You rocked up at 9am on Saturday to watch delegates register, and wondered how you could be alive.

The parliamentary leader would go on about the evil Tory empire, and then, just when they had the media's attention, the factions would hijack the conference with a brain-dead internal party rules debate.

It would go on forever. These useless debates were an excuse for the factions to flex their muscles, but the navel gazing kept Labor out of power.

Bryan Green's state ALP will hold its annual conference at Country Club Tasmania on Saturday, with maybe a rules debate to gloss over the party's second worst ever electoral defeat. Labor polled 28.85 per cent on primary vote at the February 1992 state election, which was its worst result since 1906.

Last March it polled 27.35 per cent. Who would want the job of writing Lara Giddings's election report? Losing three House of Reps seats last September hasn't helped.

The best ever ALP conference was a passionate outbreak of factional warfare at Burnie's Hellyer College in 1981. Furious Hydro union delegates ripped into premier Doug Lowe and told him that his government was about as popular as a pack of rats under a house.

The conference forced the Lowe government to hold a referendum into Tasmania's power needs. Unions forced the caucus to dump the premier four months later.

Tasmania has been a cradle of Labor politics. The great factional split of 1955 took place at a national conference held in Hobart, which helped to keep Labor in the wilderness for 23 years, until the Whitlam government.

In Tasmania the ideological schism was tribal, and lingered in Labor's dark alley ways until Jim Bacon's election in 1998.

The factional divide forced two inglorious interregnums, where an unworkable Tasmanian branch was taken over by the party's national executive. Big right-wing-led unions were denied membership.

The left's hatred of the Catholic right, along with Brian Harradine, almost cost Gough Whitlam the national leadership.

The hatred split the Tasmanian trade union movement into separate union organisations: The TTLC and TTUC. One met at the union headquarters at Carolside in Hobart's Newtown and the other met down the road at the North Hobart offices of the Electrical Trades Union and AWU. It took Bob Hawke's legendary charm to fix it.

For years Paul Lennon was ironically head of the right-wing Tasmanian Trades and Labor Council but was banned by the left from being an ALP member.

Once again, as PM, Bob Hawke intervened and Mr Lennon gained party membership.

It paved the way for the Lennon-Jim Bacon team - a militant left-wing union official, teaming up with an ultra right-wing Catholic union official.

This unshakeable duo showed warring Labor conference delegates that they could go on hating each other but still unite occasionally to fight the Tories.

On Saturday, all this history will background the reconvening of a defeated army; a time for retribution and dreams of better days. They should note that the Liberals have waited almost 20 years for majority government.

In 1986 Robin Gray's majority Liberal government was re- elected in a second landslide, with a government teaming with big names. Three years later this magnificent machine lost its majority and lost government. It won back majority government in 1992 but was so faction-ridden it lost its majority again.

In 1998 the battle hardened Labor factions under the Bacon- Lennon leadership won a majority and subsequently cobbled together a regime that would endure for 16 years.

All they have to do now is prove they can rise again, without the Greens.