Lenore Taylor political editor
theguardian.com, Wednesday 23 October 2013
Senator knew the Labor government had 'lost its way' when it picked a fight with the media six months before the election
Bob Carr announces his resignation from the Senate. Photograph: Alan Porritt/AAP
Bob Carr claimed he was suffering from “irrational exuberance” when he repeatedly insisted he would serve a full six-year term, as he announced he was resigning from the Senate just weeks after being re-elected in the number one position on Labor’s Senate ticket.
Carr, a former NSW premier, pleaded with Labor to be more “canny” and “cunning” in its political strategies and said he knew the Labor government had “lost its way” when it picked a fight over media law reform in the lead-up to a federal election – a move which “tore up the Neville Wran playbook of how to get re-elected”.
Carr agreed to the former prime minister Julia Gillard’s request in February 2012 to enter federal parliament and become foreign minister as a replacement for Kevin Rudd, who moved to the backbench after his failed leadership challenge. Carr repeatedly said he would serve another full term after the 2013 election.
But, announcing his resignation on Wednesday, he said: “If the government had been re-elected I would have served at least three [years].” He said his thinking about his future in the event of a Labor loss had “ebbed and flowed”. Many inside the Labor party were in no doubt he intended to resign if Labor lost.
Asked why he had been so insistent that he would stay on, Carr said: “[Former chairman of the US federal reserve] Alan Greenspan summed it up best with ‘irrational exuberance’.”
Carr had some direct advice and candid observations about his return to politics during the tumultuous final years of the Gillard and Rudd governments and the future of the Labor party, including:
• That Labor should bide its time before locking in a strategy on climate policy which was its “biggest policy challenge”, because public opinion about climate change could easily shift during periods of extreme weather and because of the unpredictability of the crossbench of the Senate after next July. He said he was “happy with” the direction indicated by new leader Bill Shorten on the issue.
• That it should be more canny in strategising. “I was struck by the lack of canniness, caution, cunning,” Carr said of Labor’s period in power since 2007. He said, for example, Labor would have been more cautious and canny to have adopted a federal version of NSW’s more limited emissions trading scheme when it came to power in 2007 rather than to attempt an economy-wide scheme.
• That it should stick with the tough “Papua New Guinea solution” on asylum policy introduced after Rudd returned as prime minister and should not have dismantled the Howard government laws so readily when it first came to power. “My strongest, strongest advice … is the Labor party should stick with the PNG solution. The Australian people will never accept a situation where 20% of the total migrant intake is brought to Australia by people smugglers … it could in theory get even higher and the Australian people won’t buy that … Labor cannot be wrong footed on this.”
Carr said he knew “the government had lost its way” when a cabinet meeting called in February this year to consider coal seam gas policy was presented with sweeping media law reforms.
“That was really tearing up the [former NSW premier] Neville Wran playbook of how to get re-elected … starting a fight with the media in the six months leading up to an election,” he said.
Despite having re-entered politics at the request of Gillard, Carr eventually voted for Rudd’s reinstatement as prime minister, saying he was “thinking about the long-term viability” of the party in the face of dire opinion polling.
Carr said he would not become a commentator on the ALP and intended to “reinvent himself” as an Asian policy specialist, accepting two part-time teaching positions, one at the University of New South Wales and one at the University of Sydney.
