Who would have thought? A deal carrying Bill Shorten through his first national conference as leader, even if there was a scattering of ritual booing first?

Anyone who has ever attended an ALP conference in the past quarter century: that's who would have thought.

Backroom deals are the currency of such events. Oh, there's the occasional shrieking and shedding of tears first, usually from the Left, often enough about asylum seekers or gay marriage or, in the old days, uranium.

But the party ends up supporting the leader, because that's what a national conference is: a dress rehearsal for an election campaign. If booing is going to come from within, better to get it out of the system at a national conference than at a campaign launch.

Old stagers remember when it was an art form.

Out on the floor someone from the Left would be weeping about the Leader's wish to allow uranium mining or some such. Upstairs, out of sight, Richo and Robert Ray would be holding court like a pair of Dons in a suite at Hobart's Wrest Point Casino, because that's where the conference was held for years, everyone safely corralled in a single hotel.

Factional leaders and lieutenants filed in to take their instructions, implied threats hanging. Downstairs, Hawkie knew he needed merely to wait until the caterwauling died down and he'd get his way.

Wrest Point has been nothing but a memory since 2000 and Richo and Ray have departed the backrooms. But the deal for the leader remains, because it must.

The party even rallied around Mark Latham at the 2004 conference, thanks in large part to the rallying skills of his deputy, Simon Crean, the presence of the Great Gough, desperate wishful thinking and the tradition that the leader must be supported.

Latham stared down furious Labor for Refugees, knowing deal-makers had wangled support for what seemed at the time to be his tough stance on asylum seekers. By the time it was over, all sorts of people who should have known better imagined Latham could become prime minister.

The latest national conference, everyone says, is a test of Bill Shorten's leadership. Why, he'd bravely gone out on a limb days ago to reverse Labor policy on turning back asylum boats. It was a risk.

It wasn't; not really. A deal has apparently guaranteed the numbers – even if it is a deal that delivers the numbers of the CFMEU, arch enemy of Shorten's old union, the AWU. Unions have always been top deal-makers, as Shorten knows, and the CFMEU loves to be owed.

There would be a little booing, naturally, offering an authentic edge to the test-of-leadership thing, and within a day Shorten would prevail.

The ritual of the ALP national conference: observed yet again.

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