Workers are the life of the party

FORGET Cinderella's career path – from humble hearth to royal palace. A greater fairy story is central to the American dream. "From log cabin to White House."

Of course, presidents from log cabins were few and far between. Harry S Truman had a haberdasher's shop, George W. Bush a failed oil company and Dwight D. Eisenhower arrived at the White House in his jeep. In the case of Ronald Reagan, it was from the film set to the Oval Office – via the governor's mansion currently accommodating Arnie Schwarzenegger. Like our own beloved Joh Bjelke-Petersen, Jimmy Carter had a previous connection with peanuts.

Point being? US presidents come from thither and yon – with the system casting a wide net for candidates but finding them in everything from B features to large universities. And by and large, US democracy seems all the stronger for this ecumenical attitude.

Ditto for Australian prime ministers. Although I can't recall any case of log cabin to Lodge, not all Australian PMs have started off as conveyancing lawyers, though the legal profession has been grossly over-represented. One of our most beloved PMs, for example, was a train driver, Choof-Choof-Chifley. Others had agricultural origins. Some were academics while more were educated in the school of hard knocks, bringing with them to Canberra the bruises of life's experience in a variety of jobs and professions.

Now, however, the story is different. For both sides of politics. However, the transformation of Labor's front bench is both intriguing and depressing. Where once Labor's best heckler at Question Time was an ex-shearer, whose heckles were all the better for it, these days the lacklustre jibes will come from a party hack – a professional politician who has always been in the profession of politics.

When Bill Kelty was ACTU leader, he complained to me that, these days, fewer and fewer ALP MPs were trade unionists. Signs of a party trying to distance itself from its origins. Now, however, there's an almost suffocating cosiness about the comrades in Canberra – in that few if any have ever had a proper job. That is, a job outside the ALP's auspices. They are truly apparatchiks who've been, it seems, purpose-bred for the profession, working within the system from go to whoa. Unless, of course, you count being the mayor of Liverpool as a proper job.

It would be good to look at Labor's MPs and see shearers sitting with scientists, miners with medicos, nurses with novelists. Yes, Peter Garrett brings to the parliament an interesting background – not so much a proper job as his improper job in rock music. Which makes him one of the very few who's actually earned a quid beyond Tammany Hall.

Does it matter? Yes. Fewer and fewer Labor pollies have been self-employed, privately employed or even unemployed. They belong to a class who comprehend the outside world through focus groups, demographic analyses and what are virtually anthropological observations of voters, rather than direct experience.

The other day, I interviewed an up-and-coming MP, an impressive young woman who holds pilot's licences for both agricultural and general commercial purposes, who has worked in air traffic control at Tullamarine and Mascot, as well as being involved on a family farm. Unfortunately, she's a Liberal. That automatically, axiomatically makes her more interesting than most ALP counterparts who have been recruited from the ranks.

Politics should welcome people of all shapes, sizes, backgrounds, interests and experience. If Labor is to improve its empathy with the voters, it should be more eclectic in its pre-selection process – less reliant on characters who, on leaving school, join an ALP branch and sign up for a faction.

At state level, the situation is even odder. If you want to become a premier or chief minister, at least in a Labor state, it's almost mandatory to have worked at the ABC. Premiers Brian Burke, Neville Wran, Bob Carr and Chief Minister Clare Martin are among those who come to mind. No wonder conservatives accuse the national broadcaster of bias.