Watts must be worried by the alacrity with which these groups have secured public funding for their nanny state causes – dragging resources away from people genuinely in need. Perhaps, like Walsh, he could be an effective Labor finance minister, a pebble in the shoe of rent-seekers and public-sector spongers everywhere.

This is what every good government needs: an Attila the Hun figure winding back the excesses of the welfare state. Watts was my man, the founding president and spiritual leader of Parliamentarians Against Family (PAF).

But then I decided to check his credentials further. I discovered there is no such thing as PAF.

Violence begins at home

The proper name is Parliamentarians Against Family Violence – a bunch of run-of-the-mill state interventionists hoping to inject themselves into the middle of domestic life.

Despite his highfalutin plans for creating "a grand bargain that offers a new way of responding to family violence", Watts couldn't even get the name of his parliamentary association right.

His clanger reminded me of one of the great Paul Keating stories, about the futility of government economic intervention. As a newly elected MP in the early 1970s, Keating would listen intently as the lions of Labor's Socialist Left sat around the parliamentary dining table at night, inventing new ways of regulating the economy and planning the development of future industries.

Eventually, the young Member for Blaxland thought to himself: "What hope do these old farts have of controlling companies and influencing new industries when they can't even fill out their TA [travel allowance] forms properly?"


Likewise with Watts. What hope has he got of achieving something tangible in this policy area when Literacy 101 is beyond him?

From what I can see, most MPs have trouble sorting out their own lives without worrying about everyone else's. In the modern Labor Party, it's more than a cliche: domestic violence begins at home.

The first task for Watts and his trusty band of do-gooders is to fly to Queensland to save the new Palaszczuk government. They also had plenty of work to do in the last Labor government in NSW, where a male MP landed more punches on a female colleague than Muhammad Ali laid on Smokin' Joe Frazier.

This is an issue where politicians have struggled with their own behaviour, let alone found solutions for the rest of the country. Watts' suggested remedies are so light and fluffy they're at risk of floating off the Chifley website.

He wants a "national crisis summit" and "deep engagement with stakeholders", inviting "everyone to the negotiating table where a new accord can be pursued".

In other words, he's a master of waffle – convening talkfests in Canberra that benefit the conference and hospitality industries but nobody else. The only thing missing from his so-called policy package is a United Nations-sponsored International Family Harmony Day.

Symptomatic of decline

Parliamentarians like Watts are symptomatic of the decline in Labor's thinking. Somewhere in the 1990s the party abandoned class-based analysis in favour of identity politics. Instead of judging people on the basis of socio-economic need, Australia was subdivided along the lines of ethnicity, gender, sexuality and culture.


Someone can be wealthy and well-connected, but if they are also non-Anglo, non-male, non-heterosexual – or, better still, The Artist Formerly Known As Malcolm McGregor – they are said to be doing it tough.

Regrettably, Watts has fallen for the feminist line on domestic violence: that most men are inherently bad and require re-education through "awareness campaigns" and "national summits".

This is a recipe for political puffery – the feel-good factor of appearing to do something when, in the community, nothing actually changes. The best way of minimising domestic violence is to minimise poverty.

There are two classes from which men are likely to abuse women: the political class and the underclass. In the latter, the frustration of intergenerational unemployment often vents itself in wife bashing.

The tragedy of modern Labor is that it no longer talks about poverty. It's too busy fussing about gay marriage, defending the rights of heroin traffickers and facilitating asylum-seeker drownings to tackle the problems of public housing estates (such as Mount Druitt on SBS's Struggle Street).

Watts is indicative of this shortcoming. He's part of a strange new phenomenon in the ALP: the rise of the Right Leftie – someone who belongs to the Right faction but practises the empty political symbolism of the Left.

Embedded among the gentrified coffee shops of Williamstown in Melbourne, he's fallen under the spell of Mother Russia herself – Joan Kirner, the former Socialist Left premier of Victoria.

Young hopefuls such as Watts need to stop knocking around with privileged feminists and other identity-urgers and recapture the true meaning of social justice. This might sound revolutionary in today's Labor movement, but they need to talk to the poor.