Graham Richardson, Bob Carr, and the history wars live on ...

(Above: Bill Leake does Graham Richardson in 1995 and catches something ...)

We're in despair on the pond. On a Monday we go looking for a safe pair of hands, someone who'll tell us what to think, perhaps which is the best magic water, or what is the most deliciously expensive Paddington bread.

But Paul Sheehan seems to have gone on an extended sabbatical, and so we don't know what to think. We can feel a zombieland of the mind closing in fast.

Never mind, there's always David Burchell at The Australian to help out. We've been trying to build him into a star, and while it's tough work, one must - in the British royal way - take our quirky commentariat humour wherever we can find it. Quick, click over to The Oz before the paywall ruins our pleasure for ever.

Oh no, for whatever reason, Burchell is missing in action too, and the entire Monday devastated.

What's left is mere morsels and crumbs. Why sure there's the remarkable sight of Gra Gra - Mr. Graham Richardson, esquire, to those brought up with proper values - pontificating thus in A succession that may have a happy ending:

Leaders of the Australian Labor Party never seem to leave with their dignity and reputations intact.

Indeed, as said by one who presumably thinks his dignity and reputation is intact. Yes, by golly, whatever it takes, as the rehabilitation proceeds, and Gra Gra covers the decline and fall of Chairman Rudd for the Oz, and announces that Gillard has no blood on her hands.

As a man who can recognise blood and a Swiss bank account, this is tremendously reassuring.

And soon enough we learn the real reason that leaders of the ALP never seem to leave with their dignity and reputations intact. They end up writing columns for The Australian.

Come on down Bob Carr, with Thankfully, Whitlam and Co rescued Labor from the Reds.

To which one might want to add that nothing, however, saved NSW and Sydney from the right of the Labor party.

Carr, in the inimitable manner of NSW headkickers, is still fighting the Labor party wars of the fifties and sixties and seventies, and is delighted that ASIO files have been collected over the years, and now released so he can brood on their huge implications.

No, not what collecting ASIO files on citizens might mean in the generality of things, but merely so he can put his boot into all and sundry to do with the left.

The implications are huge, he assures us, but are they as huge as the sinecure the NSW Labor party right has enjoyed in NSW, and in particular Sydney. Sure we've had plenty of bread and circuses, and our very own colosseum now sits out Homebush way and we have a nice fireworks display each New Year's eve, and we also have the most ramshackle, wretched, ill-planned infrastructure imaginable for ostensibly Australia's leading city.

And credit where credit is due, to Bob Carr and the NSW Labor right.

In the boofhead way that has always distinguished the style of the NSW right, Carr spends his entire column taking policy for granted, and imagining everything the left said or did - because of the taint of Communism - was somehow pinko perverted bastardry.

In 1963 the Left got to within one vote at a national ALP conference of committing Labor to oppose the American communications base on Northwest Cape. The other Left policy victory was to lock federal and state Labor governments into denying state aid to non-state (that is, Catholic) schools.

We can now assume the impetus behind these policy thrusts was delivered by ALP officials and trade unionists who held dual membership in the CPA or were so aligned to it a party ticket barely mattered.

Yes, and we now have federal government funding of Exclusive Brethren schools and schools founded on firm Scientological principles. We can thus assume the impetus behind this kind of policy thrust was delivered by ALP officials and ratbags who held dual membership in silliness.

Carr attempts a similar kind of revanche revisionism in other areas:

Just think: with no Gough, Jim Cairns would have led Labor, a naive academic who never conceded the North Vietnamese presence in South Vietnam, never criticised North Vietnam, could refer to Stalin and Mao as "leaders of world socialism", and as treasurer said he would print money to reduce unemployment. As I write this, the chilling analogy dawns on me: Cairns as an Australian Salvador Allende.

Chilling? Only in the sense of a stupefyingly dumb analogy. Only in the farthest reaches of the most feverish branches of delusion could one see Jim Cairns as an Australian Salvador Allende with the CIA staging a coup. Anyway wasn't the CIA coup supposed to be aimed at Gough Whitlam?

You might see Cairns as inept, but for all Carr's glorification of Gough Whitlam as an anti-commie leader, he doesn't seem to mind that Cairns served under Whitlam as Treasurer, and as deputy prime minister. That's right, Gough appointed the dumbo to take charge of Australia's finances.

Now you might see Cairns as morally corrupt - he set the pace for Bill Clinton with his "I did not have sex with that woman" routine. There's a kind of love, and then there's staging a defamation case and winning, and then waiting until 2002 to admit he did indeed have a sexual relationship with Junie Morosi.

And Cairns always made a forlorn figure in his later life, sitting outside the Prahan market of a Saturday morning, flogging books and engaging in debate with passers by. It was like stumbling across an eccentric member of your family, to see the former treasurer thus engaged.

But to see him as Salvador Allende? Come on, what hysterical rhetorical bullshit is Carr trying to get past long suffering punters?

As for Vietnam? Well that worked out tremendously well, didn't it?

By the end of the piece, Carr has drawn himself up to a level of sanctimonious umbrage:

From Aarons's book not just Whitlam but the whole ALP Right is elevated, the party members who did not take Santamaria's advice and walk out but who opted to stay in the ALP and fight. Their names should be recorded on some kind of honour roll. They include Laurie Short and John Ducker, and the secretaries of unions of carpenters, electricians and rubber workers now dead and forgotten, united in a view that the party of Curtin and Chifley was not to be packaged up and handed over to Marxist-Leninists and outright Soviet agents.

Speaking of revolutionaries, would that be why Gough Whitlam himself alleged that Chairman Mao had been held in veneration by his people, and that he'd brought internal stability to China, and in the process of establishing relations with China even undertook a little self criticism in the prescribed manner? And how about the way the entire Australian parliament, at that point with fearless leader Malcolm Fraser, expressed sincere regret at the death of Chairman Mao?

Yes, there's nothing like a mass murderer to command the respect of the NSW Labor right.

But you can see where this is heading:

Ducker, leader of the NSW Labor Right who died two years ago, once used the expression in a conversation with me, "the right-wing of the Labor Party, in the best sense of the term": in the 50s and 60s they turned up at conferences and blocked a takeover of the ALP by "the comms" - I now adopt young Keating's nomenclature.

The right-wing of the Labor party in the best sense of the term! Pardon me while I adopt young Henry Miller's nomenclature. In the land of fuck, it's fuck or be fucked, but if you want to be right royally fucked, seek out someone from the right of NSW Labour.

Well we'll see where the NSW Labor party has been led by the right-wing, and by Bob Carr in particular, under whose regime the state's infrastructure began to fall apart while he read his books and organised his panem et circenses.

Better read than red, and better read than dead, but in either case, better not to read the pieties of Bob Carr.

If you want a more interesting insight into Cairns, why not try Paul Strangio's Why Cairns fails as a Labor hero.

The point in the end being that if you elevate point scoring and cultural wars above policy making, then policy making will surely bite you in the bum. It's about to bite NSW Labor in the bum, and not before time ...

Ten long years:

Since Carr came to office there have been almost no new public transport initiatives. Those completed during his time: Airport Rail Link, the Olympic Park rail link, Sydney Light Rail, the duplication of the East Hills Line, were started or at least announced by the previous, Liberal, government. The only cross regional links started under Labor are the Parramatta-Chatswood line – half of which has been abandoned – and the half-baked western suburbs busway, which ought to have been a fast, high-quality, light rail link.

Either the man knows what is right, but is so weak he can’t bring himself to do it, or he was, all along, the greatest political conman this state has ever seen. (Carr stalled in policy gridlock).

Say no more.

But I suppose there's always memories to be treasured, as detailed in Carr not welcome at Labor's campaign launch. Golly, was it only February 2007?

Bob Carr, who led Labor to three successive election wins, is not invited to Morris Iemma's official election campaign launch on Sunday - a snub that shows how much the former premier is regarded as political poison.

As many as 300 people will be invited to attend Mr Iemma's launch at the Hurstville Civic Theatre, which will feature his entire ministry. But there will be no place for Mr Carr, who was premier for 10 years and who handed Mr Iemma his 17-seat margin, the Government and ALP confirmed.

Still there's always a seat at The Oz with a column, and culture and history wars to be fought.

Enough already. Bring back Sheehan and Burchell so we can have fun, rather than ruin a city and a state ...

(Below: Bob Carr).