Crikey correspondent-at-large Guy Rundle uncovers a seething, intra-factional skirmish that threatens to tear the ALP apart.
Bill Shorten’s Labor Party is being plunged into chaos at the worst possible moment and in the worst possible way – with a massive factional collapse and realignment in Victoria, Shorten’s power base, and the de facto seat of federal ALP power.
The factional war within and between Left and Right subfactions is being led by the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU) on the left, and the Adem Somyurek-fronted “Mods” (Moderates) faction on the Right. But it has been supercharged by personal rivalries, score-settling, ancient alliances and sheer pique. At its worst, it could draw in Shorten and much of the shadow frontbench, confronting them with a nightmare scenario: sustained intra-factional warfare, which the public loathes, and which they punish at the ballot box.
In a series of articles, Crikey can reveal:
The war has come about with the collapse of the “Stability Pact” — the Victorian-based agreement between Socialist Left and “Labor/Centre Unity” (the Right), which has been in place for around a decade, as an attempt to prevent draining factional turf wars.
The new agreement between groups breaking away from both sides is being presented as a revitalisation of debate within the party, and the creation of a “dynamic and diverse” organisation.
Yet it simply reprises the Stability Pact it replaces, sharing out seats without regard to local branches, or best-suited candidates for particular areas. Locking together very left unions with a faction based on conservative suburban branches, it appears to stifle the prospect of debate, rather than open it up.
And its critics say that talk of new ideas is a thin cover for a purely personal agenda of a tight friendship group in the “Industrial Left”, centred around the erratic state member for Brunswick, Jane Garrett, who has tried and failed to find an alternative, safer seat for the upcoming Victorian election.
“They’re obsessed with getting Jane back into a seat … it’s all based on revenge, exclusion, anger and in-group loyalties,” one highly critical Socialist Left insider told Crikey.
However, rank-and-file defenders of the new agreement say the personal angle is overblown.
“The Andrews government has ridden roughshod over workers rights, look at the trains stuff. They’re terrified of being seen as pro-union.”
The CFMEU is also understood to be angry at the lack of interest in construction workplace deaths, rising in number as part of Melbourne’s building boom. “Industrial Left” supporters Crikey spoke to believe the Stability Pact’s importance at the federal level is stifling political change.
Bill Shorten was dragged into the conflict before Christmas, meeting with leaders of the new pact — apparently, under the impression that he was attending discussions about reunification of the party. “Bill will be pissed off he was dragged into this,” Crikey was told.
Read the proposed secret agreement below, and the response of Stability Pact supporters at Victorian Trades Hall.
In tomorrow’s Crikey, the true story of friends, partners and lovers allegedly driving this fundamental realignment of Labor.
This is the document that will make or break the Labor Party, as it heads towards the “unlosable” election due in 2019 or this year.
(Click to read the whole agreement)
Crikey can reveal the new Centre Unity-Industrial Left agreement between the breakaway faction calling itself the Industrial Left (IL), led by the CFMEU and the Rail, Tram and Bus Union, and part of the Right regrouped as Centre Unity (CU), dominated by the “Mods” faction of Victorian upper-house member Adem Somyurek, and drawing in the Australian Workers’ Union, the Transport Workers Union and others.
The document is circulating among key factional and union players, with the claim that the new arrangement has, or will soon, sign up former Stability Pact heavies such as the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees Association and, the former “Shortcon” factional leadership (now simply the “Cons” and “led” by Richard Marles — Baldrick to Stephen Conroy’s Blackadder).
Opponents say that is bulldust, and that the new agreement has only 32% support heading towards Labor Party federal preselections and administrative body elections — and that the agreements claim to be a renewal of the party disguises its traditional factional aims.
The critics have a point. The agreement states: “too much power is wielded by too few with little regard to policy, proportionality or local democracy … the CU and IL have determined to forge a new path. One based on respect for ideas and values, on policy and solidarity and on creating strong foundations that still allow for a dynamic and diverse organisation …”
Before noting that “[Principles:] 1.Mutual support for State and Federal Preselections … where seats become vacant or new seats created, CU and IL will support each others’ candidates.”
Same old, same old. Right or Left candidates imposed on electorates they may not match, with no regard to local branches. Notions of primary-style preselections, aired in the 2011 Faulkner-Carr Report, are a million miles from this.
Indeed, it gets worse. “It is, however, recognised that the IL … is not adequately represented in state and federal parliamentary or party structures due to the operation of the Stability Agreements. Accordingly the IL, will be supported by CU with respect to the anticipated creation of a new Federal Seat in the North West of Melbourne …”
Several insiders have told Crikey that this seat — to be created in the AEC’s new redistribution later this year — has been reserved by the Industrial Left faction for Jane Garrett, the current state member for Brunswick. Garrett, then a member of the “Industrial Left” faction within the Socialist Left, narrowly held Brunswick in 2014, fending off the Greens with Liberal preferences.
In 2015-16, she attempted to find a new lower-house seat, and then to get on an upper house ticket, failing at both. Her lower house move was blocked by Kim Carr, as an anti-carpetbagging control. It is this affront, critics say, that has more to do with the exit of the Industrial Left from the Socialist Left (a remnant Industrial Left group remains within the SL) determination to broker a new pact than the desire to let a hundred flowers of thought bloom.
The CU-IL group is claiming to be on the way to a majority within the Victorian party, if they can sign up the SDA and the Cons. But the list of participants at the bottom is pure fantasy, and the one part not being circulated is the signatures sheet. No one believes that the Shoppies or the Cons (long cons and short cons?) will sign up. In response to this circulating agreement, Matthew Hilakari, Socialist Left secretary, has circulated his own document, which Crikey has obtained, stating:
(Click to read the whole memo)
The absolute worst prospect for Labor is that the CU-IL group will manage to gain a few more small-fry participants, without persuading the SDA or NUW across — which would leave the two pacts in a stalemate.
The perverse product of this would be that Left and Right groupings with quite different ideas of what society should look like, would be locked together, internally horse-trading policies, while in competition with a mirror Left-Right pact doing the same. Supporters of the Industrial Left say they have nothing to lose from hooking up with the right-wing “Mods” faction; they argue that SL leaders are stifling more radical demands at a time when the public is receptive to unabashedly left-wing arguments on wages, public ownership and other issues.
Of course, many of the criticisms of the Stability Pact (including those made by this correspondent) are correct. In Victoria, the SL has steered social policy into a range of cultural and personal issues, with a mania for control and surveillance — while allowing the Right free run on the economy, which appears to involve selling chunks of Melbourne to China, and giving the bits they don’t want to Apple, for free.
But the groups creating the “Industrial Left” haven’t exactly been brimming with alternative proposals. Hence the belief that what is driving this move is the ambition, solidarity and long history of key players. All of it centred round the bizarre, to outsiders, cult of Jane Garrett.
Read more about the cult of Garrett in Crikey tomorrow.
The late autumn night will glitter with stars, the lights will play from the mantled roof of the Melbourne Town Hall, at the top of the stairs the heavy copper doors will swing open, as the city welcomes its latest leader … Mayor Jane Garrett.
Could it be? That’s the word on the street. For days, since the resignation announcement of Robert Doyle, a whispering campaign has been gathering, suggesting Garrett as a Labor candidate for the byelection scheduled for May — and aired this morning in Garrett’s regular spot on the high-rating ABC Jon Faine morning show on ABC Radio Melbourne.
The sudden push to make Garrett the new lord mayor is being presented as some sort of talent search for the best candidate, fixing on a dynamic Labor figure. In fact, it’s a desperate improvisation, made possible by Robert Doyle’s resignation, and one being spruiked to journalists by spinners from both Garrett’s “Industrial Left” (IL) faction, and the right’s new “Centre Unity/Mods” (CU) faction. But has it come about because the preferred prize — a federal seat lined up for Garrett, as part of the CU-IL agreement, has now become an impossibility?
And what is it about Jane Garrett, a somewhat blemished inner-city politician, that excites such loyalty and passion?
“What is it about Jane Garrett? I don’t know, nobody does,” said one grizzled veteran of Brunswick, a loyalist to the Socialist Left (SL), in Labor’s developing factional wars. “But they [the IL] are obsessed with her.”
By the account of those who have stayed with the SL during this breakup — between the CFMEU, the RTBU and a range of smaller unions on the “Industrial” side, and the might of the SL — much of the reason for the split turns on the denial of a state upper house berth for Garrett in the 2016 preselections.
Garrett, Melbourne-born, an ANU graduate, took on the safe Labor state seat of Brunswick in 2010. It was the last election it could be described as such. Garrett, sometimes spoken of as a future premier — especially by the Labor ANU clique in which she had moved — suffered a bruising campaign in 2014, with a surging Greens party taking her to a narrow victory on Liberal preferences.
One Brunswick lifer says that the campaign nearly did her in. “It wasn’t just exhausting; it’s … well, it’s hard to be rejected by a whole community, and that’s what she was facing in 2018.”
It seemed a sensible move to try and find another seat, but when Garrett announced she would not re-contest Brunswick, a wave of anger greeted. Control of the inner-city was falling to the Greens faster than anywhere in Australia; carpetbagging members would accelerate it. Garrett is said to have tried for the seat of Melton, in Melbourne’s outer west. And by 2016 things were starting to unravel.
Some of it was rotten bad luck. Garrett had a breast cancer diagnosis, part of the reasons she gave for relinquishing a 2018 Brunswick re-run, and in 2016 she was assaulted in Carlton by a disturbed stalker who targeted ALP members (Latham had an alibi). But her greatest disaster was a stunning error of judgement; as emergency services minister, she backed the semi-volunteer Country Fire Authority, in a jurisdiction dispute with professional firefighters, and the United Firefighters Union (UFU).
“Jane should never have been emergency services minister. The dispute with Peter [Marshall, the UFU’s fiery head] got out of hand. It came in the middle of the federal election. Shorten blamed it for losing a seat in Victoria, and hence the election.”
By now, those who believed Garrett to be the great hope of the party were dwindling, but not among the nascent IL sub-faction formed in late 2015. The group had backed SL leader Kim Carr in his improbably successful attempt to ward off toppling by his federal colleagues; but when the IL put up Garrett for the Western Metro upper house region, Carr blocked her candidacy.
“Kim did it for the good of the party,” Mr Brunswick says. “You can’t cut and run on a seat.”
“That’s bullshit,” a source close to the IL’s convenors said, when asked for comment on that view. “Kim did a deal with [other SL sub-faction convenor] Andrew Giles for backing on cabinet posts; that’s why he blocked Jane.”
Sources close to Garrett say she is passionate about the lock that the Stability Pact has placed on preselections and party democracy. “We’ve had a 50+1% rule for a decade, every preselection is mapped out, no one a tiny clique don’t like can get on a committee, so how can you get your ideas through?”
By this point, negotiations for a public deal between the IL and the Moderates right-grouping were well under way – so when Garrett’s upper-house bid was killed it was Mods public ‘face’ Adem Somyurek who trailed a coat for her, telling the ABC:
“The Labor Party can’t afford to lose people like Jane Garrett, they come along once in a generation and I don’t know what the party’s thinking, but she’ll be back.”
Such sentiments are eerily reminiscent of sentiments that SL members say come continually from close supporters of Garrett, a mantra that has been chanted since she was at ANU. Talent-spotted there, by the veteran SL figure John Langmore — Garrett was at the time running with a politically mixed crowd, centred around the son of former NSW premier Nick Greiner — Garrett would later be part of a semi-legendary houseshare with leading labour lawyer Emma Walters and Sharon McGowan (her place was taken in the friendship group by Luba Grigorovitch).
McGowan, a former media chief and chief of staff for Victorian premiers Steve Bracks and John Brumby, and then a consigliere for Eddie McGuire, exited politics (she’s now CEO of Stroke Australia), and her place was taken by Luba Grigorovitch, the young, dynamic head of the very hidebound RTBU.
A couple married into the tribe: Walters, formerly at Slater and Gordon, is hitched with John Setka, Victorian head of the CFMEU, Garrett to James Higgins, a former Slater and Gordon lawyer who handles the account for both the RTBU and the CFMEU. Both Walters and Grigorovitch were said to have sought state seats.

Luba Grigorovitch, Jane Garrett, and Emma Walters
This network now sits at the centre of the new IL grouping, and since late 2016 has had its eye on three Victorian seats: the new seat to be based around Sunbury for Garrett, the northern outer-suburban seat of Calwell for Grigorovitch, and Jagajaga in the in inner northeast for Walters.
Grigorovitch told Crikey she would not be seeking a state or a federal seat in the future.
“They couldn’t get Walter up,” Mr Brunswick said. “Too close to the CFMEU, and Shorten put his foot down about dumping any cabinet members to get the IL a seat [Jagajaga is held by Jenny Macklin].”
Said a source close to Garrett: “the cabal stuff … what are we, the witches of Eastwick? Do people think that men like John Setka and Shaun Reardon [of the CFMEU] could be run like that? It’s the sort of sexism that the Stability Pact entrenches: a few middle-aged men running things.”
Whatever the case, it now looks like Garrett will not be in line for the new federal seat either, through choice or circumstance. But spinners for the IL and CU have denied that Garrett was ever lined up for the seat, or at the centre of the IL breakout.
“Jane came along late to this,” one source close to the IL’s convenors — Mark Gepp and uh, Luba Grigorovitch — told Crikey yesterday. “This was about unions and others who feel that workers issues have been put last by the Andrews government, getting together.”
Fifteen minutes later, a source close to Mods figurehead Adem Somyurek called in with the near-exact same words: “this is not about Jane. Jane is an incredible figure, but this is an arrangement between groups on both sides who’ve been excluded by the ‘Torrens Title’ process of the Stability Pact.”
Both then spruiked the allegedly marginal Garrett as a candidate for lord mayor.
The alleged marginality of Garrett provokes laughter from Mr Brunswick. “It’s all about Jane! When she got knocked off for Western Metro, the CU-IL pact was on like a gong! That was the casus belli for them!”
The mystery deepens. Garrett has racked up a lot of demerits, and Labor would need an absolute A-1 candidate to win the mayoralty in the business-slanted Melbourne local electorate. On Faine’s show this morning her handling of the issue was less than stellar
Faine: What are the pros and cons [of you running for Mayor]?
Garrett: Oh uh, for me personally, you mean?
(Brief silence)
Garrett: Well, uh, for the city, I uh — well the city has its challenges …
Later:
Caller: What are your views on the Victoria Market redevelopment, and the removal of the car park?
Garrett: Well, uh, that’s I mean there are views on both sides, and I’d be saying something about that.
Faine: At the appropriate time? You must have a view?
Garrett: Well look I’ve shopped at the market since I was a baby …
And, baby, you’ve come a long way. But is this it for the long, strange journey of Jane Garrett? And just how much of Labor’s political capital is her faction willing to spend in her advancement?
NEXT: the rise and rise of Adem Somyurek …
On a warm spring Melbourne night in October 2009, the great and the good of the Victorian Labor Party Right gathered at the Dragon Boat on the Yarra, a restaurant in a now demolished brutalist building near the World Trade Centre on Spencer Street bridge.
The crowd came in in dribs and drabs — some numbskull had put the Dragon Boat’s nominal Spencer Street address on the invite, so groupers and shoppies were wandering around the Hoddle Grid for half an hour — and the guest of honour party baron, outgoing state secretary Stephen Newnham, must have looked around nervously. But also with relief.
This was the usual Labor Right deal: a fare-thee-well-good-comrade for a player who’d been knifed after months of bitter attack. Now here he was, encased in concrete, close to a body of water, not an unfamiliar experience in the Labor Right’s history. But it was a Chinese restaurant! A goddamn Chinese restaurant! (It’s always a Chinese restaurant. If you shot the Right onto Mars, they’d find a Chinese restaurant. It’s colonial re-enactment, the White Australia Policy with MSG).
Newnham’s departure was the capper to a vicious year or two in the Victorian Right; and one that set the agenda of the ALP for a decade to come. It would take Victorian Labor to a loss they could have avoided, in 2010, but also help ensure their victory in 2014, and stunning national recovery.
Now, after a decade, the Stability Pact, the product of Labor’s 2008-10 wars, is coming under more pressure than ever before. The sudden plethora of new players — Adem Somyurek, the Moderates, Centre Unity, etc — are all shards coming off that year-long war a decade-back.
Stability Pact loyalists say they’re just another suicidal factional outbreak, each more clueless than the last. The Mods and the Industrial Left say they’re something new, a process of democratisation within the limited processes the party rules offer.
Whatever the view, much of the obsession centres around Somyurek, the Turkish-born MLC, initially elected to Eumemmerring, and later the Metro South East division, a branch-based politician, with a power base around Springvale.
Somyurek is no flabby grouper-hack of the old school. Smart, educated, he favours the Mediterranean style of grey cotton suits and open-necked white shirt, which these days make him look like a Green. But though he has a masters in public policy and is the shiny new Right, he first came to the public’s attention through old Right ways: getting pinged for driving without a licence in 2009, when Labor was drowning in scandals, as outer north and west branches controlled by the Right were being stacked wantonly, and a Labor government had to sack a Labor council in the area (Brimbank), a year before the election
The war had begun a year earlier, in 2008, when Labor Unity, the one big Right faction, had been convulsed by internal conflict, with the core group being split away from, and attacked, by a group centred on the SDA (the Catholic, right-wing Shoppies union), the National Union of Workers (NUW), and state and federal members loyal to David Feeney, then in the pre-absurdist phase of his career. Both called themselves Labor Unity; the pre-split group prevailed, and the SDA/NUW/Feeney group became known as the “Rebel Right”, sometimes “The Taliban”. The latter nickname did double, politically incorrect duty, referring both to the Shoppies’ social conservatism, and to the base of Turkish and Lebanese votes signed up by Feeney’s numbers man, one Adem Somyurek.
There was talk of reunification, at the same time as the “Taliban” explored an arrangement with the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU) and other militantly left unions. But it was only when the NUW started a headbanging pre-election campaign to have the Shorten-aligned Newnham deposed, that Right reunification was abandoned, and Labor Unity concluded a deal with the Socialist Left (SL). Labor Unity became dominated by the Shorten-Conroy alliance, the Shortcons, and the Stability Pact was born.
The NUW split from the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees’ Association (SDA) soon after. But the mainstream pact held and played a huge role in delivering an unlikely state victory in 2014, a key turning point in Labor’s fortunes.
In April 2015, with much fanfare, the Moderates — a handful of MLAs and MLCs — led, or fronted, by Somyurek, split from the SDA, and rejoined Labor Unity, the new so-called superfaction being redubbed Centre Unity, and holding around 65% control of the POSC — the Public Office Selection Committee, which finalises candidacies.
The love-in did not last long. In May 2015, Somyurek was suspended from the ministry after his former chief of staff Dimity Paul accused him of bullying and physical handling in the office. Somyurek claimed that Paul was an SDA loyalist, and that the accusations were payback. A report concluded that Paul’s account was more reliable than Somyurek’s denials, and in July 2015, he resigned from the ministry, hurling accusations of “a fix” at SDA head Michael Donovan, and SDA-aligned deputy premier James Merlino.
Somyurek and the Moderates, having been the great superfactioneers, now plotted war against both Labor Unity and the SDA. Somyurek’s expulsion coincided with a wave of discontent from smaller unions aligned with the Industrial Left (at that time a subfaction inside the SL), about a denial of state cabinet positions, in the 2014 post-victory shakeout. Sources close to Somyurek saying that the Financial Services Union, aligned to the IL, first proposed a revival of the failed 2008-9 deal that had preceded the Stability Pact.
Other potential allies appeared in 2016: Brunswick MLA, and SL member, Jane Garrett, tried and failed to find a new seat for 2018, as she faced Green annihilation. In June 2016, as a minister, she “bizarrely” backed the CFA against the firefighters union, and resigned from state cabinet, mid-federal election. Doubtless the stand was a matter of principle, but it also had the useful effect of positioning Garrett as a champion of suburban values against perception of inner-city militant unionists. In November 2017 she was blocked by Kim Carr for upper-house preselection — and praised by Somyurek as a “once in a generation politician” that Labor could not afford to lose. Relations between Carr and the CFMEU/RTBU/Slater and Gordon personal network had deteriorated to the point where the cross-party deal became possible again.
Things happened fast. In September 2016, Stephen Conroy resigned abruptly as senator, notifying his faction co-leader Bill Shorten by text message while the latter was overseas. Conroy was replaced by Kimberley Kitching, a scandal-ridden Shorten confidante, tied to the Health Services Union (HSU).
The HSU is now mentioned as a partner in the new Centre Unity-Industrial Left alliance. In December, Shorten (and Kitching’s husband, Labor blowfly Andrew Landeryou) met with Somyurek, and CU-aligned plumbers’ union head Earl Setches, to discuss the CU-IL deal. Kitching last Friday was out of the stalls tweeting the praises of Jane Garrett, when the latter made her cunning/wacky/wtf non-denial of rumours about running for lord mayor of Melbourne, on ABC radio.
The meeting marked a new high point for Somyurek, a Victorian suburban ethnic branch retail numbers bloke, who has parlayed himself into the position of a national faction leader, or the appearance thereof. Socialist Left insiders have all dismissed the threat, saying that the SDA and the NUW would never join up — and the new Centre Unity faction would tear itself apart in six months if they did.
There is a mild fear among some of what would happen if he pulled it off. “They wouldn’t stick to the ban on challenging sitting members,” one SL source said. “They wouldn’t be able to help themselves. There’s no way this gang would hold together till ’21 [the next Victorian state preselection]. They’d go for Calwell, Jagajaga, Scullin, the new seat out around Sunbury [all in Melbourne’s north], Bruce [in the South-East] and god knows.”
A more realistic fear is that they will manage to increase their strength from the current estimate of around 33% (of the 100 seat POCS, which hands out seat candidacies) into the 40s, or create loose relationships with the SDA or NUW, with no predictability. That would leave Labor with two stability pacts and therefore none, both tying radical left and conservative right unions to each other. “For the past three years, the stability pact has meant that the Opposition is pretty much run out of the Chairman’s lounge at Canberra airport,” said one supporter. “I can see the objections. But I’ve never seen a deal which had less content to it than this, except for personalities.”
God, is this the Australian dream? Does the improbable journey of Adem Somyurek stand for all of us? One day you’re a public policy wonk in a white David Jones shirt, and the next you’re dictating terms to the next prime minister? Simply by saying you want to? “How did Adem Somyurek get a faction?” one Victorian Trade Hall veteran snorted with laughter down the phone. “Come on! How did Theo Theophanous?! You just stick up your hand!”
Ahhhhh, back through the long Dragon Boat journey, to the Pledge deal of the 1990s, the re-admission of the SDA in 1985, to the “split” itself in the 1950s. Seven biblical years after the Faulkner-Carr report, and a full half-century after the formation of the Socialist Left, long after the Cold War gave the divisions real meaning, Labor has made little progress in creating a genuine citizens party, for a post-manufacturing Australia. The barons come, the barons go. The Right’s Dragon Boat paddles on forever.
Next in the series …
Feel the electricity, Bill: Shorten’s dicey dealings with the new warlords
When, in late 2017, it was revealed in the press that Opposition Leader Bill Shorten had sat down with Adem Somyurek, the leader of Labor’s right-wing Moderates faction, there was widespread dismay and bewilderment.
Sources within the Mods have been claiming that the Shorten sit-down marked the turning point: the moment at which the purported new Centre Unity-Industrial Left (CU-IL) alliance got on the road to becoming the dominant alliance.
That is disputed by supporters of the Stability Pact, but they are angered that Shorten’s involvement has made it possible for the claim to be stated.
“Why would Bill do that?” one stalwart of the Stability Pact said he asked at the time. “He’s supposed to have renounced faction crap in the leadership.”
“He was conned into the meeting,” said another.
The sit-down took place between Shorten, Somyurek, with Shorten’s courtier Andrew Landeryou in attendance, and Plumbers’ Union Victorian head Earl Setches along for the ride.
“I think He thought it was a genuine unity meeting, not something dodged-up,” our inner-city informant Mr Brunswick offered. Others disagreed.
“Conned? Nah, a leader doesn’t go to a meeting if he doesn’t know what it’s for,” said a source close to Victorian Trades Hall. When asked if the “con” of “the Short” might have been perpetrated by those close to him, the reply was “well no one’s been sacked for it. Nah, Bill knew what he was doing.”
Still, what he was doing was risky enough. Labor has spent years dispelling the image of internal instability and infighting — the sole factor that tipped the 2013 election Tony Abbott’s way.
For a decade, the Australian public has been residually tilted towards Labor: Abbott only won because he promised to maintain Labor’s program. Since the breaking of that promise, with the 2014 failed budget, the Coalition has been behind in the polls. Shorten, a creature of the Victorian factions if ever there was one, has managed to slake off that background, only in the last year or so. Meetings with subfaction players throws him right back in it.
But Shorten has no choice. As with any faction-based Labor leader, the actual election, against the actual Coalition, is a distant battle, far in the future. First, last and always is the struggle to maintain party control. Bill Shorten may not be fighting for his life — yet — but he’s fighting to not be fighting for his life.
Stuff got real for Shorten last year, with the sudden resignation of senator Stephen Conroy, and the sudden realisation that David Feeney was dead in the water, from section 44 troubles. Feeney’s factional power was long gone.
Once commanding the respect of the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees Association (SDA) leadership, his blundering performance in the 2016 election – forgetting a house he owned, stuffing up basic policy interviews – had given everyone a chance to bypass a man much loathed. How loathed? Well, his enemies had placed a fake death notice for him in the Herald Sun in 2012, when his “Taliban” alliance had finally been sidelined by the Stability Pact. Feeney’s sidelining made it all the more possible for Adem Somyurek and the Mods Squad to claim leadership of a “rebellious Right” faction.
Small change, but the departure of Conroy was something else. The timing and manner looks suspicious indeed. No one in the party knew of Conroy’s departure from the Senate before he announced it. Acting leader Tanya Plibersek learned of it live on air. Shorten was overseas — by some (likely apocryphal) accounts, out of cell phone range in Canada, so that when he came back into coverage, dozens of messages tumbled instantly into his phone.
That led to suspicions that Conroy’s timing was an ambush, but insiders deny that: “It really was actual family reasons.”
“At some point you keep your family, or your job, not both”.
But they also believe that Conroy assumed he would be able to retain substantial factional power from the “afterlife”.
Nevertheless, Conroy’s departure marked the end of the “Short-Cons”, the leadership group of Labour Unity, based around the Shorten-aligned Australian Workers Union (AWU), and the Conroy-aligned Transport Workers Union (TWU). The “Shortcons” had arisen from the wars within the Victorian Right in 2008-9. Though the Shortcon — “Taliban” division shadowed the lines of the 1955 ALP-DLP split, and thus had some content, nothing could be counted on.
Hence there was dismay but not surprise when Shorten backed/demanded the placing of former Health Services Union (HSU) manager Kimberley Kitching in Stephen Conroy’s vacated Senate spot. A former Melbourne City Councillor, married to Andrew Landeryou, Kitching was a dubious public asset for Labor.
She had been appointed as general manager to the HSU in the wake of the chaos left by Kathy Jackson, with another Right figure, Diana Asmar, as titular head. Despite there being a media celebration of her tenure by friendly figures, the HSU’s condition became worse under her and Asmar’s tenure, with $1.4 million spent on legal fees, in one year alone, part of that defending Kitching and Asmar against multiple claims to the trade union royal commission that they had sat “right-of-entry” tests for union representatives.
Kitching had previously been registered bankrupt after the online gambling venture Landeryou had started — with backing from Melbourne business identity Solomon Lew — had collapsed in 2004. Landeryou had fled for Costa Rica, ahead of an arrest warrant; Kitching sold her then-$2 million house in Parkville (now worth much, much more) to discharge her bankruptcy.
Being associated with Kitching and Landeryou, the chubby Ceacescus of the Victorian Right, is disastrous for Shorten, on the national stage. But faction-wise, he has little choice. He needs to ensure the continuing support of the HSU over which the couple hold sway. Not only has the former Short-Con alliance become an every-faction-man-for-himself affair, but the atomisation is becoming total.
Shorten’s base union, the Victorian branch of the AWU explored, and tentatively signed on for, the new CU-IL alliance in late 2017. Conroy’s base union, the TWU, also signed on — and has shown far less interest in dealing with Conroy’s nominated lieutenant, Corio MP Richard Marles.
Shorten met with Somyurek because, in the words of Socialist Left insider, “Bill got scared”. Beyond the Victorian civil war stands the land of New South Wales, and the figure of Anthony Albanese, who has, in past weeks, been making undoubtable moves to re-assert his media visibility, and define himself against Shorten’s centrism (not getting a left pinkwash, ahead of the Batman byelection). Factional command is fractured and balkanised in Victoria; less so in NSW.
The transfer of the AWU and the TWU to the new CU-IL alliance is effectively the departure of the Right side of the Stability Pact. But without the might of the SL, it remains stuck at 33%. Sources close to the SL leadership believe they’ll remain stuck there.
“They’ll eventually start to peel off. If they can’t get above 33%, then the SL will control the winnable Senate seats. The AWU are already reconsidering.”
Sources close to the AWU deny that.
“No, they’re signed up. They’re not backing out. The SDA will make a decision in the next few weeks. This has to be sorted out by then. The SL has been taking over the Pact, and the party, anyway. A lot of this is about finding a partner for the Industrial Left, otherwise things will get a bit loose.”
“Look this is how it is — it’s been this way for a hundred years. Everyone says [the process] will change, but it never does.”
Indeed. Which is why for Bill Shorten, a meeting with a handful of subfactional warlords and small union leaders is as crucial to eventual victory as the battle at the despatch box and the national stage. Crucial, but fraught with risk. Though hobbled anew by the Barnaby Joyce crisis, the Coalition will throw everything they’ve got at the figures now gathering around Bill Shorten.
Where once it was Stephen Conroy and Kim Carr in the picture, soon it could be Kimberley Kitching, Andrew Landeryou and, from the Left, Jane Garrett. The Coalition would be hoping for a narrow rerun of 2016 on that basis: a squeaked-in victory gained from centrish people swallowing their loathing for Malcolm Turnbull long enough to vote for him.
Labor is betting that the Coalition’s problems are now so grave as to make that a minor matter. They better hope so. Can you feel the electricity, Bill? If you lose this one with the crowd of desperadoes gathered around you, the rank-and-file of your long suffering party will be looking to put a million volts of it through you.
Stay tuned for the final instalment in this series
Practically the first issue I ever read of the magazine Australian Left Review in the 1980s had an article in it by Socialist Left (SL) leader Lindsay Tanner, arguing for the abolition of the factional system — and the next issue had a reply by Robert Ray, behemoth of the Right, defending it, and arguing that, in any case, there was nothing you could do about them. The Australian Left Review is long gone from the public stage, as are Tanner and Ray. The factions march on.
State by state, the constellations vary. Victoria matters at the moment because the Stability Pact, the decade-long deal that its two major groupings managed to maintain, allowed an enormous amount of political energy to be directed outwards, towards the actual enemy: Labor New South W-, sorry, the Coalition.
That deal is now under threat, a product of SL leader Kim Carr’s alleged exclusion of one distinct group — what I’ll call the Brunswick Network, centred around departing state MLA Jane Garrett — from state and federal seats they believe they deserved. The Brunswick Network now calls itself the Industrial Left (IL), though some of them were part of a subfaction of that name, within the SL. Their detractors say they are making demands for representation far outside their numbers.
The simpler and easier way to talk about it, would be to call it the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU) (Vic) Left, since that outfit is its largest component. But multiple sources from every part of this stoush have identified the motive energy and centre of the group as coming from a friend-and-partnership network centred on Garrett, drawing in the CFMEU (Vic), the Rail, Tram and Bus Union (RTBU), former Slater and Gordon partners from the industrial side.
On the side of the Right, it has sprung from a small network around the former SDA-aligned suburban branch baron Adem Somyurek. Removed from the Dan Andrews’ Victorian Labor ministry for alleged workplace bullying — the accusations came after Somyurek’s split with the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees’ Association (SDA), and amounted to some inappropriate physical handling of a staffer, no more — Somyurek had every motive to take his small subfaction to war. And no alternative in realpolitik terms.
Starting with a couple of fellow SDA renegades (who would deny that the media-savvy Somyurek is the boss of them) and a takeover of three state seats hitherto controlled by the now-declining “Cons” around Stephen Conroy, Somyurek has now drawn in the unions that formed the core of Labour Unity (LU): the Shorten-aligned Australian Workers’ Union, and Conroy-aligned Transport Workers’ Union (TWU).
To build a link to the Brunswick Network (now styled the Industrial Left, or IL), Somyurek has been publicly flattering Jane Garrett to a degree that, had it a soundtrack, would be provided by Handel’s The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba. “He’s been laying it on all the way through 2017,” I said to one insider observer, who laughed and said “longer, much longer than that, I’d bet. Adem is very good at spotting talent.” Also mutual need, it would seem. The flattery has increased as Garrett’s political skills have become less apparent by the day.
The presence of relatively rational outfits like the AWU and TWU, would probably stabilise the arrangement. One would usually add the CFMEU (Vic) to the “rational” designation, but many people sympathetic to them believe they have lost their head in this process, misapplying notions of solidarity and ‘touch one, touch all’, to supporting whatever wacky decision the most erratic member of the crew makes next.
But beyond that, there is the Brunswick Network, plus Somyurek’s old-skool suburban Sopranos Moderates (aka Moda), and the Health Services Union network with Kimberley Kitching and Andrew Landeryou attached, Bill Shorten’s wetwork crew. It may be a factional realignment; but it also looks like a caper movie.
Factional politics has always relied to a degree on the ability of driven individuals to create a network from scratch (or take over a franchise). What’s distinctive about this one is the sheer number of players who are total chancers. The ultimate shakeout now depends on the SDA, which is currently remaining aloof. Were it to remain so, Victorian Labor would have three major camps again: the SL, with a few remnant associates in a shrunken pact; the CU-IL alliance; and the SDA (and NUW, another auld Groupere union standing apart). This would stand at the base of the national Labor Party overall.
Whatever its participants say, that is a recipe for continued guerrilla warfare, over half-a-dozen federal seats, the No. 1 and No. 2 Senate spots, and various committee positions. Labor has had that before, and personalities have played a big role. But for some grizzled veterans, this is something new: a factional war, where the uproar at the centre is all about personalities, some of them assessed as “non-stable”.
“I have never seen a fight like this,” one SL loyalist said, putting his head in hands at the bar of the Lincoln Hotel in Carlton, where back in the day, stalwarts from the plumbers’ union, and the Builders Labourers Federation (BLF), would argue the merits of the Chinese and Albanian roads to socialism (now, it does a lovely gluten-free sausage; then, it had pies that were like sleeping bags filled with wet lint. Such days we have seen.) “One that’s actually about nothing!”
Factional wars have been going in the ALP since around 1920 (actually, probably about 1893, but let’s keep it recent). The party was an amalgam of “industrial groups”, and Catholic-aligned forces. By the ’20s, after the Bolshevik revolution, the industrial groups were advocating full socialism. For the Catholics, this was sin (literally, as set out by Pope Leo XIII); putting the state in the place of God. The alliance between the ALP’s left and Communist-headed unions in the ’50s led to the Split where some Catholic groups, though not all, departed the party for a generation. The Right split — between the ShortCons and the SDA — shadows those lines of division.
On the other side, the Socialist Left faction had been formed in Victoria in 1970, when the federal ALP had intervened to quash the branch’s left-wing policies. But in 1991, when Paul Keating pushed through a program of state asset privatisation — including the Commonwealth Bank — the SL split, opponents of the move calling themselves “The Pledge”. Based around hard-left industrial unions, the Pledge/SL split essentially followed a division between Marxists (most of them Maoists), and Social Democrats.
The “Maoist” designation may seem odd now, but with its emphasis on collective advancement (rather than the emerging left emphasis on “rights”), it was crucial to union and left thinking — and to taking building workers from being a shunned lumpenproletariat, excluded from a “trade” union-based movement, to being the highest-paid and best-conditioned construction workers in the world.
But the Maoist conception — with its focus on Unity, the “One” — was opposed to much of the new left strands: environmentalism, especially. That was partly responsible for the key event of the ’90s: a deal between Pledge and Labour Unity, against the Socialist Left. Both sides believed in a growth economy, heavy old-skool development, and the rest. It was an attitude that was at the base, for example, of the Tasmanian government of Jim Bacon, the Maoist-BLF organiser turned premier. Bacon’s government — no favourite of Greens, to put it mildly — was the last real programmatic government Australia has had (Rudd counts as a would-be programmatic government).
Bacon’s aim was to modernise Tasmania, use its “weakest link” in the Commonwealth chain as an advantage, and he bloody well succeeded. The place would be two B&Bs and an apple farm without that.
The Pledge-LU deal fell apart; but its legacy was the idea that a hard left — opportunistic right deal is the rule not the exception. In 2008-9, the CFMEU and SDA attempted to do a deal; the Stability Pact arose as a response to this, the centre against the edges. That may have served well, but the problem is that it has created a dissolution of even the minimal remnant of real politics, and political contestation. Into that vacuum has rushed personality, and the types of personalities rushing in are those formed in an era when much old left-right politics has been submerged, and individuality and image has become paramount.
This has been disastrous for the ALP, because it has turned the party into an incubator for delusional crackpots. The wider public got a glimpse of this with the jaw-dropping Four Corners episode featuring disgraced HSU secretary Kathy Jackson and her partner, Fair Work Commission vice-president Michael Lawler. What sort of fools, people wondered, showed their holiday videos, when one had been accused of rorting and theft on a grand scale? How did these two very average people sustain such a disturbingly grandiose vision of themselves?
The answer is that that such distorted self-perception is now not unusual in whole parts of the party. It’s the product, initially of the wave who came in, in the ’80s, as young people under Hawke/Keating, when Labor was forceful, dynamic, sexy, technocratic and elitist, and media-oriented. Who wouldn’t want that life? That generation may well have had some interest in bettering workers’ conditions; they had none in creating a mass party, or a democratic one. Their follies and falls have been of that type: machine men and women who got too clever by half.
But some of the generation who came after that are even worse. Selected early for their media-friendly style and demeanour, mentored, proteged and duchessed, they have had no defence against the disease of a media era, corrosive narcissism.
Forming networks, they have mirrored each other’s self-regard, and drawn less self-obsessed people along with them. The party’s internal defences and processes have become so weak as to lack all immunity to such. The parasite takes over the host and works its limbs, and that is something of what one is seeing now.
It is a tragedy for the party, but also for the people concerned, because they inevitably burn out. Their afterlife then becomes one running off the energy of bitterness, which is all that remains. Iago takes the stage, and they become not what they are. The examples, well … you know who they are. Political figures subject to a living deathwatch.
Could such an out-of-control process cost Labor the next election? Of course it could. If it does, then the consequences are extraordinary. If Labor can win this election, and hold for two terms, then it will have dominated the post-Howard era, and the Abbott/Turnbull period will register as an interregnum.
But if it can somehow conspire to lose to Malcolm Turnbull, or whoever, then we’re screwed. Somehow, eventually the pet-shop puppy-basket clusterfuck that is the Coalition will hit on a winning formula of centre-right social progressivism, and corporate-favouring capitalism, and at that point it will wipe away what remains of a social-democratic industrial framework.
It will preside over a nation creating a new type of Australian: with the same expectations of atomised, individual work existence as many Americans have, with little notion of an enabling state, dominated by the classical liberal conception that the state is inherently parasitic. Perhaps such a disaster would produce a revival of real left politics. But perhaps it would be the end of an Australia many off us hold dear.
In his ALR essay, Robert Ray argued that empyrean talk of abolishing factions was almost always a way of hiding the advantages one had gained from them; something the young firebrand Lindsay Tanner might have rejected, but to which the ageing fund manager of the same name might be more sympathetic. It may be true enough. Mass parties will, must, have factions.
In an era when the politics that formed them has collapsed, those “factions” will become personal/geographic/ethnic groupuscules. Perhaps one answer for Labor is not the fantasy of a mass citizen party in a post-social era — with the nightmare prospect that branch-level primaries for candidate selection would make the micro-factional wars ceaseless, chaotic and draining — but a process whereby leaders of stable factions rebuild a dynamic process of open debate, ideas production and policy development at the centre of the party, while the factions persist.
Such a turn would recognise past successes of this approach. The Hawke-Keating years are held up as the triumph of non-intellectual pragmatism. In fact, they were prepared for from the left, by the intense work of Laurie Carmichael and others, who came from Communist traditions, and had the ability to take the party (and movement’s) given politics and reconstruct them for a new era. Much of that was one-dimensional and misguided*, but it was less so than no such process would have been.
The paradox, of course, is that it took commanding people to do it, and their commitment to such had been driven by the left-right battle of the century, including World War II. Kevin Rudd had the desire to revive that; but he was, to a degree, an early victim of the media-image culture he sought to pull the party out of. There are ideas floating around Labor; but they come from the outside, from the Fabians, the Lowy, the Australia Institute. They are picked up, piecemeal, as tactical feints.
The party that once produced Labor Essays year on year, where social democrats, Marxists — in and out of the party — debated and proposed, is a distant memory. The return of an ideas process to the centre — but, ah, who would do it? — would, in turn, create a process and a focus that would be a place to challenge factional nihilism from (there’s a lot of it about; one has been trying to convince the Greens to produce a volume of Greens Essays for several years now. It appears no closer).
At some point, all of this stuff turns on a party, and it becomes subject to a “Hillary” effect: footsoldiers are asked to swallow so much entitlement, privilege and arrogance in the name of a less-worse option that, at some point, the body-politic simply upchucks in refusal. That happened to Labor in Northcote, and as goes Northcote so may go much of the nation.
One of the key factors in the rise of the Greens has been that, for all one’s frustration with sections of them, they can still become a vessel for the receipt of one’s total political energy when the crunch comes, without feeling, as you do with the ALP, that you’ve woken up alone in a strange motel with your wallet missing. You would have hoped that the sensible factional leaders could have excluded the worst elements from within their own groupings.
Instead, there seems a positive effort to put the most venal, discredited and erratic people at the centre of the action — people it is simply impossible to support. That is what has changed in the last 100 years. What once produced discipline is now creating its opposite.
It’s clear that Labor is hoping to eke out a 2019 (or 2018) win despite the roiling chaos going on beneath the leadership. Those who grit their teeth and work for it will do so in the rueful knowledge that one must fight for victory, even if the only thing that would make genuine renewal possible would be another defeat. We can’t go on, we go on, and so it goes and so it goes.
*(as we argued in Arena; 30 years later, the Marxist left are catching up to our critique of the time)
78 thoughts on “Red brotherhood at war!”
Come on Crikey – shitting in your own nest?
Huh? You think we’re all Labor hacks here, desperately holding the party line against any external critique? I think you may have Crikey mixed up with Vex News.
Thanks for the insight. We’re bound to hear all sorts of drivel from the MSM about this so it’s good you have published first. The ALP have a long way to go before they can claim to be democratic.
The MSM will dive on this like seagulls on a crumb, grateful to remove Cousin Jethro from the spotlight now there’s some actual news to report.
Good grief! Not sure what’s worse. The sheer insanity of the ALP deciding that now is the perfect time for a factional shit fight.
Or the hamsters in the Crikey bunker resurrecting this god awful PoC long form, multi-part article format.
It truly sucks. 🙁
I like the article series idea. Many subjects deserve it.
Agree on both points – typical suicidal Labor and this appalling device crashing format.
What is PoC?
What is PoC?
PoC (Piece of Crap)
It is for this reason that I quit the ALP in the eighties.
An unknown union heavyweight would be imposed upon our branch and we would have to work to support his election.
Never saw him before at any branch meeting or anywhere else for that matter. He never door-knocked like we did. He never raised any funds with us. We never really met him prior to his turning up nor did we have any idea about his character nor his personal politics. It was all back room deals, baby.
And some commentators here blame Crikey for shining light upon the factional sausage factory?
What shining of light?
Know you, of a party that is otherwise (beyond the fact that the ALP shits outdoors)?
No, not the Greens – they’re worse And secretive as balls.
Nope, you are right, all parties are faction riven. Some are worse than others, tho. In any case, this insider shit should be published each and every time it is discovered.
PS: Please, the ALP hardly “shits outdoors”. It does generally leak against itself as part of the faction wars a lot more. Though this Lib rag-tag mob is giving it a run for its money.
A view that’s totally not informed by bitterness I’m sure, but do some work for the Greens, THEN tell me I’m wrong
Hi Lykurgus. You apparently think that I either work for them, or in some way denying that factionalism doesn’t happen in the Greens. If so, you couldn’t be more wrong.
That said, your insistence on some sort of moral equivalency is a strange one. This isn’t a competition about which party is more faction rivin. This is a sad statement to where Australian politics now stands. I remember a better day where people stood for something. There was never a fantasy period where factions never existed, but there was a day when people believed in something. That the Greens also have factions is besides the point. That factions are now epidemic is the primary point. The Batman by election is neither here nor there.
I think that anything such as this published by Green Party supporters which is much less than honest about their own internal brawling and lack of democracy should just be considered electioneering. More Labor bad, hence Greens good propaganda in other words. The factional squabbles in Victoria are nothing new and certainly don’t surprise anyone either inside that state or outside.
And we shouldn’t know about this because … why?
I’m not sure it counts as propaganda if it’s factual.
Let me guess – Crikey didn’t want to fill a story-shaped hole with a giant Sudoku or a cat-in-a-tree “awwww” moment because they thought that would be cheating.
I mean, come on – we hear the impending-factional-collapse story every 2-3yrs, and nothing more dramatic than a reshuffle ever comes of it. Which never surprises anybody who lacks a MEAA card, because the ALP has all its brawls in public.
Remember when the Shoppies were totally gonna walk out if gay marriage became ALP policy? It became policy; Shoppies didn’t walk.
Yeah, that Joe de Bastard who sold out his members. That scumbag who’s virulent anti Gay position may have been good old Homophobia based on his Catholicism, but his damnable undermining of his workers pay and conditions places him at the bottom of the barrel IMO. This was the person who also supported Julias’ ascendancy, where she shed a lifelong support of Gay rights including marriage to get the Throne. It was however ok for her unmarried “partnership” to be thrust upon us all.
Isn’t Guy’s revelation just another symptom of what many of Crikey subscribers have focussed upon since at least Abbott’s dismissal and his replacement, the far more dangerous Malcolm Turnbull?
It is Australian parliamentary democracy under attack.
And who is responsible? Well, choose which ever slice of the pie best fits your individual circumstance. Are you a factional warlord, or an alienated worker. An inept public servant who doesn’t give a shit. A grasping developer mogul. A ‘shudder’ politician who’s ego or aspiration is sans any commitment whatsoever in actually serving their electorate. Or; a simple, uncomplicated member of the public who begrudges having to both inform themselves about governance and vote once every three or four years.
The world around and within our nation is preparing for war . . . again. And it is the political and corporate classes that will determine if, and when, the slaughter begins. An informed electorate can address and forestall. But to do so, must actively engage, voice our will.
There is a need to reinstate parliamentary accountability, transparency and respect of and to the electorate. There is a need to smite right and left; corporate or union; black or white; christian or muslim; gay or straight. We are either one . . . or we are nothing.
Of course it is – it sells papers, it gets names on TV, faces on radio, makes subscribers feel that they’re getting something for their hard-earned, and makes the players (the reps, the party staffers, the press-packers, the dancing bears or however the fuck else they choose to self-identify these days) feel that they’re making a valuable contribution to their species.
And you know full f*ckin’ well that not a single f*ckin’ one of them – not the members, not the ex-members, not the party lifers, not the MEAA hacks, not the talking heads, not the not-MEAA-but-secretly-wish-they-were hacks, none of them – is talking to US.
If this circus procession is talking to ANYONE other than themselves, it’s the owner of whatever thigh they’re trying to grab under the table at this or that correspondents dinner. While they bid on auction lots like a night at an unlicensed strip-joint or a plastic-surgery booking for the missus (“Spice Up Your Wife”) while gently crunching their breakfast ortalans.
Unless they took a phone call from the National Council of Civil Liberties in their school days – then it’s a ham steak and dinner roll in the OTHER room, yelling at clouds between gulps of cheap plonk that they learned to pass in a direction that they now forget, and hoping that they’re being loud enough for passers-by to realise that they didn’t just die of anaphylactic shock.
There was a time when Labour really believed its future was to be a (US) Democrat style party, embracing individualism, capitalism, even trickle down economics. This included indulging Howard’s union bashing crusade.
If I wanted to nominate one single cause of the deteriorating plight of the average worker, it would be the loss of genuine and compassionate union representation.
If Labour really wants to redefine itself, instead of considering (and fighting) the unions as just another factional group, work on improving their status and role in modern working Australia.
Worldwide there seems to be shift to the left, mainly caused by wealth disparity, and deception of big business and their political cronies.
But the solution is not about simply restoring union power, but a functional makeover. Actually believe McManus can deliver this, seems less the career politician, although so don’t want to be proven wrong about that.
As Nudie notes, the exodus of local party members in the 80s was a direct result of the poisons lurking in the muck in the bowels of the Black Lubyanka of SussexSt hatching out when the Mogul’s cur won in 1983.
Having transposed cause & effect, possibly through stupidity but more likely due to the Baldwin Bashing mentality, they thought that disgust with Frazer meant enthusiasm for a sclerotic party which was already well overdue for demolition.
Of course, it is pure coincidence that first the Dems then the Greens evolved to fill the vacant space in democracy.
Crikey…you are a bunch of bastards! ANYTHING to deny Labor at the next election. How on doG’s earth you all think the Talcum lot will be superior to Bill Shorten and Labor is totally beyond me! Haven’t they done enough damage for you yet?
Get it through your scerotic brains…only the coalition or labor can form government…NOT THE BLOODY GREENS or any other less than 10% crowd.
Those of you who think this article is okay, at this time, just make me want to throw up!!!!!
CML, if you want to throw up, then throw up. It won’t change the facts – like that cretin Feeney and his stupid child-like lies about how the dog ate his homework. Surely you are not defending this idiocy in the ALP?
What is the point of Labor gaining government if they also reject transparency, accountability and defecate on the electorate? Far better the backroom boys and their ‘minders’ have a mirror whacked right in front of their eyes. Charlie’s right.
Feeney’s gone…full stop.
Are you suggesting that the LN/P (and others) have no ‘cretins’ in the parliament? And what are the others doing to rid us of their idiots? NOTHING!
Perhaps other news organisations can take this and run with it. Chris Kenny would love this one, ‘Screaming Red Brotherhood’. I don’t know, if you can’t have Royal Commission underway, your stolen document leak gets you sued for making up half your story and you have to apologise a week later, then a Five part in depth discussion into those reds under the bed in inner city Melbourne, (5 parts, must be serious) telling us what’s been happening with Jane and her friends since uni should get us the moral panic we so thoroughly deserve. As for the Greens for me contempt is on a good day.
CML this is just reporting.
Even if Crikey was influential beyond a minority of politically engaged readers, reporting on this would hardly make any difference to the election.
This isn’t conspiracy, it’s just good bread and butter reporting, what I subscribe to Crikey for, not the increasing dross of ID politics and ‘best ofs’ (the best of political turncoats being the last irrelevant example).
It’s not as if Crikey hasn’t reported on Greens factional brawls.
Having stimulated such passionate responses, tells me that this reporting is probably on the money. Personally, it shows the gaps in my knowledge about these types of influences more broadly and I genuinely would like to understand more… the list of questions it’s raising is getting longer when I consider linkages, influences, accountability and the annual reporting to their members. I do wonder what the minimal wage earners would think of their c1.5% fees going into these types of efforts, as against staying in their pay packets. Maybe it’s my naivety.
CML, I remember now that you are a South Australian voter and are facing a state election where each of the major parties is in desperation because a third party might just come up under their collective necks and snatch the keys of office from them – either one of them. This is a smirkingly delicious scenario for an ex-party local branch member of one of those parties. Suck it up.
Charlie…the latest polling in SA shows that Xenophony is now on around 16.5%. Good…can’t go down quick enough for me.
Or do you want a situation like Germany where is has taken months to even form a ‘coalition’ government, and the pundits are now saying the various parties are in such conflict that nothing will get done.
We are talking about running a country/state here…not some local community sports club!!
CML – last time I looked it wasn’t Crikey’s job to promote a particular political party. If there is a bad smell, it needs to be reported. Labor, the Greens or the conservatives need to clean up their house. It is silly attacking the press for reporting it.
Well…if it isn’t Crikey’s job to promote a particular political party, why do we get the Greens shoved down our necks at every opportunity?
I REPEAT…the bloody Greens cannot EVER form government…so why aren’t we having a discussion about the pros and cons of the ONLY two parties who can do so?????
Not a biased, fake news diatribe, which even the author states is mostly rumour.
NOT GOOD ENOUGH!!
Mmmm…., yummy Kool-Aid.
CML – could you post that arcane bit of our Constitution wot sez only TWO parties can form government?
If only we had known!
AR…I’m talking about the REALITY of Oz politics as of today…and for the foreseeable future.
Anyone with half a brain knows that a party with less than 10% of the national vote is not going to form government anytime soon.
Constitutional issues do not come into it…as you well know!
In recent history ALP has delivered good policy only when under pressure from Greens. They also depend on Greens preferences in many seats. Primary vote not going up. Working together only real prospect for urgently required change especially in environment policy. This is reality.