Death cut close to the bone yesterday, when Simon Crean, former leader of the Labor Party, died suddenly while on a trade visit to Germany. He was 74, having left parliament at the 2013 election.
Crean’s father, Frank Crean, was Treasurer for the first two years of the Whitlam government. In that madhouse, he was a relatively sane influence; in December 1974 Whitlam shifted him to the trade ministry, giving his job instead to Jim Cairns. But Crean senior had his revenge six months later, after Cairns had been sacked, when caucus elected him deputy leader in a deliberate rebuff to Whitlam.
On his father’s retirement in 1977 Simon Crean sought Labor preselection for his seat, but was narrowly defeated. Instead he spent the next 13 years as a union official, including five as president of the ACTU – the critical reformist years of the Hawke government. He finally entered parliament in 1990, serving as a minister under Hawke and Keating, and in 1998, after Labor had returned to opposition, he was elected deputy leader at his second attempt.
Luck was not running Labor’s way in opposition, and in 2001, after Kim Beazley had lost a second successive election and resigned from the leadership, Crean was elected unopposed to replace him. In that capacity he faced the challenge of responding to John Howard’s participation in the invasion of Iraq, which he firmly resisted. The media, and much of Labor’s own right wing, never forgave him.
The Channel Nine papers today do Crean the honor of reprinting his speech in parliament against the war, on which history has comprehensively vindicated him. That’s some compensation for the campaign those same papers (plus, of course, News Corp) ran against him at the time, in which opinion poll results were repeatedly twisted to undermine his leadership, and which Beazley exploited for his own ends.
Crean faced down one leadership challenge, but then announced his resignation in November 2003, thus becoming the only Labor leader never to be allowed to fight a federal election. Beazley, however, did not reap the reward of his plotting: instead, in a preview of the Turnbull-Dutton contest of 2018, Crean secured, by the narrowest of margins, the election of his preferred successor, Mark Latham.
But perhaps Crean’s finest hour was yet to come. Latham lost the 2004 election and then resigned (preparatory to his later descent to the depths); Beazley returned to the leadership and demoted Crean, while retaining him in the shadow ministry. The right wing in Victoria then challenged Crean’s preselection, despite the fact that he was not merely a member but one of the founders of the faction. With his seat stacked out with the right’s numbers and Beazley ostentatiously refusing to support him, it was expected that Crean’s career would come to an undignified end.
Not so. As I told the story in March 2006:
Simon Crean went into the Hotham preselection ballot sounding confident, but everyone assumed it was just the faux bravado of the condemned man. But he was right: it was announced late last night that Crean had won almost 70% of the local vote. His challenger, Martin Pakula, “later rang Mr Crean to congratulate him and withdraw from the race”.
This is a stunning lesson for branch-stackers, a category that includes almost all politicians to some extent. Sometimes stacks behave like real people. Crean, with his high profile and long experience, worked the electorate tirelessly, and it paid off. As The Australian says, “It is the first time in any internal ballot that a significant number of Cambodian preselectors have turned against [local powerbroker Hong] Lim”.
So Crean remained in parliament for another seven and a half years, five and a half of them as a minister under Rudd and Gillard. In March 2013, with leadership rivalry again tearing the party apart, he schemed to return to the deputy leadership, but the plot misfired and he was relegated to the backbench – the first time he had ever sat there. Rudd’s return to the top failed to revive his career, and he chose not to recontest his seat.
Not everything in Crean’s record did him credit, but on the big issues of his day he was on the side of the angels more often than not. By all accounts he was an effective minister as well as a decent and humane one. While hereditary succession is not usually the best way to select for political (or any other) ability, in this case it didn’t work too badly.
Regardless of the selection mechanism it uses, Labor could do a lot worse than to find itself some more people of Crean’s character.
The World is Not Enough 