Peta Credlin: Labor’s branch stacking woes aren’t shocking, they’re standard
While the rest of us worry about job security and the economy, the Labor Party is busy self-immolating on the national stage. To some, power is still more important than a nation’s people, writes Peta Credlin.
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If you’re one of Labor’s true believers, this hasn’t been an easy time.
An investigation last weekend showed a once proud Australian Labor Party mired in the scandal of industrial scale branch staking, probity questions about members of parliament and their staff, grubby text messages, jobs for the boys (and girls) … and that was just Victoria.
In NSW, the Labor leader brought in to clean up the machine after the departure of her disgraced predecessor effectively ended her own leadership after admitting she was given a secret report into branch-stacking problems in her party and hadn’t even read it in full.
It’s not as though the Opposition has even been busy in these COVID-19 times, with parliament earlier suspended and given the report itself was barely 35 pages long, her lack of interest says everything about the inability of Labor leaders to bite the factional hand that feeds them.
And in Queensland, they’re no better. A deputy premier and treasurer removed after years of corruption claims – homes bought, appointments interfered with – leaving a premier drowning in her indecision and shown up as weak without her former henchwoman.
Sounds like a tough assessment I know, but it’s not lost on me that on Wednesday, it’s a decade since Julia Gillard and her faceless men took down a first term elected Prime Minister in Kevin Rudd and set in train events, with the revolving door prime ministership used as a plaything, that have shamed both sides of politics.
Branch-stacking is the Labor Party norm, not the exception. When the factions wield the power to choose the frontbench rather than the leader, and with factional vote blocs at the National Conference that chooses Labor’s policy platform and then bind all MPs to it, including party leaders, throw in the unions – with their militancy and millions – and is it any wonder the system is crook?
Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews declared last week that he wants to break the business model of the branch-stackers. Yet no-one has profited more from Labor’s broken business model than Andrews himself.
He’s the ultimate party insider, a former Assistant Secretary of the Victorian Labor Party and party leader of Victoria’s ship of fools for now 10 years.
Out of these internal war-games he’s risen to the top job in the state, has an iron grip over his MPs and he now expects us to believe that this all went on under his own nose, and he knew nothing. Give me a break.
Now that the administrators have been brought in and effectively disenfranchised 16,000 Labor members while an audit is undertaken to see who are real members and who are fakes, Andrews (and Anthony Albanese) end up with more power out of this and not less. They are both from Labor’s left too and that’s kicking off retribution internally with leaks, and now talk of a union-sponsored legal challenge.
All the while, Victoria’s debt has doubled, in two years, under Andrews. He’s just announced a second illegal drug injecting room right next to Melbourne’s famed Queen Victoria Market – with zero consultation – only a few years after saying he didn’t support injecting rooms at all.
And against growing voter anger, he’s pushing on with his secret debt deal with the Chinese Government even though China has all but been fingered for a series of orchestrated cyber-attacks against Australian governments, and businesses.
In Canberra last week, the Liberals smiled like Cheshire cats at Labor’s internal crisis but it wasn’t that long ago that they were led by a man who got his seat in parliament by way of a massive branch stack in the electorate of Wentworth.
And there’s others on Scott Morrison’s frontbench who have a rotten reputation for factionalism too and while nowhere near the scale of Labor, it is a cancer, alongside the lobbyist culture, that’s changing the Liberal Party into slightly older, slightly better dressed and a much underfunded version of the ALP.
Out there in the real world though, none of this has really made an impact. The few that might have picked it up already assume the worst of the political class.
For everyone else, given unemployment is the highest it’s been in 19 years and will only get worse once the taxpayer welfare is withdrawn, this is what they’re focused on; it’s the economy, stupid.