The Australian Labor Party could learn a lot from some of the greatest disasters in military history.

The last time the British army occupied the capital of Afghanistan, it was forced into a retreat so disastrous that a force of 4500 British soldiers was reduced to a single survivor. Only the surgeon staggered out alive to tell the story.

The British were in Kabul to prop up an Afghan puppet ruler they'd installed. Their enemy was not especially large or powerful. They were routed by a relative handful of Afghan tribesmen. The 1842 debacle was not inevitable, or even necessary, but largely self-inflicted.

"The road was strewn with the mangled corpses of their comrades and the stench of death was in the air," ran an account of the British retreat from Kabul to Jalalabad along narrow mountain passes in a bitter winter. "All along the route they had been passing little groups of camp-followers, starving, frost-bitten and many of them in a state of gibbering idiocy.

"The Afghans, not troubling to kill these stragglers, had simply stripped them and left the cold to do its work and now the poor wretches were huddling together naked in the snow, striving hopelessly to keep warm by the heat of their own bodies. There were women and little children among them, who piteously stretched out their hands for succour."

It was "the most disgraceful and humiliating episode in our history of war against an Asian enemy", one of Britain's better 20th-century commanders, Field-Marshal Sir Gerald Templer, said.

This is not offered as a premonition of the allied withdrawal from Afghanistan that Julia Gillard is helping plan this weekend in Chicago. Rather, it's a way of reviewing the political disaster that the Australian Labor Party has imposed on itself.

It's one of the questions most commonly asked about Labor's performance in the past few years: "How could they be so hopeless?" It's sometimes asked even by members of the government itself: "How can we be so hopeless?"

The years of serial misjudgments and compounding blunders so defy conventional political analysis that we might profit by turning to other fields for insight.

On the Psychology of Military Incompetence is a noted 1976 book whose lessons have been applied not only to armies but also to other authoritarian structures such as corporate management and movie sets.

In the book, Norman Dixon surveys a century of British military disasters from the Crimean War, through the slaughterhouses of World War I to the fall of Singapore in a search for common elements that might yield an answer to the same question that is asked of Australian Labor today: "How could they be so hopeless?'

Like the British generals who were responsible for episodes of unfathomable misjudgment, the upper ranks of the modern ALP have plenty of technical knowledge and a good deal of experience in their chosen craft. Indeed, federal Labor has never known such a concentration of former political apparatchiks and union officials as it has today. Even some of the most senior members of the cabinet, including the Treasurer and the Defence Minister, are former state secretaries of the Labor Party. Such people have a much greater knowledge of politics than of any other subject. To use Dixon's words, their "incompetence cannot be attributed to ignorance or ordinary stupidity".

Dixon, professor emeritus of psychology at University College, London, and himself a former British officer, concluded that "military incompetence is more often a product of personality characteristics than of intellectual shortcomings". And the authoritarian nature of the military structure made it prone to particular types of personality characteristics.

This is why the study of military behaviour can apply to modern Labor, but probably not to the conservatives. Labor is a creation of the union movement. The party's factions are outgrowths of the unions. And the unions and factions exert a good deal of control over the parliamentary party. Indeed, as Labor's grassroots membership has dwindled, the unions have tightened their grip on the party.

Consider Labor's federal parliamentary caucus. In the House of Representatives, 44 per cent of Labor's members are former union officials. In the Senate, 72 per cent of Labor senators are former union officials. The unions control 50 per cent of the delegates to Labor's policy-setting national conference and dominate the party's national executive.

In 2010-11, unions paid fees and donations of $12.5 million to the party. Above and beyond that, the unions spent another $11.8 million on third-party political campaigns. The Labor historian and former Carr government minister Rodney Cavalier said recently that the party was "controlled lock, stock and dividend stream by affiliated unions".

Bob Hawke, himself a former ACTU secretary, told the Financial Review last December that the union movement was "almost suffocating" the Labor Party. These structural ties and factional power bases lend the party a hierarchical, authoritarian framework that the Liberals lack. Time served and factional loyalty are rewarded by a conveyor belt system that carries union officials into safe parliamentary seats, often regardless of merit.

The personality characteristics of people drawn to an authoritarian structure? Dixon lists these: a need for approval, fear of failure, being deaf to unwelcome information, an inclination to internal codes of acceptable behaviour, anti-intellectualism, and sensitivity to criticism. He broadly groups these as symptoms of "ego-weakness". He describes ego-weakness as creating a "neurotic paradox in which the individual's need to be loved breeds, on the one hand, an insatiable desire for admiration with avoidance of criticism, and, on the other, an equally devouring urge for power and positions of dominance.

"The paradox is that these needs inevitably result in behaviour so unrealistic as to earn the victim the very criticism which he has been striving so hard to avoid."

Ego-weakness combines with authoritarian tendencies to produce ridiculous decisions. Dixon cites the British army's stubborn insistence on using cavalry over tanks - even after World War I. Reports urging change were censored. In the 1930s, as Hitler built his 36 tank divisions, the British army ordered that the Tank Brigade should be disbanded and never reassembled.

This sort of futile stubbornness meant that losing tactics were repeated ad nauseum. The Germans marvelled at the British devotion to the suicidal full-frontal assault. Today we see a desperate Labor revert to pre-Hawke envy politics, the so-called "class warfare", in an effort to win support.

As Paul Keating told me in 2005: "It's a fundamentally flawed strategy. The Labor Party has given up the middle-class, middle-ground, sole-employer, self-employed, small-business voter that Bob Hawke and I generated for it." Last year, 19 per cent of Australia's workforce was self-employed or independent contractors. Eighteen per cent were union members, a record low.

Other characteristics of the mindset? One, according to Dixon, is a disregard for the welfare of the lower ranks; that so long as the officers were comfortable, the commanders were content to see the troops suffer and die. Reading this, Labor's marginal seat holders come to mind. It won't give them much cheer, but as they contemplate their forthcoming wipeout at the next election they can contemplate this aphorism of one of the better British commanders, Field-Marshal Lord Slim: ''There are no bad regiments, only bad officers."

The authoritarian mindset does not welcome creativity or differences of opinion. Dixon writes: "When all that is natural, creative, flexible, warm and outgoing in the human spirit becomes crushed and constricted, such qualities of leadership as compassion, bold decisions and military flair give way to conformity, sycophantism, indecision and fear of failure."

Instructive though the Dixon analysis might be, it does not offer Labor much hope of recovery with its current structure. Why not? Because, according to Dixon, "it is a sad feature of authoritarian organisations that their nature inevitably militates against the possibility of learning from experience through the apportioning of blame".

They are, he says, "past masters at deflecting blame. They do so by denial, by rationalisation, by making scapegoats … the net result is that no real admission of failure or incompetence is ever made by those who are really responsible."

The "wise men" who wrote the Labor Party's review, Bob Carr, Steve Bracks and John Faulkner, have called for it to be published so Labor can learn from its mistakes. The review, apart from one redacted section, remains under lock and key.

Finally, Dixon explains why British governments tolerated - and sometimes even promoted - generals who were responsible for some of the worst military failures. Why did they perpetuate a system where officers could buy their commissions, instead of requiring merit, for instance?

The answer is that the overriding concern of the British political class, in the face of popular revolutions across the Channel, was that the army remained loyal. So the political leadership was prepared to tolerate the most dreadfully incompetent generals as long as they were loyal to the status quo of the monarchy, the aristocracy and the class system.

In the last Labor leadership contest, all the unions lined up in favour of one candidate, Julia Gillard, and none supported the other, Kevin Rudd. It was the first time this had happened in the history of modern Labor. Some of Australia's most powerful union leaders said privately that this was a no-brainer for them because Rudd was hostile to the unions while Gillard delivered on their agenda.

So they preferred the likelihood of the defeat of the Labor government to a chance of victory so long as the prime minister was loyal. Loyalty, in the union-dominated Labor Party, trumps the prospects of victory. The parallel has its limitations, but also its illuminations.

Charge Of The Mates Brigade Will Fail

nearby …..

Former minister Eddie Obeid's family has controlled some of Circular Quay's most prominent publicly-owned properties by hiding its interests behind a front company.

A Herald investigation has confirmed that Mr Obeid and his family secured the three prime cafes in 2003 and that for his last nine years in the upper house he failed to inform Parliament about his family's interest in these lucrative government leases.

For the first time, senior officials and former cabinet ministers Carl Scully and Eric Roozendaal have confirmed Mr Obeid's intervention in the lease negotiations for the quay properties, including seeking favourable conditions for the cafes, which the Herald can now reveal he then secretly acquired.

Crucially, when the former NSW treasurer Michael Costa had charge of the waterfront, he put a stop to a public tender scheduled for 2005 that might have threatened the Obeids' control over two of the properties.

Mr Obeid was the most powerful player inside the NSW Labor Party for the past two decades, and was described in 2009 by the deposed premier Nathan Rees as the party's puppet-master.

The Arc Cafe, Quay Eatery and Sorrentino, which are located in blue-ribbon positions on or next to the bustling ferry wharves at the quay, are all run by a $1 company called Circular Quay Restaurants Pty Ltd.

On paper, the Circular Quay company is owned by John Abood, Mr Obeid's brother-in-law. However, the Herald has obtained a sworn statement from Mr Obeid's son Moses that was tendered in Court of Appeal proceedings that lists among his $11.3 million assets a $700,000 share of ''Circular Quay Restaurants''.

At the Court of Appeal earlier this year, Moses Obeid inadvertently confirmed the long-rumoured involvement of the Obeid family in the restaurants, which was masked by using a discretionary trust. ''The Circular Quay Family Trust owns numerous Circular Quay restaurants,'' Moses Obeid said in his affidavit. All the units in that family trust are owned by another family trust - the Obeid Family Trust No. 2, he stated.

Eddie Obeid's other son, Paul Obeid, testified in March this year that: ''In our trusts we have, there [are] nine brothers and sisters, there's two parents and 30 grandchildren.''

A confidential 2007 document from a separate Obeid company seeking government contracts, which was also tendered in the proceedings, noted that the Obeid connection ''provided access to government'' and that it was a big plus ''being able to get to the right person first time''. But the downside was ''media attention and speculation''. It was suggested that this could be avoided by ''the possible remove (sic) of Obeid family name through the use of a discretionary trust''.

Previously, when the waterfront leases were still held by the Obeid associate and former Labor Party donor Tony Imad, Carl Scully had rejected an extraordinary request from Mr Obeid to have the leases extended.

In the run-up to the Olympics and as part of a plan to remodel the quay, the wharf leases were to be renewed. But Mr Scully sought approval from the Independent Commission Against Corruption specifically to ensure there would be no probity issues.

The ICAC gave an opinion that it approved based on the fact that the leases were strictly for five years and were then to be put to a public tender.

"But shortly after this process was concluded, Eddie Obeid requested that I give a five-year extension to the lease on the concession held at Circular Quay by a Tony Imad," Mr Scully told the Herald.

"I flatly refused this request on the spot without even bothering to get departmental advice.

''I advised Eddie that this whole drawn-out process had been ticked off by ICAC at every step of the way and that there was no way I was going to revisit it. This was not well received and for the first time Eddie became quite angry. I was somewhat surprised at the reaction as for me it was just another policy matter I took a firm stand on."

Mr Scully said that "it was only after I left politics that an allegation was made to me that Eddie had at the time in question a direct commercial interest. If the allegation is true, then it would explain the overreaction to my decision but would still leave me feeling very disappointed to say the least. If it is not true, then I would like the Obeid family to provide sufficient evidence or commentary to refute it".

A source has confirmed to the Herald that it was the Obeids who paid $2.4 million via a bank cheque for the three cafes and then insisted on an arrangement whereby the restaurants' true owner could not be identified. The source said that under this arrangement Mr Abood would be paid a wage and receive 10 per cent of the profits of the company, and the remainder would flow to the Obeid family via one of its trusts.

Other sources report that another of Eddie Obeid's sons, Damien, routinely collects the takings from the three restaurants in person.

In 2004, Mr Abood denied he was a front for Mr Obeid, telling the Herald: ''Yes, I am his [Obeid's] brother-in-law, but no way he is involved … I have been here for three years and he has never had anything to do with this business.''

This week, Mr Abood, 56, conceded that the Obeid family had a major interest in the cafes ''but if you think any favours or anything's been done down there for them - definitely not''.

''The Obeids really haven't made any money down there, well we haven't. It's a disaster area,'' Mr Abood said.

Banking documents tendered in Moses Obeid's recent court battle with the City of Sydney, in which he has been ordered to pay $12 million, show the Obeid Family Trust 1 made a $100,000 payment to Paul Maroon in October 2010. Mr Maroon is the general manager of Circular Quay Restaurants. In April this year, Mr Maroon signed a formal petition on behalf of the business to seek a further reduction in rent.

Having obtained and then hidden his family's interest in the businesses, Eddie Obeid wielded his powers as leader of the dominant faction in the ALP to protect his investment.

Most importantly, a competitive tender for the leases that was long scheduled for 2005 was quashed despite repeated pleas from NSW Maritime officials that it proceed.

Confidential government documents seen by the Herald show this decision was made despite written advice from multiple probity advisers and the Independent Commission Against Corruption that recommended the public tender go ahead.

Maritime's then boss, Chris Oxenbould, told the Herald Mr Costa did not want the tender to proceed, citing the fact that other agencies allowed leaseholders to keep their leases without facing public competition.

''Michael Costa was involved in the discussions around the [expression of interest] process and he made it very clear to me what his position was,'' Mr Oxenbould said.

Mr Costa said: ''I don't have a recollection of it, and I'm not going to comment on it, and where you're heading is absurd.''

A former senior Maritime official overseeing commercial property, Zenon Michniewicz, told the Herald the minister refused to allow the leases to be put to the market. ''In 2005 I can say that the minister and the CEO [of Maritime] did not allow it to proceed,'' he said.

When Mr Costa was replaced by Eric Roozendaal, a decision was taken by Maritime to not put any of the leases to tender, but to simply roll them over on a month-by-month basis.

Mr Roozendaal told the Herald he did discuss the leases at Circular Quay with Mr Obeid when he was the minister.

''Issues with Circular Quay were raised with me by both Eddie Obeid and Michael Costa,'' he said.

''[But] at no time did any member of Parliament declare any interest to me in any properties at Circular Quay.

''I would say that if any MP raised an issue with me and had an interest they didn't declare, it would make me feel very uncomfortable.''

Internal NSW Maritime files show the rent on these Obeid-controlled properties actually decreased from the amount stipulated in the original leases, which were signed six years earlier.

In 2006, for example, after negotiations over the rent, the state government took $89,000 less per annum from two of the cafes owned by the Obeid family than the government had intended in 2000.

Mr Abood, who said he was a part-owner of the business, claimed the rent reductions had only come about ''because we were all going broke - everybody!''

In 2009, NSW Maritime issued new 10-year leases to the incumbents along the wharves - including to the Obeids' front company - and again without a competitive tender. The minister at the time was Joe Tripodi.

Steve Dunn, the former chief executive of Maritime, told the Herald that Mr Tripodi was involved in deciding the matter but claimed it was the department - contrary to the wishes of Mr Tripodi - that decided not to put the leases out to a tender.

Such long tenures are worth millions on the open market, and the leases also offered cheaper rent. Combined, the two Obeid cafes were to pay $80,944 less each year to the taxpayer than NSW Maritime's independent valuation had recommended at the time. And, although there may have also been variations in the properties, compared to the leases issued at two other wharves on the same day, the Obeids were asked to pay up to $47,000 less annually than their rivals.

These leases have remained secret until now because, unusually, NSW Maritime never took the steps necessary to have the leases publicly registered.

Mr Tripodi said he had ''no knowledge of the Obeid family owning anything down there''. He said he couldn't recall whether he ever discussed the leases with Mr Obeid, but declined to answer further questions.

Fergus McPherson, a former Maritime property manager, said ''it was clear to those in management that we were being expected to do whatever was necessary to make sure the existing lessees retained their leases''.

The indefinite deferral of the public tender generated a windfall gain for the Obeid family.

Mr Michniewicz said that by previously using a competitive tender in the run-up to 2000, the government had succeeded in a ''10-fold increase'' in rent to about $1.5 million for all the shops and cafes inside the Circular Quay wharves.

''And in 2005, there was every indication that we would have done even better still. They were worth a fortune,'' he said.

During his parliamentary career, which finished last year, Mr Obeid made no mention in his pecuniary interest declarations as to whether he received any income from the myriad of Obeid family trusts revealed during Moses Obeid's recent court case. It is up to the discretion of MPs as to whether to disclose benefits received by family members.

Mr Obeid, through his lawyers, declined to comment.

Exposed: Obeids' Secret Harbour Deal