Last night John Faulkner delivered the inaugural The Light on the Hill Society address at the Revesby Workers' Club.  You can read a precis here at The Guardian or the entire speech here.     This paragraph sets the tone:

Widespread contempt for the practice of politics is not because Australians have lost faith in what politics really is. It is because too many Australians have come to see our parliaments, our governments, our political parties, and our politicians, as practising not politics but its opposite: a values-free competition for office and the spoils it can deliver.

Faulkner is right but his is a lonely voice on the Labor side of politics.   Labor's rot was evident in Richardson's "Whatever It Takes" approach, but at least Richardson had men like Mick Young, Tom Uren and others with real character in the old Labor mould to curb the excesses.     Now Labor is chockablock with flim-flam spin merchants who've had no grounding in the days when men of substance guided Labor. The bulk of today's Labor crop are people for whom character and the truth simply don't count.

Labor has institutionalised a trenchant, contemptuous disregard for the truth.  Truth is an irrelevance, helpful if the facts aid your cause but of such low intrinsic value as to be hardly worth noticing.  Regardless of the truth, what matters to contemporary Labor is spin-doctoring and talking points.   It's not what you've done, it's what can be proven and how effective you can make the "fix".   Over time people who participate in that daily charade lose their character and become soulless, blank canvases capable of saying anything with conviction.   Like Labor.

Lisa Zanatta was a tragic example of The Labor Way at the Royal Commission last Friday.   Mates, favours, the cause - she was doing no different from the example set by Ms Gillard and others in the Parliament.   Lying effortlessly and in the apparent belief that some higher purpose justified it all.

When Craig Thomson told me he'd used union funds to pay for prostitutes I wrote to Julia Gillard to ask if she supported that standard of behaviour.  Gillard's spin-doctor wrote back quoting Ms Gillard - Craig Thomson had her full support and was doing a great job.   Ms Gillard now says she had no choice because of the hung parliament - she had to support Thomson or she'd potentially lose power.

And that's the point.  Gillard's priorities were askew.   Her poor character simply could not see that some things are more important than political power.  

Here are the first few pages of John Faulkner's speech.