds like the simplest thing in the world, and it is, in a way. Gossip, slander, secrets, the weaponization of novelty. Teenage girls are capable of it sub consciously. Professionals it takes work, more than you’d think. It requires years of cultivating relationships with journalists, hours every day of reading newspapers, every newspaper. Watching every package on every TV channel. Knowing intimately what constitutes a story so you can sell your own, knowing who can write it best, matrices of deceit, knowing what you have to prove versus what you have to merely whisper. Journalists are vainglorious and you’d often have to construct narratives in a way they wouldn’t feel like you were spoon feeding them, to protect their pride, so they’d sell the content themselves. Others were pliable and lazy. There were front page gut punches I stood up that took 60 second conversations with layabouts and down pagers deep in the book that took years of leaving arrogant journoids clues so they thought they discovered weapons grade filth all on their own.

If you love your job you’ll never work a day in your life. I loved it, for a long time. But more than that, I was passionate about it, because I honestly believed, and still do to an extent, that people like me were doing the right thing. We were protecting the country, culling the weak, building crucibles to test contenders for high office so that only the best would make it through, and thus make our country a better place. To an extent, that was true. There are people I took out of commission early in their careers that would have been total disasters. People who should never have wielded legislative power. I knocked out guys who were honest to God compromised assets of the Chinese Communist Party, on multiple occasions. But there were flow on effects. Unforeseen consequences.

People like me, those even better guys who worked for the ALP, we worked for the parties. We weren’t in the parties. There’s only been one ex dirt man to get a seat. Walt Secord. He didn’t last long. He had too many enemies, a crust of distrust and grudges built up around him. Good Haters. That’s the term Labor guys use. To be a good hater is a compliment. Someone who holds onto something for a long time - and acts on it when they have a chance.

Because we weren’t in the parties, because we had no administrative skin in the game, and no ambitions for office ourselves, we were good a the job but bad at seeing the bigger picture. When I’d vet candidates I was asking myself do they fuck around, do they drink, do they have priors, are they undischarged bankrupts, are they in thrall to chicom money, do they like kids, do they punt, what’s their driving record like… And I didn’t notice, as that process rolled on, as it got more sophisticated, as we built tools to sift through ever bigger tranches of data, social media posts, ASIC records, vast troves of media copy - I was only looking at the guys with kompromat, I wasn’t looking at the guys who passed muster. At how their CVs were getting lighter. How their ages were getting lower. Their achievements less significant. We were giving green lights to guys who had never said anything controversial simply because they’d never said anything worth saying.

We were winning elections, we were getting through the crucible, the journos couldn’t touch our guys - because there was nothing on our guys. We’d made sure. But there was also nothing… at all.

Kim Beazley Senior wouldn’t get preselection today in the ALP. The Moral Re-Armament made a lot of eye brow raising comments in support of 1930s fascism. The fact Beazley was a gifted orator and man of boundless compassion without whom there would be no Native Title, no Mabo, no Galarrwuy Yunupingu being declared a National Treasure - that wouldn’t have mattered. He was a member of a group that for a brief period expressed sympathy for Hitler. Front page of The Australian. Disendorsed.

We were losing something while we were protecting something, and people like me have to reckon with that. I rail and rage against the condition of Modern Australian politics but I’m just as much to blame as the diversity hires, the weaklings, the bureaucrats and the journalists and the academics. I played my part in the last 20 years.

So how do we fix it?

I take as article of faith that everything that is done can be undone. Like Beazley, like Buchanan, my faith is tinged with mysticism and illuminism. Quod est superius est sicut quod inferius.

For some years now I’ve believed that the process that homogenized Australian politics into a swamp of bloodless inarticulate and uncharismatic freaks can be undone by running the process in reverse. If people like me can operate in the background running systemic processes that passively scourge the political gene pool of greatness it stands to reason an opposing system can accentuate greatness, and the process can self select for it.

In Kim Beazley Senior’s day, this was the default setting. He was remarkable but not unique. Whole systems existed to funnel men like him into public life. From academia, from law and letters, from the military, the unions, from businesses. They ran passively and imperceptibly in the background, until grots like me came along and disrupted it. As well as the whole architecture of cultural Marxism that would virulently taint civil society starting at the end of the last century.

Those places were once the depository of excellence, intellectualism, and importantly competence in Australia. So it stands to reason that if we are to restore excellence, we have to first identify where it now resides. Instead of focussing on what is bad, on the pipeline of mediocrity currently generating this and the next and the next after crop of politicians - where does competency actually live? And why aren’t they becoming MPs?

To start with, ask yourself, when was the last time you saw real, ruthless competency?

Last year I was cleaning a razor sharp Wüsthof kitchen knife after baking a, frankly spectacular Quiche Lorraine and I slipped and sliced open the skin on the knuckle of my digitus medius, all the way to the bone, severing the tendons and nerves. Embarrassingly, I wasn’t even (very) drunk. I had to wrap it up, pop two valium as well as one of my precious stash of 40mg OxyContins just to get out the door and present to hospital. They splinted and stitched it and told me to come back first thing in the morning to see a surgeon.

The next day, I was ushered into a waiting area of comfortable but aesthetically terrifying green lounges to wait for the surgeon to see me. I was told to bring an over night bag as they’d have to put me under to fix it. The waiting area was packed, mostly elderly patients accompanied by anxious families in the wake of falls. A junky that looked like he’d been glassed. A nervous looking man on his own with no obvious abnormalities I immediately assumed had something lodged in his rectum.

After a couple of hours, a young surgeon made the rounds in the company of a craggy hospital administrator. It was his job to book everyone in for the knife. And he was getting progressively frustrated as he did. Because, as the woman with him intoned quietly, there were only two surgical beds available for the day. He got to me, gently cut the plaster off my finger made a couple of notes and said nothing. I watched as two old ladies and their families were ushered out. As the junky nodded off. As the guy I had come to believe had a beer bottle or something wedged in his arsehole started to get more pensive.

An hour later he came back in, this time in full surgical garb, a plastic smock that when I looked closely, actually had blood stains on it. He doffed a fresh pair of gloves and tossed soiled ones in a bin then pulled the curtain, tugging down his face mask and taking off his cap. He had zero bed side manner, asking curtly: “What’s your tolerance for discomfort? Not pain, discomfort. Where 0 is none, 10 is the maximum?” I was taken aback and didn’t quite know how to answer. When I didn’t, he said “if it’s between a 7 and 10, I can fix your finger right now under a local.”

This seemed like a good deal. Maybe it was the cocktail of barbiturates and opiates I’d self administered but despite his tender years the surgeon filled me with confidence. “Fuck it lets do it.”

Across the hall was a tiny room with “optometry” marked on it. Inside were two stools, an eye chart, and boxes piled to the ceiling. This was Royal Prince Alfred, in a state of perpetual, over worked chaos and clutter. He cleared a space and produced sterile sheets on a bench. He pointed at the stool and said “do you think you can sit on that for 20 minutes without moving?” Again, his manner and obvious competency stunned me into silence, “I’ll need your good arm.” He said, taking me back outside. He was a very small chap, and it took two of us to move one of the chairs in the waiting room into the then even more cramped store room. He jabbed me with three needles of local anesthetic. I was numb up to my arm pit for the next couple of hours. He had to get out his phone and turn the torch on, because there wasn’t enough light. He made two incisions above and below the cut, like a lightning bolt and degloved my finger. I grit my teeth and stared straight ahead for the first few minutes before morbid curiosity got the better of me. It looked exactly like one of those old anatomical diagrams. He didn’t say a word, the tendon was no more than a couple of millimeters across, stark white against the meat and yellowy bone of my finger. He fished it out from its hiding place above my knuckle and fixed it back in place with a single, miniscule stich then sewed the whole thing up, then dressed it. When it was done he said, you’ll be able to type in a couple of weeks, play violin in a couple of months, but you won’t be able to make a fist for a year. You’ll have full mobility but it will never look the same and I can’t guarantee the feeling will ever come back. He wrote the number of a physiotherapist on the back of a card and disappeared.

That, is competence. Ruthless competence. A friend of mine, a management consultant, does a presentation where he would describe competence as perfect confidence. Not over confidence, and not self doubt. The exact middle. The perfect judgment of just how competent you really are. Which is what that surgeon had. A lesser man would have left me waiting until a bed freed up. A lesser man would have not cared if I wasn’t seen at all that day. But he knew the exact extent of his abilities and had the primordial need to prove them, so against what I assume were probably the rules and regulations of the hospital he tucked me into a store room and operated on me squeezed in amongst detritus. And he had no desire to prove that skill to anyone but himself. The next day I went to hand clinic for physiotherapy and they had no record of me even having been a patient.

That is the kind of person who should run our country.

Today I can make a fist, and although I still can’t play violin or piano I can certainly type these substacks with my right hand.

The question then becomes, how do we convince people like him to run for Parliament? Where do you even find those people? Politics could never replicate the thrill of cutting a man open and securing a perfect stitch in a tendon, you’d be hard pressed to make the case that milling around debating bills could scratch the same itch. But there’s little hidden slithers of competence everywhere if you squint. Chefs would make good politicians. Ironically, while the major parties preference elite sportspeople from the big team sports, it’s the individual ones that would be better at it. Zali Steggall’s politics might be insipid but there’s no denying she’s good at it, exceptional even - she was a skier. Same with Dan Repacholi from Labor, a target shooter. Ruthless devotion to perfection. Confidence in your abilities. Competence.

The most ruthlessly competent politician I worked for was Mike Gallacher, the former NSW Police Minister. He had been an undercover detective and highway patrolman. Lonely jobs that still require high openness and agreeability.

You can build up a psychological profile for this but its occurrence is rare, to score high in all five on the OCEAN personality test. So rare the only thing that makes sense is to actually shrink down the size of Parliaments so you’re not filling the political gene pools with runner ups of lower quality. There’s also the fact that OCEAN scores are hereditary (see the Beazleys)… but accentuating that political reform is for another day.

For now, the middle class perverts are in charge, and now they’re there they won’t unclench their grubby fingers from the levers of power without a fight. One interesting trait shared by all middling political figures of the current age is their allergy to competence makes them extremely good at knowing when it’s near, so they can keep it at arms length in case it starts competing with them. It won’t be easy to make the transition. But Australia must, or else wallow in the cultural spittoon forever.