Farewell Faulkner: long may you live to annoy

Farewell Faulkner: long may you live to annoy

By ABC's

Annabel Crabb

Posted
earlier today at 7:43amFri 12 Dec 2014, 7:43am

Photo:
Among colleagues, Senator Faulkner was viewed with admiration and trepidation. (Alan Porritt: AAP)

It's a rare political obituary in which
the words "honour", "integrity" and "service" make such regular
appearances. Annabel Crabb pays tribute to retiring senator John
Faulkner.

For Labor leaders over the years, Senator John Faulkner has been a mixed blessing.

On
one hand, he is a tremendous asset: principled, punctilious,
hard-working and circumspect, with the memory of an elephant, and a
clean-living elephant at that.

On the other, he is a frank and unswerving harbinger of doom.

If
- as a Labor leader - you peep out into the office waiting area and
spot John Faulkner looming there in the company of your leadership
rival, it's roughly 98 per cent certain you're about to be whacked.

At
the messiest existential junctures of a Labor leader's life (their
violent births, ignominious deaths, and the grinding election campaigns
that so often serve to contract the period of time elapsing between the
two first-mentioned events) solemn-faced Faulkner has a priestly
ubiquity.

He is not the author of political violence; rather, its
umpire. The guy that everyone wants in the room, for insurance. And yet,
his sudden appearance has something of the maritime albatross about it.

This
is also true for public servants, who at Senate estimates sessions have
faced thousands of hours of patient Faulkner invigilation, his long and
fluent periods of courtesy terrifyingly punctuated by the odd burst of
cogent annoyance.

Senator Faulkner gets the hard jobs. The
intricate unravelling of portfolio expenditure, the telling of difficult
truths to difficult people, the tidying-up of epic political messes.

He
was the party's messenger to Simon Crean, when Crean's leadership was
at an end. The night-watchman over its trickier recruits; he accompanied
Mark Latham on the 2004 campaign, and looked after Cheryl Kernot in
2001. (Later, after the shedding of many tears, he was the only member
of Labor's leadership to show up to the launch of Kernot's infamous
biography).

It is one thing to be the person to whom hard jobs are
assigned. It is entirely another to keep doing them well after one
might quite reasonably have begged off.

When Labor took office in
2007, John Faulkner was one of only two members of the Rudd frontbench
who had ever been a minister before.

As cabinet secretary, he
dealt uncomplainingly with increasing behind-the-scenes disarray in the
Rudd office, as well as sundry public humiliations like being called
"Faulks" by the nickname-mad prime minister.

As defence minister after the resignation of predecessor Joel Fitzgibbon, he brought calm authority to an always-difficult job.

It
was a job he left after Julia Gillard challenged successfully for the
Labor leadership, an act of political violence with which Faulkner
seemed unable to reconcile himself even over time, despite having - as
usual - been in the room at the relevant moment.

One would think
that a man whose career has been so steeped in difficulty might develop a
rather grim view of life, and certainly there is much in the Faulkner
countenance that would tend to confirm that suspicion.

But one of
his subtle legacies is his rich, dark sense of humour, much apparent in
this reminiscence about the 1993 election, which he fought as Paul
Keating's environment minister.

The anecdote, about Labor's
infamous candidate Peter Knott, was told by Faulkner at former Labor
national secretary Tim Gartrell's farewell dinner, and reported by Alan
Ramsey:

I am still recovering from a grand
announcement I made in Kiama to save a threatened species of frog, which
had the misfortune of living in Gilmore in an open drain, two metres
wide and two metres deep, that ran through a public park. I made the
announcement and turned to Peter for a comment. But he'd gone. He'd
pissed off, across the park, to where he yelled back to the cameras,
'I've found one!' It seemed unlikely but Peter yelled, 'There it is!'
And as the TV cameras swung round for his David Attenborough moment,
Peter fell arse-over-head into the drain.

Among
colleagues, Senator Faulkner was viewed with admiration, trepidation,
fondness and a readily-discernible streak of the annoyance people of
rigid principle tend to inflame in others.

It's a rare political obituary in which the words "honour", "integrity" and "service" make such regular appearances.

Thank you, Senator. Long may you live to annoy.

Annabel Crabb is the ABC's chief online political writer. She tweets at @annabelcrabb. View her full profile here.

Topics:
federal-parliament

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