When duty comes before ambition

By Rodney Cavalier
July 30, 2005

The 17 years that Bob Carr has led the Labor Party in NSW end next week. Of its many remarkable moments, none is more remarkable than that his leadership happened at all.

Iron discipline was a trait from his school days, with a strategic sense to match. Yet no part of Carr's life plan included a sojourn in the NSW Parliament. Thwarted in his attempt to win a seat in the Senate in the 1970s, he entered State Parliament in 1983 - a holding operation intended to put a mortgage on his succession to the federal seat of Kingsford Smith held by the then deputy prime minister, Lionel Bowen. Carr's stated intention was to be well gone from Macquarie Street before 1990. The best laid plans and all that.

When Bob Hawke called an election early in 1987, he prevailed on Bowen to go one more term. Carr had to be magnanimous. And he was, in any case, relishing the unexpected opportunities afforded him by Neville Wran and Barrie Unsworth in the environment portfolio. What was three more years? As it turned out, everything.

With the fall of the Unsworth government in 1988, Carr was adamant he would not take a leadership position. I can hear his voice, as clear as if it was yesterday, telling me that he would be resisting all entreaties to take on the leadership, he was always intending to go federal, he had earned the succession, the certainty of two years in opposition with minimal prospects of success was a task too demanding to contemplate.

Everything had changed in the previous three years. Everything changed again in the following three days. His reluctance was genuine. Carr had to buy an argument that was nothing less than sacrificing his legitimate right to an easy passage to Canberra so as to lead the party through the trying times ahead. Carr bought the argument. Thereafter his commitment to the cause was absolute. As and from day one. For every day of 17 years he was awake at 5.45am, a discipline of body and mind that made him utterly dominant in his party and the public life of NSW.

The commitment came one day at a time. So did the commitment to Carr by those who served his wider cause. Andrew Refshauge became his deputy in the same ballot. He has remained for all of the years, a partnership unparalleled in Australian politics.

In those 17 years Carr had just four chiefs of staff; Graeme Wedderburn joined on the first day and will be there at the end. After a mistaken judgement about the leadership of the Premier's Department, he recalled Col Gellatly, who had served John Fahey so well. Carr kept Roger Wilkins as head of the Cabinet Office notwithstanding his closeness to Nick Greiner. Having served another government well was not a curse as far as Carr was concerned.

The stability at every level of the Government is one reason that these 10 years seem to have passed so quickly. It has not been a time of thrills and spills, crisis and scandal. Carr regarded politics as an honourable profession. His hero, Abraham Lincoln, was unashamedly partisan as surely as he was unashamedly American. Carr was Labor through and through - his own conception of it surely, one in which even the scarecrow notions of socialism would get no expression. Carr had learned from the living example of Wran and through his reading and conversations with Bill McKell. NSW Labor in government would be working on its re-election from the day after the previous election, its strategy built around the basic services of schools and hospitals and roads, with an emphasis in modern times on law and order and driving down state debt.

In politics gratitude is not the natural condition. Achievements are taken for granted. No one much remembers that the Government reduced class sizes in the early years of schooling. Record numbers of national parks came into existence without triggering mass resistance by loggers or farmers. The working foreshores of Sydney Harbour are returning to the people. The police force has overcome its institutionalised corruption, an achievement thought not possible before Carr (from opposition) forced a royal commission. Infrastructure spending dwarfed the other states, notwithstanding the usual conspiracy against NSW when it came to federal revenue sharing.

If Carr indulged himself at all, it was by aspiring to the sublime. He wanted every child regardless of ability to be exposed to the study of Shakespeare: this was a premier interested in the curriculum in all its detail. Rigour was his lodestar. Australian history gained express encouragement. In his farewell press conference Carr revealed his pleasure in the reconciliation with Aborigines through the apology offered by the Parliament and the more personal reconciliation with Joern Utzon, architect of the Opera House.

Carr's idea of the high life was a punishing walk along the concourses of the southern beaches. His diet has been moving ever closer to denial. Somewhere in the long days and the effortless domination of the Parliament, he has continued with his love of United States history, augmented by his new passion for the history of the Roman Empire, which itself has followed enthusiasms for classics from China and Russia. He could ring you at any hour to acquaint you with a startling chapter in a book that had aroused his passion. He was not for neglecting the health of his mind nor his body because of the demands of office.

Bob Carr only ever wanted to be the foreign minister in a Labor government. Whatever his disappointment when that ambition moved beyond his reach, something he was recognising those 17 years ago, there was not a moment when he expressed aloud his bitterness at what might have been. In every stage of his life, his commitment has been total. His most creative years may well be ahead.

Rodney Cavalier was the NSW education minister from 1984-88, in the governments of Neville Wran, Barrie Unsworth.
