Meagher, Tripodi, and friends

Anybody who was at the Mekong Club in Cabramatta to watch the so-called Centre Unity faction cement its control of the NSW Young Labor Council in 1993 might have seen the party's 2011 doldrums coming. The truth is, lots of Cassandras were complaining about the progressive shrivelling of Labor's reasons to exist - and of course they were all fundamentally correct.

When people vote Green, they essentially know they are voting for green things, like leaves and grass. When they vote Liberal, they know they are voting to keep more of their own money in their own control. Modern Labor, though, seems only to stand for winning - or, in its most dignified version, something like professionalism in politics. Unless the Liberal party conspires to make an election about workplace relations, there is no core value that connects with any certainty to what ordinary people might care for, or even fear.

Nobody votes for political professionalism, except political professionals. It is especially difficult to sustain a commitment to professionalism when your government is old, tired, and scandal-ridden. But the NSW right's cult of 'whatever it takes' gave rise to this anti-charismatic doctrine, starting in the era of Bob Hawke and Paul Keating, which has spread across the party factions and around the country. We can now see it playing out to a certain logical conclusion in that state.

To do so, we wind back the clock a bit over 17 years...

A triumphant pair, Reba Meagher and Joe Tripodi were celebrating the first year of the right's control, which had concluded with the election of their acolytes to all the key leadership positions.

Clearly, they saw much to celebrate. Both stood arm in arm on the balcony with the Club's then proprietor, Phuong Ngo. They beamed and swayed while some clown with access to the stereo system ramped up the volume on Holst's Jupiter theme, favoured by the right since Keating had declared it good music. As Graham Richardson wrote in his memoir, 'winning is good.'

Losing is not good, and so of course the left was outraged. There was a lot of anger that somebody over the road was forging bank cards, creating pseudo-identification to get right-wing voters accredited in the names of absent comrades. Never mind that the left had been stacking Young Labor for years too. It just wasn't as ruthless and proficient at it any more.

But the critical difference since 1992 had been that right-wingers in the 'senior party' were now playing hard in Young Labor. The adults were sick of trumped-up young amateurs putting out press releases bagging the Hawke and Keating governments on the environment, the first Gulf war, and HECS, so they made sure the slew of left challenges to Young Labor's internal election results went nowhere. It was time to make sure the youth wing was singing from the same songsheet as they were.

It is not as if the ALP has ever been a particularly tuneful organisation. In 1993, though, NSW Young Labor simply gave up choir practice. When it stopped being an alternative voice to the senior party, it stopped being a voice. The organisation still exists, and arguably its apparatchiks are every bit as effective in what they seek to achieve now as 20 years ago, but the spark is almost invisible and the once-real appeal to a generation of idealistic high school students is now very weak.

The senior party's deal on Young Labor was well-known to both the insiders and the outsiders. Those who had helped engineer the right's victory would be rewarded with political jobs. I am not sure how many people knew how senior those jobs might be, though.

In 1994, somebody murdered the Member for Cabramatta, John Newman. Apparently only hours beforehand, right faction leader John della Bosca had offered Meagher preselection for this seat. Newman did not live to learn his career had been terminated. Meagher was duly preselected for the ensuing by-election, which she won.

In 1995, Tripodi secured preselection for the safe seat of Fairfield by outflanking incumbent Geoff Irwin in his local branches. The battle was won almost before anybody knew it was under way, and Tripodi's victory made him look like just the sort of cunning tactician the party machine loves.

What is more, 1995 saw Bob Carr win the state government back for Labor. It was clear these two political collaborators, former lovers, fellow-graduates of the University of Sydney, were bound for cabinet sooner or later.

When, in 2001, Ngo was convicted of the murder of Newman, it was a measure of their standing in the party and the parliament that any guilt by association with him could not bring them down. Ngo, under whose roof and by whose aid their inexorable rise to power got its start: if he had been convicted in the twilight of Labor – say, anytime after the resignation of Michael Costa as treasurer – the stench of it would have been the lead story against them up to the days when they each resigned their posts.

It is funny to write this column about two people I once knew reasonably well. Meagher and Tripodi have only ever treated me civilly. I assume they (rightly) saw me as a lightweight in their world: no threat to any interest they cared about. But there is more to it than that. They are capable of being genuinely human – generous, curious, self-deprecating – whenever their main game is put on hold.

On the other hand, I have seen them absolutely monster people with no apparent care or shame. Listening to Meagher screaming into a microphone is very, very hard on the ears. I saw Tripodi one night setting out to break somebody (it failed: she went on to serve as a cabinet minister), using the sort of conversational tactics I am glad to say I have never used on anyone. To get ahead in their ALP, you have to be brutal with anyone who crosses you.

Ultimately, the party got brutal back on them. Both had become deeply unpopular in the electorate, their reputations synonymous with the machinations of a government that electors had come to see as too machinist. Meagher and Tripodi both resigned because they saw the writing on the wall: their party no longer had a use for them, because they reminded voters too much of what the party is like.

This is only partially a reflection on Meagher and Tripodi as individuals. That they can switch from engaging and considerate people into such demons is hardly unique to them. Nor is it unique to the Labor party. It is not even unique to NSW, although there are few genuine democracies in the world whose politics are more dominated by a culture of bullying. Meagher and Tripodi only made themselves into what they knew the system would reward.

The main point of the personal stories of Meagher and Tripodi is how accurately these two star-crossed comrades reflect the political machine that made them in its own image, then made their careers, then became a toy for them to control, and then ultimately discarded them when their careers began to fade.

I wish them each a future more happy and more personally rewarding.