re: labour's next leader-kim beasley?.
Crean has until June : report February 23, 2003
OPPOSITION Leader Simon Crean has until June to shape up or ship out, a newspaper has reported.
And despite uneasiness about a return to the past, his most likely successor would be former leader, Kim Beazley, the report said.
Political correspondent Kerry-Anne Walsh said the paper's straw poll of Labor Caucus suggested even his strongest critics were willing to give Mr Crean another "few" months to lift his stocks in the electorate.
"One Labor MP said the lack of an alternative would not stop the party dumping Mr Crean, raising the spectre of a similar leadership revolving door that bedevilled the Liberals in the 1990s before the Prime Minister, John Howard, again took the reigns in 1995," she wrotein the Sun-Herald.
There was Caucus disquiet about Mr Crean's inability to puncture Mr Howard's supremacy. "Even the loosely grouped subterranean ABC group, "Anyone But Crean" - membership of which no one will admit to - acknowledged there is nobody ready to take Mr Crean's place."
The Sun-Herald said the ABC group numbering fewer than a dozen within and outside the parliamentary party - were members of Mr Crean's right-wing faction, some Victorians and unionists furious at him for diluting union power within party reforms.
It said Queensland MP Con Sciacca and NSW's Leo McLeay had been pointed to as ABC ringleaders and as the spearhead of the "Bring Kim Back" fan club.
