RKO General
Banned
How can we get this great Australian and great American to their countries highest office?
AH challenge: PM Kim Beazley Snr and POTUS Al Gore Snr
- Thread starter RKO General
- Start date
Wikipedia says Beazley Snr was considered for party leadership in the 1960s but rejected for being too right-wing - so Whitlam became leader instead. If that helps.
After 1955 just about every series leadership contender in Caucas was considered too Rightwing, but yes, Beazley did come in for special attention from the newly-dominant Leftwing push because of his erstwhile Grouper friends.
If the party hadn't split under Evatt then Beazley would have been a viable leadership candidate, albeit a pretty junior one (there were a couple of ex-ministers ahead of him.)
Bumped because of this newspaper article from the other day:
"'Principle not Power'
Mike Steketee, National affairs editor | January 01, 2009
Article from: The Australian
MANY voters may baulk at calling politics a profession, unless it is equated with the world's oldest one. However, for some it is not only a serious career choice but a noble calling. Kim Beazley Sr spent 32 years in federal parliament but just seven of them in government, which says something about endurance, if nothing else.
His first four years were as a backbencher in the Chifley government, followed by 23 years in Opposition and three years as education minister in the Whitlam government, before returning briefly to Opposition.
He was inspired in his youth by people such as William Wilberforce, whom many saw as a future British prime minister until he took up the highly unpopular cause of abolishing slavery, and George Grey, who in senior government positions in Western Australia, South Australia and New Zealand treated indigenous people with a dignity rare for the time.
As a country school teacher, Beazley saw a huge gulf between state and private education and wanted to do something about it.
"Political action was the obvious course," he writes in his memoir, Father of the House, published this month a little more than a year after his death. So he joined the Labor Party and started agitating for more funds for government education.
To his surprise, he was approached to run for preselection to succeed John Curtin in the seat of Fremantle in 1945 and, to his even greater surprise, won, becoming, at 28, the youngest member of parliament.
His career became a remarkable story of foresight, persistence and adherence to principle. It also is a reminder of recurring themes in politics. It took Beazley almost three decades to get the opportunity to implement large spending increases for education and to base them on the needs of the schools.
The Rudd Government is tackling under-investment in education once again and, if it wins re-election, will revise the formula for school funding inherited from the Howard government to return it to a truer needs basis.
Beazley writes that "by the time I was a member of parliament, I was convinced that the Labor Party would never reform education until we broke down the barrier which prevented government money going to Catholic schools". State aid for private schools became an enduring achievement but only after he, together with Gough Whitlam, fought a pitched battle that triggered bitter sectarian divisions in the Labor Party.
In 1949, Beazley wrote to Chifley arguing for a referendum to remove discrimination against Aborigines in the Constitution. The Holt government held it 28 years later and it was carried by the largest majority ever seen for a constitutional change.
In 1952, he advocated reconciliation between white and black Australians, the first time the issue had been raised in parliament. Thirty-nine years later it became a bipartisan commitment, though it remains a work in progress.
"In Australia, our ways have mostly produced disaster for the Aboriginal people," Beazley writes. "I suspect that only when their right to be distinctive is accepted will policy become creative." In 1951, he advocated successfully for support for Aboriginal land rights to be included in the Labor Party platform. That was a quarter of a century before the Whitlam government introduced legislation for Aboriginal title to land in the Northern Territory.
In 1963, Beazley argued that if Aborigines were members of the Australian commonwealth, "they cannot be dispossessed of land that they occupy without consent or consultation or compensation, or without alternatives being offered to them".
That was 29 years before the Mabo judgment.
On international affairs, Beazley said in 1956 that Australia's stability would be determined by the extent to which we earned the respect of Asia: not a popular view following Japan's role in World War II and the perceived menace of communist China.
Beazley's keen intellect was accompanied by compelling oratory. His handicaps, politically speaking, were religion and conscience.
He was heavily involved with Moral Rearmament, a Christian movement that sought to apply religious principles to public issues. It was an affiliation that many Labor colleagues regarded with suspicion.
The Australian tradition is to keep religion and politics apart but for Beazley they were inseparable. "If you do not accept the importance of conscience, you accept only the importance of power," he once said.
He was opposed to abortion and to the relaxation of divorce laws under the Whitlam government.
What particularly attracted Beazley to Curtin was "the graciousness of his leadership ... However viciously he was attacked, he never struck back."
In Opposition, Beazley learned to give the government credit where it was due and to acknowledge his own party's faults, an approach that helped "move debate on to a genuine consideration of the problems ... For me, honesty meant a decision that I would not play the political game of making cases, suppressing everything inconvenient to my position and playing up everything convenient. This game has many dangers, not least that I found I was convincing myself on the strength of arguments I didn't really believe."
It also is like asking politicians not to engage in politics, meaning it did not do him much good in terms of career advancement. But then his main interest was in ideas.
His son, the better known Kim, relates a story his father told him but did not include in the book. When Whitlam resigned from the Labor leadership in 1968 and then re-contested it to face down a challenge to his authority from the party machine, left-winger Jim Cairns told Beazley he intended contesting the position but would withdraw if Beazley ran. "I probably don't have the numbers but you would have," he said.
Beazley declined the offer, saying that "whatever I might think of Gough, his stance at the moment is correct and therefore I will be voting for him". Added Beazley Jr: "That really was the only time he could have become leader."
The legacy of Beazley Sr was marred by the problems of the Whitlam government, including a too rapid increase in education spending that contributed to its economic mismanagement. He subsequently admitted that he was wrong to think that spending money could solve most problems in education.
But his story overall is one that restores faith in politics."
The anecdote about the '68 crash-through-or-crash partyroom ballot is quite surprising--it goes against what we popularly know about the factional and ideological battles of the era. However, that Cairns thought of a possible 'gentlemen's agreement' with Beazley is not so crazy. Both of them were quite civilised that way, they really were paragons of the nobility of the democratic process in an era when it was the likes of Clyde Cameron, Lionel Murphy and The Great Man who were the main exponents of fuck you politics in the caucas.*
I still think Beazley's best chance of ever becoming leader would have come if the ALP hadn't split in 1955--yet, ironically**, Beazley himself had played a small but pivotal role in the Split happening when he mysteriously went AWOL from his job on the party's federal executive the previous year, right at the time of Evatt launching his devastating kulturkampf in the spring of '54.
*Eddie Ward was five years dead, and Paul Keating had yet to arrive in Canberra.
**Or perhaps not ironically. Just because he was a decent pol doesn't mean Kim Sr didn't know when to keep his head down when necessary.
"'Principle not Power'
Mike Steketee, National affairs editor | January 01, 2009
Article from: The Australian
MANY voters may baulk at calling politics a profession, unless it is equated with the world's oldest one. However, for some it is not only a serious career choice but a noble calling. Kim Beazley Sr spent 32 years in federal parliament but just seven of them in government, which says something about endurance, if nothing else.
His first four years were as a backbencher in the Chifley government, followed by 23 years in Opposition and three years as education minister in the Whitlam government, before returning briefly to Opposition.
He was inspired in his youth by people such as William Wilberforce, whom many saw as a future British prime minister until he took up the highly unpopular cause of abolishing slavery, and George Grey, who in senior government positions in Western Australia, South Australia and New Zealand treated indigenous people with a dignity rare for the time.
As a country school teacher, Beazley saw a huge gulf between state and private education and wanted to do something about it.
"Political action was the obvious course," he writes in his memoir, Father of the House, published this month a little more than a year after his death. So he joined the Labor Party and started agitating for more funds for government education.
To his surprise, he was approached to run for preselection to succeed John Curtin in the seat of Fremantle in 1945 and, to his even greater surprise, won, becoming, at 28, the youngest member of parliament.
His career became a remarkable story of foresight, persistence and adherence to principle. It also is a reminder of recurring themes in politics. It took Beazley almost three decades to get the opportunity to implement large spending increases for education and to base them on the needs of the schools.
The Rudd Government is tackling under-investment in education once again and, if it wins re-election, will revise the formula for school funding inherited from the Howard government to return it to a truer needs basis.
Beazley writes that "by the time I was a member of parliament, I was convinced that the Labor Party would never reform education until we broke down the barrier which prevented government money going to Catholic schools". State aid for private schools became an enduring achievement but only after he, together with Gough Whitlam, fought a pitched battle that triggered bitter sectarian divisions in the Labor Party.
In 1949, Beazley wrote to Chifley arguing for a referendum to remove discrimination against Aborigines in the Constitution. The Holt government held it 28 years later and it was carried by the largest majority ever seen for a constitutional change.
In 1952, he advocated reconciliation between white and black Australians, the first time the issue had been raised in parliament. Thirty-nine years later it became a bipartisan commitment, though it remains a work in progress.
"In Australia, our ways have mostly produced disaster for the Aboriginal people," Beazley writes. "I suspect that only when their right to be distinctive is accepted will policy become creative." In 1951, he advocated successfully for support for Aboriginal land rights to be included in the Labor Party platform. That was a quarter of a century before the Whitlam government introduced legislation for Aboriginal title to land in the Northern Territory.
In 1963, Beazley argued that if Aborigines were members of the Australian commonwealth, "they cannot be dispossessed of land that they occupy without consent or consultation or compensation, or without alternatives being offered to them".
That was 29 years before the Mabo judgment.
On international affairs, Beazley said in 1956 that Australia's stability would be determined by the extent to which we earned the respect of Asia: not a popular view following Japan's role in World War II and the perceived menace of communist China.
Beazley's keen intellect was accompanied by compelling oratory. His handicaps, politically speaking, were religion and conscience.
He was heavily involved with Moral Rearmament, a Christian movement that sought to apply religious principles to public issues. It was an affiliation that many Labor colleagues regarded with suspicion.
The Australian tradition is to keep religion and politics apart but for Beazley they were inseparable. "If you do not accept the importance of conscience, you accept only the importance of power," he once said.
He was opposed to abortion and to the relaxation of divorce laws under the Whitlam government.
What particularly attracted Beazley to Curtin was "the graciousness of his leadership ... However viciously he was attacked, he never struck back."
In Opposition, Beazley learned to give the government credit where it was due and to acknowledge his own party's faults, an approach that helped "move debate on to a genuine consideration of the problems ... For me, honesty meant a decision that I would not play the political game of making cases, suppressing everything inconvenient to my position and playing up everything convenient. This game has many dangers, not least that I found I was convincing myself on the strength of arguments I didn't really believe."
It also is like asking politicians not to engage in politics, meaning it did not do him much good in terms of career advancement. But then his main interest was in ideas.
His son, the better known Kim, relates a story his father told him but did not include in the book. When Whitlam resigned from the Labor leadership in 1968 and then re-contested it to face down a challenge to his authority from the party machine, left-winger Jim Cairns told Beazley he intended contesting the position but would withdraw if Beazley ran. "I probably don't have the numbers but you would have," he said.
Beazley declined the offer, saying that "whatever I might think of Gough, his stance at the moment is correct and therefore I will be voting for him". Added Beazley Jr: "That really was the only time he could have become leader."
The legacy of Beazley Sr was marred by the problems of the Whitlam government, including a too rapid increase in education spending that contributed to its economic mismanagement. He subsequently admitted that he was wrong to think that spending money could solve most problems in education.
But his story overall is one that restores faith in politics."
The anecdote about the '68 crash-through-or-crash partyroom ballot is quite surprising--it goes against what we popularly know about the factional and ideological battles of the era. However, that Cairns thought of a possible 'gentlemen's agreement' with Beazley is not so crazy. Both of them were quite civilised that way, they really were paragons of the nobility of the democratic process in an era when it was the likes of Clyde Cameron, Lionel Murphy and The Great Man who were the main exponents of fuck you politics in the caucas.*
I still think Beazley's best chance of ever becoming leader would have come if the ALP hadn't split in 1955--yet, ironically**, Beazley himself had played a small but pivotal role in the Split happening when he mysteriously went AWOL from his job on the party's federal executive the previous year, right at the time of Evatt launching his devastating kulturkampf in the spring of '54.
*Eddie Ward was five years dead, and Paul Keating had yet to arrive in Canberra.
**Or perhaps not ironically. Just because he was a decent pol doesn't mean Kim Sr didn't know when to keep his head down when necessary.