Drivel Turns The Labor Light Out

SIMON Crean should read Labor history instead of trite speeches. Half a century ago, on March 2, 1951, another Labor leader, Ben Chifley, addressed his party's national conference in Canberra. Those were the days of the so-called 36 faceless men, a Labor conference of six delegates from each of the six states, all of them men, with the ultimate power to decide policy at three-day meetings behind closed doors. And in 1951, unlike Crean last weekend, Chifley did not read from an autocue a torrent of words mou