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Bryan Dawe speaks to a senior figure from the Australian Labor Party

DAWE: Thanks for joining me.

CLARKE: Good to be here, Bryan. Comrade. Great conference. Great, great conference.

DAWE: You’re pleased with it.

CLARKE: Enormously. Smoothest we’ve run in decades.

DAWE: It ran smoothly because nobody was allowed to speak.

CLARKE: Well, that’s one interpretation.

DAWE: Is there another one?

CLARKE: Yes. Everyone was allowed to speak. Nobody needed to.

DAWE: Why didn’t they need to?

CLARKE: Because we were all in agreement, Bryan.

DAWE: How do you know you were all in agreement?

CLARKE: Because nobody spoke.

DAWE: That’s the evidence?

CLARKE: Qui tacet consentire videtur, Bryan. He who is silent is taken to consent. Even the ancient Romans knew it. Very clean. There’s no ambiguity in silence.

DAWE: Three days. One open debate.

CLARKE: One robust, healthy debate, yes.

DAWE: On extending voluntary assisted dying to telehealth.

CLARKE: Very important reform.

DAWE: Of all the things a Labor conference could argue about — AUKUS, Palestine, a gas tax — the one subject you opened the floor to was dying.

CLARKE: We like to lead with our strengths, Bryan.

DAWE: There was a motion on AUKUS.

CLARKE: Was there?

DAWE: Labor Against War. Five hundred members. Shut down before it reached the floor.

CLARKE: It didn’t reach the floor, so I couldn’t tell you what was in it.

DAWE: You shut it down to avoid knowing what was in it.

CLARKE: I shut it down because I respect the process, Bryan. And the process is that some things don’t reach the floor.

DAWE: Who decides what reaches the floor?

CLARKE: The floor decides.

DAWE: The floor never saw it.

CLARKE: And it decided not to. Instantly. That’s a very efficient floor.

DAWE: Ed Husic had a motion on Palestine.

CLARKE: Ed’s a passionate fella.

DAWE: He was going to speak. Then the union that promised to second him pulled out.

CLARKE: People change their minds, Bryan.

DAWE: Under pressure from factional heavyweights.

CLARKE: People change their minds quickly, sometimes. There’s nothing sinister in a fast decision.

DAWE: Husic says he was attacked by faceless men.

CLARKE: I don’t know who he means.

DAWE: You wouldn’t.

CLARKE: No. That’s rather the point of them.

DAWE: So the whole thing was choreographed.

CLARKE: It was unified, Bryan. Unity is a great asset. Have you seen the Liberals? Have you seen One Nation? Chaos. Faces everywhere. You can’t move for faces.

DAWE: Three hundred delegates and not one dissenting vote.

CLARKE: Well, they were very well looked after, Bryan. You don’t vote against a room that’s just given you the alfalfa pasta and a flight of boutique reds.

DAWE: That’s not unity. That’s the catering.

CLARKE: Unity, catering — I’m not sure I see the daylight, Bryan. There were artisanal chaff-bags. Locally sourced. You don’t get that at a Liberal do.

DAWE: The press compared your conference to North Korea.

CLARKE: I thought that was very unfair to us.

DAWE: Unfair to you.

CLARKE: Kim gets five thousand delegates and a standing ovation that runs for eleven minutes. We wrapped in three days. We’re far more efficient. If anything, Bryan, he should be studying us.

DAWE: The Prime Minister stood up at this conference and attacked One Nation for — his words — “raging against a system that you’re a part of.”

CLARKE: And he’s absolutely right. You can’t rage against a system from the inside. It’s not credible.

DAWE: He runs the most tightly controlled conference in the party’s history and lectures other people about rigged systems.

CLARKE: He’s earned the authority to do that, Bryan. You don’t get to warn people about a stitch-up unless you know exactly how one’s done.

DAWE: Doug Cameron says you’ll pay a price for burying debate. That you’ve hollowed the party out. Thirty per cent of the country still with you and falling.

CLARKE: Doug’s from the old school.

DAWE: The school where the party stood for things.

CLARKE: The school where it took three days to work out what we now agree on before morning tea. He calls that conviction. I call it a scheduling problem.

DAWE: Doesn’t it frighten you? A party built on argument, that’s forgotten how to argue. What’s left when the members walk out?

CLARKE: They won’t all walk out, Bryan.

DAWE: How do you know?

CLARKE: Because one of them never does.

DAWE: One of them.

CLARKE: There’s always one, Bryan. Back of the room. Forty years, never spoken. His hand goes up, and the room reads the hand. You don’t need the other three hundred to say anything. You’ve got the hand.

DAWE: And who is he?

CLARKE: I couldn’t tell you.

DAWE: You don’t know?

CLARKE: I know exactly who he is. I couldn’t tell you. That’s a different thing entirely.

DAWE: And if he stopped coming?

CLARKE: Then we’d have to have a debate. And nobody wants that.

DAWE: Senior Labor figure, thank you.

CLARKE: A pleasure, Bryan. Great conference. We’ll do it all again in three years — Reiki massage on Medicare’s a dead cert to get a run in 2029.

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A tribute, offered in the spirit of the late John Clarke and Bryan Dawe, whose weekly interviews taught a generation of Australians that the surest way to expose a euphemism is to take it perfectly seriously. Ben Trovato* presides. Nothing here was said; all of it is what would have been said, given half a chance and no shame. The interviewee is a fiction. The conference was real.

* From the Italian se non è vero, è ben trovato — “if it isn’t true, it deserves to be.”