Misha Zelinsky could be Labor’s secret weapon at next federal election

If Labor wins the coming federal election, it may in large part be due to a talented Wollongong man who is unlikely to be preselected by the party he serves, writes Joe Hildebrand.

It is now almost certain – based on every shred of evidence available – that Labor will form the next government of Australia.

The more important issue is what type of government it will be.

The battle for that answer is currently being fought in Wollongong, where a precociously talented young man is taking on the presumptive heir for the prize blue-collar seat of Cunningham.

On face value it looks like a standard preselection stoush but, as always in the ALP, behind the gentle taps of the sparring match is a seismic struggle between left and right, left and left, right and right, and — as one senior powerbroker metaphysically opined — good and evil itself.

Alison Byrnes-Scully and Misha Zelinsky.

The favourite to win preselection — and thus a virtual certainty to become the next federal MP — is Alison Byrnes-Scully, a staffer to the retiring sitting member Sharon Bird and the wife of local state MP Paul Scully.

She is popular in the branches and plugged in to the local community and has a reputation for delivering to constituents who approach her boss for help. There is no suggestion she wouldn’t be a perfectly capable local member.

The challenger is also a local boy, a third-generation son of Wollongong whose grandfather arrived from Russia and worked in the steel mills, whose father became an engineer and who himself is now Assistant National Secretary for the Australian Workers Union — the foundational union of Labor itself.

He was born and went to school there, played footy and went to university there, and still lives in the heart of Wollongong.

But Misha Zelinsky is also something else. Or, to be more precise, many other things.

Australian Workers’ Union assistant national secretary Misha Zelinsky. Picture: Supplied

He was a criminal defence lawyer for the Aboriginal Legal Service, he has a Masters of Public Administration from the London School of Economics, he won the Fulbright scholarship for US-Australia Alliance Studies and edited the latter-day Labor Bible “The Write Stuff” — a call to arms for the Labor Right to seize the policy agenda from the loony left.

He writes serious clear-eyed pieces on foreign policy, warning of the threat of China, is passionately pro-West and anti-socialist, and perhaps more than anything is devoted to giving working-class Australians the best opportunities for advancement any first world nation can offer.

And just as importantly, he is also secretary of the ALP’s National Policy Forum which created the very platform upon which Labor Leader Anthony Albanese will likely be elected Prime Minister in just a few months’ time.

Labor leader Anthony at Dulwich Hill. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Jeremy Piper

Or – if we’re going to be serious – the slimmed-down, pro-aspiration and anti-woke platform that will save Albanese from losing, as Bill Shorten did in the shock result of 2019.

If Albo wins, as seems all but inevitable now, it will be in no small part thanks to Zelinsky’s work. Not bad for a bloke you’ve never heard of who only turned 38 last Thursday.

Little wonder that Zelinsky has supporters in the Party ranging from National President Wayne Swan to elder statesman Kim Beazley – who many consider to be the last great Labor leader – as well as the most powerful right-wing unions and key parliamentary figures.

Many see him as a future cabinet minister and yet as it stands he can’t even get in the door of the building. So why?

A common trope is his co-authorship of a dumb e-book from a decade ago which was supposedly an “arsehole’s” guide to getting dumped.

While I confess to not having read this major literary tome – in common with almost everyone in Australia – the most extreme extracts seem simply juvenile and unfunny.

As the now mortified Zelinsky lamented recently: “As a comedian, I make a great public policy wonk.” He has apologised profusely and repeatedly for it and has since helped establish and fund a partnership between AWU and EMILYs List for the Julia Gillard Next Generation Scholarship for outstanding future women ­leaders.

This brings us to perhaps the greatest issue bedevilling the left: The internal struggle within Labor between traditional pro-blue collar, pro-aspiration types – outer-­suburban working-class and migrant families – and what they describe as “ID pols” – inner-city upper-middle-class university activists obsessed with identity politics.

But this then brings us to the next issue – if one transgresses that ­boundary, can there be any hope of redemption?

Two of the most senior women in Labor – NSW Senator Deb O’Neill and Victorian Senator Kimberley Kitching – worked closely with Zelinsky on developing the new national policy platform.

While both unequivocally condemned his decade-old outing as a dating consultant, they were even more adamant in their endorsement of him as a respectful and accommodating colleague – not to mention outstanding policy brain. Both would love to see him in parliament.

The problem for them – and arguably for the party – is he might not get there.

Again, on face value, this looks like a simple rank-and-file preselection in which Zelinsky doesn’t have the numbers.

But the fact is that Labor’s National Executive has swept in on countless occasions and in countless seats to ensure the most promising candidate has got the gig. In Cunningham they are oddly quiet.

Some say it is bad optics for head office to knock off a female candidate for a straight white male. Others say it is a sub-factional playoff in which the left is running dead to keep one side of the right happy at the expense of the other.

Either way this is not how it is supposed to be. More than two decades ago my uncle, a former Labor mayor, told me that the one great measure of the ALP was that it always elevated the best people.

Soon we will see if that is actually true.