PROFILE: EDDIE OBEID, POLITICAL POWERBROKER BORN IN LEBANON, RAISED IN SYDNEY AND SUCKLED BY LABOR’S TRIBAL FATHERS

The man behind the new Premier’s (Morris Iemma) coronation has stunned his party, rescued his own career and helped make NSW the ethnic State.

This article by the Sun-Herald’s Alex Mitchell appeared in the Sunday, August 14, 2005 edition of their newspaper.

Upper house MP Eddie Obeid, who was five years old when he and his parents arrived in Sydney in 1950 from Lebanon, provided the numbers to the states 40^th premier, Morris Iemma, the only child of Italian immigrants who arrived in Sydney in 1960.

Obeid’s 11^th hour decision to withdraw his support from his friend and factional apprentice, Police Minister Carl Scully, and switch to Iemma has already entered Labor folklore as an act of monumental ruthlessness and epic bastardry.

Obeid, a numbers man of formidable prowess who is the nominal leader of the “Terrigal’s,” a sub faction of the right wing centre unity, came to the view that his protégé Scully, because of his hapless term as transport minister, was “unsaleable” as premier at the next election(2007) in 20 months time.

By providing the necessary votes to elevate 44 year kingmaker and put himself back in the political main game ending the isolation he has endured since former premier Bob Carr dismissed him from the cabinet after the 2003 election.

When he relegated Obeid to the political wilderness, Carr hoped to squash the power based on his fisheries and mineral resources minister within the parliamentary ALP and the Sussex Street head office.

But he only succeeded in creating a clandestine anti Carr coalition, which began to undermine the premier’s authority by opposing the poker machine tax on registered clubs, the vendor tax on investment properties and the controversial closure of the Orange Grove factory outlet with the loss of hundreds of jobs in western Sydney.

While Iemma’s mercurial promotion has provoked much talk of the Governments “generational change,” the truly significant change is about ethnicity.  A dramatic changing of the guard has taken place with the “Anglos” and the Irish giving space to the sons of post war first generation immigration Mediterranean cultures.

For example, Obeid’s chief henchman in the installation of Iemma was ALP general secretary Mark Arbib, the son of Libyan parents, and Arbib’s  loyal lieutenant in the leadership project was the party’s assistant general secretary Karl Bitar, of recent Lebanese descent.

Two of Iemma’s new cabinet ministers are Swansea MP Milton Orkopoulos whose parents, Yianni and Stamatia, arrived from Greece on a migrant ship in 1956, and Eric Roozendaal, whose father was hidden from the Gestapo in Holland during the German occupation before arriving in Australia in 1951 and whose mother is the daughter of migrants from Russia and England.  They join a cabinet comprising:-

• Finance Minister Michael Costa, whose Greek Cypriot parents, with a background in olive growing and goat farming, arrived in Newcastle in the 1950’s
• Planning Minister Frank Sartor, who’s parents Cesare and Ida arrived from northern Italy in 1949 to begin life in Yenda, near Griffith
• Health Minister John Hatzistergos, whose parents, Theophilus and Irene, arrived from Greece in the late 1950’s to begin a new life in Redfern
• Roads Minister Joe Tripodi, whose parents, Angelo and Lolanda arrived from Italy in 1963 and 1951 respectively to settle in Western Sydney.

All of these rising ministers in the Iemma Government arrived in the Labor Party in the 1970’s and ‘80s when it was busily recruiting in the ethnic communities under the direction of federal ALP secretary, the late Mick Young, who was also immigration and ethnic affairs minister in 1987 – 88, and Labor’s NSW general Secretary Graham “Richo Richardson.

It has taken until the Carr – Iemma baton change for “ethnics” to step into the frontline of government in Australia’s most dynamic and cosmopolitan state.

The post Carr government which incidentally, makes John Howard’s crusty government look even more like a relic of the Menzies era is a sign of the bustling times in a world city engaging with the 21^st century.

In 1998, when Obeid was in St Vincent Hospital recuperating from life saving heart surgery, a lowly back bencher visited his bedside almost every day offering support.  The MP was Morris Iemma, who also gave Obeid vocal support when Carr unceremoniously dumped him from the cabinet two years ago.  Obeid has returned Iemma’s loyalty and friendship in the way he knows best, with the numbers.

As for Scully, he will be left pondering the old Lebanese saying: “When the cow stumbles, the long knives come out.”

Ambitious sons of migrants began their long march as branch soldiers for the Sussex Street machine.

Now they are held together by tribal loyalties, networking and influence and the thrill of exercising raw power.

They’ve arrived.