July 22, 2026 — 11:45amThe days of Labor Party luminaries disporting themselves in budgie smugglers while surrounded by young bikini-clad women are, sadly for us in the political circus industry, long gone from ALP national conferences.So are endless nights when a prime minister disappeared into sweaty high-roller casino rooms to emerge boasting of fabulous luck at the blackjack table – which may or may not have been the case.Bob Hawke and Gough Whitlam have a beer poolside at the Florida Hotel, Terrigal, in February, 1975.Fairfax ArchivesGone, too, are those times when two famously intimidating party arm-twisters enthroned in a smoke-filled interrogation cell skilfully terrorised colleagues into voting the right way.The Australian Labor Party, you probably haven’t noticed, is to hold its 50th national conference in Adelaide over the next three days.It’ll be a stage-managed affair attended by thousands of delegates who will ritually disagree loudly with each other – AUKUS, Gaza and gas taxes come to mind – before voting as they are told by their various factional wranglers.It is, thus, largely a theatrical event designed to ensure Prime Minister Anthony Albanese emerges with the party’s blessing for whatever circumspect path he intends to take to the next election.Bob Hawke with Glenda Bowden, secretary to then-Treasurer and Deputy Prime Minister Jim Cairns at the ALP conference in Terrigal in 1975.Fairfax ArchivesIt most certainly won’t come within whispering distance of the sort of wild theatricality of memorable ALP national conferences of the past.The most abandoned was held at the Florida Hotel in the NSW Central Coast town of Terrigal in February 1975.It was so uninhibited that then-prime minister Gough Whitlam, a man of the classics, might have foreseen it as the beginning of his Fall of Rome, if he’d been thinking straight.Party secretary Bob Hawke spent much of the conference around the pool in tight budgie smugglers. His skin became tanned in the Terrigal sun, and quivered with apparent pleasure as a scantily clad young woman laid a light flogging on him with a cat o’ nine tails at the nearby Old Sydney Town convict settlement mock-up.Back at the Florida, then-deputy prime minister Jim Cairns felt moved to announce to a reporter that he felt “a kind of love” for his principal private secretary, Junie Morosi. Australia was agog.Meanwhile, energy minister Rex Connor sat anxiously in his room, sweating on a call from a Pakistani “financier” Tirath Khemlani about a vast loan Khemlani was supposedly brokering for the Australian government.The money never turned up, and the whole thing collapsed into one of the scandals that ruined the Whitlam government later in the year.At Terrigal, it seemed the summer of love would never end.“We shall go from this conference with our program refreshed and, I believe, with our determination refreshed,” Whitlam declared.He had just returned from an extravagant 15-nation tour of mostly European cities, and hadn’t quite got out of the holiday mood. He wore a loud Hawaiian shirt as he delivered the keynote speech.By the end of the year, Whitlam’s government was gone, dismissed by then-governor-general John Kerr and massively rejected by voters.When Hawke became Labor’s leader, he ensured the national conference was held at Hobart’s Wrest Point Casino. His days were spent listening to delegates passionately debating the party’s platform and devoted his nights to sessions at the blackjack table.He didn’t have to worry too much.In Wrest Point’s suite 1002, leaders of the dominant Right factions from NSW and Victoria, Graham “Richo” Richardson and fellow senator Robert Ray, sat by a well-stocked bar in a fug of Ray’s pipe smoke as a queue of delegates filed through; supplicants required to discuss how they should vote on the party’s platform at the following day’s formal sessions. The results, thus, were satisfactorily settled ahead of time.Numbers man Graham “Richo” Richardson stands guard at the door of Room 1002 in the Wrest Point casino in the 1980s.David BarthoThe 1998 conference was a victory dance – the leader of the Democrats, Cheryl Kernot, had defected to Labor, then in opposition under Kim Beazley.She was the star speaker at a gala dinner at a fancy Hobart venue up the Derwent River. When the text of her speech was leaked, some of the tough old guard refused to board the ferry to the dinner, muttering into their beers that this newcomer was up herself.The text read: “In a way I certainly didn’t expect it to, the earth moved on October the 15th. A fault line opened up at Kirribilli, and now it’s running all the way to the prime minister’s office in Canberra.”Cheryl Kernot with her new boss Kim Beazley after defecting from the Australian Democrats to join the Labor Party. It didn’t end well.Mike BowersAfter Labor minders realised what the media would do with this extraordinary line, Kernot modified it slightly. “In a way I certainly didn’t expect it to, maybe the entire earth didn’t move, but it certainly seemed to on October 15,” she said.Years later, it became known Kernot and Labor’s foreign affairs man, Gareth Evans, had been lovers when she defected. Perhaps the Earth had actually moved.There have been a few lesser moments of theatre at national conferences in the years since.Mark Latham, then-opposition leader, was greeted at the 2004 conference by loudspeakers blasting the INXS rock song New Sensation. It turned out to be premature.In 2011, then-prime minister Julia Gillard praised from the stage former Labor prime ministers dating back to 1940. All but Kevin Rudd, who she’d de-throned the previous year.Was she playing Lady Macbeth, some whispered?And here we are: 2026, where decidedly non-Labor Pauline Hanson is getting all the attention for performances elsewhere.Press gallery journalists – which is to say, those in the political circus business – will have to work hard to dredge drama out of Labor’s proceedings in Adelaide this week if Albanese has his way. He wouldn’t want a Terrible Terrigal on his hands.Cut through the noise of federal politics with news, views and expert analysis. 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