Tom Minear: Political foes are united by division
The one thing that state Liberal and Labor have in common at the moment is that they are torn by internal divisions that could affect both parties throughout the year, writes Tom Minear.
Opinion
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The state parliamentary year kicks off tomorrow but the political contest between the Labor and Liberal parties isn’t the only battle set to rage in 2020.
Bruising internal fights currently occupying both sides of politics aren’t just a summer fling and could prove decisive in shaping the fortunes of Premier Daniel Andrews and Opposition leader Michael O’Brien.
Both leaders have limited public politicking in recent weeks to focus on the bushfires.
Behind the scenes, however, more than a few of their MPs, staffers and party operatives have been distracted by tense factional infighting.
On the Labor side, that turned into actual fighting on the Australia Day weekend, when a punch was thrown at Jasvinder Sidhu — a member of the Premier’s Socialist Left faction — during a branch meeting at his house.
Andrews comment that he was too busy to think about “absolutely internal Labor Party matters” was an unsatisfactory response to violence that is not acceptable anywhere, especially in his own party.
A looming redistribution of state seats, which will shift boundaries and likely create one or two new electorates, has Labor factions aggressively jockeying for position, fuelling claims of branch-stacking on all sides.
The coalition between the Industrial Left — including the powerful CFMEU — and a group of Right-aligned unions has been on the march over the past year.
That group, spearheaded by Cabinet minister Adem Somyurek, is playing hardball in the western suburbs where a safe Labor seat is likely to be drawn up.
Some insiders think this is a proxy war for the southeast, where boundary changes could reshape seats like Bass while possibly abolishing an electorate such as Burwood (ending the Will Fowles experiment) or even Mulgrave (leaving the Premier himself without a seat).
The factional action has now spread beyond local branch members, with several state MPs in attendance when Sidhu was struck, and could spill into Andrews’ Cabinet.
Some Labor figures have started briefing against Attorney-General Jill Hennessy, a Socialist Left MP whose seat of Altona is surrounded by Right-controlled branches in the west.
Meanwhile, a broader conversation is happening in the shadows of the party about what will happen if or when Andrews is no longer in charge.
While he has vowed to lead Labor to the 2022 election, some senior colleagues wonder if he will copy Steve Bracks and sail into the sunset if he gets stale before then.
If that happened on his terms, the prevailing theory is Andrews would want to choose his successor — probably a female factional ally such as Jacinta Allan or Hennessy.
But after a decade of the Socialist Left running the show, those in Labor’s Right would be keen to claim the top job for themselves, a thought that would bubbling away in the minds of powerbrokers even if they don’t have an obvious candidate.
On the Liberal side, O’Brien has managed to stay out of trouble so far as his party tears itself apart over state president Robert Clark’s push to preselect all sitting federal MPs now, well ahead of the next election expected in late 2021.
When preselection applications closed last week, only one of those MPs was challenged — Kevin Andrews. Even some Liberals close to Andrews, who has held Menzies since 1991, reckon it is time for him to go and some say he has acknowledged that to his allies.
That hasn’t stopped all federal Liberals, perhaps minus some who are now peeling off, backing what has become a scorched earth strategy to stop the preselection process to protect Andrews.
The peace that sort of broke out in the Liberal Party last year is now a fading memory.
Forces aligned with ex-president Michael Kroger, federal powerbroker Michael Sukkar and backroom operative Marcus Bastiaan have rowed in behind the federal MPs angry at Clark’s preselection plan.
The risk for O’Brien is he supported Clark as the leader to bring stability and when the Liberal state council meets in May, Clark and his allies on the powerful administrative committee are at risk of being knocked off by the Kroger-Sukkar-Bastiaan camp.
If they succeed, one of their first orders of business would be trying to blast out veteran state MPs who are showing little interest in retiring.
Ironically, forcing that generational renewal would be good for O’Brien, who sorely needs more talented up-and-comers, but it would also leave him vulnerable to internal disunity.
He is also exposed by the fact that the preselection to replace state frontbencher Mary Wooldridge will likely toss up a man: either Asher Judah or Emanuele Cicchiello.
Only one woman threw her hat in the ring for the Eastern Metropolitan seat and she is not expected to have enough support.
That has left senior Liberals despairing about the lack of talent, especially female talent, interested in becoming MPs. If there isn’t a field of quality candidates beating down the door for a seat for life in Liberal heartland, what hope does the party have elsewhere?
As both parties grapple with those issues, they should remember that a decade of internal power games in Canberra has left voters frustrated, cynical and without solutions to the problems facing the country.
Andrews and O’Brien will only succeed as leaders if their teams are united.
Yes, politics is about power, and some internal argy-bargy is inevitable. But it’s mainly about serving the people you represent. Labor and Liberal figures shouldn’t forget that.
Tom Minear is state politics editor.