The fine art of persuasion
The business end
Burke outside a restaurant in his
electorate. In his first speech to Federal Parliament he recalled
challenges his father faced as a pharmacy owner.
In Harper Lee's novel To Kill a Mockingbird the central character Atticus Finch advises his children to learn a simple trick for getting along with "all kinds of folks". Atticus's trick: climb into the other person's skin. Even if they are your enemy or opponent, consider things from their point of view. Step into their shoes. Walk around in them for a while.
The notion appealed so much to one of federal Labor's rising stars, the immigration spokesman, Tony Burke, that when he went into business years ago with two university debating chums they named their venture after Lee's character.
After years of competing in debating competitions the trio reckoned there was a market in training clients from the corporate and education sectors in advocacy and communication skills.
"The lesson we took from the character of Atticus was that if you want to know how somebody thinks, you need to get into his shoes," Burke says.
"So if you want to be persuasive you have to understand where the people who are listening to you are coming from.
"One of the things you learn from debating is to understand both sides of an argument. It forces you to understand how someone who would disagree with you would think."
The business is still thriving. But Burke, now 37, has moved on to a career in politics, where he is part of a new generation reshaping Labor's NSW Right faction.
With members including the Premier, Morris Iemma, the NSW Labor general secretary, Mark Arbib, and an assistant general secretary, Karl Bitar, this generation has emerged over the past couple of years to assume positions of power and influence. But they are still to face their most defining political tests.
Iemma, who signed up a 16-year-old Burke to Labor in 1986, has risen all the way to the premier's office but faces his first date in that job with the voters in March.
Arbib took over as Labor NSW general secretary in 2004 and has set about refashioning the party's Sussex Street machine in a more inclusive guise. The verdict on Arbib's organisational abilities will hinge on the March state poll and the federal election later next year, when Labor will desperately need to win seats in NSW.
And Burke has invested a significant amount of personal political capital in Labor's decision to dump Kim Beazley for Kevin Rudd, a gamble whose outcome will not be clear until the federal election.
It's a long way from the youthful enthusiasm and theatrical atmosphere of university debating championships.
Yet Burke is still practising the art of advocacy, whether garnering support from voters by making the case against the Government's immigration policies or persuading his Labor colleagues to vote for Rudd.
But does he walk in the other man's shoes as an Atticus-like act of empathy and understanding, an end in itself? Or is he deploying this technique as a means to the end of securing and wielding power?
Burke has performed well for federal Labor since being given the job of immigration spokesman by Beazley in the middle of last year. He was one of several MPs who publicly supported Beazley's return to the leadership when Mark Latham quit in early 2005.
Yet as this parliamentary year drew to an end, he was one of a handful of NSW Right figures whose decision to switch support to Rudd precipitated Labor's tumultuous leadership change earlier this month.
Burke says that when he was inside the Canberra bubble he saw Beazley as an inspiring Labor leader, an effective parliamentary performer and someone with the qualities of an alternative prime minister. Yet when he returned home and walked in the shoes of ordinary voters he saw a different Beazley. "Every time I was in Parliament and saw Kim Beazley up close, I would be completely persuaded that this man was going to be prime minister, impressed by him, inspired by him," he says.
"I would then go out into the community, sometimes in my own seat but just as often visiting marginal seats, and they were not seeing the Kim Beazley I was seeing at all. The bloke they were seeing, they were never going to vote for.
"During the course of the year Kim's performance, his media grabs and his performance in Parliament, were getting stronger and stronger but the community had already made its decision."
Burke's view that the party should shift to Rudd crystallised in the parliamentary recess in November which preceded the final fortnight of sittings for the year.
"I was convinced that Kevin Rudd was able to communicate our message to radically diverse groups," he says in his electorate office in Kingsgrove this week. "This is a bloke who can be arguing the subtleties of foreign affairs on a Thursday night Lateline program and be up the next morning in the Sunrise studio laughing about popular culture references."
He also came to the view that Labor could not afford to wait. "If we were going to change it had to be this year. We couldn't let it go over [the summer parliamentary break] into February. If we had waited until March to change leaders we would be six months out from an election, having hemorrhaged all summer."
Burke's role in the affair was not decisive but it was catalytic. It generated some resentment among Beazley loyalists in the NSW Right, reflecting continuing fissures and generational shifts inside the faction.
At one level Burke is a Labor Right politician from central casting. After university he worked as an electorate officer for the environment minister and Right powerbroker Graham Richardson. Then followed a tour of duty as an organiser for the biggest union in the country, the Shop Distributive and Allied Employees Association, a bulwark of the Labor Catholic Right.
Burke had a stint in the NSW Legislative Council before moving to Federal Parliament in the 2004 election as the member for Watson. Covering areas such as Hurstville, Roselands, Belmore, Campsie and Earlwood, Watson is one of Labor's safest seats. It is the only politically landlocked federal Labor electorate in the state. Real heartland.
Burke grew up in the area and now lives there with his wife and three daughters.
Yet at another level Burke is a different style of Labor right-winger. His background is solidly middle class. His father, Kevin, was a pharmacist.
In his first speech in Federal Parliament Burke recalled: "We had all the small business themes - the frustration of mounting paperwork; the pressure of government paying its bills to us late when every creditor was demanding we pay them on time; and the difficulties associated with ever being able to organise time off when the business was your own."
And he is part of a cohort which has emerged from the NSW Right's traditional tribalism, built on number crunching in party branches and unions, to embrace newer techniques and skills of political communication, advocacy and coalition-building.
Burke cut his political teeth not only in traditional Labor Party pursuits (he was part of a band of right-wingers which wrested control of Young Labor from the Left in the early 1990s) but also in single-issue interest groups (he was an active member of the Wilderness Society and campaigned on environmental issues such as preserving the Daintree rainforest).
His most significant engagement in single-issue campaigning was on euthanasia.
When it became apparent in 1995 that the Northern Territory Government was planning legislation to allow voluntary euthanasia for the terminally ill, and that the issue would likely come before the NSW Parliament, opponents formed a lobby group, Euthanasia No. Burke, then just 25, was appointed its executive director. He organised meetings throughout the state, raised funds, and forged a coalition of anti-euthanasia activists from all political parties, the churches and the medical professions.
When the NSW Parliament considered the issue in 1996 Burke was one of two private citizens invited by the then premier Bob Carr to open the debate by presenting arguments for and against voluntary euthanasia from the bar of the Legislative Assembly.
Most MPs who spoke in the subsequent debate also opposed euthanasia, resulting in the stymieing of moves to draft a private member's bill allowing mercy killing.
Euthanasia No then turned its attention to moves in Federal Parliament, led by the then Liberal backbencher Kevin Andrews, now Minister for Workplace Relations, to pass a private member's bill overturning the Northern Territory legislation.
Despite their political differences Burke worked closely with Andrews. When the private member's bill was passed by the Senate in March 1997, the two men shook hands in the public gallery.
Much has been made of Andrews's and Burke's Catholicism in their activism on the euthanasia issue. Burke dismisses any suggestion his stance was driven by his religious faith. "I deal with these issues more personally than some. I have the religious views I have and I wander along to church of a weekend with the family.
"But in anything that comes to public policy I think if you can't make a public policy argument in its own right then you don't deserve to win the debate.
"There was a time when I had the opposite view on euthanasia but I still had the same religion. There is a set of issues where if you have a strong opinion people want to impose the religious shadow over it. To me that just seems inaccurate."
He says his strongest political conviction is opposition to capital punishment. "I never get asked about my religious beliefs on the capital punishment issue. Jesus Christ was crucified but no one assumes that if you oppose to capital punishment you must be driven by religion."
Still, Catholicism clearly matters at a personal level.
Burke was educated by the Christian Brothers at St Patrick's College in Strathfield, where he was vice-captain in 1987.
The NSW Right has had its fair share of Catholic rogues (think Paul Keating and Laurie Brereton) and pious Catholics (think leaders of the shop assistants union). Burke is somewhere in the middle: a good Catholic boy who allows himself some irreverence.
In that first speech to Federal Parliament he used humour to deflect Coalition complaints that the strong representation of union officials in the ranks of Labor MPs meant the Opposition lacked real world experience.
"Seriously, does anyone actually believe that I would have had more real world experience if instead I had utilised my law degree to represent the same people on the same issues but charged them a couple of hundred dollars an hour to meet with me in some solicitor's office with dodgy wood panelling and terminally ill goldfish?"
In keeping with the Christian Brothers' credo of reaching out to the marginalised through education, he has been involved in community activity since his teens.
In his early 20s, he volunteered with a public speaking club for maximum security inmates at Goulburn prison, a program designed to build confidence and self-esteem among young offenders.
"I was struck by the contrast when one bloke there gave a five-minute speech about his life, going through difficult ages, and I matched up his experiences to my own experiences at those ages.
"I was in kindergarten when he had already been deemed uncontrollable and put into homes. He was drug-addicted at the same age I was going to Blue Light discos."
Walk in another man's shoes and you draw lessons about the different pathways which present themselves to people of different social backgrounds.
Burke says his worst day in politics came last year when he and a cross-party group of MPs met Singapore's high commissioner to Australia to plead for the life of the convicted drug trafficker Nguyen Tuong Van.
"We walked in the door knowing full well that we were probably going to fail but that if there is going to be any opportunity, you have got it for the next 30 minutes."
Did they attempt to walk in the shoes of the Singaporean authorities? "Yes. We knew it wasn't open for Singapore to completely change its view on the death penalty.
"So rather than focus on what was the most important argument for me, which is that the death penalty should never be used, we argued that the particular circumstances of Nguyen's case meant that if there was ever to be an example where clemency should be granted this was it. Clearly it was a complete and total defeat in terms of being able to provide any assistance."
For now Burke has his sights set on continuing to prosecute Labor's advocacy on immigration policy. After the Rudd ascendancy there was talk Burke would be elevated to a more senior frontbench portfolio.
But he wanted to keep immigration and in the end Rudd expanded the portfolio to include "integration" and citizenship, placing Burke at the centre of the so-called culture wars which are a significant ingredient in John Howard's electoral success.
He says there are three main sets of issues for Labor to tackle in immigration.
First, he will seek to push a major change to Labor's policy on refugees through the ALP's national conference in April.
Burke wants Labor to commit to scrapping temporary protection visas issued to asylum seekers pending a final decision on their case. In its place a Labor government would make earlier and definitive decisions on whether to allow individual asylum seekers to settle in Australia.
Second, Labor will need to devise an alternative to the Government's contentious work visas to take to the next election. "We want to come up with a mechanism which will address genuine shortages in skills in the workforce without undermining local wages and employment conditions," he said.
Third, he wants to develop the integration part of his portfolio by developing initiatives for better targeting of government spending on English-language tuition for immigrants.
That is Burke's immediate assignment in the Labor enterprise of recapturing power in Canberra.
But for this new breed of Labor right-winger what is the single thread of conviction which ties together his involvement in mainstream party politics, his Catholic sense of social justice, his lawyer's concern for human rights and his debating champion's love of advocacy?
"You want a society that treats people as well as possible and, where people are not being treated as well as possible, you want to do something about it. I don't know if there is an 'ism' for it, but that's it."