Injecting some fire . . . Bob Hawke at the launch. Photo: Andrew Meares
Here is how they think these days in the Labor Party: cram a few hundred party faithful into a low, dark room at the Brisbane Convention Centre, hammer them with everything they'd heard before, and somehow the punters at home will see on their television screens a party keen to govern.
"Friends," says Julia Gillard over and over again to the meagre audience before her. "Friends, we are the party of Medicare . . .'' Somewhere in the past few days, the Prime Minister has begun to channel the Baptist preachers of her youth. She is now the great believer, not speaking from calculation but the heart: "All my life I have believed in the power of hard work . . .''
Work was the word of the day. She had nothing to say about foreign policy. The words "global warming" did not pass her lips. Once she had paid due respect to the traditional owners of the slab of South Brisbane on which we met, Aborigines weren't mentioned again. It was all nuts and bolts, bread and butter, deliberately mundane.
There was no red carpet. Bob and Blanche simply appeared in the room. Kevin Rudd was given a standing ovation as John Faulkner steered him to his seat. Anna Bligh took the stage to say "the Queensland sun shines down on us today", a claim impossible to verify in the underground gloom so carefully chosen by party tacticians.
Three years ago, this was the city of victory. That feeling has seeped away. Once-cheerful kids in Kevin 07 T-shirts have grown older and wiser. The state is deserting the party. But unchanged from those happier times is the rock music pumped into these events. It was always low-key: all repetition, all rhythm, no tune.
Thank God for Bob Hawke. He might have to put his feet up for a week after this performance, but to see him raging at the microphone again was absolutely refreshing. Did no one tell him that triumph and celebration were off the agenda? He accused the other side of braying and he should know: at the age of 80 he has the last street-corner voice in Australian politics.
Old Labor prime ministers live so long they put Japanese pensioners to shame. Gough is too frail to fly north. We're told Paul Keating had a previous engagement that kept him from the launch. So the two old leaders who turned out for Gillard's show were the betrayed, still honouring the party that clawed them down. That's loyalty.
Citing Ben Chifley's Light on the Hill only to modestly abandon the comparison, Gillard took a bow, kissed Tim Mathieson - not an Al and Tipper moment: she took a couple of goes to land one properly - then in the one shining moment of the occasion, gave her parents a long, long embrace. Next she awkwardly kissed the Treasurer's neck, the lights died and that was that.
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