Finding David Feeney

I have a rule when it comes to recently fallen politicians. Don’t stick the slipper in after they’ve left the arena. It’s unseemly and a touch callous.

I figure once they’ve moved, often ignominiously, out of the line of fire, they become non-combatants.

Truth be told, it’s more of a guideline. Happily, readers, in the case of the existentially forgetful and terminally hapless David Feeney, I am prepared to make an exception.

David Feeney resigned as the member for Batman yesterday. Sadly, he misplaced his letter of resignation. He did show the media a bus ticket he has had in his wallet since 1993. He’s going home now. Wherever that is.

Some of Feeney’s colleagues offered trite condolences and tepid expressions of support yesterday but it was impossible not to notice the gritted teeth. In Adelaide yesterday, deputy leader, Tanya Plibersek, said Feeney had made a “fine contribution” to the party but when asked if he was resigning, replied, “I’ll let David speak for himself.”

Praise any fainter than that would be in an induced coma.

In 1983 Batman was the safest Labor seat in the country, safer even than Bob Hawke’s seat of Wills just across St George’s Road. Batman has been in Labor hands since 1934, save a brief period when former Labor member for Batman, Sam Benson, was expelled from the party over his continued support for the Vietnam War. Benson won the seat as an independent in 1966 only to lose it narrowly to the colourful former Collingwood mayor, Horrie Garrick in 1969. Horrie, dragged the seat back to the safest end of the Labor pendulum until he got rolled in a preselection barney and was replaced by Brian Howe in 1977.

Now it will go to the Greens in a by-election which could be held as early as March 10. The only thing that got Feeney over the line in 2016 was Liberal preferences. The Libs will almost certainly run dead in the by-election and that will be that for Labor’s long and occasionally illustrious history in Batman.

As we’ve seen in the seat of Melbourne, when Labor loses to the Greens in an inner-city electorate, those seats don’t come back.

Brian Howe was the last genuine local to represent Labor in Batman.

He was a thoroughly decent man who became deputy Prime Minister in the Hawke-Keating governments. While he was Minister for Housing, he spent three months living in public housing to see for himself what the problems were and how they could be fixed. I’d say imagine that from a politician today but we all know it is unimaginable.

Say what you like about Howe’s successor, Martin Ferguson and he has many critics within the Labor Party, indeed to the point where the WA state branch moved to expel him four years ago. In my experience, the vowelless Mar’n was always accessible. When he was a shadow minister I would call him for a quote and a yarn and if you rang early enough, Mar’n would pick up the phone himself. No protective press secretaries or chiefs of staff acting as political bollards.

But the fact remains he was parachuted into the seat in a factional deal that rolled the locals. He wasn’t even a Melbourne bloke. These things matter. A political party can’t keep doing this without losing support from the grassroots and the punters.

When Feeney was elbowed in, in another slippery multi-factional deal that saw him go from the Senate to the Reps — from the vegetables to the animals — the local branches had been treated as door mats again. It was the beginning of the end.

I’ll call it now. Labor is gone in Batman. Ged Kearney might have stood a chance a decade ago but not now. The seat, once the jewel in the Labor crown, is never coming back.

Feeney has been the butt of many jokes and God knows, I’ve written plenty myself. In another time and under different circumstances he would have been a Labor hero. A campaign director with three state election wins under his belt — two in South Australia and one in Victoria where the Bracks government won by a record margin. A big parliamentary career beckoned.

Instead he leaves politics as a laughing stock with the once safest seat in the country about to slip through Labor’s hands.

Feeney is fated to walk the Earth, knocking on doors offering a polite if by now unnecessary political spiel to the punters, “Bill Shorten and the Labor team have some great policies. I’d like a moment of your time to talk about them. Also, is this my house?”

This article was first published in The Australian on 2 February, 2018.