‘You're a joke! You're an absolute joke!’ New South Wales Treasurer Michael Costa told delegates at the state Labor Party conference on 3 May 2008. He ‘grinned and yelled at the crowd, and shook his fist in the air’ in a ‘Mussolini-like flurry’. The conference then voted 702 to 107 to oppose his plans to sell off the New South Wales electricity industry.

This scene, and Costa's transformation from a young radical into a champion of neoliberalism, tells us a lot about the Australian Labor Party today.

Michael Costa was born in Newcastle in 1956, the son of Greek-Cypriot migrants who were manual workers. His dad was a steelworker, then a railway guard; his mum was a process worker. Young Michael was politicised in the mid 1970s, in the context of intense conflicts, class confrontations and the dismissal of the Whitlam government. The level of strike action had peaked earlier in the decade, but remained high. Costa was embroiled in left wing politics from a young age. While still at high school he joined the Socialist Labour League (SLL), a Trotskyist organisation that advocated general strikes as the key to social change. He also became a member of the ALP. Later Costa switched his allegiance from the SLL to the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), a different Trotskyist organisation, with a more flexible political outlook.

Costa was dynamic, aggressive and bright. While a student at Wollongong University, he spent most of his time doing politics.