Don Farrell: The Godfather of Business as Usual

This is not the profile of a Labor minister. This is a portrait of embedded capitalism in clerical collar.

Jason Koutsoukis’ latest federal government puff piece in The Saturday Paper, “Meet the man who controls Canberra” (paywalled) puts such a sheen on Don Farrell and Labor, that he almost bowls you over with his audacity. Perhaps that’s his aim. Don’s party is a well-oiled machine, while Don, Labor’s plaster saint, and Superman is the craft beer uncle at the BBQ who greets every branch secretary by first name. And he runs Canberra.

What Koutsoukis leaves out: Trade Minister Farrell isn’t some benign technocrat. He’s the living fossil record of the Labor Right, the personification of the cosy accord that’s sold out the party’s working-class body and soul for forty years. The hyper-networked preselection broker. The union numbers man who can smile benignly while knee-capping a mate. Thanks, Jason. Dapper Don is a living reminder that the shills of capital don’t storm the workers’ party; they get themselves elected to head it. It’s a capital capture.

And, in a party that pretends faction is dead, Don’s proof it’s still the entire game.

The Gallery of Collaborators

Something’s up in Canberra. Turd-polish is everywhere at the moment. One by one, they line up for their hagiographies. The ruthless apparatchiks who run Mr Albanese and his very right wing crew are spun as top operators, sublime strategists, dignified diplomats. Seriously? We’re being buttered up. It’s a series of puff pieces that would enrage any true believer.

The light on the hill is now the light on the shill.

Behold Father Don Farrell, the latest plaster saint in a gangers’ gallery of collaborators. The lad who’s spent his life ensuring rosy-cheeked lads and lasses; vulnerable, young and callow workers get sold down the river into wage slavery and casual precarity while being told it’s all for their own good.

Look who loves him.

Mining capital. Why wouldn’t they? Ker-ching! Don’s national tout for critical minerals now. He rises. Like a trout taking a fly. Lithium today. Rare earths tomorrow. Next week the deep-sea mining permits. He’s always there. The safe pair of hands. No climate trigger. No rough justice. No brave Norway style capture of resource rents. Just the same old quarry economics got up as trade diplomacy. Billionaires who’ve never been down a shaft pocket fat profits while communities get holes in the ground and workers get wage theft.

The supermarkets love Don. Why wouldn’t they? His power base is the SDA. The “Shoppies”, whose early enterprise agreements with Coles and Woolworths became the template for underpayment. While the duopoly carved up the market and banked record profits, the SDA ensured their workforce stayed cheap, lean and compliant, ever-hungry for scraps. This isn’t an accident. It is the design’s key feature.

And don’t forget the culture wars. The SDA was Labor’s conservative citadel for decades. Long after Keating and Hawke discovered economic liberalism, the Shoppies’ hierarchy kept policing social questions. IVF. Abortion. Marriage equality. The SDA actively opposed these reforms, positioning themselves against social progress while claiming to speak for workers. This isn’t folklore. It’s Australian political history. The DLP in drag. Same social conservatism wrapped in union packaging. Same certainty that the party exists to “manage” workers’ expectations, not liberate them.

The same machine decides who’s Attorney General and who’s not. Who runs environment. Mark Dreyfus gets shafted. Murray Watt gets installed. Great. Business doesn’t need environment laws with teeth. All done under Labor’s usual pretence: no factions, no blocs, no invisible hand.

Don’t be fooled. Farrell is the hand.

The Scribes Always Find Their Prince

Say what you like about power in Canberra: it can always get a good press. Journalists who mistake access for insight. Who confuse proximity to power with understanding it. Who write profiles that read like audition tapes for future employment.

The Saturday Paper piece is the masterclass. Every hard fact about Farrell’s role in Labor’s rightward drift gets a quick look in, then it is immediately soft-focused with approving quotes from insiders. Farrell’s factional dominance becomes “stability and discipline.” His patronage network becomes “talent spotting.” His role in the Rudd coup, when a prime minister who threatened mining profits got removed, becomes evidence of his “survival skills.”

This is journalism as stenography. Or court portraiture, airbrushing warts; adding the flattering glow.

Journalists should be prepared to ask the hard questions. Why are workers in Farrell’s old union still among the lowest paid in the country? Why does Labor’s trade policy never include labour rights or environmental conditionality? Why does a party founded to represent workers take its strategic direction from a man whose unionism was always about managing workers, not empowering them? What happened to all those Labor members who got pushed aside when “the Machine” consolidated its 80 per cent control?

But those questions don’t get you invited back to Aussies Cafe. They don’t get you warm quotes from former chiefs of staff. They don’t get you the nod when you need a background briefing.

So, instead, we get hagiography posing as analysis. The authorised biography of power presented as investigation. A profile that describes systematic factional control, patronage politics, and clapped-out out party democracy while presenting it all as political skill rather than catastrophic and shameful, democratic failure.

Capitalism With a Union Letterhead

Farrell is capitalism with a union letterhead in a nice cream wove stationery set. The discreet concierge at the lobby bar. The most perfectly Australian political figure: a man who’s lived inside the nexus between capital and Labor so long he cannot see the seams anymore.

Or perhaps he sees them perfectly. Knows his job is keeping them invisible to everyone else.

This is not about character. I’m sure Don Farrell’s charming. Remembers birthdays. Loves a pinot gris and a punt. All useful skills for someone whose job is managing competing interests without ever threatening the fundamentals.

Equality? Fraternity? Reform? Go bite your bum. In an age of ecological unravelling, wage stagnation, obscene wealth concentration, the Albanese government has placed a living monument of business as usual at the heart of trade policy. It has placed supermarket friendly union tradition inside the final decision making circle. And asked everyone to pretend this is modern social democracy.

This is not a break from the Hawke Keating settlement. It’s the endpoint. Labor has moved from moderating capitalism to administering capitalism on behalf of a power elite. Once Labor occasionally made business uncomfortable. Now it makes business comfy while workers get screwed.

Farrell is the perfect emblem. He rose through a union that collaborated with employers rather than challenging them. Built a factional machine that delivered stability by excluding alternatives. Helped remove Rudd, a prime minister who threatened mining profits. Now sells Australia’s resources abroad while ensuring the profits flow upward and the environmental costs get externalised. Controls the appointments. Determines which voices get heard in ministerial suites and which don’t. When he appointed Mark Dreyfus Attorney General, then shifted to Murray Watt for Environment, he was sending a message: this government will not discomfort business.

All with such avuncular charm that journos write admiring profiles about his diplomatic skills.

The Long Goodbye

This is how modern Labor works. Not through open betrayal but stealthy consolidation. Not dramatic breaks with workers but the slow accumulation of small accommodations with capital. Not through ideology but through the ideology of no ideology. The pretence that what we have is simply competent management rather than political choices that consistently favour wealth over labour.

The workers stacking shelves don’t have Farrell’s number. The miners going underground don’t get coffee with him at Aussies Cafe. Youngsters and now, pensioners working several casual jobs to pay rent don’t owe their careers to his talent spotting. They’re not in the picture anymore.

They’re the wallpaper now. Votes to be managed. Base to be taken for granted while Labor builds its future on professionals, the comfortable and the upwardly mobile.

When they drift to the Coalition or One Nation or angry disengagement, Labor doesn’t ask what went wrong. Doesn’t wonder whether forty years of putting capital before labour might have consequences. Just doubles down on the metropolitan seats where people still believe in the system because the system still works for them.

Farrell didn’t create this. But he perfected it. Assiduously. As if his life depended on it. It does.

Don’s the living embodiment of Labor’s long goodbye to the working class. The smooth operator ensuring the transition is so gradual that nobody quite notices when the party of Curtin becomes the party of continuity. When the light on the hill gets replaced by the light on the till.

The Saturday Paper wants you to see a skilled diplomat and patient strategist. Look again. Open your eyes. Behold. The gatekeeper who decides which Labor figures rise and which fall. Who controls the appointments that shape policy. Who ensures every minister knows where the real power lies. Who greases the Machine; keeping it all running smoothly, while pretending the Machine doesn’t exist.

This is not leadership. It’s management. Management of expectations, of careers, of the space for transformation. And it works a treat. Labor can govern indefinitely under this model, so long as it never does anything that makes mining magnates nervous or supermarket chains uncomfortable.

The workers can go whistle. The Machine must roll on.

And there will always be journalists ready to write admiring profiles of the men who keep it running. One glowing portrait after another. The toe cutters, head-kickers and fixers all glossed as statesmen. The numbers men as strategists. The collaborators and traitors as the adults in the room.

This is what Labor has become. A party so in love with its own machinery that it’s forgotten what the machinery was supposed to be for. So captured by capital that it can’t remember what it once promised. So committed to managing the system that transformation has become unthinkable.

Farrell is the perfect symbol of that betrayal. Patient, charming, ruthlessly effective at ensuring nothing really ever changes. The union man who made sure the union stayed in its place. The factional boss who turned solidarity into a patronage network. The Special Minister of State who pulls the levers while pretending the levers don’t exist.

And now we’re supposed to applaud his diplomatic skills. His talent for spotting future premiers among the trolley boys. His ability to sit down with anyone over a Cab Sav or a merlot or two and find fraternity.

But there’s no common ground between workers and those who exploit them. When the SDA negotiated enterprise agreements that undercut industry standards, when they positioned themselves against workers fighting for better wages, they chose a side. When Farrell orchestrated the removal of a prime minister for threatening mining profits, he chose a side. When he now controls trade policy to ensure those profits keep flowing overseas while workers stay underpaid, he’s still choosing the same side.

There is no middle path between democracy and oligarchy. No compromise between transformation and business as usual.

Farrell knows this. He’s spent his entire career on the wrong side of that divide, ensuring that Labor stays there too. Spruiking for billionaires. The light is on the shill. And the darkness that follows in its wake.

This article was originally published on URBAN WRONSKI WRITES 

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